Firstly, the proceedings of the Textile Forum are coming along nicely - the proofs have been proof-read by our very diligent editor, and currently the cover is being tweaked. Soon, very soon our little Textile Forum will have something more to its name than the website and the conference!

Speaking of which - we will have a meeting for planning our next Forum this April, and after that we hope to be able to get the Call for Papers out. Our Forum date and focus topic is already settled upon: Decoration on Textiles - dye, print, embroidery and paint. For more information, as always, go to our Forum homepage.

Now on to more proceedings: There were two sessions titled "Dressing the Part: Textiles as Propaganda in the Middle Ages" in the College Art Association 98th Annual Conference that took place in Chicago, IL, in February 2010. Not only is the conference programme still available on their website, they are also offering an MP3-recording of the second session for download (it costs 25 USD). It's a pity they are not offering the first session, which would have been much more interesting for me.

And there is a volume coming out this summer:

Dimitrova, Kate ; Margaret Goehring (eds.).
 Dressing the Part: Textiles as Propaganda in the
Middle Ages. Turnhout: Brepols, (June 2013).
28cm., pbk., ca. 350pp., 32 color, 150 b&w illus,
210 x 275 mm. English text. ISBN-13 9782503536767 ISBN-10 250353676X
They are approximating the price at about 100 €, but it looks as if it's not really fixed yet. More info available via the publisher's website.

A few nice, new and exciting things have come to my attention, internet-wise, during the last days - so it's time for a link list.

A find of a smelting oven, not too far from here, has been radiocarbon-dated. It's from the 13th century, making it one of the quite late ovens of that type. Read more about it (and see pics) in the Schauhuette blog.

If you are more into graphics design, you might be interested in having a look at the Elephants of Typography.

There's something new out regarding the finds of Lengberg - parts of the find are presented in the book "The Tudor Child". Beatrix Nutz has also made a website about this in German and in English, including some additional information about the pieces that will not be in the book.

There will be a conference about children's garments in Krefeld in May; the German language info page is here.

And finally, something not so nice: A 15 year old girl on the Maledives was raped by her stepfather - and was then sentenced to public flogging because she had sex while not married. I won't go into that further, because it's obviously so, so wrong on so, so many levels. The only positive thing about it is that word got out, and now there is a public outcry about it, and a petition running to get the Maledives government to abolish that law and institute better protection for rape victims (and actual prosecution for the criminals!). It's run by Avaaz, and signing is easy the first time and even easier once you have registered in their network.

There's a (small, but existent) stack of colourfully printed paper on my desk. Most of the sheets are obsolete now, though - and I will dump them, with a little bit of ceremony, into my wastepaper basket later on.

These last days, I've been working on a new information leaflet for the workshop programme that Sabine, David and myself are offering, for joint venture information in the future. The leaflet evolved from incorporating a few nice ideas but being unfortunately quite ugly (in retrospective) to looking really, really nice and offering plenty of information - largely to mostly due to the help of a friend.

I have learned several things during the course of making this, among them why layouting programmes make it possible to snap items to a grid; that more reference lines are better than fewer reference lines until you pass that point where it's too many reference lines and you do not know which one was for which purpose; that the first idea is not always the best one when doing layout work; and that someone who has actually learned the craft sees the problems, and the possible solutions, much faster than someone just dabbling (yes, I know, that's a thank-you-Captain-Obvious).

Now I only have to wrap it all up and get it to the printer. Yay! And then? On to the next adventures.

It's time to revisit (and re-vamp, or rather re-make) my info leaflet, and add a new one with info about workshops. Which means that I get to spend quality time with my camera, all kinds of picture-prettying programmes, my trusty layouting programme... and of course with all the little arghs and oh-noes connected with that.

One of the two pages of the workshop thingie is about finished now (at least I hope so) - there's still a few tweaks and stuff to be done, but I think the general layout and direction is like it will stay. Much of this progress is due to the book that I was sent teaching graphic design to non-graphic-designers...

The other page, however, is still much more uncooperative. I had this idea, you see? That touches on picture shape and alignment? That, together with a limited selection of piccies that can not all be re-done has turned out to be much more of a pain in the brain than I had expected. Well, never mind - I'm not ready yet to give up regarding that one, and I think I might be able to get it to a reviewable stage today.

I have been spring cleaning the bookshelf - there are quite a few journal issues that I have two copies of, plus a handful of other books just taking up shelf space since I do not use or need them.

It's mostly Exar Bilanz books and GHWK journal items, but a few other things are on the list as well. The list is German (since most of the books are as well). If you are interested, please download the list in .pdf format and have a look. I'd be happy for these things to find a new home where they will be appreciated!

A few days ago, someone pointed out another sciency search engine on the web in one of the comments: Scirus. Meanwhile, I have managed to try it, and it might be a good additional way to find things - articles, books, pdf files - regarding a research topic.

Like usually, it is a bit biased towards both patent applications or natural science articles (because more of that is on the net than, say, scientific articles about the performance of a 16.5 g spindle whorl on different spindle sticks), but it's nice to have a second place to look in addition to Google Scholar.

Speaking of alternative search engines - I have been trying to get a little more independent of Google search recently. Because, you know, monopoly is not good, usually - and total dependency is not good either. So I have given DuckDuckGo a go.

DuckDuckGo searches stuff but does not rank it by hits like Google does by default; they have a very, very good privacy policy (that is so good it will havoc stat tracking functions for webmasters, since you will not hear about search terms used to find your site); there's goodies like instant calculator and password generator, and no ads except from a very unobtrusive sponsored link.

I have, by way of testing, put it into my browser as the default search engine. It is very interesting to see how different search results can look, and quite impressive how much Google "tunes" the results. I'm not totally convinced I will stay with it forever, though - and I still use Google for some stuff. I have noticed that in quite a few cases, I have a much easier time finding the site I am looking for with Google, thanks to their sorting algos. And the Duck has no image search (something that I need not too infrequently).

However, I like their policy. Go give them a try - maybe it's just the (additional) search engine you were looking for.

I don't know how all of you handle it, but I have tried out a lot of to-do lists and other track-keeping things over the years. Calendars, special "get things done" thingies, hand-written lists, reminder calendars, you name it. Some of these worked for a day, some for a week, some for two weeks... and then I would quietly ignore them and go on with my life in some other way.

The method I currently have involves a blackboard (or something quite like it) that is hanging at the wall across from my desk and that holds several things, mostly long- and mid-term projects. Add to that a stack of paper snippets with lists on them directly on my desk - most of those are short- to mediumshortterm things. (Though there are some items that keep getting transferred from one list to the next. Gah.)

But yesterday I stumbled across a new sort of to-do list... one that is supposed to give you extra motivation by not just taking that task off a list, but by sort of Roleplayifying your life. (If you have never played a roleplaying game - pen and paper or computer - and have no clue what roleplaying means, here's the short one: you play a character that goes on adventures, kills monsters, saves people, finds treasures (to buy stuff that will help during the monster-killing and people-saving and treasure-finding) and gets better and better at stuff over time.)

So the basic idea is that you have a list of stuff to do - daily, weekly, or small things you want to make a habit - and each time you sucessfully finish a task, you get XP and gold. The gold can be used to buy stuff - either rewards you made up yourself, such as "have cake", or rewards available from the shop that will help you get more gold and more XP. Which sort of makes clicking "done" on these tasks... more fun.

I'm trying this out, and I can tell you: I had a lot of fun yesterday already, even though the to-do list is freakishingly long. And even if it will not work long-term for me, I will happily take a spike in productivity.

Oh, yes, the details: The thing is called HabitRPG. It's under development, it's free (unless you die and need to resurrect yourself), and there is currently a Kickstarter campaign running (which also features a video telling you more about the idea and the "game") to help develop it more, including a mobile app, and faster.