 |
|
||||||||||||||
| Links to Notebook Pages: | Birds |
Technology |
Wednesday September 13, 2006 5:25 am Lethbridge Sunrise 7:04 Sunset 19:50 Hours of daylight: 12:46
A. Morning Musings
5:20 am It is + 11 C and clear. The wind is at 35 km/h, gusting to 46. The forecast high is 18 C. That is 7 degrees cooler than yesterday and the forecast is for another drop of 9 degrees for tomorrow as the high should only be + 9 C. We are in for a bit of cool wet weather.
I am feeling fresh and alert this morning. The coffee is in the plunger and I will have a look at puzzle #6. This is going to take some time. It involves placing the numbers 1 - 25 in a 5x5 grid with many constraints. After a careful look at all the constraints I do not yet see a pattern that allows me to place even one number on the grid. Once I can get a few, then the rest should fall into place, but I am still looking for the break through. Now for the coffee.
B. Plan
Immediate Health Walk & exercise 1 hr Puzzles The Orange Puzzle Cube: puzzle #6 History Continue reading "Citizens" 1 hr Mathematics Read "The Computational Beauty of Nature" Chap 3 1 hr Literature Continue reading "All the Men Are Sleeping" 1 hr Read "In Praise of Folly" by Erasmus 1 hr Read "The Art of Living" by Epictetus 1 hr Read "The Song of Roland" 1 hr Science Make notes for "Science and the Akashic Field" by Ervin Laszlo 1 hr Later Chores Investigate water softeners for home 1 hr Technology Read manual for cell phone 1 hr add keywords to iPhoto records 4 hr Make notes for chap. 4 of "Switching to the Mac" 2 hr Begin reading "iPhoto" 1 hr digital photography - learn about using the various manual settings Use Dreamweaver to create an XML data file for north american birds Mathematics Larson "Calculus" Gardner "The Colossal Book of Short Puzzles" History Watson "Ideas" Model Trains Build oil refinery diorama: add ground cover Add blue backdrop to layout Assemble second oil platform kit Redraw diagram for Lower Mainline control panel Wire Lower Mainline turnouts Birds Create a North American web site for birds seen 2 hr
C. Actual/Notes
6:30 am There is no need to become obsessed with the puzzle, particularly during early morning "prime time". Today should be a good day for returning to some serious Learning. I have two activities on the go at the moment. One would be to create some notes for the book "Science and the Akashic Field", the other to try creating an XSLT file with Dreamweaver that displays information for a couple of North American birds in an XML file.
6:50 am I am playing catch-up with my North American bird watching. I located my original database of records from 2003-4 and have converted it to a FileMaker Pro 7.0 file. I notice that I have 81 "lifers" in this data base with a total of 132 records. I will want to add a few fields that permit the storage of images. The good news is that this version of Filemaker Pro allows me to export the files as an XML data file (this means that I do not have to use Dreamweaver to create this file). I am not sure what will happen when I try this with an image in one of the records. The other task will be to review my journal pages since May 15, 2006 (we didn't do any North American bird watching in 2005!) and create appropriate records for the Filemaker Pro database.
7:25 am Continuing progress. I have added a field for containing images and a new field that will permit me to see how many birds we have seen each year. This will be pretty sparse for the years until now, but they still count. Hopefully this data base will become more substantive in the years to come.
8:20 am Problems! At the moment I am not sure what to say. Working with the Filemaker Pro database has been fine. I have imported an image into the database and have begun reviewing my images since the beginning of May. This is the first time I have had a close look at the images that I have on the Mac. I seem to be missing many! I only have a few pictures of our trip to Currumbin near Brisbane! I have no idea why the rest are missing. I have backup copies on CD, so now the labor intensive task will be to add these and then edit the file of duplicates. Time for a break and an early morning walk.
1:00 PM Problem solved. Thank goodness I had CD back up of my photos. DELL has a special sale every Tuesday. Yesterday Phyllis checked it and ordered an external hard drive for half price. We were genuinely surprised to have it arrive this morning! I may use it as a supplementary backup for my iPhoto files.
3:30 PM I updated the existing records in my Filemaker Pro database file for 1994, 1995, 2003 and 2004. This is a record (albeit very intermittent) of North American birds that I made a note of identifying. At the moment these records show that we have identified 80 distinct birds. I was also able to go over the files and tally the number of unique birds for each year. Here are the totals;
14
We also saw some birds on a trip to Spokane in 2005, but I am not sure if I can find a record of the birds. The record to date is embarrassingly small but hopefully the record over the next few years will show the advantage of retirement to the lifer count.
I just received an email from Larry confirming that a photo I took on August 25 is indeed an Indigo Bunting. I have updated that web page.
I have not been able to find any record of the birds we saw on our trip to Spokane.
My next task will be to review my Journal pages since we returned from Australia in May 2006 and add the birds that I made note as having identified. Then I will try to add to my list for this year, adding birds such as the magpie and crow and house sparrrow if they are not already on my list for this year. Silly, yes. But I want to see if I can get the total for this year to exceed that of 2003!
D. Reflection