Friday January 20, 2006 6:05 am Ballina NSW

A. Morning Musings

6:05 am I wasn't aware of any heavy rain overnight but it is overcast this morning and the roads are wet. Now that I have my coffee I will try the dial up again. Nope.

While reviewing my new web page of Ideas/ToDos of items that I don't want getting lost, I realized that the table was already becoming difficult to view, largely because it was too long. I will try breaking it into three tables. One will contain items I hope to handle during the current month, one will consist of items that are clearly off in the future (e.g. when we return to Lethbridge) and one will be items that have been completed during the month. Make that 4 tables. The last will be items that I am abandoning with a brief explanation as to why. Reviewing these tables is fascinating, in large part because it is so overwhelming. I must adopt a maxim from mountain climbing: one step at a time. Now to identify one item on the January list that is doable today. The first item on the table is a good candidate. Sometime today I will scan the Mind Maps that I made last April and insert them onto my web pages. I feel better already. I now have a doable task in front of me.

All of this activity is a variation on the important theme of time management. I have now revised the table called "Ideas To Be Engaged In In January 2006" and added a column that indicates items that I am presently actively involved in. A look at the result shows that I have identified a total of 18 items for action in January and am presently working on 7 of them. That still leaves 11 items. However a review of those items indicates that I should still be able to complete most of them by the end of the month. 7:30 am

B. Plan

7:30 am Chores: None come to mind.

Exercise: Tummy stuff and a beach walk. (The latter depends on the weather.)

Technology: Scan Mind maps from last April. Upload Technology Notes web pages. Depending on how long this takes, I would like to continue some Learning with Stylus Studio.

Literature: Make Web notes for chapter 14, read chapters 15 & 16.

History: Make notes for chapter 1 of Ideas.

Food, Mathematics, Art and Drawing will not be active. 7:35 am

C. Actual

7:40 am The review of my new Ideas/To Dos page has taken over an hour this morning, but I think I have it working fairly well. It definitely will help ensure that I don't "lose" ideas. I like the addition of a table that keeps track of ideas that I now longer think are worth pursuing. 7:45 am

7:45 am The day is young. I may as well take care of the scanning of the Mind maps item. There are only 4 maps, all of which I made on April 21 of last year. The first one used color pencils but I found the image to be too faint so I switched to a package of felt pens for the next three. The first image is of my overall approach to Learning.

The second is a Mind map based on a book I was reading called Studying History, 2nd edition by Jeremy Black & Donald M. MacRaild. It is only because I have a set of Notebook files for History that I am able to recover this information.

The last two Mind maps are also based on the same book - each is on a separate chapter. This one is on various "traditional" approaches to history.

The last Mind map describes the numerous different approaches to history that exist today.

An additional comment is in order. It was relatively easy to scan these pages from a notebook and insert them in this web page (it took about 20 minutes). Now that I have them in electronic form I can quickly copy them and reinsert them in other locations (such as the History Notebook web site). However another approach would be to redo these images using the Mind Genius software. That resulting image would be highly amenable to editing and modification. For example, I could easily add a node for the Peter Watson book on the history of ideas. I have just added a copy of the images to the History web site.

Time management was an important factor in doing these four scans. It is only because I created the list of "Ideas/ToDos" that I realized that this hadn't been done, and that it would be a good idea to take care of it this morning. I have already updated the Ideas tables by moving this item from the "Ideas to be Engaged In In January 2006" to the table called "Ideas Completed in 2006". 8:40 am

8:40 am There is blue sky showing among the clouds. Perhaps the rains are over. It will be good to try a beach walk this morning. I continue to be surprised that even though it is raining, it is warm. Now to get off this screen for a bit! 8:45 am

11:10 am A phone call to Sue clarified matters with the Internet. I have been hitting a time quota for being online for the week. The system is set to still allow a couple of minutes to download email messages but then disconnects. It gets reset every Saturday evening so I have a couple of days before I can update my web site. Not a problem. I had heard stories about the Internet connections sometimes being unreliable during heavy rain storms so it took awhile before I suspected that it might be something else. It was the regularity of the disconnect that roused my suspicions.

We are back from a walk along Lighthouse beach and Shelly beach. What a surprise! What a mess! The water is brown from the outflow of the Richmond river. But even more striking was the foam created by the stormwater overflow. I will add a few images later today, but we are off again, this time to see what it looks like at Lennox Head. 11:20 am

1:30 PM The foamy surf goes as far north as Flat Rock beach but doesn't get to Lennox Head. We had a nice Turkish bread sandwich at a cafe in Lennox Head. I also ventured into the newsagency and ended up buying 4 magazines:

• Philosophy Now (British)
• Quadrant (Australian) "one of Australia's leading intellectual magazines"
• Dumbo feather, pass it on. (Australian)
• Microsoft Windows xp Summer Special 2006. [with CD] (Australian).

"Dumbo feather, pass it on" is the most intriguing. It appears to be a collection of 5 interesting biographies. I continue to be excited. It is only because of the uncommitted time that I have while on Study Leave (my pre-retirement phase) that I have the freedom and flexibility to play with ideas such as, "Let's try this magazine and see what develops....". Everyone should be so fortunate. 2:00 PM

2:00 PM Yesterday I read chapter 14 from "The Story of the Stone". I will now make the notes for this before continuing to read the next chapter or two. Also a good time to play my Beethoven symphony No. 9. I feel I am spending too much time on the screen and need to break away from this. 3:00 PM

7:40 PM We are back from our beach walk. The beaches are still a mess, but the foam seems to have gone down a little. Hopefully tomorrow will look better. Earlier I made my notes for chapter 14 of "The Story of the Stone" and read chapters 15 and 16.

D. Reflection

9:00 PM Using the categories for this morning:

Exercise: Tummy stuff and a beach walk. Done.

Technology: Scan Mind maps from last April. Upload Technology Notes web pages. Done.
Depending on how long this takes, I would like to continue some Learning with Stylus Studio. Nope.

Literature: Make Web notes for chapter 14, read chapters 15 & 16. Done.

History: Make notes for chapter 1 of Ideas. No.

Overall, not too bad. Generally I don't feel like engaging in a strong analytic activity late in the evening. However I am disappointed that I let my Learning of Stylus Studio to take a back seat to getting my web sites ready for placing on a web server. 9:10 PM