Monday January 15, 2007 5:00 am Lethbridge Sunrise 8:23 Sunset 16:58 Hours of daylight: 8:35

A. Morning Musings

5:00 am It is -9 C at the moment with a high of -4 C forecast. Almost balmy.

Today looks to be full. I have some well-defined Learning activities: purchasing some blank DVDs, burning backup images to DVD, editing images in iPhoto, making final notes for the two Virginia Woolf books that I have been reading this month. I have coffee this morning at The Ugly Mug (and I hope to take a couple of pictures of this). I am not sure if I will get around to working on my model trains.

The early morning coffee tastes great.

I am going to try adding a couple of news items to the beginning of the day. This should accomplish two things and have one obvious drawback. The pluses are to give a brief sense of the daily context and to add a small personal touch to the journal. The minus is that it takes time, but hopefully not too much.

CBC Headline: Saddam's co-defendants hanged: prosecutor.

Iraq and the Middle East continue to dominate world news. Depressing.

Canadian Headline: Canada's drug strategy a failure, study suggests

The report is critical of the percentage of money (73%) that is spent on law enforcement compared with treatment, prevention and research. The article notes a program that has police officers making presentations in schools (75,000 students in 1,600 schools) is expensive but there is no "objective evidence" that it works. I have always maintained that if one is to be critical of a policy or action, then would should also propose at least one alternative. Unfortunately for me, President Bush is using the same argument to attack opponents of his new Irag policy. We seem to agree on procedure, but are still poles apart on policy. Back to Canada. The trick is to imagine what such objective evidence would look like. To attempt to correlate it with some form of drug use statistics seems unlikely to succeed. Perhaps a questionnaire given as part of a sociological survey a few months after the presentation as well as to a matched control group who did not receive the presentation would be a start.

Australian Headline (from The Australian): China committed to trade pact: Howard

The leaders of the two countries (John Howard and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao) have been discussing possible future trade relations. One of the side-issues is that of coal emissions. This seems like a much more constructive approach than one that Canada's Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, made when he recently raised human rights while discussing trade with China.

Now for The Ugly Mug.

 

From rear window	South patio
Both images taken at 11:40 am

B. Plan

Immediate
Health	Walk & exercise	1 hr
Technology	Begin reading "iPhoto"	1 hr
	Burn backup of images onto DVD	2 hr
	Digital photography - learn about using the various manual settings	1 hr
	Remove a file folder that contained many "user" files	3 hr
Model Trains	Follow tutorial for 3rdPlanIt (Manual p. 3 - 24)	1 hr
Literature	Make notes for "Between the Acts & "Virginia Woolf: The Inner Life"	1 hr
Later
Chores	Investigate water softeners for home
Technology	Read manual for cell phone
	Make notes for chap. 4 of "Switching to the Mac"
Mathematics	Read "Fearless Symmetry" chap 9: Elliptic Curves
Model Trains	Add ground cover to oil refinery diorama
	Continue assembly of coaling tower
	Purchase DCC system
History	Read Watson "Ideas"
Philosophy	Read & make notes for "Breaking the Spell"
GO	Complete reading "Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go"
Puzzles	The Orange Puzzle Cube: puzzle #10

C. Actual/Note

	Technology 08 January 15
Technology Notes
6:00 am I expect to be working on this throughout the day. The goal is to backup my iPhoto images onto both a hard drive and a DVD. I also want to spend some serious time editing my files from 2004 and 2005. My approach to backup is horrific! I rarely do it. Backing up an iPhoto library to a hard drive is easy. One simply drags the iPhoto Library folder from the MacBook to the hard drive. This took about 10 minutes to move about 8 GB of images. Backing up on DVD. First I have to buy some blank DVD disks. I will do this later today. I still need to do more reading about setting up multiple iPhoto Libraries and having each library on a separate DVD disk. One weakness with the entire DVD approach is that, at least at the moment, I cannot read a DVD with my PC. Although I now have my iPhoto files all backed up onto an external hard drive, I still should back up my other personal files. Oh Oh. I think there is more going on with my Mac than I realized (or understand). I just noticed a second iPhoto file that actually contains all of my photos. The problem is that I have a second user folder that I think is not really a user (i.e. I created it a few months ago, but suspect that I did something wrong at the time). Sometimes my files seem to go to this folder and sometimes they go to a folder called user (which is my admin account). Now to read up on this (in a book I have called "Switching to the Mac"). 1:20 PM I have been working on removing a folder that I that was a User folder but which was "just" a folder. It contained many files that properly belonged in a User folder but I was able to transfer them to the only real User folder. I was nervous about a couple of folders that I wanted to simply delete, but after backing them up, I deleted them with no effect. Great. I now have a clean hard drive with only one user, called User. The next task, which will take a few hours, will be to review my iPhoto images and do some serious deleting of unwanted images. SUMMARY of the session: I am delighted with my efforts to clean up an unwanted, and very confusing file folder. This took about 3 hours.

D. Reflection