Record of my life (well, just one year)

arcticwoman — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 15:46:00 -0800

Help putting together an online record of my year as an exchange student. Specifically, my questions inside deal with: what media (blog, wiki, lj, flickr, website?) how to deal with different materials (diary, emails, photos, memories) and a legal question regarding the association that sent me. In 2000/2001 I was a long-term youth exchange student to Malaysia with a particular service organization. I was thinking about my year abroad and realized that if I don't do something now to preserve and organize my memories they will be lost. My diary has already suffered some water damage and parts of it are unreadable, and years of shuffling around has meant that my photos are all out of order and some have disappeared. So I want to get everything together in a virtual format that will withstand physical damage and will make it easy for me to search particular events/photos. Also important is that it is in a form that I can share with my family and friends.

I have: a damaged diary
a few old livejournal posts
emails that I sent to my mother and her replies
photos
pamphlets
postcards
cookbooks/loose recipes
other scraps (from conferences, movie tickets, song lyrics/)

What can I do with all this? How can I organize it all online in a coherent order?

Finally, my legal-ish question: I didn't actually have a good year abroad and I have a lot of negative feelings and opinions about the organization that sent me. Do I need to hide the name of this organization under a pseudonym, or can I be candid? Not all of my opinions on this group are bad, and it is possible that in a few years I may even try to join. Is writing about how they let me down going to be problematic?

As if high school isn't awkward enough already...

ruby.aftermath — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 18:35:09 -0800

Can someone explain French lycée-level notetaking to me? Is there some kind of secret system? My roomate and I spent some time studying in France while in high school (a semester or less). We both remember being completely amazed when come note-taking time, all our classmates suddenly whipped out something like 15 different colors of erasable fountain pens, rulers, and who knows what else. There were underlines and double underlines, and some kind of color coding. We both tried to fake it, but were entirely lost.

Is there some kind of special system, or are French kids supposed to make up their own fancy note style? I've been unable to find anything on Google, and while I am certainly a nerd, it's just not a topic that ever came up with French friends. None of which, unfortunately, I'm in touch with anymore.

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Record of my life (well, just one year)

As if high school isn't awkward enough already...