water on water

Water on water, rain on the loch, a boat with two fishermen.

An odd week, I had a public holiday on Monday, and took a day off on Tuesday, and was out of the office on Thursday, so a bit away from the usual routine.

I don’t imagine my long weekend was very productive in any technical sense, but I just feel that I have been working so hard, for so long, that it is okay to indulge myself a bit. We headed out to a new garden centre, well the place is so big it is like a mall with a gardens theme. Not sure what I think of it, I don’t want it taking away trade from all the local small struggling quality businesses. We all headed into town, so that my daughters could get birthday presents for us, their parents. They are just a little too young to go off shopping on their own, but they are keen to get whatever flexibility they can.

Usual stacks of paperwork, both personal and community council.

Delighted that my new cordless mouse and external hard-drive arrived. Got them both set up easily enough. I’ll register SuperDuper and start regular back ups. The cordless mouse is a frivolous purchase, to bump up the AppleStore order enough to take advantage of a money off voucher. I know I need to be backing up, so good to get that task finally ticked off.

Also tinkering about with voodoopad. Initially the sheer plainness of it was disconcerting. But once you start adding stuff, the ability to create freeform lists is invaluable. You can nest material within material upto a certain point, but it becomes hopelessly confusing after a while. Voodoopad lets you simply create pages, and then these can be linked to from anywhere, and link to anywhere. The search facility is also pretty awesome. I am just adding stuff and adding stuff, and figuring out how to organise it as I go. I guess that it is always about 80% okay, but the time spent finessing out that last 20% would be wasted, so it is easier to just add yet more stuff that is 80% okay.

One of the things that I really picked up from GTD was this idea of universal capture of all your ideas. I’m filling up a little notebook full of random stuff, and this blog was initially used as a braindump. However I am now figuring out that these are different things. The blog is primarily a diary of what I am thinking about, the notebook is a braindump. The problem is that neither is a particularly useful end in themself. I therefore intend to capture all the stuff from my notebook into voodoopad, and incorporate my blog entries in as well.

The eventual idea is to use voodoopad as a single place to capture stuff, and organise it as I go. The more stuff is in voodoopad, the more it will be able to act as a resource of my ideas and material that I felt was worth capturing.

Of course there is always the issue of scale, for a few pages, voodoopad is pretty dull, plain vanilla, for a certain number of pages it is pretty cool, with search etc. I’m not sure if it will simply get too large and cumbersome to use at some point. For the lack of any way of knowing, I suppose I just need to try it out.

My girls have woken up, and will be nagging me to get on the computer to play Sketchfighter
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/games/sketchfighter/

Next on the shopping list will doubtless be our second computer, doubtless followed by another...