A freezing weekend in Ireland. The deal to bail the country out is to be announced in the next hour. It'll take generations to pay it off. By 2014, somewhere between 20 to 25% of tax collected will be used to pay back the loan and its interest. Ireland will be in every economics textbook about how to build an economic miracle, then slam it into the ground with enough velocity that it'll take years to get out of the resultant hole, and then rather than trying to climb out to keep digging. The powerlessness to do anything but watch slack-jawed is incredibly frustrating.
I've spent the last three days doing the index to the Code/Space book for MIT Press. It is incredibly tedious and I'm still going. I hope someone actually uses the thing for all the effort it's taking!
My posts this week:
Short story: Undergrowth
Kindle version of The White Gallows
IMF report on structural reform in Euro area, including Ireland
Review of Vanilla Ride by Joe Lansdale
Signing on the line
Giving apartments away has social and economic consequences
2 comments:
My commiserations, Rob. It is very sad. I'm glad your own trajectory does not seem to be similar, though.
I must admit that I have never thought all that much about the individual efforts behind an index. Good luck with all that labor.
I've done all the indexes to my books, except the first one and the last one, and also the encyclopedia. The first one was hopeless and I vowed to do them all after that. I got lazy on the last one and it cost me 800 pounds (1250 US dollars), to be deducted from royalties. The encyclopedia took some poor sod a year to do given it was 5 million words long. Once I've finished, it will have taken me about 25-27 hours to index 100,000 words. It really is very tedious, but it's saving some money and I know that the index will work as intended.
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