Signing Off

Blogs...  hmmmm  well I tried it and you know what - it just isn't for me and guess what facebook isn't either.. I find myself logging in way too often to find out what all of my fabulous friends are doing and thinking wow why am I not having children, traveling to far off places and doing wonderful things.  So I'm signing off.  I can still be reached by all the old fashioned forms of communication e.g. email. So if you have exciting news I would love to hear about it (send me a letter, or give me a call) but right now, in my life, having access to everyone's wonderful lives just isn't working for me.

Fleeting Fall

It never ceases to amaze me how quickly the end of summer turns to fall and rushes straight on into winter. I simply love fall and this year the leaves were absolutely beautiful...  if you wanted to see them you missed it.  You could almost see the leaves changing as I left each morning I would count how many splotches of orange and red had blossomed on the mountains. Even before the official start of fall most of the leaves had changed colors. Now just a week into October the leaves have mostly fallen and the first snow has dusted the ski runs. In my hopes to hold onto one of my favorite season for just a little bit longer I've added a collection of orange pillows and blankets to my house that seem to beg for you to curl up with a cup of hot chocolate.

Now if you know Leif you know that fall is is favorite time of year and Halloween is his favorite holiday. I'm not the very crafty type so I haven't been able to fulfill his greatest desire for halloween house.  But you can be sure we will have pumpkins. Last year was our all time record for pumpkins carved...

Off hand I can't remember exactly how many pumpkins that was - I'm sure Leif will want to top it this year... anyone want to carve pumpkins with us?

Why would anyone want that many pumpkins you're probably asking yourself about now - answer for these...

Cups upon cups of pumpkin seeds.  Enough to last you through Thanksgiving and beyond if you're lucky.  If you have never roasted the pumpkin seeds from your pumpkins then you have missed out on one of the most wonderful smelling events of fall. There isn't much better than hanging out sipping hot cider talking with friends while your oven fills the house with the spicy scents of fall.

Gadgets and Doodads

I think that technology is fabulous.  However, Leif and I have been trying to decide if it is possible to have too much technology. Sometimes I look around at our 900 square foot apartment and think, is all of this really necessary? With three computers for the two of us, as well as an iPad, iPod Touch, and PS3. communicating, working, and entertainment has never been more convenient.  Honestly, I could probably live without it all - but it is so much fun.

All that being said, Leif recently introduced me to a gadget that I wish I had had a long time ago.  The smart pen by LiveScribe. Just thinking about it makes me smile a little, which means that I should really own up to being a geek. If you haven't seen this before you will wish you had one in college.  A pen that makes a digital sound recording of your conversation, or lecture, and matches it with whatever you write or draw. It is like magic.  So that when you're looking over your notes going what the heck is that?  with a simple tap whatever you, your professor, or classmate said at the time is instantly played back to you.  Seriously, is no one else as excited as this as I am?!!  And I am no longer in school.  Then you can simply drop your pen onto is dock and upload all your notes to your laptop, where, you can search for keywords or click on different parts of your notes to again replay what was said.

They just came out with a new model the Echo which means that all the previous model, Pulse, pens are on sale at Target.  So here I sit thinking how much better school would be for Leif if he just had a smart pen and I am dying to run out and get one right now, but seriously... don't I have enough gadgets already?

Streamlining My Digital Life

Until last week I have spent hours every week trying frantically to control the chaos that was my digital life... Leif is just finishing his second year of a PhD in Business Strategy and I wish that we had had this system when we started.

Over the past two years Leif has amassed a huge collection of .pdf files of journal articles for school. Together we have been painstakingly renaming and filing each one into folders on our hard drives then trying desperately to make sure that each one got backed-up to the appropriate external drive without loosing the annotations that were added as Leif read through each paper. And though every folder was meticulously labeled and each file appropriately named, it was often still easier to just pull down an article again from Google Scholar or JSTOR instead of finding where the article was hiding on our computers.

We’d been hobbling along with our dysfunctional system thinking, dreaming that there must be a better way out there. Then we found it a solution to finally free us from the chaos of folders buried in folders of pdf files…. Papers. Papers - a digital library of journal articles that takes all the madness out of organizing, naming and filing pdfs. After downloading the trial version and playing with the importing, file naming, searching functions we laughed and almost cried at how much easier it was… we would now finally be able to find, and organize all our pdfs. The excitement didn’t last for long however, as the daunting task of trying to keep the libraries on both the iMac and Leif’s MacBook Pro synced up. Asking Leif to just work on one system wasn’t going to happen. Our iMac is a powerhouse for researching with 2, 24” monitors and Leif also needed the mobility of his MacBook so that he could access the library in seminars and while researching on campus.

Luckily just at the time we were despairing over how hard it would be to constantly be copying the library folder back and forth between the two hard drives, Leif got an invitation to access a colleague’s dropbox file. We have been reluctant to use an online cloud to access our files as we are not always in places where we have access to wifi. But with dropbox the files are kept locally on any harddrive that has access to the dropbox folder… and here is the magical part – if any change is made to a file in the dropbox folder it is automatically updated on every computer that has access to the folder! Ok so you’re probably not as excited as I am about this. But seriously, I have spent hours and hours of my life trying to figure out which version of Leif’s current research project is the most current… was he working on the MacBook last or on the iMac? No longer do I have to search through every file on both computers looking for changes to update and files to transfer.

It took an afternoon to backup all our files and make the switch but now, I have an abundance of afternoons that I no longer have to spend worrying about which files go where – isn’t technology great, especially technology that takes care of itself.

The Beginning

Thanks to Liz for the fabulous title for this blog... I'm not really sure what I will write here or how often I will use this blog but I thought I would give it a shot