Tip: If you edit the Twenty Ten theme that WordPress comes with… DON’T edit the original version, copy the directory and build off of a copy. Updating WordPress overwrites the Twenty Ten directory. wiping out your custom version!
How did I think of this? Made the stupid mistake myself, as you can probably tell from looking at my site right now. No backup = not going to have time to fix it until late September/early October :-(
I enjoy the fact that after I fix my water damaged iPhone, Apple tosses a background of water bubbles on it.
Its about halfway through August and I have got a ton of stuff going on. Too much to mention really. September is going to be the start of some exciting times, as well as my return to school after an eight month co-op work-term with Gazaro.
The flood of work, projects, and other commitments has me reevaluating where I am spending my time. Which brings me to the point of this post: time for a vacation from Twitter. I’m going to try to spend the little bit of August that I have left to really to get things done. Twitter is a major distraction, and even though I find it incredibly useful, I’d like to see what happens if I take some time off from it. The time I spend online and on my computer will be focused on work.
Since I have been a student at the University of Ottawa, The Fulcrum – the university’s English language newspaper – has been the place that I turn to get the latest news about what is happening on campus.
While working full-time and not being on campus often, being able to read The Fulcrum online provides easy access and keeps me connected with what is going on at the school. During the latest SFUO election, the newspaper’s website provided invaluable access to information about the candidates, issues, and ongoing scandals.
However easier access is only one part of what makes having the paper online essential. The bigger thing that The Fulcrum’s website provides is an area for students to discuss, debate, and add to the stories that the paper publishes. University is all about critical thinking and reasoning, developing arguments and theories, and learning and sharing new information. A printed newspaper is a one way broadcast from the writers to students (though The Fulcrum does publish letters to the editor from students). The website allows for immediate discussion and debate of the issues, giving students an open forum to learn from (or attack..) each other.
A great example of this discussion is a story that was recently published in The Fulcrum’s summer issue, on the topic of the SFUO’s funding of a bus for students to travel to Toronto to take part in the G20 protests. This story is obviously a controversial topic, considering what ended up taking place in Toronto – the vandalism of my home town. The comments section on this article is on fire, with students taking to either side of the issue, debating back and forth. I read through the comments, and there are some great points from both sides, opening my eyes up to both sides of the debate.
I think delivering the news and providing this discussion forum to students is important, and I hope to be able to make a positive contribution to this when I start in August as the Webmaster of The Fulcrum.
I just downloaded the Globe and Mail’s new iPad app. This is the second high profile Canadian iPad app to be released in the last few days, the first being The Score.
The Globe’s app is actually very nice. You can easily view the headlines of all the latest news stories on the main page of the app.
The stories display in a narrow column on the right side, with sharing options and an ad on the left. The overall experience has a more newspaper-like feel than their website.
A nice feature I was pleasantly surprised by was the ability to swipe left and right when viewing an article, which takes to you the next/previous article in the section. Makes flicking through stories a breeze.
They also include a very cool photo gallery of the days top photos. Some great photos were there when I checked it out.
The app is free, supported by ads that do not get in the way or detract from the readability. Made by Spreed, same company that made the G&M’s iPhone and BlackBerry apps.
Grab it on the App Store here.
I use my iPad to do a lot of reading. Zinio for magazines, Kobo for books, The Early Edition for RSS feeds, and Twitterrific for my Twitter feed. One app that I want to point out now is Folio Case, a beautiful PDF viewer and organizer, it allows me to read PDFs distraction free and with style.
Not everyone has a lot of PDFs to read, but if your brother is a screenwriter like mine is, you tend to find a lot of scripts in your e-mail inbox. I have always let him down and often fail to read them, usually getting distracted or not having enough time. Now, I load them into Folio Case as soon as I get the e-mail, and I can read them anywhere I go.
Folio Case offers an easy way to store your PDFs, a great page-flip animation as you read, and a distraction free reading environment. Check out the short video I recorded to show how the app works.
If you are reading a lot of scripts and have an iPad, Folio Case has been great for storing and reading every script I get. You can pick it up from the App Store or check out the Folio Case website.
I have begun to whittle down my stack of books that have been hanging over my head for a while now. Most recently I started, and finished in a few days, The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich. The book describes itself as “The Founding of Facebook A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal”. I’ve read many of Ben Mezrich’s other books, including Bringing Down the House – which the movie 21 was based on – so figured I couldn’t go wrong with The Accidental Billionaires.
For the most part, the book is incredibly interesting. It details how Mark Zuckerberg came to founding Facebook, originally known as thefacebook, and the many people that he dealt with on this journey. Amazingly enough, Zuckerberg is not actually the main character of this story. The focus is more on Eduardo Saverin, Mark’s orignal cofounder of Facebook.
Before reading this book it is necessary to realize that this book is written by someone who was not there for any of these events, and his sources are no doubt quite biased against Mark Zuckerberg. With this is mind, it is hard to know which parts to believe and which to shrug off as fiction. But nonetheless, the book is an exciting story, and definitely worth reading. I wish that is had focused less on the controversy that surrounded the founding of Facebook, and more on the growth and evolution of Facebook after its founding. Maybe I’ll have to pick up David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect to get that part of the story?
For those who don’t care to read the book, Aaron Sorkin adapted it into a movie titled The Social Network. The trailer of the Social Network was recently released, have a look below:
This trailer is intriguing because it really screws with the timeline of the events, making the plot unfollowable unless you have read the book or know the story. The movie comes out October 1st, and it would be an understatement to say I am looking forward to it!
Embedded below is a spec script of Parks and Recreation that my brother, Derek Robertson, wrote last summer. It features all of your favourite characters; Leslie, Tom, Ron, April, Mark, Ann.. oh sorry Jerry – you didn’t make the cut!
If you are an rabid fan of the show, keep in mind that this script is from last summer (2009), and the creators of the show made significant changes to the characters and tone of the show for this latest season.
You can read is below or, if you prefer a flash-free version, head over to Scribd and read their HTML version of it. If you liked it, hit the Facebook Like Button!
I have yet to use my iPad for taking notes in class, though this is one function that I am looking forward to trying out come September, when I return to school full-time.
However, I have yet to find an app for the iPad that has the functionality that I would want in a note taking app. Many that I have looked at come close, and look great, but there is one feature I see as the most important, that none of them have.
Here is what I think is necessary for a university/college notes app:
The combination of text, drawing, and highlighting give you the flexibility of handwriting your notes, with the added bonus of typing and an undo button.
Adding pictures into your notes is probably not required for when you are in class, but could be very helpful for enhancing your notes later on.
Having your notes tagged by day and time and accessible through search would ensure you can always find your notes from a particular lecture or on a particular term. When studying, and you come across a term that you remember learning at some point in the semester, being able to search for it and instantly find your note on it would be invaluable.
Exporting as PDF would be ideal. The worst thing you could do would be using an app to take all of your notes, then they are stuck in that app, unable to be printed or easily viewed. PDF would be an easy format for printing and sharing, though editable formats would be nice too.
My sixth point is what I believe is the most important feature, and one that no app on the iPad app store seems to provide. If any iPad note taking app nails this, I will snap it up in an instant. In my lectures, typically the professor will lecture, aided by a barebones PowerPoint file that contains the main points. What the professor actually says adds details, definitions, examples, explanations, and sub-points to the main points of the slides. The points on these slides are a great guide for your notes, because they organize your notes into a hierarchical structure that the professor has designed their lecture around. My favourite way to take notes in these sort of lectures is to print the slides, and make notes around each slide, including drawing pictures, arrows with explanations coming off points, adding sub points, and examples that the professor uses to explain the concepts. Printing these slide shows is a hassle, can become expensive due to the cost of ink, and is not the most efficient way to take notes. My ideal app would allow me to do all of this, by importing these slideshows as a PPT or PDF, and letting my add drawings/text to the slides, as well as notes below each slide. This way my notes would be directly tied to the professors slides, follow their structure for the lecture, and be clearly organized. I don’t expect to be able to edit these slides, I am not looking for this note taking app to be a PowerPoint equivalent – but being able to write and draw over the slides would be enough.
There are a lot of great note taking apps out there now, but I don’t see one that accomplishes this last point in a satisfactory manner. The best class notes iPad app that I have seen is called Course Notes. It is well designed, has a great organization structure based on time, breaks your notes down by course, has drawing/text/pictures, Wikipedia integration, and exporting. I suspect it would be perfect for me, if only it could accomplish point six, importing files for annotation.
Upon further searching of the App Store, I have actually found one iPad app that nails the annotation feature, called Noterize. It imports PDF and PPT files, allowing you to add text, drawings, and highlighting. Going even further, you can rearrange pages, add in note pages, import from Google Docs/Dropbox/Box.net/web pages, and export back to these, as well as Facebook, Twitter, and e-mail.
Course Notes has a much nicer icon and user interface design, but Noterize seems to deliver on my most wanted feature. If these two apps could fuse together I would be extremely happy, but for now, I am really looking forward to trying out Noterize when courses start in September!
A few months I posted to this blog, explaining that I was dropping WordPress and switching to Tumblr. I was interested in their service and saw it as a neat new way to keep up a blog.
Tumblr has some great features that make it easy to publish short posts, pictures, and videos. It seems like a great platform, but it just wasn’t for me. I found the platform limiting, and was not a fan of the Tumblr Dashboard or the “following” of blogs on Tumblr. Obviously there is a lot you can do with Tumblr, and I am sure it is very powerful if you take the time to learn it, but I found myself longing to be back on WordPress.
I had grown tired of this blog, and the inflexibility of the theme I had been using. Last week I decided to revive willw.net. What brought me back was the news of WordPress 3.0 arriving, and the new default theme that comes with it. I had been recently working on custom WordPress themes for some projects that I had going on, and saw this as a great opportunity to refresh my own blog. The new default theme is incredibly easy to customize, and with some great comments in the code to help you. I have done some significant edits to the theme, all from my iPad (more on that soon).
My experiment with Tumblr is over, so forget I ever dropped willw.net, and stay tuned for some more blog posts!
