Saturday 18 August 2012

Medalling time

If there were the equivalent of an Olympics for journal editors, I think I'd be aiming for gold, silver, and bronze: I've made just over one accept/reject decision (excluding 'revise and resubmit' decisions) each and every day this year. Oh, and each and every day last year too. As for the four years before these two.. my load was actually higher. In lieu of medals, I think I shall just go eat a lot of chocolate. Oh wait... should I go get chocolate, or go get a life? Nah... chocolate.

Having looked at this (and last) year's statistics, I'm wondering now whether it's just a coincidence that I end up working around 6 days in every 7, and end up rejecting around 6 manuscripts in every 7.

Truth is, and due to the editorial equivalent of some masochistic desire, I actually enjoy all this. And if I wasn't doing this, I'd probably be spending even more time surfing the web for those covetable objects of desire without which my bank balance would be rather healthier than it is. And yes, I love my new Sony RX100.

Sunday 12 August 2012

I'm back!

Yep. Four months blog-free. That's all I could manage. It's been a long time, but it's time to take back control of my web presence, no thanks to Apple who have done many great things in their time, but cancelling their web hosting (on what used to be homepage.mac.com) is not one of them.

So updates will resume, shortly. For now, I'm uploading my website to a new site and once that's complete (next couple of days), I'll post the link here. My current concern is that the site's too big for the hosting package I have, and so, like me, it'll need to lose a little weight. In service of that particular goal, I have discovered the almost sugar-free goodness that is Weetabix, but why, oh why, can Apple not put their design smarts to good use and design the inner wrapping for my Weetabix so that, each time I open it, I don't spread all that crumbly goodness over the kitchen counter and floor? If iPhone and Mac packaging were designed by the same people that design cereal packets, we'd have iPhone/Mac innards strewn across the floor each time we took receipt of a new one.

Once I've figured out how to digest the more newsworthy moments of the past 4 months, and how to then spit them out in a palatable summary, I shall do just that. But it's all pretty much more of the same: watches (new ones), pond (same one), karate (lack thereof), work (overdose thereof), holiday (too little of), medals (a surfeit thereof), etc. etc...

Until next time.