Things 1 & 2

Here's what I did in Week One, 18 Jan 2010, as part of the "23 Things Oxford" programme:

Thing 1

I already had a Google ID, so didn't need to set one up.

Thing 2

I didn't have an iGoogle page, so I customised one.

I added these gadgets:

• Google Map Search
• Date & Time
• BBC News
• CBC News
• Time Out London
• Weather
• The New Yorker
• Salon
• Daily Literary Quote
• Gmail

I'm sure that, given more time, I could make my iGoogle page more attractive, interesting and functional. I do, however, like the functionality of seeing my Gmail inbox on the side of the iGoogle page whilst I'm looking at other things.

For now, I've made my iGoogle page my home page. Here's a small screen shot of it:

I operate my pc with two monitors on at once, so when I did the screenshot, it evidently captured a shot of both my iGoogle page on one monitor (on the left) and of my current green leafy wallpaper on my second monitor (on the right). I don't think I had never done a screenshot before, or least it was so long ago when I did know that I had forgotten, so am glad to have been reminded how to do this.

That's about it for Things 1 & 2.

Thing 3 of 23 Things Oxford

Creating the blog itself was easy.
Coming up with a suitable name for it was the hard part!


I love food, the early modern period, and writing,
so "quince & sippets" seemed to sum up these interests of mine.

Quince: both the sound of the word and beauty of the fruit appeal to me. Whenever I see the word, I think of fresh and pretty Elizabethan gardens. I also like that the fruit transforms itself from a hard, white and bitter substance into a lovely sweet reddish and perfumey mash when cooked.

Sippets are another early modern food item; they're small pieces of toasted or fried bread usually served with soup or stew. The word "sippet" can also refer to any small piece of something, a mere fragment, which, to me, is sort of what blogs are--small sippets or fragments of a person's thoughts.



Uh oh... already too many sippets about sippets and not enough about my hopes for the 23 Things programme!



Without trying much, I've encountered plenty of web 2.0 technologies over the past few years. It's difficult in today's world and workplace not to. I'm certainly more conversant in some of these technologies than others. So, I hope that this programme will help me keep up-to-date and on top of the latest technologies and that, by the end of it, I'll feel fully web 2.0 competent.



Thanks to the organizers for putting this together!