Endless Scholar

Word of the Day #1: Scabbard

Tracy — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 13:50:34 +0000

Part of speech: Nown

Plural: Scabbards

Pronunciation: \ˈska-bərd\

The sheath of a sword or similar bladed weapon.

Photo courtesy of www.old-smithy.info

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Starting GRE/SAT Word of the Day

Tracy — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 19:24:15 +0000

Greetings, all who may still follow this site. I’m helping both my husband and I study little by little for the GRE and though some in the e-world may want to play along :-).

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Evernote? OK, I’ll give it a go.

Tracy — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 07:04:06 +0000

Happy 2009!

I’ve been playing with Evernote some and it has definitely improved since I last toyed with it. I’m thinking, now that I’m in a different environment, that it just might work for me.

Here are my requirements:

Must be able to use it for work on a laptop that I can’t install stuff on
Also must be able to use it at home when I often don’t have work laptop
Must be secure enough that I can put work documents on it (which pretty much means “not online”)
Of course must be very easy to use and manage
And must be mobile, so I can grab things as I think of them on the go

My idea is to get one of those SanDisk U3 drives they say Evernote can be installed onto and put my things on there (getting around requirement #1). I’ll keep my work notes on an non sync-ed notebook so they never go online and security is not an issue (#3), but I can also access them at work or at home. My personal notes would be on a sync-ed notebook so I could use my iPhone and personal computer while at home (#2 & #5).

I’m going to research this some more, but in theory, it sounds like it should work. Looks like it’s just requirement #4 that is up in the air, though the FireFox plug-in and iPhone app do look promising.

Cross your fingers.

Cleaning out my gmail inbox

Tracy — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 20:34:49 +0000

I’m bad with letting things get cluttered, but that’s why I’m taking action. I’m on chapter 4 of Getting Things Done and I’m inspired to finally get my gmail inbox clean. It feels like I had my inbox clean only a month or two ago, but I’m looking at 500+ messages that I kept “to do something with,” as in, not junk mail. Hm. That’s probably at least 100 things I planned on doing but didn’t. But that’s what GTD is meant to fix, so here I go!

I use FireFox and Gmail all the time. Gmail’s simplicity and power (and storage) and FireFox’s plug-in capability is a real winner in my book. When I ran across the GTDInbox plug-in for FireFox and Gmail I was just stunned that it was so perfectly available. After hesitantly installing it, stumbling through set-up, and then wrapping my head around what it was doing, I’m pretty pleased with the results so far.

GTDInbox provides a way to use Gmail as a GTD filing system, full of next actions, reference, and other labels. It gives your labels a tree-folder apearance for easier managing of the many labels you’ll need, and also adds some “Reply to self” and “Compose to Self” options for making notes on items and reminding yourself of things. Pretty neat so far, but again, only for Gmail and only for FireFox.

Why stick with Gmail when there are so many Outlook plug-ins available? Because I can’t use those plugins at work, and I can’t use my home Outlook file structure at work. Gmail I can use just fine anywhere I have internet (just without the FireFox plug-ins). The flexibility just works better for me. And Outlook is slooooow with the gmail IMAP when you have 7000 messages to sync. I just can’t find a happy medium when I include Outlook.

Do y’all know of any neat GTD FireFox plug-ins? Or what do you use, if anything?

Oye. Office Life is Different.

Tracy — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 23:50:32 +0000

Well, I’m finally in an office of my very own. I have a name plate outside the door and I can look out a pretty window and see cars below. I got myself some business cards and I’m now attending meetings.

But boy, did those high oil prices (and ever-changing technology) create a lot of confusion the last four years with all the hurry, hurry, hurry attitude everyone’s had.

Now that they’re back down, we’re still puttin’ away but I’m making it my mission to make some sense of it all :-D. And I’m up to my ears in ideas and projects and to-do’s.

And I’m also in a new world where there are loads of paper products again. Big offices are not tree-friendly, I’m quickly finding out. When tablet PCs are back out of the picture (since I can’t get anything but the normal laptop they provide everyone), little annoyances start creeping in that I’m not sure how to manage again. Like filing notes from meetings. Or even taking notes in meetings. Or what do I do when I need to go talk to someone about something I’ve been working on in my excel file?

I’m trying some different ideas with, such as a combo of paper and digital organizers, digital pen + paper items (surely something like that has to work! I’ve seen them at Target), and a bunch of sticky notes I’m using as a crutch in the mean time. But first I want to help clear my head in a way I tried briefly in college: “Getting Things Done.”

Oh yes, that magical system that, as 43 Folders describes, “probably takes a backseat only to the Atkins Diet in terms of the number of enthusiastic evangelists.” But I got half-way through the book last time and what I did get from it was very helpful in terms of just remembering to write stuff down and think about what is the true next action.

But now that I’m drowning in paper and projects and getting paid to do stuff (and wanting to get a good review in the spring), I really want to take a closer look at this. I’m on chapter 3 and hoping to find a way to make this all work better.

So now I’m spending this holiday with family, friends, and a book. It’s a nice thing to unwind for two weeks.

Anyway, yeah, sorry about the silence lately. Just getting use to life as it is now! It happens :-).

And if I don’t happen to write in the next few days, happy holidays and merry Christmas!

Joining the 50 Book Challenge

Tracy — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 16:48:58 +0000

As Robert continues on his 50 Novels in a Year Challenge, I watch in envy as he checks each interesting book from his list. My love of a good challenge and a good book, and my new Sony PRS-505 Reader purchase, finally made me decide to jump in and join him.

I miss reading for fun, as I was a kid who never let a book leave her side but gradually let the academic world steal my reading time (ironic, eh?). OK, I’ll be honest, dating and other social activities also stole that time away :-P.

Since I’m also trying to learn Spanish, I’m including some books translated into Spanish I found online. Reading in my target language has really helped my comfort level and has kept the progress fun. I’m also the type that grew up learning nearly everything through reading books, so it’s only natural (this was largely my dad’s doing–> Me: “Hey, Dad, do you know…” Dad: ”Yes. Here are four college-level books on it, along with some websites that have a lot of info to read.” I love my dad).

So, to the right of this post (those reading on the website and not RSS) I’ll have my book list a-la-Burdock style just for me to track my progress and to pick my next selection from. The Spanish books will be a lot slower than English, but the idea is for those to gradually become faster anyway so it shouldn’t bog me down too much.

By the way, the whole language thing is going great. I can still only create parts of parts on my own, but I can tell I’m improving and I’m actually starting to think in the language at times. I can definitely follow along in written word and I’m getting there in spoken word. A combination of the Michel Thomas method, SpanishPod.com, sentence flash cards, and reading novels in Spanish have really boosted overall progress and I highly recommend a similar approach to anyone reading this.

And thanks to all who emailed me to help me learn. I hope to get to a conversational level pretty soon but right now it just takes so much time for me to produce the language that it’s a largely one-sided conversation! I overestimated my ability to converse with native speakers when I made that post :-P.

Guess what I have! (Hint: it’s a Sony Reader PRS-505)

Tracy — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 01:27:39 +0000

That’s right! I gave in and decided I really, really wanted one of these e-book reader things, and the last commenter who mentioned that Target had the Sony PRS-505 was the final straw that just broke my will power!

I didn’t want to wait for the new Kindle or the new Sony, and, hey, the instant gratification factor of the PRS-505 being at Target down the street was a big plus. And this one was cheaper than the Kindle or Sony 700 reader, especially when the wireless would be less useful to me since I have my iPhone.

I’ll review it more but first impression is that I LOVE the screen! As my husband put it, "It looks fake," as in, it looks like you need to peel off the sample "here’s what it would look like if it were on" plastic before using, that’s how clear it is. Awesome.

And of course, if it’s good enough for my avid-reader co-author, then it’s good enough for me! I’ll be loading books for the rest of tonight :-D.

Cute OneNote tip for meeting notes

Tracy — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 14:15:31 +0000

While browsing John Guin’s blog, I found this cute (yes, I said, “cute”) tip on how he keeps notes on his meetings with coworkers.

I have meetings with all the people on my team regularly, and have a separate section for each. But that is boring. I asked everyone to give me a photo, and used MS Paint.net to “fade” the photo. Then I enlarged them each to about screen size, pasted them onto a page, and made a template for each section with a background photo of the person. I would post a picture of this, but I had to promise none of these photos would wind up on the internet.

I thought that was fun :-D. Sounds like a good way to keep client notes as well.

Are long OneNote pages bogging you down?

Tracy — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 02:49:51 +0000

Maybe if you’re using OneNote on a powerful laptop or a new, ultra-configured tablet, you may not have noticed any slow-down. Or if you like to keep neat little notes that only use a letter-sized page of writing/text at a time, this likely has never occurred.

But if you use just a half-decent tablet (that’s what I consider my X61T) and you enjoy the freedom of an endless notebook, then you may have noticed the hit that OneNote takes if you start messing with ink and images a few scrolls down the page.

Now, in OneNote’s defense, just having an endless page as an option is cool, but we want perfection! How long has OneNote been out? Years? Let’s get on the ball, wonderful OneNote team (they really do seem like a great team).

But until it’s a non-issue, here are some ideas to help perk up your perpetual page.

Start with the basics

OK, so the problem is with OneNote but if you can’t make the weight lighter, make the muscle stronger!

OneNote increasingly needs more RAM the more words you select, pages you scroll, and images you paste (or so it seemed from my testing), so free up that RAM! Add more if you can. If you only have one gig and you’re running Vista, you really need at least two. If you have two, try three. If you already have three then you’ll probably have better results freeing the RAM you have, but four won’t hurt anything but your wallet.

While messing with your long pages, minimize the use of other RAM-hogging programs, or just other programs in general. Remember that FireFox tends to grab a lot (at least on my machine), especially with numerous tabs open, and often keeps it even after it is closed so you may need to manually end the process in the Task Manager (right click on the bottom Windows toolbar).

I’m not sure if it’s true, but there’s a rumor that just minimizing program windows that aren’t in use can improve the performance of your computer. Worth a shot.

Also don’t forget to end any background services like…well, there are a lot of them so just make sure you know what’s going on. Is Windows indexing stuff? Are you seeding any torrents you don’t know about (not that anyone here would download torrents )? Are there updates to anything downloading or installing? Just keep an eye on this stuff.

There is also the option to sacrifice battery to get better performance, an option I often use. I’d much rather sit by the outlet or only have two-three hours battery if it mean not having any wait time. Your call, but remember it’s an option.

So what is OneNote doing that’s so hard?

I did some research on this and it seems that John Guin, a member of the OneNote test team, explains it best in this post.

Since each line of text from the original file becomes its own element, we track the last modified time for each element and assign it a unique ID. This way, if you (or someone else in a shared notebook) makes a change, we can show who modified which element and at what time the change took place. It does add some overhead to the file.

This is why 20 pages of text in Word acts differently than 20 pages of text in OneNote. A trade of performance for features, and only a performance hit for some users. But I would question Guin’s evaluation when he says,

And there was no detailed case to paste an entire book of prose onto a single OneNote page. This did not surprise me too much - this is not a common operation at all, and I doubt any significant number of people would do this.

OK, maybe not a book of prose, but I have pages upon pages of 50-60 slides in a single OneNote page with written notes on top. I think this has the same effect and I would hardly consider it extreme. Maybe not every user does it like this, but I am sure I’m not the only student who does. You need different test cases, OneNote team.

So what can you do?

We won’t see any major improvement from OneNote for a while, but in the meantime there are some things you can do to help that are internal for OneNote I’d like to thank to reader Julian for help trouble-shooting this problem.

Julian found that changing the Pen Mode (under the Tools menu) to "Create Handwriting Only" and then starting a new page improves the performance of long pages. I think this is because it’s one less thing for OneNote to think about while you’re writing, but do note that this will give you some odd ink-to-text results when it tries to convert that arrow to a word instead of treating it like an image.

You can also check out OneNote’s option panel for some performance options.

Under the Pen category, turning off pressure sensitivity will make your files smaller and theoretically easier to handle. The only use I find for pressure sensitivity is for highlighting and for using a chisel tip, and since OneNote doesn’t have a chisel tip option, I usually have this option off anyway. My files are big enough as it is.
I went ahead and turned off the "Automatically switch between Pen and Selection Tool" with the thought that if it’s done automatically, then it’s likely it’s thinking about it while I’m writing. Since I usually know when I want to ink and when I want to select, I turned this off so I can do the thinking for it.
Under the Audio and Video category, you may have search of audio and video recordings enabled. This happens in the background while you’re plugged in, but if that’s how you usually take notes or mess with your long pages, then it could be indexing those audio files while you work. Like any other process, this can slow you down and you may want to sacrifice audio searching if all else fails.
Under the Other category, you can disable text recognition in pictures which is technically something that slows down OneNote but it’s one of my favorite features so I never have it checked. I love picture search :-D. Any lag from that is worth it in my book. A better option is the battery performance selector. If you can spare a few minutes of battery life, you might as well have it at Max Performance rather than Max Battery. I’ve found the difference between these two are rather dramatic and if OneNote is ever acting sluggish, this is the first thing I check.

If all else fails, you can always just make subpages instead of long pages, but what’s the fun in that?

Other suggestions?

So those are my suggestions, but I’m fairly sure there are other things you can do that I just don’t know about yet. If you have any ideas that weren’t mentioned or if you’d like to clarify or correct anything I mentioned here, please do comment!

Does anyone have a ModBook? Or tried one?

Tracy — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 21:42:32 +0000

Has anyone ever tried a ModBook, the third party Mac tablet that is a slate made from a normal MacBook? I’m thinking a Mac would be cool for my next computer, or a small Tablet PC slate, but maybe this would be cool. A 13.3″ widescreen, glass slate with a DVD drive, 2.4 GHz processor, and a 160 GB hard drive. Sure, it’s 5.5 lbs, but that’s still on the lighter side of laptops.

And looking at the digitizer, it looks better than the one that most tablets have. It looks like they’re putting one of Wacom’s better digitizers on there, with two button pens, three types of pen tips, and 512 levels of pressure sensitivity (and a screen that’s etched to “feel like paper”).

I wonder what software you would use with this for taking notes? I wonder what type of keyboard support they have, like the Tablet PC Input Panel, and external keyboards. Hmm.

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