Ladies and gentlemen, if I could have a moment of your time.

With the debate season winding down, many of you may wonder to yourself how you’ll occupy those last few weeks of school. You could go outside, have fun, make friends- or better yet do something productive like beta-test Debate Synergy 1.5.

Billions of hours, blood, sweat and tears went into the 1.5 update to the Debate Synergy program. I’ve been receiving about two emails a day about Debate Synergy since October and have used it myself in over fifty rounds; I have learned from experience  what works and what doesn’t. Currently, this is a Beta version- so it’s not Roy-friendly. Although myself and others have been testing it this week, it’s still possible for there to be bugs and the manual has not been rewritten in great detail (not that any of you read it anyways).

If you are a debate coach interested in making the paperless transition easy or a camp director, I would love to give a personalized presentation to your squad- similar to the one I gave at Woodward this past weekend- but it’s better if it’s personalized since I can spend as much time as necessary for the debaters to learn it. The ideal time to do this would be in those last few weeks of high school or before camps start. I can also present my browser addon to make debate research easier and faster- and I’ve been working on more useful features for a new release this summer.  I’ve received several such requests already, so please contact me soon at alexgulakov@gmail.com.

What’s new in 1.5?

• The virtual tub system is entirely different- it’s much simpler to use since it just mirrors the structure of subfolders and files on your harddrive
• Standalone timer.exe program- it’s not just launched from Word
• The Word toolbar integrates with a superfast file search program called Everything Search, which you should download from http://www.voidtools.com/
• Major macro improvements to the paperless macros and a warrant extension macro
• Many small things, like bug fixes, interface improvements, ability to customize the toolbar, compatibility with Windows x64 versions and Office 2010 (a larger changes list will be in the final release)

The NDCA is recording this presentation so that it can be made available to the community; more information will be posted as soon as we have it.

www.newegg.com has a bunch including a 189 netbook and a 60 dollar tom tom GPS (great if your coach keeps getting lost at tournaments…)

ecost has some decent stuff

289 netbook

USB Hub -5 dollars

8 gig hd- 12 dollars

or 9 dollars

Decent flip camera- 100

You can also find these spreadsheets that have thousands of deals listed- but they are kind of a pain to sort through

1. Computers/accessories:

Personal use- I have the alienware M17x- After a few years of more “mobile” laptops I went back to the big daddy and a 17 inch screen. I found that most of the time I was doing work I wasn’t in a convenient place to plug into an external monitor and so I wanted a big ass screen. My previous laptops up to this point have been

-dell inspiron

-Alienware area 51 (in cyborg green)

-Alienware sentia

-HP dvt6000

-Acer aspire 1

The m17x is heavy as hell, and the power brick prob. ways more than most 12 inch laptops. I also only found 1 backpack that it would fit in the laptop pouch for as even though it is a 17 it is designed so that it is much wider in the middle than your average 17. The screen is amazing to stare at for long hours, and the keyboard does not in any way feel like a chincy notebook keyboard. It is also lightning fast even when I have a million windows open. While I love it, prob. not for everyone.

Asus EEE pc 1005ha These are what I purchased for the squads viewing computers. Super long battery life for flights, solid build, good screen. I only installed open office to save some cash there and it works pretty well though obviously when you open the speech the template functions won’t work. People’s major beef with this line is the power supply- people keep saying it breaks easily. Actually the thing has a heat sensitive chip in it that turns it off when the temp goes up. So if you wait for it to cool down (or stick it in the fridge for 20 mns) it works again. The asus forums and various eee pc websites make this the top netbook in my mind for getting tech help/customized programs etc.

Mouse- I recently got the Razer Naga which has way more buttons than any other mouse. The problem is that the software for the mouse doesn’t allow you to customize the buttons like other Razer mice- the number buttons just do the number commands (which I guess is useful for warcraft or something) so I had to re-shortcut key all the template functions which is kind of annoying, and you have to hit ctrl with each stroke- but hopefully they will fix this soon. Other than that the Razer diamondback was what I used for ever and you can get for like 40 bucks.

One other thing I use is this mouse case that doubles as a mouse pad.

I bought a bunch of these power strips due to their cord length for the team/paperless.  These HP jump drives where big and cheap so I picked them when buying in bulk.

2. Podcast/Speak and type-

We use a combination of Skype and Pamela a skype add on to record the podcasts. I use a program called acid/sound forge for editing.  You could also use audacity.

A USB headset seems to work better than the ones that plug into the microphone jack, I have this one.

For speak and type I use Dragon Naturally Speaking which is amazing. You can use it in conjunction with most (though not all) blue tooth headsets .

3. Scanning-

I got this neat desk system for scanning receipts but it turned out to be a pretty good scanner overall- sheet fed it can do 50 pages per minute. I would highly recommend it for coaches who have to deal with admin tasks or keep track of spending.

Before that I used a few different canon flatbed scanners which you can get for as little as 40 bucks.  There is also a good guide here.

For software I am an Omni page fan, though I don’t know that version 16 is actually an improvement on 14/15 and may in fact be substantially worse. I have not been able to get my claws on 17 pro yet unfortunately… I would also like to try this which has a nice little feature:

Before I go into detail about the main app, I want to mention my favorite Finereader 10 innovation: a “Screenshot Reader” feature that ought to be part of all OCR software. If you’re trying to copy text from a scanned image of a document in a Web browser—for example, in Google Books, or on site that displays police reports and similar documents—you don’t have to transcribe the text by hand. Instead, you click on the Screenshot Reader’s taskbar tray icon, draw a box around the text you want to copy, and wait a few seconds for the Screenshot Reader to perform its OCR magic and copy the text to the clipboard or into a new file in Word or Excel. The full Finereader application doesn’t even need to be open when you do this. This powerful new tool may make even those who are satisfied with their current OCR consider upgrading.

4. Misc-

Xnote stopwatch- for those of you not using synergy or who do LD- allows you to open multiple timers at once and it will remember how many you want open and set for what times.

Evernote- another tip from Gulakov- I like that its free and syncs automatically with my iphone- so I put things like tournament addresses, flight times etc in a note through copy and paste and then I have it on my phone with me automatically.

Carbonite- need more online storage than your drop box allows? Carbonite gives you unlimited for a yearly fee- repeat-unlimited. And the fee is less than the minimal drop box upgrade.

Mifi- these things are awesome. They are like wireless 3g cards for your laptop, only they are a built in router so up to 5 people can use the internet on them. Not great for torrenting 20 gigs of comics at one time, but for cutting updates at the hotel/airport/hs tournament with no internet they are amazing.

Headphones on a plane- I use these – the jist of it is in ear headphones don’t use active noise cancelling and are thus better for your ears/produce way better sound quality than over the ear cans.

Source

UPDATE- if you have to email me to ask what google wave is you should first familiarize your self with google…

Ok so this is basically an evidence quality contest. The idea being it is some what like the ol ev challenge at evtub but since I have done my best to repress all memories of evtub we won’t call it that. So i’m gonna give you three categories of a “card”. To win you must cut the best card you can find that supports the argument for it, and it has to be a card  we haven’t heard before. So if a category was “realism inevitable” and you submitted murray you wouldn’t get credit even though Roy would think it was the best card of all time.

You should both paste the card in the comments so that people will know when someone has beaten them to a card, and email the card in a word document (since the comments don’t allow formatting) to scott@the3nr.com. Some things that will make your card stand out would be

-recenecy

-author qualifications

-warrants

-not being from google news

I tried to come up with some broad categories that would be useful to everyone (based on debates I have seen and discussions that have come up recently)

Judging- I may consult Roy/Batterman if there are some close calls but generally it will be in-genuine so as not to collapse my leadership.

1. Word Pics- this can either be a card that they (or the style of argument they represent) are good or bad, either way. But the card should make some kind of argument either for or against them. Obviously as previously mentioned it can’t be something we’ve heard of so a Butler or frameworks institute card won’t count.I’ll also lump in here reps K good/bad since the judge choice discussion has gotten some heat and the 2 styles of cards are related.

2. Predictions Good/Bad- as per Batterman on the podcast, try to find some better cards then monkeys throwing darts. Cards that obviously we have heard of include Kurasawa, Fitzsimmons, Bleiker etc. This category will probably be harder than the above since the threshold for what is a good card will already be higher.

3.  Epistemology- this can be either an aff card that you would read when the neg reads a k of epistemology (in the sort of vein of the 2AC K post from a bit ago) or a neg card about the importance of epistemology- but again, has to be an unknown.

Expando system

http://www.youtube.com/user/Scottyp431#p/a/u/2/VhmkS9JvEzg

Flowing

Speech Prep

Discuss… but only in this spot

Hey everyone, if you liked using this and have any questions/suggestions/troubles, you can email me at alexgulakov@gmail.com or AIM me at cloudheat16.

@Whit
Here’s what I use that’s directly related to online research.

fasterfox – makes webpages “endless”, so you don’t have to click “Page 2″ in some news articles or search results, you just keep scrolling; also lets you search google right from the url bar: the dropdown combines your visited sites history with the top results from google right as you type, so you never even have to visit google. make sure you disable “Auto Copy Selected” (for compatibility with Debate Copy) and maybe disable that annoying text popup bubble

evernote – lets you clip and save notes of anything. you should install both the software program and the addon. in the program options, you can assign a hotkey like F6 and that will clip either the selected text or the website to your notebook. I use it to organize literally everything I find; you can search, organize, or go back to original source later.

feedly – it makes RSS simple. subscribe to your favorite websites and it gives you a daily digest. I think it’s organized better than Google Reader

pdf download – you can set it to either ask you to download & open the PDF or load it as text in your browser.

LibX – puts links in Google Scholar results to my university library; you can also reload a page of a commercial database you find through google- like sagepub or jstor- through your university proxy. you should download it from your university website. use the addon “Menu Editor” to remove the annoying context menu entries it adds

readitlater – saves webpages for offline viewing. you can set it to automatically backup everything you add to it. I don’t use it anymore, but when I went places without reliable internet access I used it to backup the online caselist and maybe a few articles.

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If you are an IE or Chrome user and would like to use the Save Google Books feature, right click on any bookmark, select “Properties” or “Edit”, and change the URL to the code below. Press it while on a Google Books page to open a popup with the page image at the highest resolution possible.

It will let you do a lot of useful things, but the 2 best in my opinion are

-organize google news results in a way that automatically formats a debate cite for you

-copy out of google print without having to use an extra program- and this appears to produce a much higher quality image than screen capture software.