A Map View shows my original Day Book “dashboard.” (Click for full size.)

My Day Book has slowly evolved to look like this. (Click for larger view.)

From the screen captures above, you can see how my Day Book has evolved. There is nothing new or innovative in the latest iteration in terms of Tinderboxology. I’ve just added pieces to the map as needed. In the upper left I have an adornment for corralling a container for each month of the current year. To the right of this I have a cluster of four elements, three containers and an agent:

• Advanced Planning, which holds notes about 2013 and beyond
• Undated Notes, inactive notes I want to keep, but which are not associated with a date
• Archive, which currently holds a container with notes for 2011
• The agent collects aliases of notes which are about contacts

In the top right I have another adornment where I keep notes relating to my healthcare providers. The healthcare provider notes get dated with my next appointment and marked as needing followup so they show up in my Alerts agent (the green box in the lower left — see the previous article about this topic for instructions on how to create such an agent).

Below the healthcare adornment, I have a couple of containers to hold notes about specific things I want to keep track of. One of these is where I dump ideas for writing projects, and the other (2012 MI Programs) relates to upcoming events at Mount Independence State Historic Site, where I help to run several events over the summer. I actually keep the calendar of events for the site in OmniOutliner Pro, because it produces a nice, easy to read PDF that I post to the Mount Independence web site, but it was easy to import that data into Tinderbox, so that I could keep notes about them. (The next step, which I have not yet tried is to start the note keeping for these events in Tinderbox first, then export to OminiOutliner.) The brown box in the lower half of the Day Book is an agent that finds notes marked as needing followup and relating to my work with the Mount. Some of these are meetings and other activities that are not events AT the Mount, so they can come from anywhere in the Day Book, which is why I need an agent for this, rather than just using the 2012 MI Programs container with notes events.

Finally, there is the lower right section of the map. This is kind of my play area. I put active notes that I’m not yet ready to date here. I have a container listing my favorite movies — I just add new notes to the container as movies I love occur to me.

So that’s the tour of my Day Book as it stands now. I haven’t added any whiz-bang functionality to it, but you can see how it is growing and adapting to my needs. This is one of the reasons I love Tinderbox. Nothing I have done here is very difficult. I’m not making use of any real arcane Tinderbox knowledge. Yet I can’t think of another application that would give me this kind flexibility to organize my daily note book.

The two biggest challenges for me are deciding when it is appropriate to use the Day Book for a note and when I should use another Tinderbox file (or another application altogether), and including my iPod Touch in the mix, especially for calendar-type information. When I figure this out, I’ll post my solution here.

It should be no secret (although thanks to our mealy-mouthed media it still seems to be) that Republicans have used the filibuster to wreck havoc on the democratic process. According to this article by Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, it turns out the filibuster is an accidental side effect of a senate rule change proposed by Aaron Burr:

In 1806, the Senate, on the advice of Aaron Burr, tried to clean up its rule book, which was thought to be needlessly complicated and redundant. One change it made was to delete something called “the previous question” motion. That was the motion senators used to end debate on whatever they were talking about and move to the next topic. Burr recommended axing it because it was hardly ever used. Senators were gentlemen. They knew when to stop talking.

So, even one of our nation’s most notorious ne’er do wells* couldn’t imagine how any self-respecting senator would abuse the process to subvert democracy for their own twisted, extreme agenda. Too bad Mr. Burr isn’t around now to challenge Mitch McConnell to a duel.

*Can’t call Burr a traitor, because he was never convicted.

I learned over the weekend that Pete Fornatale, perhaps the greatest rock DJ of all time, died at the too-young-age of just 66. I wasn’t quite a listener in the real heyday of free-form FM radio back in the late 1960s. My listening days began around 1971 or so. And I didn’t discover Pete until later in the decade. But when I did finally hear him on WNEW (I was initially a WPLJ fan), I became an instant fan. He had a passion for the music that leapt from the radio’s speakers, but there seemed to be no ounce of ego about him. Just a love of the music and the musicians. The combination of soulless corporate ownership of media (continually shuffling the formats of radio stations to squeeze every ounce of profit from the airwaves) and my moving to Vermont in 1990 meant that it had been a long time since I’d heard Pete on the radio. He still had a weekly show on his old alma mater radio station, WFUV from Fordham University, and occasionally I’d hear a piece of the show on satellite radio or streaming online. And the soothing, enthusiastic voice sounded just the same. Full of life and appreciation for the music and the people making it. Those moments were like a little time machine, bringing me back to my youth, when music seemed to be an expression from the soul and not merely a business. I’m sure I was naive back then. The Rolling Stones were into the money as much as any artist today. But it didn’t feel that way. Pete Fornatale always respected the songs, and always gave you more information about them, putting them in a context that helped me to appreciate them and the people making them.

I won’t say that I’ll miss Pete Fornatale, because I already missed him and the radio that he helped create. But I am very sad that he won’t be on the airwaves (do we still have airwaves?) any longer, making new shows and keeping the golden age of FM rock radio alive.

This can be kind of intimidating for people like me who are not comfortable with scripting or coding. My message about Tinderbox has been that you can still do a lot with it just knowing a few basic concepts that are easy to understand. The same is true — actually more so, I think — with ConnectedText.

I was able to prove this to myself yesterday when a friend at the outliner site asked for some advice about creating a database for quotations using CT. I got the feeling he was over-thinking the process a little, so decided to create a simple CT project for quotations to test my theory.

My quotations project has two templates and just three pieces of “coding.” That’s it. And yet I have a very powerful database for collecting quotations. Here’s what is involved:

I started by creating a topic for my favorite writer, Edward Abbey. I clipped a brief bio from Wikipedia and included the URL to the Wikipedia article. That doesn’t really matter. You could put any type of content you want in your author topic. The key was that I assigned the Category of “Author” to this entry. The screen shot below is the entry for Edward Abbey in edit mode (remember that each entry — or topic to use CT jargon — has two viewing modes, edit and preview):

This is the raw text in edit view for an entry in ConnectedText about the author Edward Abbey.

I then added a couple of quotations from Abbey in separate entries. Here’s what one of those looks like in edit mode:

This is a detail of a quote from Edward Abbey, again in edit view.

Note that I’ve once again made use of the Category feature, designating this note as a “Quote.” I’ve also made use of another CT feature called Attribute. This note has two Attributes, one for the author of the quote and one for the theme of the quote. One thing important here is that I wrote out the author Attribute “Abbey, Edward” exactly as I had named Abbey’s author entry. You’ll see why this is important in a moment.

So let’s take a look at how the quote looks in preview mode:

This is the same quote about war, but now in preview mode.

You can see that CT has done some nice work rendering what I put in as plain text. The red, underlined text are wiki links. If I click on the Abbey link, I’m brought back to my entry about Abbey, which looks like this with a couple of associated quotations:

This is what my entry on Edward Abbey looks like rendered in preview mode, now with two associated quotations.

Adding those associated links to quotes is all ConnectedText. I didn’t have to tell it to do that. It automatically sees other notes with an Attribute with the same name as this topic and puts the links in. (Don’t be confused by the fact that CT adds the text “Properties with value Abbey, Edward” even though I set Author up in the quotations as an Attribute not a Property. I don’t know why it doesn’t say “Attributes with the value of Abbey, Edward.” Maybe it is just an oversight.)

Now this is all pretty cool, but here’s something even better. ConnectedText automatically sees that there are currently two types of Categories: Authors and Quotes. It creates a page for each of these, and if I open the Author page, for instance, I get this useful index:

This is the ConnectedText page automatically created to display an index of topics that I've categorized as "Author" pages. (Click for larger view.)

Not only does CT automatically put in the links to each author page, it also includes links to the quotes associated with each author. (Note that I’ve added a few quotes since the earlier screen shot of the Abbey page to fill things out more.) Update: Just to clarify, the reason I get the top listing of authors with associated quotes along with the bottom index of authors is because I used the same exact phrase “Author” as the Category and as the Attribute. If I had called the Attribute “Source,” then I would only have the index in the Author topic. A new topic called “Source” would show the top list…. I hope that makes sense.

There are, of course, innumerable ways this simple database of quotations could be made more sophisticated, such as adding source information and altering some of the information rendered by ConnectedText. I just wanted to demonstrate how easy it is to make ConnectedText useful with just a basic understanding of some of its concepts. I had to do very little in the way of “coding” (I’m not even sure that’s the right term for this). I just had to know the proper syntax for creating a Category ( [[$CATEGORY:value]] ), and an Attribute ( [[name of attribute:value of attribute]] ). That’s it. ConnectedText does most of the rest.

So when I saw this article about NBC hiring Sarah Palin to co-host the Today show, I thought “must be an April Fools joke.” But no. It’s April 2nd!

For those of you who don’t remember, NBC used to be a television broadcast network along with ABC, CBS and Fox. It had some great programming, being the network that broadcast “Cheers” and “The Rockford Files.” It had a respectable news department. Chet Huntley and David Brinkley did the evening news. Even it’s late night programming was great with Johnny Carson and Steve Allen as hosts of the “Tonight Show.”

But NBC has made one stupid decision after another in recent years and with this latest move, it has just about completed its decent into absurdity. Sarah Palin is barely able to spell her own name. A geek who makes fart sounds with his armpit would actually sound more intelligent than Sarah Palin. Even  Fox News describes her as “inarticulate and uneducated.” But some how NBC has decided she’s worthy of filling the chair once inhabited by Barbara Walters and Jane Pauley? Could they have been trying to get Michael Palin and just picked up the wrong Rolodex card?

What does NBC stand for, anyway? Nothing But Crap apparently.

UPDATE: Watch this video to get a preview of what Today Show viewers have in store this morning.

If only someone had given Cheney a heart twenty years ago, perhaps we’d have saved a lot dead and wounded Americans and Iraqis.

PersonalBrain is now known as TheBrain. (Click for larger view.)

I’ve written a few times about PersonalBrain, an information management application from TheBrain Technologies. The most recent version of PersonalBrain is 6.5, but the company is very close to releasing version 7, and this represents kind of a new chapter in the application’s development. Version 7 is still a stand alone desktop application, but it is much more connected with WebBrain, the service that allows you to view your “brains” online and synchronize them across your computers. As such, the program will go back to its original name, dropping the personal to become TheBrain once again.

Where three options were available before — the free, core and pro editions — the company is dropping the core edition, but has lowered the price on the pro edition from $249 to $219. They are also offering annual subscriptions, which include all updates to the application and WebBrain access for $159. If you already have a license and a WebBrain subscription, the upgrade price is pro-rated.

I just upgraded. Though still in beta, version 7 is very nearly ready for official release and seems quite stable. Aside from whatever under-the-hood changes have been made to make TheBrain and WebBrain work better together, the major addition to version 7 is what you can do with links. The calendar has also been improved to the point where I am actually starting to use it. I’m not going to go into all the changes, but you can read about them here.

I’ve been corresponding with a fellow CRIMPer*, who had this comment about TheBrain:

I find it nearly ideal for connecting bits of information, but don’t see it as useful for teasing out connections and structure over time when the information has some depth or complexity to it. Maybe I’m selling it short.

I do not think he is selling it short. This is my sense too. TheBrain is a great store house for information of all kinds. It is unparalleled in connecting related information. But it isn’t so great for garnering insights from previously unrelated information. In other words, if you didn’t think about the connections at the time you were adding the data to your brain, you’re not likely to come to some ah ha moment later. This is not a criticism of TheBrain, just an observation.

And, while ThBrain’s main interface (called the Plex) is very versatile in a lot of ways, it is also very rigid. I’m thinking of the Map View in Tinderbox, where you can freely move your information around to try out various associations. Applications like DevonThink and ConnectedText have functions that try to draw associations among your information that you may not have noticed. Scrivener has it’s scrivenings and cork board views.

Those are examples of applications with functions that facilitate the thinking about, the comparing, the merging and unmerging of text/information so that you can take it from one form and transform it into something more. TheBrain doesn’t really do that, and I don’t think it is really intended to, though the developers might disagree.

I may be getting beyond the comfort zone of my wisdom/knowledge of these topics. Mostly I’m trying to understand my sense of the limitations of TheBrain (and by extension, of other applications like it). You could just as easily chalk this up to my working/thinking style. That is, everyone’s experience will be different.

Nevertheless, I have been relying upon TheBrain for the past few years and find it almost indispensable at this point. Why? Because it is a beautiful warehouse for collecting all kinds of information. In the Plex, each individual item is called a Thought (although I prefer to think of these as Ideas, in the platonic sense). When you create a Thought in the Plex, that Thought becomes the star around which a solar system of information can revolve. Here are the ways you can associate information to a single Thought in TheBrain:

1. Link child Thoughts — topics that flow from the Thought.
2. Link parent Thoughts — topics from which the Thought flows.
3. Link related or jump Thoughts — topics related in an unhierarchical way.
4. Add notes in the Note tool.
5. Attach as many URLs as you’d like.
6. Attach almost any type of file: spreadsheets, text documents, PDFs, pictures, etc.
7. Give the Thought a Type — make all urgent Thoughts red, for example.
8. Give the Thought multiple Tags — Tags allow you to quickly find Thoughts that share a Tag.
9. Use the calendar to associate date-specific events.
10. Use links to define special relationships among the data.

I’m undoubtedly forgetting some. But the point is, if you are working on a project, TheBrain makes a perfect repository for collecting all the information you need to properly manage that project. It also makes a great archive for stashing information — as long as you can find a place to put it in your Brain.

I have three active Brains, as follows:

1. My day job Brain. I use this Brain to collect and organize resources I need to do my job. I don’t use it much for actual note-taking (see below).
2. My Commonplace Book Brain. This is my organized stash of information, tidbits I want to keep for future reference. For example, I have a curiosity about Neanderthals, so whenever I come across an interesting piece of information about these relatives of Homo Sapiens, I drop it into the Neanderthal Thought.
3. A Brain for my “other” job. This is a Brain for organizing information related to a nonprofit historic organization of which I am president.

The Neanderthal Thought in my Commonplace Book. (Click for larger view.)

ConnectedText is a personal wiki and then some.

ConnectedText is a personal wiki. But it is much more than that. It is packed with functions that help you manage and make sense of your information. CT can be a database, a notebook, a knowledge base, a journal and more. It is freeform, but you can impose structure if you choose. The developer has loaded CT with many thoughtful features. The program feels rock solid to me.

I probably do not need to define what a wiki is. Anyone who has used Wikipedia knows, and who hasn’t used that ever useful online knowledge base?

So a wiki is a growing collection of related and linked notes. A personal wiki is one that resides on your own computer, and for which you control access. What is appealling to me about the wiki is the organic nature of your expanding network of notes. No structure is imposed on these notes as you create them. A link does not impose hierarchy, it merely expresses an undefined relationship. An article about pets can be linked to an article about dogs, which can be linked to an article about Fido, which can be linked to the article about pets. Wikis feel natural, and undemanding, unlike an outline. Or, to put it another way, a wiki is like a shoe box into which you drop your note cards, while an outline is more a filing cabinet that requires you to consider which drawer and folder to put each note. (That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It depends upon what you are working on and what outcome you need.)

The idea of a personal wiki has appealled to me since I first heard about the concept, but the applications I tried never seemed to live up to my expectations. Even CT didn’t click with me when I first bought a license several years ago. But earlier this year (2012) I decided to make the commitment to ConnectedText for recording the day to day activities of my job.

I’d been trying to do this with a number of different applications, all to various degrees of failure. I work on a Windows PC, so my favorite Mac applications were not available. There are some very good information management applications for Windows: OneNote, PersonalBrain and Zoot foremost among them. But I found none of these made the job of recording daily information satisfying — which is the same as saying I didn’t do a very good job of it. But with ConnectedText I’ve finally found my solution.

So what was it about ConnectedText that finally won me over? I’ve been trying to figure this out and think I’ve finally come up with the answer.

It’s all in the name: Connected. Text.

Let’s start with the second part: Text. I like writing in CT. It isn’t a robust editor, not by word processor standards. But it is nice and clean, just like another editor I like to compose in, NoteTab. The plain text environment has fewer distractions. It’s just a piece of paper in a typewriter (with some marvelous additions that I’ll get to shortly).

There are two modes for any CT topic (CT’s word for a note): edit mode and view mode. You need to be in edit mode to make changes to the topic. You toggle back and forth quickly with a hot-key combination of Alt-E.

ConnectedText in View Mode

ConnectedText in Edit Mode

The two screenshots above are of the same note. The first is in View Mode and the second is in Edit Mode.

Of course, if CT was just an editor, it wouldn’t be any more powerful than NoteTab. But that gets us to the “connected” part of this review. First of all, being a wiki, CT uses a simple mark-up language to create formatted text in view mode, and to do some marvelous things with my information. This is what I first had trouble getting past when I started trying to use CT. To make a word or phrase bold, for instance, you bracket it with double asterisks. I’m still exploring and learning this mark-up code, but just about any formatting you can apply in a word processor can be applied to text in CT.

Yes, I know, I haven’t actually gotten to the “connected” part yet, but here it is. You also use mark-up to establish links to other topics, or to create new ones. Just enclose any text in double-brackets and you’ve enabled a link. If the text inside the backets exactly matches an existing topic’s name, the link will be complete. If it is a new topic, that topic will be created the first time you click on it.

In this way, you can grow your web of information without interupting your writing. Just make your links as you write, then go back and fill in the information. In an outline-style application, you would have to stop writing, find the place in the structure you want the note to reside, create the entry, go back to your original note to pick up where you left off, then remember to go back to the new note to fill in the information.

But wait. There’s more!

So far I’ve described any run of the mill wiki. But ConnectedText is loaded with powerful features that make it a more robust information management system. For example, there’s the date topic, which is any topic name that contains a date in the special CT format. This format is yearmonthday in numbers. So February 18, 2012, would be rendered as 20120218. Date topics automatically display a small month calendar in the top right corner of the screen when in view mode. This little calendar is now the key to building a journal or diary, because every date in the calendar is a wiki link.

Another smart feature of CT is how it handles headlines. When you bracket text in equal signs (the first of which has to be the first character on the line for this to work), you tell CT to see the text as a headline. Single equal signs on either side of the text indicate a top-level headline. You can create sub headlines by adding equal signs to the mark up. As you would expect, CT displays these headlines in differentiated text. It also includes a disclosure button so that you can roll up the text beneath a headline. Any topic that has four or more headline’s automatically displays a table of contents above the first headline for quick navigation to any part of the page.

You can add keywords, or what CT calls “Categories,” to your topics. You just add this code

[[$CATEGORY:categoryname]]

anywhere in the text.

This same sort of code construction is also used for doing many other useful things with your information. You can assign properties and attributes to data within the topic. This is sort of like creating a meta-data field. For example,

[[Birthday:=19560707]]

sets the attribute birthday to 7/7/1956.

This is useful if you have a set of topics with the same attributes of different values that you would like to be able to query or display in summary tables.

I’ve only brushed the surface of the things you can do with your information using ConnectedText. The developer, Eduardo Mauro, has built in many thoughtful features. A really great example is that you can select any amount of text in one topic and with a simple command have ConnectedText pack it off to a new topic leaving a wiki link in the original topic. So if you’re on a roll, just keep writing your thoughts into one topic, then go back and quickly “granularize” it.

I’ve written a lot about a terrific Mac application called Tinderbox. In many ways, ConnectedText makes me think of it as the Tinderbox for the PC. No they do not look alike or even behave alike. But both or remarkably flexible note management systems that you can grow into as you learn more and more about them. But they are both very useful even if you don’t learn all the power functions from the start. Both provide useful and varied views of your information. For instance, both applications give you a visual as well as a textual reference for your notes — though Tinderbox is much more sophisticated in this aspect. Both provide outlining functions.

Here’s the difference to me: I would choose ConnectedText for writing, and Tinderbox for analysis.

Anyway, I hope to write more about ConnectedText in the coming weeks. In the meantime, an excellent source of information about CT can be found on the web site Taking Note.