March 28, 7:30 am Musing - Ballina, NSW, Australia
I am beginning to slow down and adjust to simply enjoying the moment. Driving is now pretty well under control. The windshield wipers no longer go on when I try to signal, and the traffic flow is straight-forward. I still have to pay close attention in parking lots where I occasionally enter a route on the wrong side of the road.
We are getting the hang of shopping for only a very few items at a time as our fridge is very small.
The Queensland election was a bit of a surprise to almost everyone, not for the final result, but for the scale of the switch. Reminiscent of when we turfed out the PCs in Canada 20 years ago. Electronic elections are becoming problematic as hackers as well as poorly designed software are beginning to raise questions about the validity of the results. The NDP leadership contest in Canada is a case in point.
I am surprised at how little reading I am doing at the moment. At least part of the explanation may be due to the change in body rhythms but I feel that I need a good non-fiction book, or web-site.
March 13, 8:00 am Musings
I am in a bit of a transitional phase with respect to technology. I am clearly moving toward the tablets rather than computers and toward apps rather than programs. It also looks like CDs and DVDs will soon disappear in favour of memory sticks, and hard drives in favour of clouds.
I am still leery of having all my personal data (e.g. photos) stored elsewhere (e.g. iCloud) and lean toward large terabyte peripheral hard drives that I possess. Books are another issue. I am in the middle (muddle?) here. I like both paper books and ebooks. But I am not sure what happens to ebooks that possess my own annotations.
I am going to shift my emphasis for awhile toward greater use of ebooks. I am delighted with the combination of two ebooks that provide both analysis and content of Shakespeare's plays. And I really like the portability of ebooks compared with real books (i.e. lack of weight and volume).
At the moment I have all of Sir Walter Scott's and Charles Dickens' books in electronic form. I also have a number of non-fiction books in ebook form. Now to set up a special reading list for these.
- Sir Walter Scott
- Ivanhoe (I remember the movie, now to read the novel)
- Rob Roy
- The Talisman (I remember this from when I was in high school)
- Charles Dickens
- Bleak House
- David Copperfield
- Great Expectations (I read this in English 210 in 1961)
- Nicholas Nickleby (I read this a few years ago, and loved it)
- Jane Austen
- Pride & Prejudice
- Robert Louis Stevenson
- Treasure Island
- Bhagavad Gita (I have begun this, but then keep forgetting it!)
And here are the non-fiction books I have on my iPad2:
- The Information (James Gleick)
- A New Culture of Learning (Douglas Thomas & John Seely Brown)
- Alone Together (Sherry Turkle)
- The Power of Pull (John Hagel III, John Seely Brown & Lang Davison)