Tuesday May 16, 2006 5:40 am Lethbridge Alberta

A. Morning Musings

6:00 am The temperature is +10, and the forecast is for a high of +31. This is a bit of a worry. It is only May.

Now for a muse. I have checked with my ISP and they provide 10GB for web pages as part of the basic monthly package. My entire learning web site for 2006 is already about 60GB and likely to be more than double that before the end of the year as I continue to add photos and scanned images. The first thought was to chuck the entire effort as being impractical. The second thought, a second later, was to only post the current month but keep everything going and focus on the version on the hard drive as being the important one.

The third thought, another second later, was to shut down all activities involving web authoring. This is close to the first thought. It would certainly free up some time. I would no longer be on the web in the early morning (this could focus on reading) and I would no longer have to think about XML and stylesheets. On the other hand, I view this entire activity as primarily one of time management. If I stopped doing this entirely then I am afraid that I would soon slip into a morass of unstructured time where I just live the moment. Enjoy the moment, yes. But live it? There is also the mental challenge of staying abreast of current developments with the Web. I am genuinely excited about how XML requires a totally different mind set about conceptualizing the structure of the data, be it a record of bird watching or keeping some form of Learning file.

Moving on to Life for a moment. We have stained the wine barrels and plan to fill them with dirt this morning so they will be ready for planting the flowers. I still need to reset up the small bamboo fountain. Both of our external taps leak. This may be fairly easy to fix. I think I only need to unscrew the tap handle and replace a washer. But I may be wrong and it may require a plumber. Also the front sidewalk continues to settle and it looks like it should be replaced with paving stones. This may also require putting in some additional foundational support for a corner of the garage. And we are thinking of adding a basic roof and open shelter over half of our backyard patio so we can enjoy sitting there when the sun is hot, or what is more likely, when it is raining. The city is moving to a bin system for garbage collection. This means we should remove some cement blocks that form our current garbage area and remortar them to make the back fence a smooth surface again. My job jar is overflowing. On the other hand I will not be bored. I must admit, I am looking forward to all of this.

Returning to Learning. While in the university the other day I purchased another book, "God Created the Integers" edited by Stephen Hawking. It looks like a real gem. It makes a perfect supplement to his earlier book, "On the Shoulders of Giants" which does a similar job with physics. Both books consist of excerpts from the seminal writings through history that have led us to where we are at the moment.

Another thought, this one a bit scary for me. I am reflecting on how to organize all of this material relating to Learning. I have opted for an approach where I keep a daily journal page and then a series of notebook pages, one for each topic such as mathematics or literature. But a few years ago I created a web site called yol (year of learning) where I only had a daily journal page which incorporated both comments as well as notes for whatever I was Learning at the moment. I then kept a set of colored links that allowed me to easily branch within a particular topic. I am beginning to think that that approach may be the better one. It is certainly much simpler from a structural perspective.

I am going to play with this for a bit on this page. I will change section C from "Actual" to "Notes".

B. Plan

Chores: yard work

Technology: Continue to edit Panasonic images.

Literature: continue reading "Napoleon: The Immortal of St. Helena" (vol. 4)

C. Notes

Here are two images from the day:

Staining the barrels		American Robin

D. Reflection

8:10 PM I like the idea of imbedding the notes within the Journal web page. But I still want to keep all of the index pages for each topic. I think there is value in these different summary tables. I will stay with this for a few pages before making a final decision about changing my format. 8:15 PM