Method's and Blogs - Detractions

Adobe Acrobat Pro. Well, after uh... borrowing the program... and using it instead of the reader to view my PDF articles, I can say it's definitely a step above. Clearly I haven't seen the full potential of the program yet. The OCR stuff kinda, sorta confuses me a bit. I'll have to talk to Spencer about it. Already though I am happy that I'm able to actually interact with my PDFs. Highlighting makes life so much simpler. And being able to add my own sticky notes where ever I want is great. Of course, I'll probably end up writing it all out into a notebook but... still pretty damn cool. It'd be interesting to see some articles thrown back into circulation with people's highlighting and side notes, almost like finding those awesome doodles or jot notes in the margins of old books. Sometimes it's pure gold. Other times it just has me flipping to page 65 ... then 110, 88, and 42 for no reason at all.

I can draw on the documents when I grow bored with them. I can stamp it or underline or strike text. So much fun to be had ruining enhancing documents! I can even attach recordings to the text. This Pro business is pretty nifty!

While playing with Pro I also learned that there's a read aloud option?! Probably not great for me to use as I won't actually absorb anything useful. But robot voices do soothe me, perhaps I've found a new way to fall asleep.

How much of this was available on the Reader, I don't know. But even if it was there it was never anything I used before the upgrade.

Just as an aside from reading William Turkel's blog. the IRISpen is effin AWESOME! I think I want to play with one. I'm sure it's well out of my price range, what with being a starving student an all, but it seems like a hella cool toy!

Blogoshpere

I've just come across a treasure trove of MRP related information through a blog. What has me particularly excited is a rendition of Haig's war diaries in the National Archives. I'm sure I would have been using this source in my MRP so it's pretty cool that I've come across an audio version online. Gotta love the blogosphere! The Great War Heroes blog, although dated, has a decent amount of information that is directly related to my MRP topic so I'm pretty happy with the find.

Another one I came across, Thoughts on Military History is pretty interesting for me, not because the material is relevant to my topic but because the approach is. Apparently the author of the blog is Ross Mahoney who is doing his PhD at the University of Birmingham. He is looking at the leadership effectiveness of Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh Mallory. This is along the lines of what I want to do with Sir Douglas Haig, in attempting to understand the leader to better understand their policies while at war. Leadership theory is something I'll have to look into further. He outlines his thesis on his blog and describes what he is doing, so I thought that was pretty cool.