Blog

Today was the first day for the 2009 Blog Indiana conference in Indianapolis. This conference is the first conference I’ve attended since I really started jumping into Evernote and using it more and more.

Granted a note-taking application should be performing well in this type of setting. You’re taking notes at a conference with various sessions. The difference though is that there’s so many other nice touches that make it very helpful in this situation.

One of the first things I did was to import the PDF of the conference schedule and session agenda into the notebook I setup just for the conference. After that I grabbed the user specific free wi-fi account access for me into the notebook so I’d have that available.

As I was in sessions I could quickly take notes and organize them with keywords and tags for later retrieval as needed. Throughout the day as people would mentioned various websites and applications, I could visit the site and then use the Evernote bookmarklet tool to import that link to those sites right into my conference notebook.

Although I didn’t use my camera much today, if I wanted to, I could have copied photos that were taken in each session and throughout the day into the notebook and already prepare captions and information about what was happening in the photo to be ready to use for an upcoming blog post.

Evernote just made keeping track of all this information throughout the day certainly manageable. I love this tool the more I use it.

I will say I need to work on the keyboard shortcuts, because I just realized you can use CTRL+SHIFT+B to format a list as bulleted notes. That would have come in handy during the sessions. I’ll remember that for Day 2 of Blog Indiana.

I’ve been dealing with an ongoing issue lately where my computer is locking up and freezing for some reason. It always happens whenever I’m in a folder either trying to view, copy or move files around on my system.

What will happen is that I’ll click on a file or collection of files and normally try to send them to another folder location or copy them to move them somewhere else.

Normally, as soon as I right-click on the files to access the right-click menu, the system stops responding. I’ve determined lately that if I immediately go to Task Manager and stop the offending process my system recovers and I’m able to continue working.

If I let the system sit a little too long after that, under the impression that it’s working, it apparently locks up some other processes and goes into a loop of various application no longer responding to any input from me. If things get to that point, I normally have to manually kill a variety of processes and then manually restart the Explorer.exe application to recover Windows and begin working again.

What’s weird is that some of this is very familiar to what I believe my wife has been experiencing on her Vista laptop.

Anyone else experiencing this? I’m wondering if there’s some kind of Windows update that’s been released over the last couple of weeks that may have caused these issues for me on my Windows XP Pro machine.