I really enjoyed the day off yesterday - spent mostly sitting in the sun, enjoying the warm, balmy spring air, and reading. And now it's back to all those things that wait for me to do them - including a full backup of my current data on the computer, and then migrating the contents of the computer to a new (and much larger) internal disk drive.

And all this because I am running out of space, and I started to shift some files to external disk drives - until a while ago I realised that there are pictures missing from the internal drive. Pictures that I knew must be there, and that seem to be (hopefully all of them) on a backup drive from quite a while ago. I have no clue how that could have happened, but it's not filling me with delight, quite the contrary. So I did what everyone with not enough space on the disk does: I ordered a new, bigger one. Once this is all finished, I will have an internal terabyte (Yay! Space!) which, judging by my current migration process to bigger disks, should last at least two years... or quite a bit more.

These were the news from pallia's IT department. Stay tuned for news from the Customer Service department and the Research Facilities... they are due soon.

I am back from the fair, and it was really, really nice - a lot of people I knew (and some that I had not seen for ages), and a lot of people I enjoyed to meet for the first time. We had a nice and cozy room, friendly neighbours (the three closest were two ceramics ladies, a Roman painter and a Roman knife-maker, followed by several jewellery and textiles folks), a delightfully fun evening on Saturday, and lots of interested visitors.

And now, after all the stuff that happened and the places I went during the last weeks, I am in need of a day off - which is exactly what I will be taking today. There's a dentist appointment on my calendar in a bit more than an hour, and there's a package to fetch from the post office, and the rest of the day will be spent in delightful stupor, reading a book I have read a dozen of times before and drinking tea and doing nothing, nothing at all. That, my friends, sounds like bliss to me at the moment...

If you have never heard about it, the Mühlberg-Ensemble is a complex of buildings in Kempten, southern Germany, where lots of organic material from c. 1470 to 1580 were found in the dead floors and other fillable parts of the building structures.

They were excavated several years back, and now vol. 3 of the publication of the finds is finally out! 

Rainer Atzbach / Ingolf Ericsson (eds), Die Ausgrabungen im Mühlberg-Ensemble (Kempten). Metall, Holz und Textil. Bamberger Schriften zur Archäologie des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit 3 =
Mühlbergforschungen Kempten (Allgäu) 3 (Bonn 2011).
362 S., zahlr. (tls farb.) Abb., 1 CD-ROM, 30 cm. (Bamberger Schriften z. Archäol. d. Mittelalters u. d. Neuzeit, 3/ Mühlbergforsch. Kempten, 3) Ln,
978-3-7749-3756-7, € 59,-

The volume contains the results of excavations in the basement plus the evaluation and publication of the metal and wooden finds. In addition, Antoinette Rast-Eicher and Klaus Tidow wrote about the textile finds from the buildings. You can find a table of contents and a German/English summary here (pdf file).


The book can be ordered from the publishing house or via your local bookshop. I already have a copy, but have not yet managed to take a good look into it - some report about it will follow as soon as I find the time.

Today is setup day for the IRM fair on Saturday and Sunday... so I am occupied in shifting stuff around, repeatedly, and setting up all the things and materials and info materials that Sabine and I brought. It's the first fair of this kind for me, so I am pretty excited and totally do not know what I have gotten into - though I suspect I will know more on Sunday evening.

If you are in the region, why don't you stop by tomorrow or Sunday? It's the Roman Villa in Perl-Borg, and Sabine and I will be standing in Room 9, the Laubad.

Today is the day when I pack for the IRM - which means I have to do some last-minute printing, sorting, and stuffing things into boxes before stuffing them into the car. Yes, I have a list to help me packing. And no, I'm not sure I put everything on that list that should be on there... so it will still be interesting. Plus my foot is still acting up a little (though I don't know where and how I damaged it), so hauling things will probably take a bit longer than normal.

Apart from this, I have just finished an update to the online shop software after a nice client sent me a heads-up yesterday that registration was not possible due to some weird error. My test registration worked, so I hope everything is in good order again now - I will check the language files and tweak the template, if necessary, once I am back from the IRM. (Sometimes, having a staff including a sys admin and shopkeeper would really, really be nice.)

And on a completely unrelated note: Did you know that we already must have had World War 11? And a good while ago, too? No? Me neither - until I received a Nigeria Scam version that totally enlightened me. Here's a snippet of it, emphasis mine:

I am leading a group of other top system analyst/programmers to develop and launch a new fire-wall at the UN`s Central Data Facility, in Geneva.

We have been here since July of 2011 and due to complete our assignment at the end of the year. Sometime in October last year I accidentally stumbled on a
secluded data base containing detailed information of individuals and families whose wealth were confiscated at the end of World War11.

Ever since this discovery, I have been on the look out for any new information and development. Just recently, I noticed that the United Nations have been
systematically releasing these seized individual and family wealth back to relatives and descendants of those originally affected. Those mostly affected were
Germans, Jews alike, and other Nationals that were found or assumed to have supported the Nazi Regime.

On further research I found out that your name matches with one of the listed family names in the said data base, hence am contacting you to inform you of
this and to also find out if you have any knowledge that the wealth of your ancestors was confiscated at the end of WW11. 

Now... I know that I'm not very good at keeping up with modern politics and what is going on in the world, but I think I would know about 9 world-wide wars that took place before I was born... no?

Moral of the Story: Sometimes, randomly clicking on the mails in your spam folder before deleting them can be totally worth it!

It's time for a link again, and today I have a very non-textile link. There is a new (German-language) online mag about stove ceramics and their history, complete with gallery and quite a lot of info. You can find it at www.furnologia.de, and you find its navigation links in the blue bar on top of the page (my screen shows it as blue writing on blue-ish background, so it took me a while to find it).

If you're interested in this sort of thing, go check it out. You should also go and have a look at the gallery if you are not interested in ceramics, but like to see pictures of dragons, half-naked ladies, men and women wearing 16th century headgear, men on horses and nice ornaments. (In this case, click on "Galerie" and enjoy.)

It took most of yesterday to catch up with emails and get my brain back onto something resembling a track, and it feels like I should already start packing and preparing again - for the IRM on the weekend. This mostly means planning what I want to show and what I want to emphasise in my assortment of goods and services, making a list of things to take so nothing important will stay here by accident, and taking care of the urgent things to do around here.

(Now... is clearing the desk considered urgent if I still have enough space to type? Probably not. Though it feels like I should set aside a whole day one of these days to do some clearing, and sorting, and probably filing or discarding of lots of the paper around me.)

Plus I'm struggling with my youtube account which seems to have forgotten that I exist. Or that it exists. Or both. The channel is still there, but I cannot log on to it, and I don't even get a new password sent when I try. Should I be able to get it to run, I can decide how to edit the video of my talk in Vienna and how best to upload it. (It needs editing because, as a good soul just told me, I have made a horrendous mistake in a calculation that I put into the presentation. Uh. Oops. So no uploading it un-edited, and I will still have to decide how to fix the problem, which is present on two slides...)