Bianca on the lookout {{tag: cat, portrait}}
Bianca is hard to photograph, partly because she is either asleep or roaring around the house at a million miles an hour, but also because the details of her light coloured fur tends to result in blown out highlights. I spotted her sitting on our bedroom windowsill today, intent on watching some birds outside the window. The frosted film we have on the lower part of the windows to give some privacy acted like a kind of light box, softening the light, and I got a couple of pictures I liked. I would have preferred a little more light on her eyes, but it was a case of grabbing a chance.
Is Anybody There?
Fantastic black comedy, with some great performances from all involved. Some very poignant moments, along with a lot of laughs. =D – read more at blippr.comYou'll Never Leave Harlan Alive - Darrell Scott
Caught this on The Transatlantic Sessions last week and was captivated by it. He sings with so much feeling and conviction, and it’s a brilliant, deeply melancholy song. Having so many talented musicians joining in doesn’t hurt either.
John Shuttleworth - Two Margarines
A consolatory song for those of you out there who have faced the pain and mental anguish of opening a new tub of margarine, only to find that you have an open tub already. In John’s immortal words, “It’s a nightmare scenario”.
listening to "Black Joe Lewis
Fantastic brass and enough funk to get the dead bopping around the room. If you ever need a song to get you going, this is it.
The problem with haircut specifications
Defective Yeti is on brilliant form with Haircut 2.0:
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They wouldn’t even give me a haircut at first; I had to go through a “consultation”. The stylist who drew the short straw came out and asked me a number of questions only slightly less than that found on the LSAT. To each I provided the same reply: “just do whatever you think is best.” At one point she even asked me if I wanted “a clipper and scissors cut or just clippers” and I explained that this was like me asking my grandfather if he wanted his email delivered via POP or IMAP. Haha, just kidding. Actually I said, “just do whatever you think is best”.
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Go and read the whole thing, it’s brilliant.
I go to the hairdressers slightly more often than that, but I have the same kind of communication problem. On the one hand, I have a vague idea what I’d like my hair to look like, but I don’t have any of the right terminology that would allow me to transmit this mental image to the hairdresser. On the few occasions that I have stumbled across a bit of hairdressing jargon (for example: ‘vertical bob’), I’ve managed - without having any understanding of what the jargon means - to use it like a secret password to get a haircut approximating the kind of thing I had in mind.
Secret reading
On the way home on the train, I saw a guy who looked like a builder, wearing dirty jeans, a high-visibility jacket, and drinking a can of Carlsberg. On the vacant seat next to him as a magazine called “Stylist” (no, I’ve never heard of it either) with the headline, “Are You Secretly Desperate To Be A Housewife?”. I found myself wondering if the magazine was secretly his.
Reference managers: advice needed
I’ve recently been having another look at reference managers, and my interest has been piqued by Sente. At the moment, I use Papers for searching for papers, auto-filling the bibliographic meta-data and reading them, then I export to BibTeX format and import to BibDesk. This works OK, but it doesn’t really cover citing references and formatting bibliographies unless I’m writing in LaTeX: sometimes I have to resort to Pages (exporting/importing Word format) to collaborate on documents with colleagues.
I’ve been playing with the Sente demo, and while I much prefer the UI of Papers (and to some extent, the method of importing references in Papers), the note-taking features in Sente 6 are brilliant, and the bibliography formatting works very nicely. Exporting notes to DEVONthink Pro, and adding to them there works beautifully, and then you get the power of the terrific AI searching abilities of DEVONthink too. I’m nervous about entrusting my precious PDF collection to the bowels of the Sente document bundle, so I would probably just link to the PDFs and manually sync the documents using Dropbox. I like the range of import/export formats in Sente, so I would plan on exporting the whole lot (or a subset relevant to a particular manuscript) to a BibTeX file periodically to enable LaTeX authoring, with Sente as the master collection.
So, my academic lazyweb question is this: have any of you had experience of using Sente for serious academic reference collections? Is it good enough to search for, read, make notes on papers and use for referencing on it’s own? I’m getting a bit tired of using multiple applications, excellent though Papers is, in many ways.
About Me
little snippets of things: twitters, photos, quotes, links and random thoughts
