Getting Things Done

I bet one of the most common items on the lists of newly-enshrined GTD-practitioners is blogging about their fantastic new system and how better off they are than when they had a life-less-organised. I'd hate to break the stereotype, since stereotypes are so very, very useful, so here I go. Omnifocus. It really is very good. I really do feel like my head is clearer. I really do think I've had quite a productive week. I really have forgotten to put number23.org article-writing down as a project. Gah!

Anyway, enough of this thinly-veiled filler post. I'll wrap it up by giving you a hint of what's to come. Very soon I'll be waxing lyrical about a new application that really could change the way we interact with scientific literature, putting it right at the heart of the community and the data. Really. Not long to wait now...

Facebook Data Sharing. Am I missing something?

I posted this as a comment on an article entitled "Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook". The biggest question for me as to whether I should stay with Facebook, is down to me knowing who I'm sharing my data with. Do I have the choice that the terms seem to say I have? From "http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy&section=applications&field=learn"

"When you visit a Facebook-enhanced application or website, it may access any information you have made visible to everyone (Edit Profile privacy) as well as your publicly available information."

I read this to mean that only data I've stated is either public or accessible to all is accessible to applications. Since that for every item in my privacy settings I have selected "Only friends", I would expect that applications cannot access any data of mine other than my public profile.

If this assumption is wrong, please let me know!

PhD, done.

So, after nearly four and a half years, my dissertation is bound for the last time, handed in and accepted. All that's left now is to wear a slightly odd hat in June and change my name on my cards. Coming to the end of a big project is always an unusual feeling, but luckily with a PhD it is sort of spread over a few key dates. There's the day you finish your dissertation, the day of your viva, and the day you hand in your corrected version for the last time, so the shock is spread out a little and you feel quite capable of rejoining the normal world. In my case, the fact that my contract as an research assistant runs for a few months to come - and hopefully much longer - helps this even more. The Utopia project is on the precipice of some really interesting times, so hopefully we'll catch the ball and run with it.

Whatever happens though, it's nice to know, that even just for a short time, I'm probably the world expert on hierarchical tagging systems applied to scientific data. That's definitely worth wearing a silly hat for.