Because I tend to forget passwords, I use a nifty little programme called "KeePass" (here is its official website). The programme can store your passwords for everything and anything, so it is finally possible to have different passwords for all the important and security-relevant things, and only keep the one master password in mind. (Better not forget that, though!) The little programme will even generate long and very secure passwords for you.

The only thing that really throws me off track with Keepass sometimes is when I've generated one of the nice and safe passwords, copied it to its new home, saved everything, bumbled on... and then I find that the password hasn't been stored correctly in its new home because there is only space for 12 digits, and they cut off my password without warning! And there I stand then, trying like mad to get into the site, application or whatever. I KNOW that new password, darn it! I just changed it! I KNOW it's the correct one, it's stored in Keepass!
... and after a while, it dawns on me...

So should you need a little programme to keep track of your passwords (and I think it even can be add-on-ed into Firefox), KeePass is a good choice. It's free, secure, helpful with password generation, it's even portable so you can take it with you on your USB stick or whatever else you carry around for data transport. Just make sure you don't fall into my trap and check the maximum allowed number of password digits first!

I've half finished one of the most dreaded chores in my freelancer's business life: Bookkeeping. And I don't even know why I dread it that much (though by far not as much as the dentist!). It's not so bad once I sit down to do it, and since I have a very very simple system, it's not even complicated.

Oh, what system? Well... pile all un-booked things, including unbooked bank statements in a spot on the desk. When booking, go through pile paper by paper, booking each item into freeware software (easy-to-use programme, but in German only, and I don't want to be without that little helper again). Then put all items into a folder. Keeping track is very easy then: If it's in the folder, it's been booked. If not, then not.

So while keeping up with books only takes a few minutes for a whole month, out of some unknown reason, I have the tendency to wait until bad conscience cannot be ignored any longer. And while I'm not sure that my general style of working would benefit from a change, I am very sure that just booking things once a month, regularly, would be quite sensible. Now I only need a way to remind myself to book things regularly... preferably in a nice, fun way.

I'm slowly gaining on my gigantonormous list of "To-do-and-double-quick" and finally feel as if things are looking up a bit. Whew.

And speaking of "looking up" - in this case, looking up from the computer screen and resting the eyes and stretching - a friend pointed me to a neat little programme a few days ago. It's called "Workrave" and intended for those folks (like me) who never manage to take a break when necessary. The programme can be personalized for your preferred work time and break time lengths, and it will then nag you to take micropauses and longer rest breaks. And best of all, the icon is a little sheep, so it's perfect for fabric freaks. While you can ignore the pauses, it makes taking a short break now and then so much easier, and that can really improve performance. Which is something I can always use.

If you are spending as many hours a day in front of the computer, you might also enjoy using workrave as a small helper. It runs both on Linux and Windows, it's completely free, and you can download it here. Healthy computer working to you!

Doesn't everybody hate doing the taxes? Well, count me in, at least.

Our wonderful German system wants a tax form filled out and handed in by the end of May. After catching up on my bookkeeping yesterday (hooray!), I thought that today I could at least install the tax program we bought oh, weeks ago.

It doesn't work. And I'll give up now and try to run it on the other computer (though I'd have preferred it on mine). The installation won't run here on mine because my system is missing two components (the installer says) that can't be installed because they just won't work from the CD. One of them is a security update that I have already installed, and the second one is some cryptic thingie that I've never heard of before. And I've re-installed the Service Pack rollup already. I've even tried to run the other update directly from the Windows server, but it won't download since they want to be sure that it's an official 2000 I'm running. And the verification plugin won't work. And the alternative verification won't work either. Gaargh.

I think that I'll have a piece of cake now. And then I'll do nice, productive things far away from this machine. And when we're back after the weekend, I'll find a way to run it...

Periodically, it occurs to me how much I rely on the internet to do my research and writing work. Not only do I suffer from the "Google is friend"-Syndrome, I do most stuff online - because it is so convenient, especially with DSL and a flatrate.

I got addicted to the net as a research tool when I had the possibility to work at a desk with two computers, my laptop and a PC that was permanently hooked to the 'net, and with a fast connection at that. I started using the net more and more: For getting a quick reference check in Wikipedia, getting translation help in online dictionaries, looking for garments and persons in text and picture databases, checking out information about manuscripts, using Google and Google Scholar as well as other databases to find articles about each and every side topic I stumbled over, and of course reserving books for checkout in the library and making inter-library loans.

There came the day where without the internet connection, my workflow was seriously stunted. Of course I can still read an academic book without help from the net (at least if it is written easily enough written in a language I can read well enough), but I soon miss the easy additional info right at my fingertips - and wanting to check up something, get a translation, a definition, or see whether I've already read the book mentioned in a footnote and maybe reserve it for checkout, and not being able to just do these things, sort of jars my pace.

This is definitely one downside of the internet as research tool. Another one consists of these deep, well-concealed rifts in spacetime you can stumble upon when surfing the internet. Surely you have hit one at least once - suddenly, at least an hour has passed, without any proper work done. There are times when I'm especially vulnerable to time sucks, and I have even resorted to leechblock to keep this at bay.

A third bit that I don't love so much is the fact that the computer has to be on to access the Internet. Even with a laptop that can technically be carried over into the next room, you are chained to a machine that won't work anywhere, that needs proper support, can't take too much rough handling, gets warm and chirps (at least mine does). It's just not as comfy as a good old book, not as easy to take along, as easy to access.

Still, my thesis would not have been possible without multiple online dictionaries, .pdf-theses offered on the net, picture databases and manuscript databases, and very importantly e-mail and museum webpages. I must have spent gazillions of hours looking for information, reading excerpts, looking for books and articles about clothing I had not found before.

And surely I'm not the only one. What about you? How much and how often do you use the Internet as a research tool? Are you relying on the old 'Net too much sometimes? And what do you do to avoid the pits of mis-information and the maelstroms of time-suck?

After some very hectic and rather stressful weeks, I feel like things are slowly getting under control again. I have managed to meet all the deadlines even with new and unexpected extra deadlines dropping in, so the struggle to get everything done in time was really worth it. Even my little folder/brochure got finished, printed and delivered in time and doesn't look all bad - two of the pictures turned out a little more "technicolor" than I had intended, but I'd say it is still okay. The two important pics and the text have both turned out fine. I'll never, ever work with Quark Xpress, though - I thought I'd do myself a favour and work with a proper layout programme. It did not turn out well. In the end, it was faster making the layout anew in good old CorelDraw, even if that means not as good control over text layout.

Unfortunately, there is no time to lay back and relax - yet. I hope I can get a good writing flash in this week, and I have to finish preparing yet another presentation. And finally write all the emails I didn't get around to write yet.

The weekend will be spent doing things with clay, mostly in service of the Spinning Experiment that will run during the Textilforum, since I need to have a test run first making and then spinning with the whorls we will use for the experiment. Hopefully there will be enough time to do some other ceramic stuff for my own amusement - and maybe a cooking pot or two will come out of the weekend.

I've been wondering a long time now about the differences in the writing guidelines in Germany versus those in other (English language) countries.

Did it ever strike you as curious that in the English language, the length of texts (maximum or minimum) is given in words - as in "this novel is complete at 100,000 words", while German regulations for submission are given in characters - as in "no more than 40,000 characters"*.

And so I find myself writing a short and a long text with character count "not more than" in both cases and I wonder why there is that difference. After all, there are long and short words in both languages, and I'd suspect that when the difficulty level of the text rises, so does the average word length. So why count words? Is this better possible in English than in German? Or is it some "historical reason"? Or do the Germans just want it that much more exact?** And why does MS Word include a character count, but not a (complete) word count when that is needed much more often (since there are much more English language writers than German)?***


And, the most important question of them all: Why did I not manage to get my characters counted properly yesterday, in spite of having used "Extras - Word Count" so often before?



*I'm not using the proper German 40.000 here, to avoid confusion - but I think it is funny that 40.000 and 40,000 mean different things in English and German. Talk about confusing.

** Yes, I know, that is so cliché. But did you know that because listing these huge numbers of characters for a text can be daunting, there's a conversion into "Normseiten", standard pages, that are usually worth about 1.500 characters. Which makes those figures much, much smaller.

*** You can of course download and install an add-in for MS Word. It might be useful for you (I only have it for fun - well, mostly). You can find "Complete WordCount" at Shauna Kelly's site - together with a lot of hints for using Word efficiently.