Wiki me!

After years of doing work and then forgetting that I had done it, last year I decided to take a drastic step and start a record of previous fixes and information.  After discovering that writing things down on tiny scraps of paper was ineffective (the scraps tend to bunch together in the washing machine), I installed a personal Wiki on my workstation.

Minimal web research led me to choose MoinMoinWiki.  Now I have an easy-to-update, searchable, browser-hosted record of my day-to-day work activities.  This is far superior to just unrelated Word documents in a LAN folder.

Wiki: not just for sharing!

Pointless Tech Purchase!

I bought an Asus 4GB Eee PC today. I figure I can sell my larger HP Laptop and cover most of the $350 cost, and the Eee is much more portable. I’ll provide a review when it actually arrives. Still pointless!

Actually, I thought my first laptop purchase was pointless, too, so this isn’t so bad.

Google, Library Scanning, and Copyright

There’s a nice (and brief) roundup of issues concerning Google’s massive library book scanning project at Ars Technica this morning. I’d like to comment on it more fully, but I don’t have the time or patience to read through all the relevant copyright law. My illustrious employer is also a member of this project, so I expect to be hearing a lot about this topic in the coming years.

The gist of the problem appears to be that copyright pertaining to electronic media has not been fully hashed out in the courts, so several opinions can be regarded as having validity. The idea of Google, a powerful media corporation, having control over copies of many millions of pages of copyrighted content is mind-boggling. What do they say they intend to do with them? Their use could be either lawful, unlawful, or exist in a legal limbo.

Several amusing remarks are made in the back-and-forth comments between Paul Courant and Siva Vaidhyanathan about the general laziness of modern students, to the effect that they won’t bother to physically seek out actual books, but prefer electronic versions…a generalization, but one with some truth to it. It’s just the way they was raised, I guess.

Ebooks – Amazon Kindle

I’ve been looking for an electronic reading device that works for, oh, I guess about 40 years now. Lately more are being developed, but they all have one thing in common – they’re too expensive. Amazon’s Kindle is no different, coming in at $400. It has nice features…that are still not worth $400. Sorry, please play again.

The Kindle, by Engadget

p.s. also, it’s ugly.

Launchy streamlines programs

I usually don’t bother with ‘productivity applications’ because I think they’re just another way to waste time playing with freeware.  But Launchy has proved itself to me as a way to skip the annoying hunt for shortcuts and Start menu items.  Launchy provides a quick way to start applications by typing instead of mouse-clicking.  It’s free, so try it out.  For Windows only.