Once again my poor little blog suffers the pain of its negligent owner. It’s been a busy semester. I am now officially back in Grad School with a paper due at the end of May. To that end I bought a new iPad, which I’m using at this very moment to write this post.

The new iPad is in a word SPECTAULAWESOME – Yes I had to make a new word up for it. Last year I undertook a very large project, I scanned all my MA book, all 30-something of them into PDFs. Then I ran text recognition on them so they would be searchable. The plan was to buy an iPad and use it as an e-reader, but when last year’s iPad 2 came along without a retina display I held off. Fast forward to this year and all that effort has finally paid off.

So now all my books for the current module, of which there are 12, are on my iPad and I no longer have to carry my books and my MacBook to the college everyday. My back is thanking me. I’d really love to see more support for educational books in electronic formats from publishers.

Another little and unexpected treat is iAnnotate, a little app that allows me to write notes on and highlight my PDFs, it’s a fantastic study tool! Best part is that it doesn’t even cost ten dollars!

Beyond my geeky techno-bliss, life is good. It’s been a long semester, most of my students aren’t very motivated or driven which makes for long days at times. At this point there are only two days left in the semester. The next 2 weeks will be all about marking, grading, and tweaking our current course. After that ….

VACATION!!

I’ll be spending a week in South Korea, time to relax, eat some good food, maybe get in a hike or two, and most importantly, spend time with K. Most of my friends have since scattered all over the globe, but it’ll be nice to see those who remain.