Sunday July 02, 2006 6:15 am Lethbridge Alberta

A. Morning Musings

6:15 am There are a few high clouds this morning. The temperature is +10 C with a forecast high of +28 C and a 70% chance of showers in the afternoon.

I continue to struggle with the best approach to time management. Overall, I like the table of activities that I have under section B but I have been putting too many items in the Immediate section of the table. This should only contain items that I definitely plan on engaging in during the present day. This means that only two Learning items should be in the top section.

That has made a big difference to my plans for the day. I have a fresh cup in hand and now have a clear focus for the day. Another feature of today's plan is that the Chores list is very short. This is the first time since arriving home from Australia in mid-May that I have felt on holidays.

 

B. Plan

Immediate
Chores	Buy sealant for join between garage floor and wall	1 hr
	Repair cement step at rear of garage	1 hr
Health	Walk & exercise	1 hr
Technology	Familiarize myself with the MacBook (iPhoto)	2 hr
Literature	Begin reading "The Time In Between" by David Bergen	1 hr
Later
Chores	Take cement blocks to landfill	2 hr
	Take stuff to Salvation Army	1 hr
	Take 5th wheel in for maintenance	2 hr
	Investigate water softeners for home	2 hr
Technology	Read manual for cell phone	1 hr
	Transfer music to iPod
	Purchase Maxtor hard drive for Mac	1 hr
	Experiment with partitioning Maxtor for both Mac & PC use
	Install Skype on MacBook
	digital photography
	try using extender lens and monopod	2 hr
Mathematics	Larson "Calculus"
	Read "The Computational Beauty of Nature" Chap 2	1 hr
	Gardner "The Colossal Book of Short Puzzles"
History	Continue reading "Citizens"
	Watson "Ideas"
Model Trains	Visit Lethbridge Model Train club at 7 PM on Tues	2 hr
	Add blue backdrop to layout	2 hr
	Review layout for under the table turnouts
	Wire lower mainline track for a power block
	Fasten lower mainline track to layout
	Draw schematic diagram of track layout	2 hr

C. Actual/Notes

Previous	Technology Session 2	Next
Technology Chronology
7:00 am I am going to try documenting my technology sessions. I need to enlarge the font for this table. After that I want to download a few photos that I took yesterday and then play with a few options in iPhoto. Enlarging the font turned out to be simple. Just select the table and change the font size. Now to download a few images from the camera. I plugged in the camera to the MacBook USB port and iPhoto automatically started up. I clicked on the option "delete item from camera after importing" and selected the import option. The software automatically noticed that there were duplicate images on the camera that had not been deleted from an earlier download and gave me the option of not downloading them again. Impressive. The images were automatically added to the 2006 Library. I then noticed the Play icon in the bottom right corner which gave me a slideshow of all the images that I selected (i.e. those I had just downloaded). This was another slick feature. I was able to review 4 images of a sparrow in our back yard that we watched yesterday and identify it as a Vesper Sparrow. The Delete feature puts the image in the trash can. This can be retrieved as long as the trash can has not been emptied. I am not yet familiar with adding keywords to the images. I finally used the Help menu to clarify this. The Get Info command (command-i) is one way to do this. Another way, which I had discovered by myself, is to drag the image to the keyword. To change the available keywords, use the iPhoto Preferences menu. The Preferences menu also allows one to change the search criteria for the keywords from "All" to "Any". Another nice feature of iPhoto is that when one rolls the cursor over the various libraries it indicates the number of images in that library (e.g. last 4 months has 448 images).   I clearly have a lot of work to do to place keywords on all of the images. I also need to delete many of them. But I am now getting comfortable with the software and its features. I have imported about 1600 images. Interestingly, the software did not import 80 images that I had taken in RAW format. Fortunately this is not important as the camera also saved a JPG file of the same image. I have now imported all the images that I have since I purchased the Panasonic DMC-FZ30. The total is 1981 images. I am having difficulty cropping an image and then saving the result in the library. The first step is to duplicate the image, but when I do that I am not sure where it went. I do not see it in the library.   9:00 am

 

D. Reflection