Pre-Reflection: Catching Up

I seem to have got way behind with Cam 23 already - here we are in Week 6, and here I am still climbing out of the foothills of Week 3. But, fortunately, I have a fair amount of experience of the Things that we have covered since then. So I have decided just to write about my experiences with these. I'd be interested to know if they ring any bells with others.

Week Four was Doodle, to fix appointments, and Google Calendar, to keep track of them once fixed. I have been using both these for a couple of years now, and I am pretty well pleased with both. Like Aidan (as he explains in a post from June 2010) the first online calendar I used was the late and, initially, bitterly lamented Mosuki. When Mosuki closed down in April last year I chose Google reluctantly, because "everyone else" had already done so (starting with my brother-in-law). Since then, however, I have come to appreciate Google Calendar's many virtues, even when compared to my memories of Mosuki. Besides the fact that each calendar has its colour, and the site's very ubiquity [yes, I know, the same excuse I use for staying with Windows when I could move to Linux or save up for a Mac] I particularly value the fact that, when a calendar is viewed a month at a time, each day's entries appear chronologically.

Aidan pointed this out last year, but let me explain why that matters so much to me. Ever since I was a raw post-doc (when men were real men and disks were 5.25" wide) I have printed out monthly schedules to go on my (later our) and on my parents' kitchen walls. These started off in Microsoft Outlook, which worked quite well. When I tried to migrate to Mosuki, however, I found that each day's items appeared in the order they were posted, which led to oddities such as the train home from a meeting appearing before the meeting itself. Google Calendar's order is more logical, and that alone has made it more useful.

I've been using Doodle for a couple of years, too. The only similar tool I've tried is Meet-o-matic, which does much the same thing. I greatly prefer Doodle, mostly because it lets me see others' responses before posting. Whether you are trying to arrange a meeting (when participants will congregate towards the most popular slots) or to fill spaces on a rota (when the reverse applies), making people post blind feels very second best.

I did say that, if I came across a week where I knew the Things well, I would jump straight in to the Extra Thing. In Week 4, however, the Extra Thing was the Cambridge Libraries Widget, and I can't think what I, as a non-Cambridge non-librarian, might use it for. ["So what are you doing on this course, impostor!?" The explanation is here]

Onwards to Week 5, and we come first to Google Docs, which I have used to share documents with myself (on different computers), with family, and with external collaborators on a couple of professional projects. (The most recent of these has been a project to review and catalogue open educational resources for bioscience, which I might blog about separately some time.) This tool is now a near-invaluable part of my professional life, but I've only used it for the standard docs, spreadsheets and presentations so far. I'm thinking of an excuse to try out creating a form.

I've not tried PushNote and EndNote yet, so I'll leave them - along with my reflections on the course so far - for a separate post. But at least I've caught up a bit...

Thing 5: Screenshots

For quite a few years, I've been using a rather old, cut-down, non-licensed (cut-down because it's non-licensed) version of Corel Paint Shop Pro to take screen shots. This has worked fine, but it's occurred to me from time to time that it would be good to find a completely open source equivalent. I was therefore very pleased to come (eventually) to Thing 5, and find LightShot recommended there.

I found it easy enough to install as an add-on to Firefox although I do have to confess that I wasted a good thirty seconds looking in the wrong part of the screen for the purple feather.

And so, I now have a new toy. What to do with it? Well, I could do with livening up my blog with an image or two. An image, perhaps, of a little bear... Googling "little bear", however, proved embarrassing. A whole page of primary-school cartoon images, all copyright. "Bear cub" was rather more promising:

A whole screenfull of little bears

But wait. I'm no wildlife photographer, and each one of those cute images is almost certainly copyrighted to someone who is. What I want - no, what I need - is an image that is firmly in the public domain. Wikimedia Commons has a few, labelled, in a most un-primary-school-like manner, as "Category: Ursidae (juvenile)".


The one I like is one up a tree. No author name is given, and it is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 Unported license and a GNU Free Documentation License. You can see the result on the left-hand side of my top page. I think it looks OK; if anyone reading this and who knows more about copyright (and copyleft) than I do suggests that I take it down, I will.

The constellation Ursa minor (Creative Commons image by BorgQueen)

Had I stuck to my first degree subject of Physics, I might well have landed up with an image like this one