Two weeks down (50 + 156 to go...)

October has passed me by almost completely, in a whirl of lectures, reading lists, journal articles, train tickets and, happily, a little lindy hop.

They did say it would be hard work...
Image by The Prudent Cyclist

Two weeks into my Masters, I'm very pleased to say that I'm enjoying what I'm doing so far. Some of it is a bit of revision (never a bad thing, especially after a year out) but there's a lot of new stuff in there too. I'm heartened by the fact that we're on the threshold of knowing more about the brain and how it does what it does, and I hope I can contribute to this new venture in the years to come. I'm finding that postgraduate study takes you from the realm of confirmed fact and certainties to the brink of real discovery - a little disconcerting, but very exciting indeed.

However, getting to grips with new theories and the latest research requires a LOT of reading - eye-crossing, mind-scrambling, fatigue-inducing amounts of reading. At time of writing, I am up to date with my reading...but give it a couple of days and a weekend in Richmond and I'll still be frantically trying to understand Cinque's 1990 account of Clitic Left Dislocation come Monday.

On the more pastoral side of things, I'm getting to know the campus and the city much better, and I'm settling into a kind of extended friendship group, thanks largely to the people I met at the York GSA's Meet a Housemate event as well as some very lovely people on my course. In fact, regarding the latter, I'd like to thank them for electing me as the MA representative for the department's Graduate School Board - I will do my best to represent them and their views as the year progresses. I've also taken up playing netball for my college, Wentworth...having not played for 8 (!) years, I was actually quite pleased with how I played at Goal Defence, my spectacular full-length face-plant across the goal third notwithstanding. Of course, we were still beaten by Vanbrugh 15-10, but they're all 18, so we win morally, I think.

Lindybombing the Festival of Ideas underneath the
Raised Faculty Building
Photo by Minh Hai Tran


In other news, CLX 2011 (that's the Cambridge Lindy Exchange, to the uninitiated) took the Sidgwick Site (and most of the rest of Cambridge) by storm last weekend. I particularly enjoyed the opportunity to see a lot of lindy hoppers, both those who are still Cambridge-based and other itinerants like me, not to mention about 12 hours worth of dancing. Cambridge itself is looking as stunning as ever this time of year (autumnal colours + 20 degree heat? Yes please!) and I have to add in an honorary mention for the East of England Ambulance Service, who came wonderfully to my aid on the Sunday morning (note to self: ask future dance partners if they've been eating Brazil nuts...)

Anyway. I should not be here, I should be at a desk getting my head down and attacking Cinque with highlighters. Poor man, he was only trying to clarify CLLD...

P.S. For a good read about PhD reading vs extreme procrastination, read here...

Thing 12: Delicious and my Picky Palate

After last week's happy experience with Evernote, I was wondering what bookmarking tools might be able to add to my increasingly enhanced web-browsing experience.

I'm terrible for finding interesting links and images, emailing them to myself and then losing them in the slew of renewal requests, important stuff about periodicals and myriad other emails that come to my cam.ac.uk account. So a bookmarking service is precisely what I need, right?

Yup, this is as far as I got. And I have no motivation to
[dii]go any further.

I decided to go a little off-piste and try diigo first, because I vaguely remember hearing something positive about it at the second Teachmeet in March (more about Teachmeets can be found here and here). This was a monumental failure, as the "diigolet" button on the browser toolbar seems to do precisely nothing, and is also fairly aesthetically offensive in comparison with the Lightshot feather and the Evernote elephant. I also could not work out how to even add a first bookmark on the main site, which kept trying to get me to watch a tutorial. If I can't work it out for myself or browse through decent FAQs in my own time, I'm not interested.

A very well-organized, information-rich layout (in my
humble opinion)

So diigo diiwent. Delicious was next up, apparently revived and rebooted after the fairly indifferent reception it received in last year's Cam23 Things programme (comments here and here illustrate the "it's OK but...meh" attitude that seemed to prevail). This was somewhat more successful from the off - I installed the add-on (though I'm still not quite sure why it necessitates three icons on the browser) and added my first bookmark without too much pain. The 'tag' icon add-on is swift and effective, and I like the web-based homepage, which provides a lot of information in a clear, digestible way. However, I dislike the fact that you can't just drag things around to make links appear, and that tags can only consist of one word. And they're really difficult to get rid of in the case of typos!

Delicious, frankly, has left me a little unsatisfied and still waiting for the next course. It seems quite useful, but I'm not sure that it captivates me enough to make regular use of it. It seems good for sharing huge lists of links en masse, as the excellent cpd23 programme has shown to good effect. I can also see its application in libraries for reading lists and the like, though for Classics in particular, so little of our material is online that it seems a little redundant there too.

To really sum up how I feel, I'm going to rely on the ever-insightful Library Wanderer to do the talking for me. A year ago, she expressed largely the same feelings, noting that she'd probably switch the most important stuff over to Evernote, which is what I'd be tempted to do too...I prefer the tag system and the way it can include attachments. The biggest factor is, that Delicious does what it does well. But Evernote does it just as well, with a lot of other features (see here for an extended take on this with beautiful accompanying pictures...)

Cake. Mm.
Photo by Dimitri N

The Delicious cupcake is trumped by the towering Evernote pineapple upside-down cake, with glacé cherries to boot.

Now I need to go and find cake...