@sbvet1

… texting without knowing cell phone numbers.

After I decided to kill my Facebook page, enjoyed Google+ (which remains a bit desolate, compared to FB) and reverted to good ol’ emails, I’m now finding Twitter very useful for a number of reasons that I will explain below.

1. Newsfeed

Twitter is the perfect news reader. Google Reader is very good for keeping up with various blogs and website you follow, but for news, I think Twitter is still the best choice. You just have to “follow” this or that newspaper, magazine, agency… anything you are interested in, and you can easily get headlines and links into your Twitter stream/feed. You spend less time browsing through websites and you can easily skip to news that interest you the most. Because let’s face it, anyone who uses the internet is at some point forced to deal with the infamous “information overload”. We were looking for something and suddenly / 3 hours later, we still haven’t found it, but instead we read about all sort of news, completely unrelated with our initial search. So, if you want to read the news, but at the same time avoid wasting too much time doing so, Twitter and a good Twitter app. are probably your best choice. I’ll talk about Twitter apps in another post, as there are quite a few with different features.

2. Work

Although I am still not sure merging private usage and work usage of social media is a good idea, I find Twitter a good way to keep up to date with news and events related with my work. More and more companies and scientific magazines have Twitter accounts. Organisations, discussion groups, conferences organisers… the Chief Scientific Adviser of the British Government! All have Twitter accounts and spread news about events, publications, reports of all kind. Then Twitter can be quite useful.

3. Social activities

A lot of cultural organisations, centres and interest groups now use Twitter to advertise their activities. Cheltenham Festivals, for instance, has a few Twitter accounts, one for each festival basically, and following them is a very quick and easy way to receive news on events and guests. Another example, I am part of a Swedish Club and we organise events, as well as weekly classes. I write the newsletter and a group member runs our Twitter account, keeping everyone up to date with what’s going on. This leads to my next point…

4. Texting

Now a lot of people use smart phones or can text their Twitter messages to a number and it will show up on their account. Even though I have my friends’ phone numbers, we might not text because international texting isn’t usually included in phone plans and therefore it could turn out to be quite expensive. But many have internet/data usage included in the plan and if not, there’s still the option to send a text to a “Twitter number”. The same happens with Facebook and status updates: you can sort of text yourself a status update. Therefore, now I can text with friends I usually just email with or occasionally chat on Skype. If you have friends abroad, then this trick could be useful. If you don’t have friends abroad, well, it could be useful too. In fact, I don’t know some friends phone number (see, Swedish club members) but we Twitter-text and keep in touch anyway. This is also a good way to deal with privacy issues and having to distribute your private phone number to many people. If you text via Twitter, no one will see your phone number so, problem solved.

In conclusion…

I still think that emails are the best way to keep in touch. They are quick and don’t necessarily have to be long. Some people might argue that emails are dead and social media is taking over. Are they? Well, I might be the wrong person to discuss this matter, as I do use emails and I still love sending postcards. The obvious problem with snail mail is that people move, the address changes and so on. Instead, you can keep your email address virtually forever and use it anywhere. This being said, Twitter might have interesting features and be potentially more useful than Facebook. There is something about Facebook that just doesn’t seem to get along well with work, privacy, sharing with friends and family. It’s all very confusing and layout tweaks and privacy settings constantly changing do not help. Twitter is less intrusive and can also be used as newsfeed. Next time I will write about a few Twitter applications I tried and what I think are the strengths and limitations of each one. I’m not an expert, then you’re more likely to read comments from the user’s point of view.

*bored smiley*

Any suggestions?

This morning I turned on the shuffle on iTunes and Daft Punk started playing. End Titles. From the last Tron soundtrack. You’d ask: what is the connection with Harry Potter 7.2? Aside from mentioning an end, that is.

Well, Harry Potter main theme is quite simple and easily sticks into people’s head. They remember it. Same as Superman or Star Wars… 2 notes and *poof* we already know what is playing. If you think of the music itself, in all these cases it’s just few notes, simple melody, very repetitive. Exactly like this Tron soundtrack. Daft Punk is a French duo that released quite a few electronic/dance album. The tracks are simple, not a lot of ‘musical virtuosity’, no lyrics. Nonetheless, this simplicity is what stays with us. Simple sounds often evoke deeper feelings and memories than instrument mastery. Chose carefully the tones, maybe a minor key to convey a bit more sadness, hold the notes long enough and people will mumble your song for years to come.

The mysteries of the human brain.

—
Daft Punk – End Titles (Tron Legacy Soundtrack)

A sunny rain shower: perfect light

Maybe I should sort my photo galleries by season and track down climate changes in the Cotswolds.

It was very amusing to watch journalists spread across the country, having to report on drought warnings… under the rain! This week has been one of the wettest since Winter, yet until 10 days ago we were prepared for the worst drought in years.

Oh well, I guess we’d better get ready for the good ol’ rainy British Summer now

However, I noticed that it can be useful to have a simple spreadsheet where you can instantly see how much money you have left every month, how much you can transfer into your savings account and so on.
Then I decided to upgrade my initially very simple monthly budget spreadsheet. I made a yearly version with 12 sheets, 1 for each month, and 1 extra sheet with the explanation for the formulas I have used. I decided to used allocated budgets sections, such as:-

• bills: rent, phone and so on
• food: groceries, eating out
• transportation: fuel, public transportation, car insurance, road tax and so on
• extra: clothes, books, DVDs, anything goes…
• savings: no description needed here

This template is a rather basic file, but it is fully customisable. For instance, I pay my car insurance, road tax etc… annually, so they will show up in 1 month only. Also, you can decide where to put things like house cleaning products and such. In my budget they usually fall into the “food” category if I shop at a supermarket (I’m not going to dissect each receipt!) or in “extra” if that time I bought all non-food items.
I used “cell references” in all of my formulas, instead of the bare figures, so that when you type in your initial figures (i.e.: income and allocated budgets for bills, food, transportation etc.) or insert a row because you have more than one expense that day, all the rest smoothly follows.

Click on the links below to download the file.

Available versions:

Excel for Windows - Monthly Budget Template.xls

Numbers  for Mac – Monthly Budget Template.zip
(the file is in a .zip folder because apparently WordPress will not upload .numbers files “for security reasons”)

Please, if you download the files and decide to use them, leave some feedback here. The formulas are pretty basic and I’m sure they could be improved or customised, but comments are much appreciated. Thank you!

Keys to...

Spring has ‘sort of’ arrived to the UK. It is a bit warmer, but not always sunnier. Aside from some minor Spring cleaning, I’ve been crazy busy with work, so today I took the day off. I can still catch up during the weekend, before I head to another crazy week. I’m really looking forward to the trip to Denmark: 10 days without work. Well, almost without work. I’ll be visiting 2 professors and another PhD student at the University of South Denmark. I’m sure it will be very interesting and I can’t wait.

Then, time for catching up with the blog now. I haven’t really followed the “post-a-week-2011″ challenge started by WordPress. I post whenever I have time, which is usually during weekends. But some days I just don’t feel like posting anything. Forcing myself to write something new every week is not reflecting what my life is: highs and lows, busy times, lazy times, and so on. When I first read about the WordPress challenge I thought: wow! 1 post a day? I’ll never have time for that. One post a week definitely seemed more reasonable. I wonder what people really do all day. Where do they find the time for blogging every single day. Imagine you have a job, or even if you don’t, you might have family and kids to take care of, food to buy, bills to pay… Do you do all this online? How much time do we spend on the computer?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a very ‘techy’ person, a bit of a nerd. But no computer screen will ever replace the company of people in flesh and blood. Blogging is nice, I enjoy it. But no one is paying me to blog on daily basis. I’m a very practical person. So what can daily blogging bring into my life? I read people saying “I want to be a better blogger” and in some instances it really sounded a bit like “I want to be a better person”. Was I reading comments from Born Again Bloggers?

If you have time left every day for blogging, why not. But I don’t think that blogging should come first, carefully planning your blog posts as if you were working on the new breakthrough novel of the century. People in flesh and blood should come first.
After all, for most people on the internet, blogging is a hobby, a pastime, something we do for fun whenever we can or when we want to share something funny, serious or we believe is important to share. I like blogging and I met some nice people on blogs. I read some interesting opinions and comments on the most various subjects. In fact, we can exchange a huge deal of information through the internet and blogs have become one of many ways to do it. But I think it would be better if we, the perfect nobodies of the blogosphere, would just stick to the “blog when you have time” rule

This being said, my time is up. I may go out now and have a somewhat productive day off work. Have a nice Friday, everyone!

Writer's block?

I recently joined the Post A Day/Week 2011 challenge (see, The Daily Post) and I’ll post whenever I get the time, at least once a week. It’s going well so far. I like to write stuff during breaks at work, sipping coffee or tea, chatting with colleagues.
One funny thing I realised today is that if you have Facebook and update your status say, at least once a day, well, there you have a topic for your blog. Check out your status messages and I bet most of them could become a topic for a blog post. Maybe add a few more sentences and a picture, and there you go.
After all, who said you have to write novels on your blog? Short, straight to the point, thought provoking posts are probably more effective than long, tedious essays. I blog for fun about random stuff and ideas. I like blogs that have short posts because I get tired of reading online. I already do it a lot for work. Blogs have to be entertaining, so… unleash your creativity and if you use Facebook, take inspiration from the huge amount of random information you certainly get from there. Some completely useless, but some might give you ideas for a debate. For example, some of my friends and I follow various newspapers and we post links to news articles and such. Conversations that come out of those are some times very interesting. Then, if you are struggling to find topics for your blog, there are plenty of sources you could get inspiration from!

Simple Moleskine hack: the notepad holds a 18 months weekly diary with also some blank pages at the end.

Do you have a favourite agenda? I don’t. I either find them too small to write on or too big to carry around.
So now I have 2 small Moleskine agendas.
One is very small, a Sky Blue X-small Daily Diary. I use it as “work calendar”. I don’t write much on it, mostly events.
The other one (see, photo on the left) wasn’t an agenda or daily planner originally. I “hacked” a ruled Moleskine reporter notebook. On the top page I write week events and on the bottom page I write the To Do list for the week. I took the photo this morning, just about 2 hours after I got back to work after the holidays. By lunch time, the To Do list as you see it was half done, but then I filled the entire page! And this is just the first week. It’s going to be a busy month…

My MacBook Pro keyboard

I finally decided to try to use the iPhone to update my blogs. I often get ideas for blog posts when I’m not at the desk, so I thought that maybe the WordPress application could come in handy.

Well, I could easily link my wordpress.com hosted blogs (see, links at the bottom) but I kept getting a XML-RPC error message on the phone. I have no idea what that means, but I checked in the blog settings and that XML thing was enabled.

So I googled and found a lot of people with the same problem. Posts were from 2009 though, so I looked for some more recent info. Comes out there’s a plug-in that is supposed to give a more phone-friendly look at your blog to visitors using mobile phones. This plug-in doesn’t get along too well with “phone blogging”. Then, I turned it off and I’m afraid mobile visitors will have to deal with it.

-Sent by Rick, the zealous iPhone

Let's try Google Image Search...

A couple of weeks ago I noticed that Google has changed their image search layout/interface. I have to be honest, I am not sure I like it. Besides, what was wrong with the previous image search?? I really don’t understand why so many websites, and now Google search too, have grown so fond of these image gallery scripts that are like a pop up window without being a pop up window. I’m not trying to be cryptic, I just can’t remember the technical word for those galleries.

So now, once you hit the Search button and got all of the images spread out on the page, you cannot scroll down the page without having previews of the images popping up if you rest the cursor on the image for more than 1 nanosecond. The image thumbnails are so packed close that you have to really meticulously look for a “free spot” to let your cursor still.

Result: it is very confusing unless you do as we were taught to read at the primary school, scrolling the letter with your index finger as you read them. If you use your cursor this way, you are going to be fine. If instead, like everyone in this world, you often let the cursor rest wherever while you read the page content, you are likely to be distracted by annoying previews overlapping the photos you are trying to search through.

Google Image Search wasn’t probably the fastest loading, smoother looking image search available, but at least you could see the results without wrestling with “pop-up-like” previews!