Taming the Web...Riiight
So in the last 24 hours I have somehow gone into consolidation mode. Yesterday it was because of one of the classes I'm taking. The professor doesn't have an actual textbook assigned for the class. What he does have are his "notes" which are not complete, so we get updates as the class progresses (somewhat annoying). Then, he also gave us two other books to look up which can be downloaded for free chapter by chapter (which is nice that they're free) as supplements to his notes. I also found another book online about the subject which seems to be the one I'll learn the most from. But let's count. I have four different sources to get the same information from, and should probably follow the notation used by my professor in his notes, yet the notation in the other sources is all slightly different. Hence, consolidation commences...
Yesterday evening I started to combine definitions, notations, and explanations of all four sources so that I can remember which book each formula/number came from and figure out which are actually the same thing but look different and which are actually different. It should help when it comes time to review for the test. The fact that my professor doesn't even define some of the things he mentions in his notes makes understanding this stuff more difficult, but c'est la vie, it's grad school.
The second item of consolidation has to do with the number of online accounts available/I'm signed up for. This mostly applies to Google related apps, but not all. I recently shared a pretty funny but true video on G+ (originally posted by someone else), and the gist was that we already use Google for so many tasks (email, search, news, photos, etc) that G+ does make more sense than Facebook (as a social netword) because it will incorporate all those tasks/apps/accounts into the same place. Then, if you so choose, you can share any and all of the things you discover with friends, family, or complete strangers. Anyway, the point is that I spent some of this morning linking accounts with each other so I can keep track of them. I logged into a couple that I haven't checked out in a while and I'm hoping to be more active in those (Yelp for one, I think it's a pretty cool site). It's seems a little ridiculous because I don't want to be an internet crazy person who has to check all these sites and always post or update something; yet, there are so many cool sites that I want to be a part of that I'm conflicted on how much time to spend on these things. Hopefully by linking them together I can keep a better handle on them.
The moral of the story? I do like that we have so many places to go for information and ways to share that information, but for simple people like me it gets a little overwhelming. Like I said, in the last 24 hours I've kicked it into "control the information!" mode, trying to organize things into virtual baskets and digitized drawers. Online gazintas (look it up) are not as fun as real gazintas so oh well, but it's better than a mess of unlabeled sites and pages.
For those who share my opinion, I sympathize and hope we find a way to keep things together (in our virtual world). For those who do not, props to you for being able to keep track of that many online sites and accounts.
Yesterday evening I started to combine definitions, notations, and explanations of all four sources so that I can remember which book each formula/number came from and figure out which are actually the same thing but look different and which are actually different. It should help when it comes time to review for the test. The fact that my professor doesn't even define some of the things he mentions in his notes makes understanding this stuff more difficult, but c'est la vie, it's grad school.
The second item of consolidation has to do with the number of online accounts available/I'm signed up for. This mostly applies to Google related apps, but not all. I recently shared a pretty funny but true video on G+ (originally posted by someone else), and the gist was that we already use Google for so many tasks (email, search, news, photos, etc) that G+ does make more sense than Facebook (as a social netword) because it will incorporate all those tasks/apps/accounts into the same place. Then, if you so choose, you can share any and all of the things you discover with friends, family, or complete strangers. Anyway, the point is that I spent some of this morning linking accounts with each other so I can keep track of them. I logged into a couple that I haven't checked out in a while and I'm hoping to be more active in those (Yelp for one, I think it's a pretty cool site). It's seems a little ridiculous because I don't want to be an internet crazy person who has to check all these sites and always post or update something; yet, there are so many cool sites that I want to be a part of that I'm conflicted on how much time to spend on these things. Hopefully by linking them together I can keep a better handle on them.
The moral of the story? I do like that we have so many places to go for information and ways to share that information, but for simple people like me it gets a little overwhelming. Like I said, in the last 24 hours I've kicked it into "control the information!" mode, trying to organize things into virtual baskets and digitized drawers. Online gazintas (look it up) are not as fun as real gazintas so oh well, but it's better than a mess of unlabeled sites and pages.
For those who share my opinion, I sympathize and hope we find a way to keep things together (in our virtual world). For those who do not, props to you for being able to keep track of that many online sites and accounts.
I had some ideas for keeping the citations of your notes under control. Check out the BibTex library for Latex (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Bibliography_Management) and look at the citations section. This should help keep things organized. Another thing you could do to make sure that you can find EXACTLY where you pulled the info from is to include the page number. Check out the "Referring More Specific" section.
ReplyDelete