Tuesday January 31, 2006 7:50 am Ballina NSW

A. Morning Musings

7:50 am We began the day with a beach walk. Now to wake up. The coffee is in the plunger and will be ready to drink in a minute or two. Let me try to get my head around my Mathematics Learning. The approach to calculus is pretty well set: I will follow the Larson text and supplement it with some Mathematica activities. But Number Theory is yet to be established. I have a few books on topics such as the Riemann hypothesis and infinity and chaos that are not too technical but which try to get at the underlying ideas. I would like to give them a go and see what happens.

B. Plan

Exercise: Exercise & Beach walk.

Mathematics: Begin Notes for "Coincidences, Chaos, and All That Math Jazz".

Technology: Continue with Stylus Studio documentation.

Literature: Reading "And On the Seventh Day."

Food, Art, History and Drawing will not be active. 8:00 am

C. Actual

8:00 am I have my coffee and am ready to begin some mathematics. I have made my notes for the first chapter of "Coincidences, Chaos, and All That Math Jazz". It was actually exhilerating to get back to this and to feel that I am moving forward. 9:30 am

1:00 PM I continue to be surprised with some of the problems I encounter while creating this web site. Most of the time I am operating within a Dreamweaver environment where I am updating the content. Thus it was only a couple of hours ago that I realized that I had two web pages that I used for planning and time management that were not posted on the web server. I have added links to the top of this page for these two pages ( ToDos Lists and Projects ). 1:10 PM

4:00 PM I am well into the second novel, "Veronika Decides to Die", of Coelho's trilogy "And On the Seventh Day". Here are two quotes that caught my eye:

• "She hated everything. ... the school that had forced her to spend whole evenings learning algebra, even though she didn't know a single person, apart from teachers and mathematicians, who needed algebra in order to be happy." [p. 209]
  
  
• "The chronically embittered person only noticed his illness once a week, on Sunday afternoons. Then, with no work or routine to relieve the symptoms, he would feel that something was very wrong...." [p. 226]

D. Reflection

8:50 PM I have completed one month of daily journal entries that have established a framework for a Year of Learning (YoL). At this point I am very pleased with the result. Now that the major design decisions have been made I can focus on the content. Generally I am pleased with the idea of trying to include some form of image on most of the pages. I am also pleased with providing a slightly more complete description of the day's Learning activities. The idea of a media-supplemented narrative adds an important context for viewing the notebook pages.

The various time management tables give one an opportunity to view the overall emphasis of each month's activities. For example, this month the major activities were Technology (largely devoted to setting up these web sites) and Literature (largely a slow reading of the first volume of The Story of the Stone").

In the coming month I will aim for the major activities to be Technology (Stylus Studio software), Mathematics (calculus and number theory) and Literature. I will aim for an equal balance among these three areas. 9:10 PM