Sunday, April 22, 2007

Using Delicious Library to avoid library late fees

I've come up with a rather simple idea to use the wonderful Mac program Delicious Library to help me track library books I've checked out and help avoid (or at least reduce) late fees.

Delicious Monster allows you to track books, video games, music, and movies you have loaned out to people. In the Apple Address Book, I have an entry for myself. When I check a book out from the library, I add it to my Delicious Library. I then loan the book out to myself with a due date of, you guessed it, the due date.

Due items show up in two places: Delicious Library and iCal.

This trick should be usable on just about any similar program that has the ability to track things that have been loaned out.

It would be nice if Delicious Library 2.0 would have the built-in ability to track books borrowed as well as book lent out.

Monday, April 9, 2007

AHA! moment with Circa notebooks

It has taken over a month using Circa and Rollabind notebooks, but I've stumbled across a feature that Levenger Circa and Rollabind notebooks provide that I find truly powerful. In the past, I've tried to keep everything in my planner. This includes calendar, contacts, todo lists, ideas, notes on books, meeting notes and any other little bit of information I write in my planner.

If I keep all that stuff in my planner, it quickly becomes a pretty full planner. So what to do? I would take all the old pages out and put them in a yearly archival binder. I don't believe I've ever lost an idea, but I don't believe I've ever went back to do anything with an idea I wrote down over a month ago.

Enter the Circa notebooks... I have a section for Creative writings, a section for notes on books I've read along with books I want to read.

Once I'm running low on room in my planner, I can take these pages out and put it in my "Creative" notebook. And if I have enough ideas or notes about books, I could put those each in their own notebook. The whole system grows organically and I can assign individual notebook(s) to a topic. This doesn't require a bunch of bulky binders, just a few rings and notebook covers.

Cira and Rollabind notebooks