Saturday March 1, 2008 7:10 am Lethbridge, Alberta

It is +5 C with a high forecast of +7 C. Sunrise 7:13 Sunset 18:13 Hours of daylight: 11:00

8:40 am

A. Morning Musings

The first day of a new month is always a good time to re-evaluate one's activities. I slept in this morning but am now up and energized. The coffee is almost ready and I am ready to do the extra work to get this Web site set up for March. The first thing I noticed this morning was that I still had the year on the first line of each page as 2007! This has been true for every page in both January and February. It will be easier to manually correct this and republish the pages than to do a simple search-and-replace as the year does not have any stable information on either side of it to definitely identify that use of the year. If I replace every occurrence of 2007 with 2008 I may inadvertently change a value that should be left alone.

A quick glance at the Year-to-Date values for the Time Tables (see link on left margin) shows that I am slightly more "productive" this year than at the same time for either of the two previous years. Technology, Literature and Model Trains are the three staples of my activities. The surprise is Technology - that has remained high even though I have been retired for over two years.

Since this is the first page for March I am going to attempt to "recode" it using Dreamweaver into a page that is much more consistent in terms of separating the formatting commands from the content. This will involve a totally new web page as well as a totally new CSS page.

Learning Category	Planned Activities for Today	Time
Literature	Begin morning with a Rumi reading
Literature	Complete reading "The Other Side of the Bridge" by Mary Lawson	2 hr
Technology	Update March web pages; redesign journal web page to CSS formatting	3 hr
History	Make notes for "A Short History of Progress" by Ronald Wright	1 hr
Model Trains	Install 1 Caboose Industries Ground Throw	1 hr

B. Actual Learning Activities

8:50 am

Here is a photo of the pussy willows coming into bud in the tree next door. Spring is almost here.

willows

11:50 am

Success! This page has been completely redesigned using "Insert Div Tags" to create all of the regions and using CSS for all of the style commands.

3:50 PM

I have just finished reading "The Other Side of the Bridge". It was a great story. An added bonus was a comment by the author at the back of the book about a Web site called "Paper of Record" ( http://www.paperofrecord.com/ ).

I now have two books that I have finished reading this week, both still need to a comment. Here is the first:

A Short History of Progress (2004)

Ronald Wright

Although this is a short book, only 5 chapters and 130 pages (not counting the 70 pages of Notes at the back), it is the single best book I have ever read that tries to summarize the entire history of mankind from the beginning of the early stone age to the present, and then on to the future. The book is one of a series based on the CBC Massey Lectures where various emminent people are invited to give a package of lectures on a topic of interest to them.

I totally agree with the quote on the back cover, "I don't care if you have never read and will never read any kind of book at all, but you mut read this one."

The book immediately brings to mind two others:

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. (2005) by Jared Diamond
An Inconvenient Truth (2006) by Al Gore.

All three books have the same theme: what is does the future hold for mankind? But Wright does it much more quickly and yet more thoroughly than either Diamond or Gore.

The first four chapters summarize our history, the fifth extrapolates to the future. The first four chapters simply flow.

Here are a few selected quotes from the last chapter:

"... all civilizations become hierarchical; the upward concentration of wealth ensures that there can never be enough to go around. ... thinkers from Christ to Marx have touched [on this]. As the Chinese saying has it, 'A peasant must stand a long time on the hillside with his mouth open before a roast duck flies in.' " [p. 108]
"But the parochialism of the present - the way our eyes follow the ball and not the game - is dangerous." [p. 109]
"It doesn't take Nostradamus to foresee that walls will go up in times of crisis - though the thickest walls are in the mind." [p. 123]
"Joseph Tainter notes this interdependence, warning that 'collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global ... World civilization will disintegrate as a whole.' " [p. 125]
"First, terrorism is a small threat compared with hunger, disease, or climate change. ... Second, terrorism cannot be stopped by addressing symptoms and not the cause. Violence is bred by injustice, poverty, inequality, and other violence." [p. 126]
"The idea that the world must be run by the stock market is as mad as any other fundamentalist delusion, Islamic, Christian, or Marxist." [p. 129]

Tags: history, future

And here is the second review:

The Other Side of the Bridge (2006)

Mary Lawson

This is a first rate story. But when I finished reading it, I realized that it is much more than that. Lawsons portrayal of the main characters, and even some of the minor characters (particularly the native boy, Pete) all contribute to a rich blend of contrasts.

The action builds to fever pitch with the ending catching me by surprise. Yet the ending is fully in keeping with the entire telling of the story. Lawson is a first rate story teller. At the same time one has an intimate peek at what it would be like growing up in a small remote town in northern Ontario in the 1930's and 1940's.

As with all good novels, I am reluctant to say much in fear that I may give away part of the story.

But this is a book that I highly recommend.

Tags: novel Canada

5:30 PM

A great day. I accomplished everything that I had on my list. Now to sit back, have a hot bowl of chili and a couple of glasses of good Australian red wine.

Books on the Go

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