I spent the Sunday transferring files and MP3s on my new baby, a 80Gig MP3 player. Mind you, it's not cool, pretty or anything like that. It's rather large, but it's got a lot of space. A lot. I love that and rather carry a bulky, utterly not iPod like thing around with me. Well, nothing madly interesting about this weekend perusal of mine, just that I managed to cut rather than copy all my digital pictures. Read: delete from my harddrive. Gladly, I noticed only a day later, and instant pang of panic was swiftly replaced by faint memory of the potential error in my system. Phew.

So, now that I've outed me as someone who can't tell a CtrlX from a CtrlC, and while my computer is working hard to this time copy my lovely pix back to its own hard drive, I've come across some useful stuff for the geeks out there. Firstly, SDP is a nice free programme that allows to capture Windows Media Stream. I think that means you can record live streams (video and the like) to your hard disk and view them again. And copy them onto moveable disks and take them even further. Apparently, my beloved chops in, it's not perfect as it doesn't do any such thing with Real Media Stream. I'm not quite sure what that means, but thought I'd tell yous anyhow.

Secondly there's a fascinating website that I haven't quite managed to pay its due attention: It's the Open Source Academy . It's aim is to promote the use of open source software in government offices, but they also have lots of exciting news, articles etc presented in a really nice way, so it's definitely worth a look.

As to blogging, I've been contacted about a research project involving a survey, into the usefulness for community engagement and participation through the use of blogging within nonprofit organisations. Sounds interesting indeed, just that the survey was multiple choice throughout which is simply bad practice as my trainer and developer incarnation can confidently tell you. No space for qualifying comments, and consequently a feeling that my answers may not be useful at all. Strange too that the research is geographically linked to the US, while I'm on the other side of the pond, so have I actually contributed to a misrepresentation of the US voluntary sector blogosphere? The timing was a shame too, with just a month since the Mount Florida Community Council blog was launched. And I would really like to link to this research project just that the URL is at work, and I can't google it. and should be boycotting google anyway. hence no link.

Now, once my music is all in portable format (just imagine, shelves of music in one handheld piece of magic!), the film scanner will be next, to digitalise my other passion; photography. If I finally manage to buy the right SCSI card or whatever they are called.
Yours happily foraging in the technology jungle without having a clue, eh, compass.