Aside from the con­stant stream of del​.icio​.us links, there hasn’t been much I’ve felt like writ­ing lately. A bit of an oppres­sive pall cast over the whole affair.

Sev­eral other blog­gers, most of them aca­d­e­mics with big impor­tant jour­nals and con­fer­ences and depart­ments stand­ing at their sides, pub­lished much the same thing I did back in 2005, when I voiced my neg­a­tive per­sonal opin­ion about the cor­po­rate cul­ture at a small engi­neer­ing conference-​​organizer and jour­nal publisher.

As far as I know, those other aca­d­e­mic folks with equally neg­a­tive opin­ions haven’t spent sev­eral thou­sand dol­lars of their per­sonal sav­ings on legal fees. Hope­fully they won’t have to.

But I did.

My lawyer and the pub­lish­ers’ lawyer have ham­mered out a bind­ing legal agree­ment regard­ing my opin­ion piece. Kudos to both legal teams, deal­ing with two clients, both a mix of idiot and ide­o­logue. After this explana­tory post, I’ll refrain from fur­ther com­ment on the affair here in my blog. I have removed my blog post that annoyed the pub­lisher, and also all com­ments posted by my read­ers in response.

That said, my per­sonal opin­ion of the cul­ture of that orga­ni­za­tion has not been improved by this ridicu­lous and expen­sive affair.

At any rate, good rid­dance. Let’s get back to busi­ness. I’ve deleted every­thing I and you all wrote about the prob­lem, at their behest.

No great loss, is it?

Both Ed Viel­metti and Juliet Suther­land have sug­gested I sub­scribe to the Read2.0-l mail­ing list.

Thing is, they’ve never for­warded instruc­tions, and the gen­eral state of affairs on the Web these days means it’s nigh impos­si­ble to Google instruc­tions on how to sub­scribe, what’s expected, or even what goes on there. Far as I know, an old blog entry of mine made the rounds… and nonethe­less I had no idea except for a for­warded mes­sage or two, years back.

So, list­serv gen­er­a­tion: Tak­ing a walled gar­den and sub­se­quently for­get­ting the walls are even there? Weird and kinda scary, by mod­ern stan­dards. That would be feel­ing like a secret, invis­i­ble walled gar­den over­grown and emit­ting no noises.

Very Harry Pot­ter, mind you.