Internet is good. Well, since you read this blog, you will know that I think the internet is good. But sometimes, it comes back to me just how good it is - and then I have to say it again.

The internet helps me to connect with my friends. To find out when favourite musicians play somewhere I can go. It enables me to buy strange and useful things, like my new spinning wheel (yes, I have a new one). It continuously provides me with new programmes that are good to use and totally free for most private purposes (like Anti-Twin, a wonderful tool to find duplicate files, or Sequoia View, a programme that shows you how big a file is on your hard disk). It is a wonderful place to do research for writing and working.*

And it makes it possible to collaborate with people who live on the other side of the planet. All the way around, with no delay whatsoever, I can send things and messages and pictures, and we can discuss what is good and what is okay and what is not so good. And that, I think, is absolutely amazing.


*And yes, it also provides me with endless opportunities to get side-tracked, procrastinate, and waste time and money. But hey, that's the Internet for everybody, right?

Books are just like pictures. They are lovely to have, wonderful to peruse, and a pain to organise. And it's immensely helpful to organise them - having keywords and tags to search pictures, and having keywords and notes to check whether a book was helpful or not. Plus a bibliography programme can help with citations - and save a major pain when writing.

There are several programmes on the market, the two best-known of which are probably Zotero (a free plug-in for Firefox) and Endnote (a commercial stand-alone programme).

Just recently, I have re-assessed Zotero as a possible alternative to my usual bibliography programme (which is Endnote). There are pros and cons for each of these two programmes, but one of the best comparisons I have found yet is this one from profhacker. So, even though my version of Endnote is quite a few years old now already - from how everything in Endnote is integrated in my workflow, I'll stay with it.

If you do not have a bibliography programme yet or are not totally content with yours, though, you might want to check out Zotero. After all, it's free - so it can't hurt to try.

Of course the tax stuff was not finished without one or two revisions and double-checkings, and of course that took longer than expected.

And getting the book-keeping up to its current state also took a while - but I have finally found a few web resources that really helped me to understand some of the stuff I had just muddled through before. So, for those of you who are German and need to get some basic knowledge about how to do the books, I can recommend the introduction into bookkeeping offered by Collmex (which is software to do the stuff - not the software I use, but the booking processes are the same regardless of programme) and, for any additional questions, there's a forum called Rechnungswesenforum, where a lot of knowledgeable people hang out and are willing to help.

So while I did (of course) not get all of the stuff done that I wanted to get done yesterday, I learned a few things about the book wrangling that were really helpful - and will probably make life (and bookkeeping) easier in the future. Whew.

I've finished the current extra-urgent bit of work that was on my list yesterday night, and now I only have to wait for the piece to dry and bring it to the post office. And the rest of today? I'm taking it off. Yay.

But since I promised you more info from NESAT, I will at least tell you about the ATN meeting.
For those of you who have never heard of ATN, it is short for "Archaeological Textiles Newsletter". This has been an institution for quite a few years now, started way back on somebody's kitchen table and sent out as a biannual newsletter.

Nowadays, the ATN is put together, edited and sent out by a small group of people, and it used to be printed at the university press in Copenhagen. However, this printing possibility seems to have ended; the university wants to close its publishing department. And that in turn means the ATN has to make some changes for the future. It is planned to change it to an annual double volume instead of two volumes per year, and of course a new print shop has to be found. Plus a name change has been discussed - from "Archaeological Textiles Newsletter" to "Archaeological Textiles Review", since it seems that something called a newsletter is not worthy for external funding, while something called a review is.

These changes mean that the ATN (or ATR) will need a few more members to survive - so if you are not a subscriber yet, but interested in textile archaeology, please join the "Friends of ATN" (which is a subscription for one year, called membership because of some other bureaucratic issues) and help it survive! 
Anyone can join, you don't need to be affiliated with any university or research institute. And it is really worth it - there are always interesting articles in the newsletter, and the ATN regularly sees the first (or even the first and only) publication of a smaller textile find, or a preliminary results note about a work in progress. Subscribing is easily done via the secure webshop of ATN, and it's not expensive either - the one-year membership costs 20 Euro.


Oh, and of course you are welcome to spread the word...
 

I'm one of those people who have the deep-seated wish to do everything correctly... so among the other things, I'm still working on getting my head wrapped around all the things that I have to be aware of in the future, tax-wise, and there's not every thing really clear for me yet.

However, I found some really interesting stuff around on the net, and even though most of you readers are not from Germany, I'll still share it. There's a totally amazing guide for freelancers called mediafon, and not only does it answer about every question that might come up, it's also written in a way that makes reading up on the stuff fun. And if you know how German law texts are written (probably the same for all law texts in every language), that really is an achievement. So between that and a call to my friendly official in charge, I'll probably be quite ok.

In other news (and I'm sorry again for the non-Germans), you might remember that back in June, I had a film team here and an insane amount of fun working with them. Well, the film is now finally not only cut and edited (has been for a while), but also furnished with an airing date. It will run under the title "Ritter, Gaukler, Heilerinnen (Faszination Mittelalter)" on BR alpha on the 28th of March, 16:00 to 16:30 o'clock. It's not up on their programme preview site yet, but will be in time.

It is the season to drink Earl Grey tea again, since the sky has a tendency to be gray and cloudy, and eat Lebkuchen. And bake "Weihnachtsplätzchen" (christmas cookies). And meet with friends and chat or watch a film together, and stay up way too late because it's so nice. And find something yummy in the advent calendar each day.

When I was a child, the yearly advent calendar with chocolate in it was an absolute must, and all my school colleagues had one as well (plus, in the first few years of school, there was one for the class, and someone different got to open a door every day). And when I got older, that somehow stayed a well-loved tradition for me, as it did for many others of my generation - most of our friends also have a calendar at home.

And because I am a curious person, I checked Wikipedia which in the English version says that advent calendars are mainly produced for children. Well, not so in Germany, where you can find all sorts of advent calendars for grown-ups and very clearly for those only - like those where you get a "Schnapspraline" (chocolate filled with liquid hard liquor) every day. And now I'm wondering... is that really a German thing?
If it is... I think you are missing out. 

Just like all youngsters in my generation, I had to learn a tiny bit of Middle High German when I went to school. But unlike most of my classmates, that old German language somehow fascinated me immensely, and I really enjoyed learning the old-style words of that little poem we had to know by heart (and then recite).

I don't really remember when I immersed myself deeper into that old language, but I picked up enough of it during my time at the Uni to be able to read most texts fluently (with occasional help of a dictionary) and translate the texts into modern German. And that is an immense help, of course, when hunting for garment descriptions and clothes in context, a part of research that I also like very much. Those texts, with their garment descriptions and focus on beauty and fashion in some of them are really invaluable to get an idea of how clothes were supposed to look and what was important for them to fit correctly and give the right picture to the contemporaries; and when I'm looking for text passages about special items, I always turn to the MHDBDB. In case that doesn't ring a bell for you (yet): That's the Middle High German Conceptual Database where you can search for a term and get it with a bit of context from a large number of texts.

And sometimes I want to read a bit more of that text, to see if I have the context correctly or to know a bit more about the scene including my term-in-context, and for that, there's an internet solution as well: Middle High German texts on the Net. So in case you feel a need to read some of them, here's my link list:

Digitales Mittelhochdeutsches Textarchiv
Mediaevum.de
Anthology of Medieval German Literature
Biblioteca Augustana
Erlanger Liste (scroll way down)

Enjoy! (There's a bit of English info in the Anthology, plus translations into modern German, if that is of help for you.)