Category: the process

it is always something.

My (quite new) laptop didn’t want to start up this morning. So instead of working on going through all the abstracts I downloaded yesterday, I’m running diagnostics on the computer. All crossable appendages crossed.

That’s today’s productivity killer.

Yesterday’s was using the record export features of ISI’s citation databases to tranfer all those records I should be going through now to WebEndnote, an ISI product, so that I could export them to Procite (also an ISI product) (footnotebegin)It’s one that I live a third of my working life in. Another third is spent in TreepadLite, taking notes and arranging them into the structures of papers.(footnoteend), only to find that the journal titles were not transferred with the records. It only took a little over the hour to find and scrounge around in ugly text files and import config files to fix that. Good job, ISI!

I will also take this opportunity to mention the anxiety I have over the fact that (to my knowledge) I cannot save sets of marked records in the ISI citation databases across sessions. It makes sense why they would not have this feature, however I live in constant fear that my browser is going to crash or my internet connection is going to go out, and I’m going to have to sift through and re-mark lots and lots of records. Once a graphic designer who learned to save Photoshop files every ten minutes, always one.

The big productivity killer of the past couple of weeks was that pesky emergency appendectomy.

And tomorrow night’s will be air travel. I’m headed to SF to visit J. This one isn’t so bad, since I tend to be productive enough while I’m there to make up for the time lost in transit. Plus, I get to see J.

like a version.

Last night I set up activeCollab on my website. I did this for two reasons.

1. Backup. I’m uploading each thing I work on to my webspace every day anyway. Now I will just do it through activeCollab, and it will be more organized because of…

2. Simple version control. I’m the only one working on these things (but that may not always be the case), but I never want to run into that cliche of being asked by my committee to revert to the chapter as it was before I made all those revisions, only to find I’ve lost the copy without the revisions.

But, I can also maybe use this to share the documents.

Critical readers who know how grad school goes may raise an eyebrow and say, “New blog, now this? Is someone perchance procrastinating?” But no, I protest! My web host, Dreamhost, offers quick one-click installation and upgrades of a variety of tools (including WordPress and activeCollab), which is so nice and easy when you are like me and know just enough about wrangling things from the command line to make progress until you get yourself into trouble and have no idea how to get out of it.

No, I’m not rationalizing. 🙂 Back to work…