Google Lovin'

I really like Google's logo for Valentine's Day this year.
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I've also been discovering some more uses for other Google services which I don't usually utilise too often, like Google Calendar, which I usually just use to keep track of birthdays, really. But after some fiddling about, I managed to create a simple schedule page for organising my experiment slots for the next 2 weeks (I'm collecting data for my final year project). It's probably not a use I'll be repeating often, but it seems that it might come in handy once I start teaching.



I also thought that the Events page on the sorely-outdated York Singsoc website could have been easily kept up-to-date with Google Calendar, which is what we tried to introduce, but apparently it didn't work so well. Maybe it'll be picked up again by the current batch, or maybe they'll think of something better.
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Since we're on the topic of Google products, Google Reader is a utility I highly recommend. It's a feed aggregator, which basically means it collects all the new posts from various websites and displays them on one page, so you can rely on just one page instead of dozens. I previously used it mainly to track infrequently-updated blogs, since most of the personal blogs I read don't update daily (or even monthly). But recently I've come to appreciate it as an easy way to follow new sites (such as FXcuisine, an excellent food site I've just discovered) as well, I can happily add as many as I want, and remove them later if they turn out to be less interesting than expected.

Think of it as a replacement for the bookmarks system, for the sites that support feeds anyway (usually indicated with an orange web feed icon somewhere).

I've also more recently started playing with the social aspect of Google Reader - sharing interesting articles. I've not used it too much, but it seems a pretty simple way to share stuff you've read, and if reciprocated it helps me to discover new sites. In fact I've just embedded my shared reads in the sidebar of this blog.
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Sometimes I suspect I might need a new pre-lunch hobby, other than surfing the web.