Life Without Practice

We all live lives without practice - you only live once, and this ain't no rehersal. Life is what happens along the road. Plan as we might, things sometimes take another path. This is an on-going diatribe from my perspective. Don't live like it's a rehearsal!

Thursday, November 23, 2006

Hallowed Halls

My curiousity crossed the threshold today for the first time in a while. Oh hey - is this a noted project? Yeah, okay - I suppose it's an element of P11, but relates to some familial research. Digging into a prominent relative who was in WWII. I've been conversing with a WWII historian & author who's father knew my guy, and wrote a bit about him in letters home from the front, well overseas anyway.

So anyway, I kept thinking about the city directories and wanting to look some stuff up in the early 20th century Winnipeg and Toronto directories. A resource that's still not online, and frankly, until there are massive high-volume optical readers I don't think you're going to see these things online. Perhaps with a thousand low paid typists who know English in India you might plug through a few of them, but it's a ton of data in a dense book, published every year for every city.

Anyway, that was enlightening. I also wanted to quickly look at a London Times article from 1943, so walked into the microfilm room at the Archives and realized I'd need to know the box numbers to pull the microform stuff. Do you think I'd could find out that? It's one of the worlds most prominent newspapers, I'm in the national library and archives of our country. Man - I've seen military exercises that are more straightforward. Lots of searching online by a reference librarian with no luck. She looks for someone else, while I go try the computer search with no luck. Then someone else finds a binder of newspaper reference numbers for Canada (But England should be in there too) That gives them a long number which can be typed into a search field, then something cryptic comes up - just click on the first numeric string, don't worry what it is, then you get a hit for the newspaper (it doesn't come up if you just type the paper's name in the search box). Now enter a date range, and hey - there it is, but it's not in the room full of microfilm, it's got to be brought up from the basement and will take about an hour.

I could just drive over to the University and get it from the cabinet marked "London Times" in that time, I commented. I did drive over to the Public Library nearby to check something else out about my neighbourhood. They don't carry the London Times there it turns out. I came back to find the Microfilm had made it up - and the microfilm was on the spool backwards, go figure.

So I had to install it backwards, and back-up to read it - but found the article I was looking for. Interesting, but containing no new news about my guy. I didn't know there was a Times article, but I got that from one of the writer's dad's letters. He read it when it was still on paper and easy to pick up and read.

Whew.

Tools
Looking over outliners and mind-mappers. One a friend showed me called Scrivener looked pretty cool, but wants OS X 10.4 to load. I'm on 10.3.9 still, and not likely to upgrade until my next Mac. I did download FreeMind, which is pretty good. But like someone commented online, CMAP produces nicer maps. CMAP though is a bit obsessed with client/server operation for sharing. It's not clear that it will also work without the server thing. It probably will, but I haven't tried it yet.

I also tried a barebones note-taker. Probably can't call it an outliner, but for a simple hierarchical note taker, DeepNotes is fine.

But I did download the trial version of Avenir. It lets you launch it 30 times before dying, then it's only about $30 I think, so I'll try stuffing one of my manuscripts into it and see what happens.

Ice
The ice on the pond is still 1cm thick. Gotta drain that thing again. Tomorrow sounds warmer. Amazing it's not thawing in spite of above-zero temps. But I'll pump her out tomorry.

Wrap
That's it for me today. Hey - your assignment for today is to grab the nearest paper and sketch out a plot of a novel - first idea that comes to mind. No, don't sit there thinking about it - you're going to throw it away anyway!! Just sketch out a really rough plot with a beginning middle and yes, an end. Got something down - okay fine, it's junk, just throw it away.

Having trouble tossing it out? Well, maybe it's got enough to the idea that you can sketch out a few scenes. Give it a try and see what happens. Let us know your progress. Did you manage to throw it out?

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