"...it just says 'M'...": November 2007

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Control

I just finished watching Control, a movie by Anton Corbijn, about Ian Curtis and Joy Division. I was taken by this story since spending a train ride to Ottawa talking to a colleague about how Curtis is looked at as a tragic figure, whereas other popular music figures who have taken their own life might be seen as somehow heroic (Kurt Cobain is the most obvious example). Curtis was 23 when he was found dead. I'm not sure people are so comfortable even mentioning Curtis; his story seems to be so dark.

Above is the last photo taken by Deborah Curtis of Ian and their daughter Natalie, taken on 13 May 1980. He died on 18 May 1980. I encourage anyone interested to listen to some Joy Division. I can't guarantee that you will like it (I'm not sure I do), but it is something very interesting. Tragedy is all around, it seems.

(picture is from here).

Thursday, November 15, 2007

Trying to get rid of old "coursepacks"

I don't know about any of you, but I'm drowning in paper. Well, not really drowning, but we have a lot of it taking up space. So I've decided to take the course outlines that are at the front of these coursepacks from when my wife and I did our Master's (by the way, a coursepack is simply a collection of photocopies of articles and book chapters that are purchased in lieu of a textbook) and take that citation information and get rid of the rest. Any articles that I can find online I've downloaded so that I can keep some record in the off chance that I might need these articles without going to a library.

So I generally download pdfs of the articles and then link them to records using an open source document manager called bibdesk. It's supposed to be used with TeX editors, but I don't use TeX (I tried it but it's a bit confusing). Besides that, it's searchable and you can open the pdf file directly from that application.

Any other solutions?