That might be due to an (alleged) problem with the routers they supply, see http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/2011/02/22/virgin-media-uk-admits-to-broadband-speed-problems-with-new-superhub-routers.html, and there's an El Reg story about it too- http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/20/virgin_media_apology_over_media_superhub_snafu/

Of all my techy/non-techy friends, not one of them has had anything good to say about TalkTalk. Anecdotal evidence, and you don't know me, but take it for what it's worth.

Not that I necessarily disagree with anything you say, but the following bit caught my eye:

Nutritional supplements are a multi-billion dollar a year market, and that they paint themselves as the antithesis of "big pharma" is somewhat ironic.

Blueprints here

On a serious note, your best bet may be to record a set of a number of phrases (open-ended questions!), use some standard audio library to detect silence, and select a response. If you wanted to get fancy, put an evolutionary algorithm in- select the set of "random" responses that causes the person to stay on the line the longest!

The main point is that you could turn this annoyance into some real fun, as many have.

After the end of term actully, but I appreciate your concern :-) You do make a good point for anyone else reading now or in the future which I'd like to echo - don't leave organising things to the last minute, get organised as early as possible because it takes a long time to do properly, and gets increasingly time consuming and difficult the longer you leave it. Fortunately, I have about 4 months to get it done!

That's useful to know, thanks, I'll look into Zotero further (if for no other reason that I'll probably end up using it as a reference manger!).

Your investigations are quite correct, I'm studying up in Glasgow. I don't know how your university organises their course but we're strongly into PBL here, and all the implications that has. We don't fully get to the clinical stage until 4th and 5th year, so I'll need my notes for a while yet! We also don't cover things by system, so malaria may turn up as an example of a fever in the returned traveller, an example of a disease with often poorly-adhered to prophylactic treatment, and so forth; each visit to the subject adding more information. It's perhaps not the best example, but as you say there are other contexts where it would come up, and it wouldn't do to miss out on them. There are a lot of interlinked subjects, but perhaps that's calling out for a hypertext ( / wiki) solution rather than a multiple categorisation system.

Yes, everything important should end up in my head, but it has to get there first ;-) I've actually also done an undergrad degree as well, so I'd like to incorporate the useful bits from that too. Basically, I'd prefer to be overprepared than underprepared!

I appreciate you sharing your experiences, it's very useful to hear from another medic. Which London university are you at, if you don't mind my asking?

Unfortunately OneNote seems to be Windows-only, and I'm spending ever-decreasing amounts of time using Windows. It's undoubtedly a good suggestion for everyone who does though :)

You're right, I didn't include Zotero in that comment! Having looked at it before, my impression of Zotero was that it is a (very competent) reference manager / source collection. Is it more than this? TiddlyWiki sounds familiar too - this is a subject I've dallied with before, so perhaps I came across it previously :-). I'll have another look at Zotero and TiddlyWiki and see if I can get it to do the categorisation thing I'm looking for that I mentioned in my other comment. Cheers!

Thanks, it's good to be aware of the payoff of pre-organising things (a la putting in frameworks in programs that will never need it) before embarking on something like this. You also reminded me of something I wanted to put in my follow up: The reason I wanted multiple categorisations or tags is that some things do fall under more than one category. I'm a medical student, so I'll give you an example: Malaria. Does that come under:

1. Parasitic diseases
2. Blood-borne diseases
3. Diseases involving the liver
4. Tropical medicine
5. Block 3, where we first covered it?

I'm not sure what your research area is, but you must have come across something similar. I've (very briefly) worked in the area of antioxidants, and even there it would have been useful to pull out say everything on copper chelators in rat models, clinical trials of antioxidants and so forth. Basically, I'm concerned that while a filesystem-based approach is good for retrieving one or a few results for a specific query (ie where was that paper by Doe et al from 2007 on the effects of foo in vivo), it is less good at including things that fall under multiple categories (eg malaria, heart disease). Symlinks go somewhat of a ways towards alleviating this but they are a significant increase in efforts versus tagging and I'm concerned about cross-platform symlink handling.

Of course, you may ne right in tht I may be putting *too* much thought into this, but then again I'm a medical student and we worry about not knowing things fully ;-)

(OT but ordered/unordered lists aren't showing up for me in preview. Weird.)

Many thanks for all the informative replies so far. I've had a quick glance at Evernote, thebrain, Nepomuk (I'm loving KDE4 so far after switching a week or so ago), OpenKM and FreeMind and these seem promising. I've still to look at emacs' org-mode, and when I do I will try to put my vi prejudices aside ;-) Some of the other suggestions are rather good but aren't really what I'm looking for as they are either fully cloud-based (eg Google Docs, Wave) or one platform only (eg Sharepoint) or too expensive (hire a secretary :-P).

I like the idea of some of the "roll your own" ideas, eg directories + hard links, serving from a web server or wiki. The problem is as I progress though the medical degree, I am likely to have decreasing amounts of time to tinker with things if they have shortcomings; and to be honest they probably will as I am unlikely to have thought through the problem fully! Plus third-party solutions will definitely have substantially more polish than anything hastily dreamt up by me!

A shared wiki for my cohort / medical school / country may be an option on top of whatever comes out of this discussion, but I'd like something personal as... ah, let's say medical students have wildly varying standards of what is acceptable for notes ;-)

My supplementary questions for anyone still wanting to chip in:

• Do Evernote and thebrain/personalbrain have an "offline" mode? That is, can I keep things nicely organised locally instead of having to upload to the cloud? Evernote seems to suggest this is the case but at a very cursory perusal both seem to stop short of actually saying "you can use this to organise the files on your hard drive".
• Do any other docs / medical students want to chip in and say what they use? I suspect each solution will have practical considerations that may affect my decision or not. Sharing practical experience is very useful, even if it's just "I use Evernote and find it useful" as some have said above.
• Similarly, does anyone have experience of Nepomuk? Any drawbacks?

Thanks again for the helpful replies, Slashdot. You continue to impress me - I doubt I would have gotten such a useful variety of responses elsewhere. I hope this discussion is useful to other folk looking for something similar.