Ian Milligan
@ianmilligan1
Professor of History and founding Director of the School of Social, Historical and Political Research at the University of Waterloo. Posts in a completely personal capacity.
It’s a good thing I went into admin, sure would hate to be one of those faculty who spends weeks at the cottage when on a non-teaching term. Wait a second…
Beautiful sunset, Jays game on, kids off kayaking down the lake. Life is good!
This giant bug hangs out on the outside of my office window. It comes by every day! Maybe I should give it a name..
And we have floors … and walls! Only six more weeks to go. Moving out of our first two-month AirBnB for a few weeks of suitcase living and temporary apartment hopping. It’ll all be worth it.
The new office is getting there! The books are unpacked and the meeting table arrived today.
Picked this up at our (increasingly empty-shelved) local bookstore yesterday. Interesting how so many of the problems of Canadian democracy seem relevant for university leadership as well. Something in Canadian culture?
My son has made us go to the Jays game two hours early - cool for him to be like a few meters from his current childhood heroes.
It’s a convection oven outside (feels like 43!), but there’s an ice cream stand on my walking commute home. 🎉
I’ve been absolutely devouring this book - a gripping real-world engineering horror. It’s a sad case study of an organization making shockingly-bad decisions.
Woah, the Brooklyn Smutty Book Club has fallen in love with digital preservation. Who woulda known!!
Took two hours today to pack up my old AVP office. I moved in with 18 boxes of books and am moving out with 22. Gotta do some downsizing. It is hitting me that I only have ten days left in my role. 🥲
We had an HVAC failure and when I wore shorts to my 33 degrees office, people still acted as if I'd broken a taboo. And I'm an all-powerful AVP!* www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0... * sarcasm very much intended
So when the renovation company said “y’know, you don’t want to live in your house,” they weren’t exaggerating!
We are stuck public charging our EV for a week - it’s eye opening. First charger I went to was out of service, despite being listed as active on Google Maps (thanks UW!). Second charger tho is super fast. So that’s cool! Gaining over 800km an hour.
Perk of the AirBnb during renovations: top-notch walk home from work.
Our full-gut reno is coming up next week and we’ve been selling/storing everything - so now I have a house full of chairs. Maybe we will have our family dinners on moving boxes!
Had such a wonderful time at Aix-Marseille University today, an honour to be invited to speak on my work around web archiving and the impact of the September 11th attacks. Back tomorrow, and in the meantime, unwinding…
Some folks on main campus were describing the satellite campus admin building I'm in as "the place with the smelly bathrooms," and it hit me like a wave. Have they put us in the campus equivalent of Slough House?
I know AI is debatable, but I gotta be honest, it's going through and placing library holds for me (after I've signed into my browser), and this is automating the worst, most boring parts of my workflow.
I can’t believe I have a 3pm meeting, during the third period of the US/Canada gold medal women’s hockey game. Let’s go Canada!!
Transit nerd alert, checking out the new Line 5 in Toronto. (I am not a good photographer, as I always forget to take photos)
Took the Friday off to take my son up to a ski race - now that my feet have defrosted, glad we did! (Also, it was at a private hill, kept thinking they’d kick us out once they realized we were from Kitchener..)
Oh, when people do that, they get some serious consequences from me!
Heck of a day, worth trying out a new bottle of gin. Empress 1908 - makes me want to head to Victoria!
Hey, this makes me seem pretty, pretty cool - hanging out with the "British Academic Historians."