Thing 10

This was interesting! I found a whole series of photos of a small exhibition I put together last year for the Whipple Museum, "all rights reserved". Just as well I took a photo of it myself when I installed it, I suppose. Checked out all the CD letters, but no new ones. Found a couple of images to download. Hmm, not bad - though I would be extremely wary of using images from this site, unless I was sure the photographer hadn't infringed permissions.

Thing 9

Flickr was interesting - I always like looking at good photographs. I searched on "Charles Darwin" and found a few interesting things, though no previously unknown letters even after 35 pages. Still, there was a page from CD's botanical specimen book about a rust disease in wheat in South America: John Stevens Henslow had used this when he published an article in \Gardener's Chronicle\ 28 Sep. 1844 p. 659, but Duncan Porter (\Bulletin of the British Museum of Natural History (hist. ser.)\ 14(2): 145-223) described it in 1986 as missing. Apparently the photo was taken at the New York Academy of Sciences. And there's a photo of Charles Lyell's \Principles of geology\ annotated by CD that apparently was photographed here. However, I don't know what cd be done to stop people taking photographs in the building, unless people had to go through the same procedures that they use at airports.

Thing 7

Have to admit I'm not at all sympathetic to Twitter. I got Twittered out a year or so ago by a work colleague who Twittered incessantly on Facebook. Personally I prefer a bit of coffeetime chat!
Anyway, I've set up the account & we'll see what happens. I feel I need to be wary of things that can be seen as time-wasters.

Thing 8

Aaagh! What was Thing 7?
Well, I can see the point about tagging, and as I'm not a librarian I have no investment in classification systems. Anyway, I've tagged my blogs (lightly) and I'll see what happens. Knowing me, I'll forget my own tagging ideas and invent some more each time I do it, which will no doubt lead to a relatively inefficient system.

Things 5 & 6

Thing 5 - the meeting scheduler on Doodle - worked a treat; though in a department of 6 or 7 people who are in adjacent offices it's probably easier to discuss such arrangements over coffee!
The Google calendar seems good: so long as I remember to update it, it shd be very effective. At first I think I set up 10 minute email reminders for every diary entry, including my holiday: but I \think\ I've been able to switch that off now.
Some one sent round a very complicated email to a long list of people trying to coordinate a meeting on one of five dates: I did feel that a Doodle would have been much simpler. Though perhaps it wasn't my most tactful move to point this out!
In the end I felt the diary was perhaps just too much trouble. These things work best if you don't spend most of your working day trying to organise them: they should just take a few minutes of your time.

Things 1 & 2

After what seemed like a lot of effort, I managed to create the iGoogle page. I'm sure the instructions were really simple, but obviously not simple enough for me. Sigh. Anyway, mine looks like this.
I'm sure I've done this before . . . well, after several false starts, here we are. Our own website, a countdown to my holiday, the time in our other office in Harvard, the weather here just in case I can't be bothered to look out of the window, my favourite blog, the Victorian clerk's diary I'm following (although the RSS feed on this seems to have come unplugged). The COPAC box is on a tab, too. It will probably be some time before I can decide whether I will find this more useful than my present arrangements. Some of the boxes seem rather larger than their usefulness - like the clocks box.