Technology Chronology

7:15 am This is a simple test of this format for embedded notes within a journal page.

The idea of including photos within these pages is fine, but it boosts the memory requirements for the pages from a very small number. With images, the memory needed for these Journal pages (not including the various actual notebook pages) is 4.22, 8.03, 7.44 and 5.52 MB for the first 4 months for a total of 25.21 MB. Without images, the values are 0.68, 0.30, 0.29 and 0.29 for a total of 1.56 MB.

Yet the images are important. They provide a sense of the context for the day. The scans of the book covers give a better sense of the books I am reading and the images of the birds are the actual content for that topic. Images of beaches and mountains, as well as the occasional social picture give a much better sense of the day than a simple statement.

Now to stay with this format for a few days and see how it feels.

While I am on a Technology activity, I will have a quick look at a few XML examples from the Stylus Studio documentation to see how they handle paragraphs of text. As near as I can tell, not very well. It is possible to modify a file in WYSIWYG format but you are really modifying the stylesheet rather than the actual data file. To actually modify the data file one must either type in a horrifically long character string, or do the typing elsewhere and then copy & paste into the XML data file.

8:25 am

Literature Chronology

3:40 PM I have begun reading "The Mrs. Dalloway Reader".

The first chapter is an introduction to the book by Francine Prose.

Here are a few quotes that caught my eye:

• "... she was one of the century's most dazzling productive and consistently first-rate authors. She completed dozens of novels and stories, hundreds of book reviews and long essays and volumes of letters, plus biographies, a comedy, and the diaries that so seamlessly combine ruthless self-examination, social observation, provocative literary opinion, and delightful turns of phrase ..." [p. 1 - 2]
  
  
• [quoting Virginia Woolf about writing this novel] "There is no principle, except to follow the whimsical brain implicitly, pare away the ill fitting, till I have the shape exact. ... Only I must note this odd symptom; a conviction that I shall go on, see it through, because it interests me to write it." [p. 4]

• "And so Septimus and his hapless Italian wife are made to endure versions of the Woolf's appalling and damaging consultations with pompous, uncomprehending medical specialists about Virginia's health ..." [p. 5]

• "... what else is she referring to but the way in which word choice, cadence, tone, and diction transform the essayist and the objectively removed into the psychological and the interior?" [p. 6]

• "What we instinctively respond to here is the way in which Woolf is exchanging the measured, reflective, faintly magisterial tone of the essayist for the psychological novelist's ability to portray the swift, sensory, associative workings of perception and of consciousness." [p. 7]
  
  
• "Ask any writer of serious fiction why they write, what continues to engage them. And nearly all of them will tell you that what interests them - the reason why one becomes that sort of a writer in the first place - is consciousness, human awareness, the mind and soul of one's characters." [p. 8]

4:10 am