Yes, I’ve been busily consuming… spending money. I confess to being a bit of a technosucker. I’ll usually find a justification for some gadget or another if I really want it.
I never could justify an iPod. Not heavily into my music, not really in need of a portable hard disk or even an organiser, but Mrs woo bought me a shuffle for my birthday, so I was naturally delighted.
Firstly, the shuffle is fantastic – I’ve turned into an avid music listener… exploring parts of my music library I haven’t visited for years. BUT… the earbuds are (literally) a pain! They fall out unless you jam them into your ear so hard they hurt. Never mind the 12 hour battery life, one or two was all I could stand. Until I found Griffin Earjams. Believe me, if you have an iPod G3 or later or Shuffle, you owe it to your ears to get these. They only cost me $18 over at centre.net.
Month: April 2005
the social bookmarking experiment…
I’ve recently joined the wave of web users to try online bookmark tools – specifically del.icio.us – known as a ‘social bookmarking’ tool.
Del.icio.us is simple and, for what it does, it works very well. The social aspect is the real revelation though. You bookmark a page and see that others have also bookmarked it, so you get to explore things that have interested them. I have already found dozens of excellent sites I would never have found in other ways.
Still, I’m a picky bugger, and I find it lacking polish and integration.
I have now dropped del.icio.us in favour of Furl. This is state-of-the-art in online bookmarking. In beta, run by Looksmart and (at the moment) free, it has all the appeal of del.icio.us, but with added extras like: bookmark importing (yay!); page snapshots; export to bibTex, endnote etc.; smarter handling of the social aspects; superb integration with firefox and IE; integrated contact management; several different feeds for my weblog (coming soon!) etc…
While I was ferreting around I found another excellent tool that people might like to explore… Connotea. This is a much more hard-core academic bookmarking tool, though still in development. A level of polish and integration somewhere between del.icio.us and furl, but definitely one to watch. The only problem with connotea was that I felt a bit low-brow posting my ‘fun’ urls, when everyone else on the site was posting scholarly journal articles… the latest postings show up on the front page!
I still feel there is plenty of room for improvement and further integration that would significantly benefit the academic user/researcher/student, but I feel these tools are going to change the way we look for new information, having huge implications for search engines, metadata etc. If you think about it, they are profiling you, then finding other users with similar interests and then offering recommended urls based on that information – you are multiplying your searching and filtering powers for every user that you silently collaborate with. Compelling stuff!
another site launched
Quite pleased with this one: Melbourne University Publishing, it’s the first time I’ve had a high profile site with full css layout. Very accessible and pretty much compatible with most modern browsers, but best looking in firefox on a mac (of course!).
Send a link from Safari
I love Apple’s Safari browser. There is a level of polish not even available in the wonderful Firefox, however, I’ll admit it’s sometimes a little short on functionality. One that annoys me is the lack of a quick ‘send link’ function to email a URL to someone. All fixed now!
Drag my ‘mail this‘ link to your Safari bookmarks bar to provide a functionality similar to that in Firefox/Mozilla. It also works in those browsers if you’d rather a clickable link than the default menu item.
Bollywood and Jane
Just been to see “Bride and Prejudice” at the Nova. It was great! what a laugh – what a riotous party of a movie.
One of my criterias for music I like is that it should sound like it was fun to make – if you can hear the musician’s enjoyment coming through, it’s bound to be good. This is a movie that fits the criteria. The actors practically beam enjoyment as they go about the story.
From what I recall of the Jane Austen novel I studied in year 10, it was surprisingly close to the structure of the story, if not the setting. Also, I never remember getting the impression that Jane Austen particularly enjoyed what she did…
Get a few friends together – leave your critical thought at home and go and see it!
upgrade time!
Ok, the observant ones among you will have noticed that my website looks different. I have upgraded the blog software, wordpress, which went swimmingly well. Not wanting to push my run of good luck too far, I am going to leave the look and feel for another day. Til then, you can enjoy the default (and very sweet!) kubrick theme.
destroy this website!
It’s been ages since I posted and this isn’t really news, but it’s fun… Go on, destroy this website!