I just found out that three books I thought I’d have to return to the specialty library in a week, will not be due until the 8th of January. Which really kind of made my day.
I know, getting all excited about a bunch of books that are not even mine seems a tad unusal, but you need to understand my situation. I keep renting books for my thesis, and before I know it (ha!), let alone have read, understood and excerpted the book, it’s due again. And with these certain libraries, the ones that hold the books that are really interesting to me (and no, I’m of course not referring to these notorious “adult bookshops”), it’s really a bit of a pain. You can’t rent for longer than 28 days, and after returning a book, you need to wait for another three days before being able to rent them again.
This is especially tedious when you’re like me, who can’t just rent one book, but at least 3 or 4. I know, my own fault, but I just can’t help it. And well, usually it ends like this: 4 books taken out, 2 books half read, no excerpts, no gain. But pain! Because I need to return them, then rent them again.
I guess you will now understand my utter joy upon discovering that the advent of the holidays has given me an extra three weeks with my precious books.
Well, not quite. But today I finally received the grade for my last class. Which means I can now hand them all in and hope everything works out.
Not that there’s anything I actually know about that could go wrong, but trouble tends to come in the most plentiful of guises.
I just found out that the whole of the Ten Books by early medieval scriptor Gregory of Tours are accessible online via Wikisource.
To most of you this may sound as interesting as the discovery of yet another website featuring tiny kittens, but for me it means I will have the primary primary source for my thesis right there at my fingertips, online, fully searchable, all the goddamn time!
And a little note on the side: the source is located in the Latin version of Wikisource. Check out their mainpage, it’s more fun than a birthday-party.
People are not meant to sit in seminars longer than 90 minutes.
As a follow up to yesterday’s post, and answering the comment by “eigenschaft”, I will now write a bit about the watered down compromise I mentioned yesterday: the one about the tuition fees.
Tuition fees were introduced by the Schüssel government in 2001, only shortly after the minister for education, Lisl Gehrer, had promised that no such thing would ever exist under her reign. They were protested by almost every student union, but to no avail. Before last year’s election, the SPÖ promised that in case they won the election, they would get rid of the fees. Well, now that they have been taken by their word, it turned out to be not as easy as they thought. In return for becoming chancellor by the grace of election loser but necessary evil ÖVP, Gusenbauer, head of the SPÖ and leader of the coalition talks, presented his version of what “getting rid” means. For him, getting rid of the fees means being able to work them off.
Starting next semester, any student who doesn’t want to or can’t pay the fees, has the option of doing 60 hours of social work per semester. Divide the bi-annual fees of about 360 Euros by that amount of work, and you get the absolute minimum wage of 6 Euros. Basically this means students will be used for jobs that require unskilled labour (because, of course, they won’t spend ten of those 60 hours training someone), in order to pay for the fees.
Now, I don’t think anyone could have come up with a better solution of NOT getting rid of the tuition fees, even if they had tried really, really hard (next to actually NOT getting rid of them, of course).
Here’s an article on the whole thing to make up for my scandalous lack of sources.
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