5/2

Throughout the golden week(Sadly it was not golden "week" for ICU students), I just hung out with my friends and did nothing else. I even forgot how to read books though I have to deal with them for the mid tests to come. hmm...

On 5/2, we first visited the site called "Communication Via Multimedia", which Rab created for the CM course in ICU.( It is an ELP course, but I didn't even know it exists.) This site is very useful because it introduces lots of materials Rab made us familiar with. It should remind me of what I learned in class in case I forgot. In the class, we focused on tips which make research more efficient. In the Research section of the website, you can find some advice for efficient searching. Google Guide gives you lots of helpful tips for Google search. Pandia provides tutorial on the search engines and the search directories. Then we visited Flickr Commons, where you can find lots of copyright-free pictures. It will be useful when we need to use pictures for papers and presentations. After that, Rab introduced Firefox Portable, which can be booted on the USB stick. Personally I prefer GoogleChrome because it's faster, but Firefox is also needed for using Zotero. Firefox Portable will be useful for such purpose. (By the way, Yoshiki told me that the new version of Firefox is much faster than old ones. I would have to see if that's true.) Xmarks was then introduced. It is a tool which enables you to access your bookmark on whatever operation system you are using. It is quite helpful if your home computer is Windows since most of the computers in ICU are Mac for some reason. After that, we tried Wonderwheel and Timeline, which are both Google search functions. Wonderwheel draws a kind of mind map that makes search results visually-easier to understand. Timeline is just like what the name claims. It makes it possible to sort search results in chronological order. You will find it very useful when you need to search something/someone historical. We also tried Google map. It provides a number of ways to view the world. Street View is especially impressive because it makes you feel like you are actually walking on the street. In order to collect images, Google cars with a digital camera on the roof drove through all the streets and took the pictures of them. How crazy they are!!! When I was a boy, I dreamed about such a thing. But they actually did it spending all the cost, which I can easily imagine was not cheap at all. Freaky! Lastly, we saw how Google translate works, which turned out to be not so useful. Rab also introduced Google Toolbar. Google Toolbar is an add-on program that provides shortcuts to main Google applications. For Google junkies like me, it will be a must tool.