Found some good things worth mentioning, software wise, for academic types. Zotero is a great extension for Firefox 2.0 that makes keeping track of citations, books and articles, etc. much easier. I’ve played with a lot of different software packages and web sites to track my research and this one really seems to work easily. The weird thing about it was that I had just started a blog to dump citations and notes into, and now this comes along. I think I like keep research out (at least in a limited way) in a public space instead of buried on a file on my computer. But Zotero makes it easier to generate the citations I need as well as filing the pdfs that can’t make public in a reasonably intuitive way.
Book Burro may end up being my downfall. Making it so easy to locate books may kill what is left of my time. The Worldcat interface is tremendous, so I’m hoping I might avoid buying as many books. Yeah, right. It also makes it much easier to find cheap used copies.
Finally, Notepad 2.1 is a Mac widget that may finally make me use dashboard consistently. Nice to be able to just pop out to take a few notes, or manage to do lists.
Years ago, I told myself that I wouldn’t split up my blogging activities into separate venues. Somehow though, I feel sort of saddled with a certain “brand” of blogging activity here. I usually blow everything up and reinvent a new version of this blog when that happens. But I don’t have time for that now. Instead, I’ve decided to split into the blog for research noting and musing, and a fishblog. When I have something that at least approaches being coherent, I’ll blog it here. The other venues are mainly just for more mundane notes. It’s tempting to put that stuff here to keep this place “alive,” but it wouldn’t be very interesting to most people. So I’m trying to make it a productive split. We’ll see how it goes.
