Synaxis TV

• 05/22/07 02:14 PM – Just got back from a haircut. Decided to take a break from the fauxhawk and go back to the messy look.
• 05/22/07 11:02 PM – I took a nap, then Carolyn came over and I did some more formatting on her thesis. I called my sister Yvette to wish her a happy birthday, but the connection was bad.
• 05/23/07 01:12 AM – I spent some more time digging through the past trying to remember when and where I worked.

• 05/21/07 12:50 PM – Apparently sleep is screwed up again.
• 05/21/07 08:38 PM – The main thing I did this morning was call temp agencies. Just now I got back from pizza with Carolyn. I tried an Optimo peach cigarillo and it wasn’t so bad. Carolyn should be sending me her thesis soon so I can help format it.
• 05/22/07 02:10 AM – Wow, formatting Carolyn’s thesis really sucked. Not only did I have to mark all of the headings (and she used four levels), but I had to change a bazillion figures and tables to captions so they would show up in the lists.

• 05/21/07 01:32 AM – Time passed, I had a great time at Olive Garden with Carolyn (she is slowly becoming more pomo — I sold her on assemblages), then had a great time at the Morrissey concert in Indy (I cried to “Everyday is Like Sunday” and loved “Panic,” “Suedehead,” and “How Soon is Now”). Hubert is considering anthropology.
• 05/21/07 01:34 AM – More about the concert: I was really surprised by the crowd. There were lots of normal folks in the crowd. It wasn’t all hipsters. And they really made the experience better. My favorite part was when Morrissey sang Disappointed and the crowd did the whole “yeah!” and “aaw!” part. Oh yes, Morrissey wore three different shirts during the concert — one got thrown into the crowd.

DIY Planner (via Lifehacker) has a post on making a multi-threaded bookmark, but I don’t think this would be suitable for my practices.

The idea behind this bookmark is that you can mark multiple sections you’d like to return to, but I think it would just get in my way.

Instead, I use an index card as my bookmark, and make notes on it as I go along. That way all my jumping points are all in one place and easily accessible — I don’t have to hunt through the book for notes like those who write in the margins.

Also, when I am finished with the book, I can either retain the index card as a resource, or enter it somewhere digital so that it is searchable.

The article tries to rely on an “environmental guilt trip” to support itself (or at least to appeal to those who are susceptible to such influence):

Then the nagging starts. Slowly and silently at first… appearing in the farthest corner in the back of your mind. That environmentalist guilt trip that reminds you that all this paper, those sticky notes, will do nothing to help the environment.

But it’s not a compelling argument for me. If you are that concerned about the environment, then just use scrap paper.

This DIY project might be good for the environment, but I need a little more than to know that something on the surrounding pages was interesting — I need to know what was interesting on those pages.

I was really touched by this post on How Scoble Reads 622 RSS Feeds Each Morning because it resonates so well with my own information processing practices.

Like Scoble, who is apparently some type of blog god, I too use Google Reader with keyboard shortcuts to filter through information, both to see if there is anything that might be useful for me, but also to stay on top of what is going on in general.

I had a conversation about my practices with my friend Sarah recently, and told her that part of being an expert is taking in an enormous amount of information, so that you can filter through it and build up the ability to discern the small portion of that information that is worth anything. (As a side note, I also see this as a similar process to what a music DJ does — they filter through a large amount of information to see what will be best for their audience.)

This in turn helps to give me a better sense of what it is that I am doing when I read anything — be it a website, book, or journal article. I am building up a body of knowledge to discern meaningful, relevant, and important connections.

This is also why I am thinking about using DEVONThink to manage the little bits of information that I come across. It isn’t enough to collect all of this information — you also need to be able to find and use it. If you don’t have an easy way to access the notes you have taken, then you may as well not have written them at all — another reason I don’t write in books.