Snow in August

Posted by sarcozona on September 4, 2008. No comments.

Flagstaff has interesting summer weather. After this hailstorm on August 25th, there was snow on the mountain, and I changed into a sweater. My poor housemate came home looking like she’d jumped in the shower fully clothed.

Tomatoes

Posted by sarcozona on September 3, 2008. 2 comments.

One of my tomato plants finally has tomatoes. Tiny, tiny tomatoes. There is no way they are going to be ripe before the first frost. The other plant doesn’t even have tiny tomatoes yet.

The one with tomatoes blew off my porch in a storm and its stake broke. Now it’s indoors, propped against the window. Poor thing… But it does seem to be doing better than the other one. Maybe they’ll do better indoors. I don’t think they like how cold Flagstaff gets at night.

Blogs I love

Posted by sarcozona on September 2, 2008. No comments.

I know you don’t look at my blogroll, so I thought I’d point you in the direction of a few blogs I really enjoy.

If you like plants, Seeds Aside is awesome (and has a great sense of humor). If you’re addicted to shoes, Manolo’s Shoe Blog points out the best. If you’re into art, Le territoire des sens finds some great pieces. If gender turns you on, you should be reading Sugarbutch Chronicles. If you’re going to grad school, or thinking about being an ecologist, Ruminations of an Aspiring Ecologist lets you know what you’re getting yourself into.

Citation managers

Posted by sarcozona on September 1, 2008. One comment.

I have to read a lot of papers for work, and every once in awhile I write one of my own. Keeping track of all the papers and then citing them and building bibliographies can be pretty time consuming. Citation managers make the job a lot easier. I’ve been using RefWorks for the past year, but recently switched to Zotero after reading about it at Ruminations of an Aspiring Ecologist.

Zotero is much faster and easier to use. The integration with Firefox is flawless and importing references is effortless. For databases without automatic RefWorks export options for their citations, I had to download a citation file, then import it into RefWorks in a separate (tricky) step. I say tricky because I had to choose several options on the import that were different for different databases and often not very intuitive. This doesn’t happen with Zotero.

The biggest problem I have with Zotero is that it doesn’t work with Microsoft Office 2008 yet. So I’m using both RefWorks and Zotero until the new plugin gets built. Hopefully that will be soon. I’m excited about not using clunky RefWorks anymore.