Light at the end of the tunnel?

or is it an oncoming train?

LinkedIn; thing 17

This is another thing I'm going to skip. According to my wife, most of the practical uses of this come after you've paid up, so I'm not going to waste my time on this.

Facebook; thing 16

Oh dear, no way of avoiding it I suppose (especially since there's a least one other 'Thing' I'm not going to do). So, I've signed up to Fa*e*oo* under a pseudonym a while ago, solely to see that was being said on a group about the UL. The signing up process was pretty grim, actually. Their process objected to the first name 'I.', saying "The name contains too many periods". It also objected to 'I' ("You must provide your full name"), "IM" ("The name contains too many capital letters") and even "Im" responding with a message which I think means it only likes Anglo-Saxon first names. And, you have to have a first name, so if you're someone like U Thant you've got problems. 'U' is a Burmese honorific, so U Thant's whole name is 'Thant' (or so I've been told).

So no marks to Fa*e*oo* for cultural sensitivity - but why should this be a surprise?

Anyway, I can tick the box, but I'm probably too old to appreciate this. Why for example does every entry on the wall have an icon of the Fa*e*oo* page that added the entry? It looks really quite odd.



Though the screen shot above probably won't do it justice.
PS The 23 things instructions include this:

gender and date of birth but (and I haven't told you this) it doesn't have to be truthful.

Why be so coy? I'm not telling anyone my real date of birth and interestingly Fa*e*oo* have decided to ignore the date of birth I gave them and substitute the date I joined.

LibraryThing; things 14 & 15

I had to think about a use for this, given that I'm not keen on shelling out actual money, so I decided to create a small catalogue of items in the UL I'm interested in.

What do I think? So far, so good. I've added two items, and one of these is a rather obscure history of the 144th Regiment, Royal Armoured Corps, later the 4th Royal Tank Regiment. It will be interesting to see if I can export this list in some useful format. A quick look at the help pages and indeed it does offer an export function, and into CSV. This means it could go into Excel and from there into Access if I so desired. I could even create a catalogue of my books at home by importing 200 items, exporting them to CSV, deleting them and then importing another 200, and so on.

I've sorted the collections part, though this instruction:

To move books into the collection, click on the folder icon and select the relevant collection.

seemed a little abstruse. Perhaps "click on the folder icon on the right" might have been a little clearer. All that being said, it's rather nice. Pity about the 200 book limit (but that'll be the Scot in me coming out). One thing I didn't like was the widget, which has looks rather ugly in my blog. I've moved it a little, but the colours are still a bit odd. No doubt there are ways of altering these, but I shouldn't have to have an in-depth knowledge of html to change this.

Reflections; thing 13

"God almechty, it's Reflections"

which should confuse anyone who hasn't heard of Scotland the What, and probably quite a few who have.















This is what I'm supposed to be reflecting on:

1. And so what?

See below.

2. How have your skills/knowledge improved?

A little

3. Have the 'Things' covered everything that you need to know, or think it relevant to know?

Probably not, but it would be unreasonable to expect them to do so.

4. Have the activities suited your learning style? (If you're not sure what your learning style is you can complete a very short VARK questionnaire which gives an indication of your learning style. There are lots of other similar questionnaires on the internet)

Not really. See below.

5. Do you feel more competent and confident?

Slightly.

6. How can you apply this learning?
7. What would you do differently - and what might change about how you approach the next 12 Things?

6 & 7. Not sure about that.

8. Is there one (or more) Thing that you would be happy to recommend to a colleague? Why?

Google calendars, but then I was using it anyway.

More detailed responses:
4/ I think the 'things' perhaps ought to have had more detailed instructions available. They occasionally read like someone who had already done this loads of times was jotting down some notes as an aide memoire. The screenshots really ought to have been of plain browsers with no themes, styles, etc. Many people may be starting this from scratch and to see Firefox decorated with planets or something equally distracting isn't necessarily helpful.

1/ The good, the bad and the ugly, or more accurately, the very good, the OK and the 'please uninvent this now'.

Very good: Google calendars; Doodle; Flickr/images.
OK: Tagging
No thanks; Twitter, and I might be tempted to include Delicious as well in this category.

Delicious; thing 12

After some mucking about with Delicious, I've come to the conclusion that there's one major advantage to it from a personal point of view. This is being able to find out who else has bookmarked a particular URL and to see what other bookmarks they've got - this way you may be able to find out useful URLs you've missed.

From the perspective of a library, it could be useful, but I think I might want them to appear as though they were part of my web pages, not something completely separate. I wasn't sure about the navigation aspect either - it struck me that Firefox could do some of what Delicious can do, and I don't think it would be impossible to write the bookmarking aspect of a browser to provide a list sorted by tags.

Finally I was a bit puzzled with this comment:

Compare this with saving your bookmarks via the browser menu command, where you can only access them from the computer you saved them on.)

If you were working on two separate PCs which didn't have roaming profiles, you could of course export your URLs and import them at the other PC - this isn't difficult with Firefox, but is a bit of a pain. Alternatively you could run the browser from a memory stick - both Opera and Firefox allow this.

Email addresses in Voyager

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Email addresses in Voyager

View more presentations from imburke11.

Slideshare; thing 11 - part 2

Hmm, now I've got my Powerpoint thing up, what do I think? Quite nice, though navigating the site isn't terribly intuitive. I also couldn't see how I could stop Slideshare from advertising similar presentations. It's quite nice, in some way, that it does, but I think it would be helpful to be able to turn that feature off.

Someone's bound to ask why? OK, let's say I advertise some particular process I would liek my users to carry out, but, I'd rather they didn't carry out some similar process. I can't stop them finding out about that second process, but I can at least not point them to it (and therefore avoid any responsibility). I can't think of a practical example right this minute though.

It's also worth pointing out that there are alternative ways of doing this. I've just taken the same presentation and turned it into html in one easy process. It's not very pretty, and does involve ActiveX it seems, but it did work. An alternative approach might be to download and install 'Cute PDF writer' which appears to your PC to be a printer, but produces PDFs. This can turn your Powerpoint presentation into a PDf which you could then put on a website.

P.S. The navigability issues seem to be a bit better once you've logged out and back in.

Slideshare; thing11 - part 1

Oh dear, yet another login ID and password needed. At least I could recycle my Yahoo one with no problems.

At first sight this reminds me of the startup screen for IBM's PC operating system OS/2. It's difficult to know where to start, and even after a couple of minutes of looking I still can't see what I'm supposed to do first. Eventually I found a small quick tour link, which wasn't much help, and finally I saw the upload button. So far, so good.

So, I've uploaded a small Powerpoint presentation I've done, now I have to classify, oops, sorry, tag it. I'm not sure that the categories are particularly helpful - "Education" and "Technology" are a bit vague, so I thought I'd settle on "Humor", but had second thoughts as people may be expecting more jokes. At this point I'm trying to post this to Blogger, so I'll publish this bit now.

Flickr; thing 9, thing 10 and tagging

Flickr. I'd had a go at uploading some photos onto another photo sharing website, but hadn't done much with Flickr other than browsing around. Following the instructions I now have this photo:

This is quite a curious photo (taken by one Peer Gynt it would seem). It's of a British designed (specifically Vickers-Armstrong Ltd.) tank called the Valentine, at a museum in Russia. The Soviet Army was supplied with quite a large number of these, not that they were overly impressed with them, but rather than giving this example Soviet markings, they've had a not very successful go at a British marked vehicle (it's supposed to be in a unit of the 23rd Armoured Brigade, but I haven't managed to find the book which will tell me which unit is referred to by '67').

The original photo is at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/peer_gynt/3966916040/

(I've now found out more about the markings. It's supposed to be a Valentine of 'A' squadron, 50th Royal Tank Regiment - that's what the '67' means. There's even a photo of this vehicle in Tunisia in 'British tank markings and names by B.T. White'. The Liver Bird symbol to the right of the name really should be black on a white square and the 67 should, I think, be white on a black square, and the whole tank should be painted a sand colour, oh, and there should be a registration number, but apart that it's accurate.)

I've also set up my own Flickr account at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/53094833@N03/

So, is Flickr of any use? Quite handy if you want to get photos of obscure British military vehicles or aircraft. I'm not quite so sure about libraries though; after all, someone has to create the images in the first place and then feel sufficiently generous so as to make them freely available afterwards.

One worry might be that one library has a member of staff who's adept at creating such images, does them in work time, or using work resources, and makes them freely available, until there's a change in the economic climate, and management goes kerching! [2] and sees a potential income stream. What's the legal position if I make something freely available, then change my mind a year or two later? Am I entitled to start charging anyone who's used my images? Should people who who have used my images be checking the legal position regarding specific images regularly? One for a lawyer I think?

Another problem is the tagging issue. By allowing people to chose their own tags, you could get the same image described in different ways. For example, in my Flickr photostream, I've currently got pictures of half-a-dozen british military aircraft, carefully described with both their name and the manufacturer's name. Except, that is, for the Spitfire which I though was a sufficiently iconic name not to need Supermarine before it. After checking in Wikipedia I could see there was a car called a Triumph Spitfire, which might have been present at the event where I took the photo. Should I go back and make sure that the manufacturer is in the tag as well?

Not that there are problems only with user defined tags. Library of Congress subject headings are a well known subject classification scheme, but they're incomplete, wrong in some cases, and subject to needless changes (like 'World War, 1914-1918' to 'European War, 1914-1918' and then back again to 'World War, 1914-1918' a year later when people in Washington thought to look at some history books).

At this point I'm going to have to admit that I don't know what the answers are (and probably apologise for having possibly wasted some of your time reading this).

[1] This supposed to be the sound of a cash till. I could also have used the Tom and Jerry image of dollar signs in someone's eyes, but that would have been even more difficult to do - I doubt that there are any free to use images of that around.

A comment

It's been pointed out to me that I've had a comment. I think the commenter (or is that commentator?) may have missed my point (which isn't surprising since I didn't really explain it). Quite apart from the rather silly name, a lot of us have experience of twitter like activity. After all, even my mother sends text messages when she needs to.

The problem I see with twitter is the limit on characters - 140 isn't really enough for any serious communication. Recently I've had to send an email message to a fellow of Peterhouse explaining why the stack request system in the UL has to work the way it does; that couldn't be explained in less than 560 words, or more than 3000 characters, and a few weeks ago I sent a letter to Skoda commenting on their apparent inability to allow people to test drive cars that people might actually want to drive. It had to go as a letter because the comments form on their website had a limit of 1,000 characters.
Iain

Twitter; thing 7

Thing 7 is "Create a Twitter account and interact with other Cam23 ‘tweeple’"

I don't think so. And certainly not if you can't speak plain English.

Google calendar; thing 6

I've seen a number of different types of electronic calendars, ranging from web pages, which look extremely dull and cant' easily provide reminders to Microsoft Outlook, which was quite nice, but meant you were more or less forced to use Microsoft's pitiful attempt at an email client [1].

Google calendar, as long as you ignore the web side of it, however is pretty good. Ignoring the web aspect of a web application may seem contradictory, but if you combine Google Calendar with Thunderbird and Lightning you can get a quite effective calendar. Here's how it works:

1. Install and configure Thunderbird; the Computing Service has instructions on configuring Thunderbird at http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/email/muasettings/mozilla.html.
2. Download and install Lightning, an add-on for Thunderbird that allows you to create calendars on your PC, from http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/lightning/.
3. Download and install the Provider for Google Calendar from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/4631/.
4. Follow the instructions at http://bfish.xaedalus.net/2007/04/stay-in-sync-with-gcal-and-thunderbird/.
   

If I can find the time I'll expand on this later or somewhere else. The advantage of this is that you can set up a public calendar on Google, choose whether or not to have email reminders (I've turned them off), and then use Lightning to provide the reminders. Lightning can then have a non-public calendar for stuff you don't want everyone else to see. The only disadvantage is that you can't, as far as I can see, see other people's Google calendars in Lightning - you have to use the Web version of Google calendar to see that.

Why is this important? Part of the impetus for this was hearing that the Computing Service were talking to Google about Google apps, particularly the calendar application. Given that they were going to do this, there was bound to be some pressure from management for some or all staff to use this and I thought I might as well get some experience in how I would like to use it.

A pretty good tool on the whole.

[1] I could go on about how useless Microsoft is at Internet type stuff at great length. On the whole I'm OK with their operating systems and Office is quite good (particularly Access), but IE and Outlook/Outlook Express are pretty atrocious and have changed the way email works and not for the better.

Doodle; thing 5

Used it already. Very useful tool and, as someone pointed out in another 23 things blog, it saves the multiple email messages having to be sent.

Thing 4a

Registering my blog. I've just had a second go at this, as the first attempt doesn't seem to have worked. It's always possible that I've been banned for excessive cynicism. Next step I'll have to go and look at other blogs.

Things 1 to 3

Did thing 1 this a while ago. Here's the screen shot:
















As this can be read I've obviously done thing 3, and I created a blog a while ago; see:

http://antarctic-trips.blogspot.com/

I eventually decided that blogging software wasn't necessarily the best solution for this, despite making the HTML part a lot easier. One of the irritations was getting the entries in the correct order - correcting a spelling mistake for example basically seems to muck things up, which what's a diary is a bit of a pain. So much of a pain that I never updated the blog with the second trip.

Additional comments:
The problem I had with the order of entries being moved around does seem to have been fixed now (and was probably fixed a long time ago - I did tend to assume that this was how things were supposed to be). On the whole I'm not sure about blogs as a means of transmitting information. However you try and communicate with readers, you've still got to get them to read or otherwise ingest what you want them to know.

The 23 things

It seems I'm now up to thing 7, creating a Twitter account, at which point I'm passing. I'm afraid I really can't see the point of Twitter and I'm not having anything to do with it. On to thing 8.

What I like about computers

Just in case I'm giving the impression that I'm a dyed in the wool here are some things I like about computers:

• Email. One of the best inventions ever, and that's despite spam. The idea that I can send a message to someone else in the world and I won't have to worry about whether they're around at the time or whether they can read my handwriting is brilliant.
• Graphical user interfaces. I think I must have developed the need for a GUI before I actually got hold of one, when I was using DOS and WordPerfect and worked out that there was a "trap door" in the latter that took you back to DOS, from where you could run Kermit to check your email. You don't know what Kermit is? Look it up on Wikipedia - which leads me to ...
• Wikipedia. Yes it's got inaccuracies, but it's still a vastly better than the alternatives.
• Command line interfaces. It might seem a little odd citing this as well as the GUI, but there's a lot to be said for a command line interface. It's a lot easier to write down odd commands you don't use very often, rather than trying to remember being shown what's essentially a load of hand movements.
• Free software. I'm half Scottish, so the attraction should be obvious.

Fonts

I'm old enough to remember the days when computers worked in one font, and one font only. OK, it was a problem if you wanted to type characters in a foreign alphabet, but other than that everything worked.

These days we're exhorted, obliged even, to use a sans-serif font, which from my perspective is a pain. I've had a number of phone calls from people expecting to talk to Lain, simply because it's an unfamiliar name, and their font is set to something which can't distinguish between an upper case 'I' and a lower case 'l'.

PS: Curiously, there was an article in the Guardian (at http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/jun/20/in-defence-comic-sans-font). One of its advantages, for me at least, is that it doesn't suffer from the same I/l problem as Arial.

Blogger gripes

OK, here's one for a start. This blog is attached to my Google account which has a calendar. I created the calendar for work purposes only (excluding leave) and it knows I write in UK English and write from the UK time zone. Blogger is apparently incapable of copying this, so the first blog was apparently written at 2:38 a.m. because it thinks I'm writing from California. More mysteriously it's worked out that I'm going to write in UK English!

Digital scepticism

This is supposed to be a blog that I created as part of this wretched 23 things stuff at Cambridge. This of course leaves me with the problem of making sure that it's not public. Strictly speaking I've been here before, and have a blog created from a diary I kept of our last Antarctic trip. Not really the correct medium for a diary as the entries tend to get sorted in order by date of editing, which means that you've got to get the entries correct first time round.