Bye 2011
Posted on December 31st, 2011 by lulu
Jenny’s marriage, school, moving south, Hashekoo, FaChoi, WongChoi, so many changes in 2011. Hope 2012 will give us some stablity.
Jenny’s marriage, school, moving south, Hashekoo, FaChoi, WongChoi, so many changes in 2011. Hope 2012 will give us some stablity.
Have not decided how to present this project.
Gotta start collecting stuff for my multimedia project.
A very encouraging result, 10 times better than I would have expected.
Didn’t do any school work today. Spent most of the day setting up a spare OS on an old hard disk for testing/evaluation all them useless LMS/VLE. Tried first with Virtual PC and VMWare, possibly the best way to test software but they are slow. Since I got a couple un-used hard disks and I could dl Windows 7 for free as a student, I finally decided to simply install a new OS just for the testing.
Also got Office 2010 working (it’s a download from the ‘web’) but the phone activation actually worked. Amazing!
Seven weeks into the MSc course and nearly half the class have dropped out. I spent a lot of time on it. Everything seems so rusty – can’t think, can’t write and have found it hard to structure my learning.
There is one important assignment due next Friday. Haven’t started it yet but begin to feel a bit more comfortable in using Citavi and OneNote to help my writing. Without these, I wouldn’t have completed my first writing assignment on time.
Over three weeks now since we moved. School has been crazy and haven’t had the time to unpack and tidy up the new home.
Zotero is a Firefox plugin for collecting, indexing, citing and collaborating contents (very much everything: books, newspaper clippings, images, pdf, audio recordings, movies, web pages, etc). It can be integrated with Microsoft Word and OpenOffice making it an excellent tool to generate in-text citations and bibliographies and it also has the flexibility to adopt different Citation Styles.
I first installed it under Linux (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS). The setup was simple and fast. After restarting Firefox twice (once for the plugin installation itself and once for the OpenOffice addon), I was able to start using Zotero. I also had the file sync set up for WebDAV on my own server as Zotero only allows 100MB storage space for free.
I then installed it on a Windows 7 machine. Everything went smoothly until I tried to verify the WebDAV connection. “SSL Certificate Error”. Since I don’t use my Windows 7 machine very often except for playing games, it took me some googling to find out that Windows 7 does not support Basic authentication, ie, http:// is no good and it has to be https:// for WebDAV. And I suspect that many of the sync problems posted in the Zotero forum are actually related to this inherent Window 7 behaviour.
To overcome this without resorting to a SSL Certificate, a registry key change is needed:
1. Windows “Start”, Run “regedit”
2. Change the following key value (decimal) to 2
HKEYLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WebClient\Parameters\BasicAuthLevel
** as always, messing with the Registry is risky, do this only when sober. **
One of the biggest regrets of my life was not being able to complete my degree course in Traditional Chinese Medicine. I loved the prgramme and did reasonably well in the first 2 years (despite my shortcomings in Simplified Chinese which were used in many of the 2nd year textbooks). I wasn’t able to continue the study as we were moving to Ireland. I never thought that I would study again.
Made an application for a Master degree in Education – something I wouldn’t do if not for the encouragment from Trudy. But I told myself that if I would ever go back to school again, I would do something that is more meaningful than the MBA I already have. The MBA was fun and in the end it further my career and made me a lot of money. But I don’t need that now. I’m hoping that a MSc in Education will enable me to do some meaningful volounteer works after graduation.
Got a confirmation today. I’m happy that I’m going back to school in just over a week’s time. The school is over 200 miles from where we live and the first thing to do next week is to find an accomodation. It is a big decision but I want to do it.
Finally a perfect reader for organizing my eBooks on my pc – Calibre.
I was using Kindle. It is not bad for .mobi files but it cannot handle other popular eBooks formats. I have quite a few eBooks in .pdf which I use Acrobat to organize but it’s a pain to switch back and forth between Acrobat and Kindle. I tried the Mobipocket eBook Creator but found a bit cumbersome to use particulary in editing meta-data properties. It does handle a wide range of file formats such as .pdf, .lit, .txt, .html etc and it is free. Calibre, however, combines Mobipocket Reader and Creator in one and it automatically fetches and fills in any missing meta-data. And I do not have to maintain two separate libraries for my Windows and Linux OS as it is available in Windows, Mac and Linux.