Take Back Parliament Flashmob 10/05/10 FAIR VOTES NOW!

I was at this demo in London yesterday, and it was bizarre to discuss the appropriate twitter hashtag with a woman next to me, only to then see her icon and post right above mine in the #takeitback stream. We agreed to follow each other. As you do. Strange days indeed. Fair Votes Now!

One Last Thing

I've certainly enjoyed being part of the 23 Things programme as a presenter! It was great fun to read the blogs, view the photos, and follow the tweets, thanks everyone for your enthusiastic participation.

I'll leave you with a few memorable quotes from 23 Things:


"I have never thrown a sheep at at anyone"

-- Alison Prince on 23 Things Oxford A Prince's Progress


ZCZC 121219Z RSL 17 #ox23 TECH SERVICES CONFIRM J RADIOCARBON SENT TO DARKSTORE BY ACCIDENT STOP PLACATE READER WITH FREE ILL NNNN 12:19 PM Mar 12th via web

-- tweet from Konnie Bunny (@kboxf23)


"Thanks to a mouse malfunction I almost located the photo in Norway."

Alison Felstead on Leda Neatfossil's 23 Things

Here's a picture of my delicious bookmarks from my iGoogle page. I used one of the two iGoogle gadgets called My del.icio.us... it is quite basic, useful I suppose if you want to have your current bookmarks close to hand, but there are delicious plugins for browsers that give you much more functionality, like all your bookmarks grouped by tag in a sidebar etc.

One Thing Left! This has been great fun. Going to take a short break before writing my final wrap-up post.

(photo)streampunk

I added the flickr photostream gadget to my Blogger blog some time ago, so in the interest of fairness I'm going to pick a different gadget to add and write about.

Well that was quite entertaining. I added a gadget that tells you what foods are in season in different parts of the US. Apparently, Nothing is currently in season in Massachusetts, where I used to live. Good thing I moved to the UK then :-)

ThinkFree.ThinkSlow?

My initial enthusiasm for ThinkFree Office has been slightly dented by the slow performance I've experienced in the word processor this morning. I typed two lines of text - screen updating was sluggish at first but then improved. When I tried to select the two lines of text, I found it quite difficult - I triple-clicked the top line and selected it, but then couldn't get any reaction when I tried to select the second line as well. The entire interface seemed to have frozen. Now that I've just returned to it, the performance is much better, and I was able to drag and select what I wanted with no problems. Perhaps these are temporary glitches. Onward.

The font selection is quite impressive, I've used some of them as well as some colors. I decided to add some clip art. This necessitated the installation of some files and everything slowed down again. Even writing this blog post became impossible. But finally, my four-leaf clover appeared in the document, and I imagine that in future, it won't take so long.

Above is the result of my experimentation.

What are Google Docs when they're at home?

Useful! The most recent use I've made of a shared google document is a recipe spreadsheet, so that my partner and I can easily refer to our favourite dinner recipes, and make additions or corrections whenever we think of it. There is a column for cookbook, page, vegetarian or not, and whether other people (less enamored of The Spicy) would be able to eat it. Prior to that, we used a spreadsheet to calculate whether the car scrappage scheme made any sense for us, and allowed us to compare the costs of different vehicles and look at the same figures from different locations as we discussed it.

These are not earth-shattering feats, but it is surprising how making access simple can encourage you to update a document whereas otherwise you might never get around to it.

Portmanteau

Just beginning this Wikipedia thing has been entertaining - while reading the page about Wikipedia itself, I followed the "portmanteau" link and learned all sorts of fascinating things about the use of that term for a new word made by combining two others. We can thank Lewis Carroll for this usage - he borrowed the concept of a two-compartment suitcase to describe such created words.

And the fun continues, here is a great cartoon about wikipedia. Everybody loves to laugh at wikipedia, until their assignment is due.