I am *never* taking two classes during the summer again. If you try to find me and I dont respond until next week, it’s because I have two finals to work on, one due on the 6th, one due on the 8th. I am *soo* looking forward to the end of the semester!

The first adventure of our trip has occured – Union station is under a bomb scare. They’ve evacuated the station, and no trains are coming in and out. Theoretically, our train is just delayed, and we’ll be on a later train.

Sometimes it’s great to have friends with so much tech – we have my cell phone for Internet – tlttlotd has a police scanner – we have food and snacks that we were going to eat on the train, and seele and neomantra have their DS.

If it wasn’t so hot, it’d be kind of fun.

This past weekend, I had a pretty major paper due that required quite a bit of research to complete. Luckily, almost all of my research is online thanks to UMUC’s online library access. I also had to deal with a lot of web resources, so I was in Firefox a lot. I used Google’s Notebook for the first time for “serious” research rather than just piddling around. It worked out amazingly well. There are a few glitches that I need to get used to – dragging and dropping is *way* too easy, as is accidentally hitting the delete – thank you for a confirmation message!

I had to research two companies from the Fortune 100 list of Best Companies to Work For and discuss what they did unique, blah, blah, blah. I not only used each company’s website, I also used the library research. Every time I found an article or a web page that was useful, I highlighted it and “noted this”. I made sure that there was enough information (other than the URL) to create the bibliography – and if there wasn’t, I could always easily go back to the page thanks to the link Google helpfully provided.

For each article, I edited the note to summarize and indicate what material I wanted out of that source. After that, writing the paper was merely going back through my notes and citing appropriately. After I had used the source, I “closed” the note so that it wasn’t taking screen space, also indicating what other resources still needed to be cited.

I wish I could have fit more on one screen, like small images of the note in a “page” view, but what I had worked.