Procrastinating. Helpfully.

I have to do tax stuff. Which, as you probably know, is not my favourite task of them all... so I've been procrastinating this morning.

At least I've been procrastinating in a productive way - finding a slightly better way to get bibliographical data attached to the many .pdf articles that I have in storage (but not yet in the bib database I use), and doing some cleanup and maintenance work on said database. That includes correcting special characters that have not transferred correctly. A pain in the neck, especially if they are not the simple, regular ones that can be typed easily on my standard German keyboard.

I used to have a specialised keyboard when I was writing my thesis, adapted to include Danish, Polish, and Czech special characters, but that has not survived the changes of computer hardware and operating system that happened inbetween, and I haven't gotten around to setting that up again. For the moment, I've found a handy character list on the 'net to copy and paste the single individual characters; it's here, and includes HTML and ASCII codes, if you find those handy.

I've also looked into some other database stuff, though not quite as successfully yet. There's a few things I would like to organise better, so that I can use and access the information I have more easily, but haven't found a really good solution yet. The optimum would be something that also allows cooperation with colleagues via the 'net, while easy to use, linking things both online and in local storage together, and searchable. I might have a lead on something that sounds promising, but haven't looked into it much yet... and I shouldn't, today, since - see above - someone has to do my tax work... and the cat, while purring helpfully and being very cuddly as she currently lies on my arm (the left one, for a change, very unusual) refuses to do that.