Work and Play

Today, Karen Searcy and I finished work on a new website: Botanical Collections of William S. Clark and David P. Penhallow. Karen and Lita D'Acunto (a former student of mine) scanned in herbarium cards that William Clark made when he visited Japan in the late 1870s. We built a site in Drupal that let's the public browse thumbnail images and download very, very high resolution images of the herbarium cards. Tom Hoogendyk helped with the theme and a bunch of other folks contributed historical images and checked the identifications. It was a cool and interesting project that has been in the works for a long, long time.

My new Macbook arrived today. I have named it "polpo" so that it sort of goes with the ipod touch (which is named "palpilo"). I'm currently using the migration assistant to move over all my data from my previous laptop (which was named "mopso"). I'm looking forward to having a laptop with a working keyboard, battery, and airport card.

I've been frustrated with not being able to find any instant messaging software for the iPod touch that supports OTR. That seems like a huge gap -- people have been complaining about it for years. Every one of the programs seems to have a thread in their support forum with people pleading for them to add support for OTR.

I'm kind of surprised at how difficult it is to compare apps at the App Store -- all you can get is a big swarm of icons that you then have to look at one at a time. There is very limited tagging, so you can see "Social Networking" apps, but you can't sort easily by price or by ratings or last updated or by any measure of viability. Using iTunes as the interface for the iPod Touch is also quite cumbersome. It feels clunky and not-well-thought-out.

Using the iPod Touch at a meeting yesterday, I was surprised how easy it was to use it unobtrusively for research. Having a laptop open really changes the dynamic with other people. But the iPod Touch doesn't create such a barrier with other people. It felt like a bigger difference than I would have predicted.