I am beginning to wonder if my blog is turning into a Scots dialect blog. Anyway, I had a wee look at the Scots dictionaries in the School of Scottish Studies at the University but none of them had the word "dekko" in them. I have not talked to the dictionary people just yet because I wanted to check before I bother them. I did not find it in the Dictionary of the Old Scots tongue, which covers 13th century to 16th century Scots. I should take a look at the Oxford English Dictionary, which has a huge wealth of Scots from the 18th century. In any case, the "dekko" mystery is still open.

For another interesting turn of phrase in Scots, I encountered "Jing help my bob!", which means "That was surprising!" This is a completely opaque phrase and I have nowhere to being trying to figure it out. Try saying it sometime. It really is surprising in and of itself.

I just saw this on Slashdot. It is exactly what is needed in medieval studies or any historical studies whatsoever! Please, if you are a part of a University department which handles handwritten documents, take a look at this. I am going to pass this on to my supervisors and I may contact these people to see what they are all about. This is very exciting stuff for someone in the Humanities.

Otherwise, I am putting together a computerized note keeping stuff for my PhD (in the sense that it keeps which books and journal articles I have read and notes about them). It almost looks like a library database. Honestly, with the way things are going at the University library, I could rewrite their software better than the system they have now (and cheaper too). I am using a MySQL database, which is free and open source, and I am using Perl as my programming language. With the web interface they use at the university now, I could just bolt on the Apache Web Server and mod_perl, which are again both free and open source, and build a complete library catalogue system for half the cost they are probably spending now on it.

Anyway, it is late and I should go to bed.

posted by Chris  #1:05 AM | 0 comments |