OK, it's been a few months too long, but your host is undead not dead and is overdue to be posting. Having gone to the LSA conference in Chicago this past weekend, SC was looking forward to renewing old acquaintances and catching up on interesting research. And while no small amount of activity happened on both fronts, certainly it didn't all go as planned. If I missed you this year, my apologies, but at least there's always Portland (site of next year's conference).
In any event, on Friday night, your host had dinner with Neal Whitman, who offered two pieces of sage advice: 1) don't apologize, just get back to it, and 2) clean up your comments. SC promptly went back to his hotel room and got most of the way through the comment-cleaning portion of that endeavor (getting rid of about 800 of some 1300 spam comments before having to stop), and then took his laptop with him to go work on a new post for the first time in several months while sitting on a Chicago subway train.
Alas, sometime on Saturday morning, Mrs. SC needed to use the computer to catch up on her work (she wasn't going to pass up a trip that put her in walking distance of this steakhouse, and your host now understands completely). In and of itself, opening a web browser, even one as pernicious and evil as Internet Explorer, shouldn't kill your hard drive. But it crashed shortly after being started, as all Windows programs enjoy doing (they are not proof of artificial intelligence, though, because they are cases of demonic possession instead), and this time the Blue Screen of Death turned out to mean the death of the hard drive's boot sector. So: no live blogging from LSA, note-taking by hand only, and no e-mailing or composing posts until getting back to Los Angeles. Over the next couple of days, there will be writeups of the sessions that SC made it to, plus a rueful post on why the Windows virus is on SC's new hard drive despite what it did to hamper his conference-going.
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