Journals 2008
Year to Date
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
Time Tables 2008
Year to Date
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
Journals 2008
Year to Date
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
Time Tables 2008
Year to Date
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
It is -6 C with a high forecast of +6 C. Sunrise 8:28 Sunset 16:43 Hours of daylight: 8:15
I have, and not for the first time, hit a major difficulty organizing my books. It began simply enough as an attempt to create a Literature web site. But then I decided to see if I could expand this to include all of my books. I began by considering the books I have that could easily be categorized as History books. I identified 5 books that I have read and 36 that I have not yet read. And I am sure that I have more History books to consider.
One obvious thought is to do a cull. There are already more books here than I can possibly read. On the other hand, all of the titles are still of interest to me. It is nice to have them available in the event that I decide to read one of them when the mood seizes me. But this leads to the much larger problem of all my books. I have a similar, and in some cases a much larger number of books in areas such as Mathematics, Science, Philosophy and even Trains.
Meanwhile I have lost sight of the original objective of organizing my Literature books. Taking the basic idea that I have used for the History books, I could create two lists, one of the books I have read and the second of the books I hope to read. I could also create a series of sub-categories using Country of author's nationality. Coming full circle, I could also create a series of sub-categories for my History books.
| Learning Category | Planned Activities for Today | Time |
|---|---|---|
| Drawing | Complete Jan 2 calendar watercolor activity | 1 hr |
| Model Trains | Clean mainline track; inspect for trouble spots,; program 6700 | 1 hr |
| Literature | Continue reading "The Tender Bar" by Moehringer | 1 hr |
| Technology | Continue "Wikinomics" by Tapscott | 1 hr |
| Technology | Design structure for Literature web site | 1 hr |
| Technology | Examine some mass collaborative web sites | 1 hr |
Looking at my History books, I can easily form a few sub-categories based on geography:
My first reaction is one of delight. I have finally created a structure that captures my particular interest in History. There is nothing profound in the above, but it does provide me with a framework where I can explicitly recognize where I am in the structure when I am reading a particular book. One obvious gap is the lack of a book on Russian history.
While waiting for the dentist I read a few more pages from "Wikinomics". I now realize that I need to bring myself up to speed with a number of new web sites. I have had a quick look at Boing Boing and Craphound (both blogs about technology) and del.icio.us (social bookmarks). I am not sure about this latter site yet, but I just saw a link to a web page on mathematics textbooks, notes and tutorials - http://users.ictp.it/~stefanov/mylist.html - all available for free download! This led to another web page where there are three books available for download. One of these books is on Number Theory by Leo Moser. I once had him for a instructor for 6 weeks when our instructor was ill. He was fantastic!
Delicious has a link to its most popular pages, one of which was Web 2.0. I clicked on that and saw this link:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/01/2008-web-20-companies-i-couldnt-live-without/
From this site I learned about Firefox 3.0 (beta) which I immediately downloaded and installed. This has been an exhilarating hour!
We have just finished watching the DVD "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix". The special effects were there but I found the story line to be fairly linear. I did not enjoy this as much as the earlier Harry Potter movies.
Earlier in the day we did our hour walk, then went to Smitty's for lunch. We then visited a hardware store and bought a fluorescent light fixture that I plan to attach above our kitchen sink tomorrow. I did find time to continue reading "The Tender Bar" which I am enjoying but failed to carry out my exercises. I really must not let this slide. I am also having difficulty keeping up the schedule of the watercolor calendar. I did make substantial progress at reviewing my history books and identifying a number to donate to the local library.