Life, The Universe and Everything: Reflections and Rants
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I finally ‘get’ Livejournal
Now that I’ve added a few friends to my LJ, and I can read their LJ posts on my friends page, I can see how it works. Hopping from friends to their friends with similar interests, like science fiction, gaming or neo-techo-paganism, is easier than surfing the ‘blogosphere’, and I think the LJ process of…
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A few of my favourite things
Moodle is now a ‘one click install’ on Dreamhost, where mikecosgrave.com is hosted. Moodle is an excellent OpenSource Learning Management System which I like because it has a built in wiki which is handy for collaborative writing exercises. Having it as a one-click install ( and therefore a one-click update ) is very convenient. It…
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Yes, I have a Bebo Page
..but I hardly ever bother to update it. I signed up for it because so many of my students have Bebo pages, and I figured I better know what I was talking about. Mostly, It just points to here – I find Bebo flat, and prefer to be able to work with style sheets and…
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Playstation Catholics and Religious Tolerance
The start of the new school year has produced more hot air about the role of the Catholic Church in education, and the Minister for Education appearing on the news suggesting that the only problem was accommodating immigrants in the system – this is wrong. The major issue is that the government allows the Catholic…
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The best way to win is by..declaring a truce
Moqtada al-Sadr is what we’d call a ‘cute hoor’ – we’d also call him a ‘bad bastard’ but his announcement of a 6 month truce by his Mahdi army is a smart move if he can make it stick. In the old ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’ novels, it was referred to as a ‘policy of masterly inactivity’.
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Small Win, Big Loss?
The Unions representing Semi-State workers seem to feel that they have derailed decentralisation plans with the Labour Court ruling preventing the explicit use of promotion as a means to encourage workers to move out of Dublin. While the semi-state sector’s use of the idea was blunt and unsubtle, in the long run, the ruling is…
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Fun with Zotero
I’ve been using Zotero in ways which I suspect the designers didn’t think of, but I am lazy and creative when it comes to work. If you don’t know, Zotero is a Firefox plugin for managing bibliographic information in academic writing – it is an absolute gem for managing references, which are the bane of…
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Windows Free OCR
Did you know that XP has built in OCR? And it is actually good? I scan some books, but I also use my digital camera to capture a lot of books and archival research , which I can carry on my laptop as .jpgs. Using the Portable Apps version of Gimp, I can convert those…
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Look Up..It’s not Aer Lingus anymore
The reaction to the dropping of the Shannon-Heathrow provides an opportunity for many groups to show the limits of their frame of reference. Government, Unions, pilots, management and others are all lining up to be ‘surprised’ at the real world.
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Evacute the translators
I have mixed feelings about the news that the Danes have completed a ‘secret’ evacuation of 200 Iraqis who worked with them from their area of operations in Iraq.
