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OsCommerce sucks: backoffice interface is so “old style”, there are so many functionality problems: you cannot delete english language, you cannot import from files, you HAVE to add image to every products..

Do you know a better e-commerce php free tool to try?

I’m thinking of upgrading my MacBook from 512Mb ram to 1Gb or 2Gb. Do you have any advice for me? Should I buy 1Gb module to get to 1Gb/256Mb or is it better to have same ram size for both slots (512+512Mb or 1024+1024Mb)?

from developer.mac:

Because the memory in the two slots is configured as a contiguous array of memory, both SO-DIMMs must be the same size and type for the interleaving function to be used to improve performance.

Have you got some benchmarch that can help me to choose between these configurations?

Disassembly you mac:
Removing Ram or HD in MacBook is quite simple (see all info here).

Prices:
ram prices are very differents: 1Gb at $119.98, at 198$, at 235€

What to choose? Help meeee!

Here 10 tips to organize your photoshop layers when you work on web sites layout:

1. Before start working, create folders to organize your layers.. Organize them in a tree format (take a look at the image). If you start without folders, you’ll loose a lot of time to re-organize layers.
2. Use forlders colors (easier to identify folders and quite prettier).
3. Name the layers: you have to name them when you create, not later. Name ALL the layers or you will mess your photoshop work.
4. Create a lower folder to organize the images sources (logos, cutted images, artworks). If you crop or modify some source, you can always get the unmodified original quite fast without looking for them in your hard-disk or on the web.
5. Link the layers that should be linked.
6. Don’t raster font layers…
7. Join layers as soon it get your work easier (sometimes It’s better to have less layers).
8. Create a top forlder called BROWSER (here you’ll put the browser frame: sometimes clients want to see the “site preview” inside a browser).
9. Don’t use layers comps if you are not sure about that (I once tryed it and lost yours or work).
10. Save final composition to PNG (gif is color number limited, JPG has fucking compress “same color” problems). PNG is quite heavy format, but is a looseless format!

What are your photoshop layers tips?

Dirk Knemeyer of Involution Studios has just posted his slides from his “Experience Design Principles & Practices” course at the IIID Summer Academy/START in Chicago.

Download slides (pdf, 3.4 mb, 72 pages)

When flash interfaces are minimal like this one, I love it!

Another good site from the same web designer is dkvogue.com.

Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.

• microformats.org
• wiki: MicroFormat
• presentations: what-are-microformats

This is a quickly example to show how to test links with ajax requests.
Make sure to notice the “xmlhttp.open("HEAD", target, true);” to make the script fly!

From IBM ajax tutorial:

When 0 is equal to 4
In the use case where multiple JavaScript functions use the same request object, checking for a ready state of 0 to ensure that the request object isn’t in use can still turn out to be problematic.

Since readyState == 4 indicates a completed request, you’ll often find request objects that are not being used with their ready state still set at 4 — the data from the server was used, but nothing has occurred since then to reset the ready state.

There is a function that resets a request object called abort(), but it’s not really intended for this use. If you have to use multiple functions, it might be better to create and use a request object for each function rather than to share the object across multiple functions.

How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think

by Lion Kimbro

—
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike License. To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0/ or send a letter to
Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305,
USA.
—

TOC:

* Introduction
I. Materials
II. General Principles
III. Intra-Subject Architecture
IV. Extra-Subject Architecture
V. Theory of Notebooks
VI. The Question of Computers
VII. Getting Started
* Acronyms

—————————————-
INTRODUCTION
—————————————-

This book is about how to make a complete map of everything you think
for as long as you like.

Whether that’s good or not, I don’t know- keeping a map of all your
thoughts has a “freezing” effect on the mind. It takes a lot of
(albeit pleasurable) work, but produces nothing but SIGHT.

If you do the things described in this book, you will be *IMMOBILIZED*
for the duration of your commitment.The immobilization will come on
gradually, but steadily. In the end, you will be incapable of going
somewhere without your cache of notes, and will always want a
pen&paper w/ you. When you do not have pen&paper, you will rely on
complex memory pegging devices, described in “The Memory Book”. You
will NEVER BE WITHOUT RECORD, and you will ALWAYS RECORD.

YOU MAY ALSO ARTICULATE. Your thoughts will be clearer to you than
they have ever been before. You will see things you have never seen
before. When someone shows you one corner, you’ll have the other 3 in
mind. This is both good and bad. It means you will have the right
information at the right time in the right place. It also means you
may have trouble shutting up. Your milage may vary.

You will not only be immobilized in the arena of action, but you will
also be immobilized in the arena of thought. This appears to be
contradictory, but it’s not really. When you are writing down your
thoughts, you are making them clear to yourself, but when you revise
your thoughts, it requires a lot of work- you have to update old
ideas to point to new ideas. This discourages a lot of new
thinking. There is also a “structural integrity” to your old thoughts
that will resist change. You may actively not-think certain things,
because it would demand a lot of notekeeping work. (Thus the notion
that notebooks are best applied to things that are not changing.)

For all of this immobility, this freezing, for all of these negative
effects, *why on Earth* would anyone want to do this?

Because of the INCREDIBLE CLARITY that comes with it. It may feel
like, doing this, that for the first time in your life, you REALLY
have a CLEAR IDEA of what kinds of thoughts are going through your
head. You’ll really understand your ideas. And you’ll also see
connections that you were never consciously aware of before. You’ll
see a structure and a pattern in your life. You’re goals and
psychology will become clearer to you. You’ll be clearer too about
what you do NOT understand.

It is like taking a microscope to your brain. You’ll see the little
thoughts moving around, *literally*, as you walk them through the maps
you discover within yourself.

You’ll see what you care about, quite clearly. You’ll be familiar with
your mental terrain. Incredible clarity. Addictive clarity. Vast
clarity. Extraordinary clarity.

You will Love it, if you are anything like me. It will feel natural
and free; There will be a freedom within your mind. You’ll create
astonishing things, and you’ll find great tools that will help you in
your life after you are immobilized.

Or at least, *it will seem that way*.

Time will tell whether such an experience has been useful to me or
not. I still do not know, and will not know for some time now.

The experience is very much a modern version of the
“walkabout”. Except for instead of going out there somewhere in the
world, you hole up in your mind.

Is it useful? I still don’t know.

Thus it is with great hesitation that I present for the public this
work on notebooks. (That is, my notebook technique.)

I want to digress and say something here as well:

I am astonished that there isn’t a field of study of notebooks. I have
searched on the net, and while I have found a page here and there on
some type of notebook method, it is almost ALWAYS one of the following
two things:

1) The Diary
A bunch of entrees, chronologically based, maybe with a TOC, in
which a person keeps a record of their thoughts.
aka “The Journal”.

2) The Category Bins
A bunch of notes, stuffed into category bins, maybe 2 or 3 levels
deep.

That’s IT. In all the world, people have only been putting their notes
in the above two ways.

Sure, there are a few others, but people aren’t comparing notes,
talking about such things. I would think that something like
intelligence augmentation through notebook study would be one of the
first things that people talk about on the Internet..! I would think
that one of the first things we would be greeted with on the Internet
would be, “Did you know how to use Notebooks to be smarter?” At the
very least, it would be accessible.

Instead, there is a vast desert.

(Ted Nelson in a very special case and deserves particular comment.
Sadly, he seems a bit unhinged, and doesn’t write much about the topic
of keeping notes openly on the web.)

(Note added Later: David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” system is
actually pretty cool. Sadly, it does not appear on the Internet. But
it’s a cheap book. If you are interested in contributing to a study of
notebook systems, this is a must read.)

My solution to understanding this lack is my faith in what I call “The
Anarchist Principle”: If there is something *really cool*, and you
can’t understand why somebody hasn’t don eit before, it’s because *you
haven’t done it yourself.* That’s DIY for those in the know: Do It Yourself.

Now I have a third thing I want to talk about, before getting on with
the text.

(First, I wrote about the things that my notebook system will do to
you, then I wrote about the darth of notebook study on the Web, and
now I’m writing about this third thing:)

I am just SPITTING THIS TEXT OUT. I know that my understanding of
personal projects and getting them completed is low. I know my
weaknesses- that I am bad at getting huge projects done. So what I’m
doing is just SPITTING THIS TEXT OUT.

I figure that if you are reading this, you’d much rather have this
than nothing at all. And that’s what’s out there, if you aren’t
reading this- NOTHING AT ALL. I mean, you can always keep a diary or a
bunch of category bins, if you like. That’s a real no brainer. But
besides those two, and treatises on Ted Nelson’s madness, you won’t
find a whole lot.

So please excuse the poor formatting of this. It’s raw, coersive,
straight text. It’s unorganized. It’s terrible.

Maybe one day I will improve this. But that day is not today. Today is
a day for spitting text out. With God’s mercy, I will learn how to
finish big projects. I pray for that ability frequently. If you can
mentor me in the subject, I will happily hear you out. But I have not
learned it yet.

Side Note: I actually believe that we should all communicating with
what Robert Horn calls “Visual Verbal Language”. The problem is that
we don’t have good tools to do so. Damn. It’s a shame. When the tools
come, there will be a revolution in communication just as big, if not
bigger, than the revolutionary introduction of the Internet. So:
Double Apologies for swabbing a mass of text at you.

Let’s see: We’ve talked about:
1) The Terrible Things this notebook system will Do to you.
2) The Nonexistence of an Internet field of Notebook study.
3) How I am just spitting this text out into the world.

Lastly, I want to briefly introduce some of the unique features of my
notebook system. Things that my notebook system does that NO OTHER
NOTEBOOK SYSTEM that I have ever seen does. These are the results of
years of keeping different types of notebook systems, and taking the
best ideas from each.

1) Strategy.

This notebook system allows you to STRATEGIZE. Very few notebooks do
that. I mean, sure, you can start some pages on, “what will my
strategy be now?”, but then you have to figure out what all your
options are. The notebook system I describe has built in strategy
management. You will always know what your options and priorities are
in notebook management.

It does this with the aid of maps…

2) Maps.

Tables of Contents (TOCs) are TERRIBLE. TERRIBLE TERRIBLE
TERRIBLE. Their main utility is in providing you the next number to
number something.

You want MAPS of Contents, or what I call “MOCs”. This is like a table
of contents, but far more dynamic. Is an entry really important? Make
it’s MOC entry really big. Unimportant? Make it small. Or even pull
out the name, and just surround the page number in parenthesis. If you
are ever investigating that area, you can look it up to see what it
is.

You can put related concepts close to each other, REGARDLESS of the
actual physical position of the pages.

You can move things around. Trace paths of connection through. Make
non-ordinal order apparent. All with Maps.

So don’t keep a TOC, unless the material is intrinsicly linear (a
chronology, without episode tracking.) Keep a MOC!

More in the text on this subject. This is just a brief introduction
for the sake of introducing some major concepts from my notebook
system.

3) Color and Glyph Management

Abbreviations/Shorthand, and Color. You MUST use a 4color pen. (I
mean, you don’t NEED one, but it’s so amazingly helpful, that once you
start using it, you’ll NEVER want to go back.)

You’ll develop shorthands, and you’ll want to trust that you can
decypher them later. You’ll thus need systems for cataloging your
shorthands, and there is such a system in the notebook system I am
describing.

4) Speed Lists

You will be capturing EVERY SINGLE THOUGHT. Well, every thought that
is more interesting than “I need to go to the bathroom”, or “I need to
take the trash out”.

(Actually, needing to take the trash out may enter, as per the Getting
Things Done system. SHOULD you decide to integrate my system with the
GTD system. More later on the subject.)

Speed lists are the answer to the demand. Speed lists are vast lists
of simple thoughts- about 1-50 words. Generally around one line.

There are two types of speed lists- pan-subject and
subject. Pan-subject speed lists are for all thoughts, you take a
pan-subj speed list out with you to work or to wherever you are
going. Subject lists you keep in a cache notebook, and you have one
per subject. You’d prefer to just use your subject lists, but
sometimes you have to make do with a pan-subject speed list, and then
transfer out from there to the individual speed lists. More on all of
this later.

In particular: You do NOT want to be just scribbling thoughts out on a
piece of any old paper. You want at least a pan-subj speed, with a few
exceptions. (If you are having a thought-attack, you may need to make
do w/ just any old piece of paper, and then go from there to the
subject pages.)

OKAY: I’m getting too much into details.

So four advantages are:
* Strategy
* Mapping
* Color/Glyph
* Speeds

They work together marvelously. In particular, Strategy, Mapping, and
Speeds all directly affect and rely on one another.

So there we have it.

1) What this system will do to you. (EXPECT IT.)
2) The nonexistence (to date!) of an Internet study of Notebooks.
3) How I am spitting this text out.
4) The advantages of my system.

The Introduction is over.

—————————————-
System Overview
—————————————-

I will be talking about the following things:

* Intra-Subject Architecture
* Extra-Subject Architecture
* Materials
* The Question of Computers - don’t get all excited now.
* Theory of Notebooks
* General Principles

Let me talk at a high level about what this is all about.

The notebook system roughly divides all of your thoughts into
“Subjects”. What subjects? Depends on your thought patterns. In the
Subjects section, we’ll talk about how to divide your thoughts amongst
subjects.

Now, there are two domains: “Extra-subject” and “Intra-subject”: that
is, outside and inside of your subjects.

Intra-subject: Within a particular subject, you’ll have an
organization. You’ll have your speed thoughts for that subject, you’ll
have your maps, you’ll have your big dissertations (”Point of
Interest”, or “POI”), you’ll have your cheat sheets, your
abbreviations/shorehands (”A/S”) particular to that subject, all sorts
of wonderful things. Most important though, are your speeds and your
maps.

Now, beyond the subject, there is a whole field of all your
subjects. You’ll have the “GSMOC”- the “Grand Subject Map of
Contents”, whereon you’ll see a gigantic map of EVERY THING THAT YOU
THINK ABOUT. Just imagine that right now: _Wouldn’t you be interested
in seeing such a thing?_ When I think about my GSMOC, I see a mirror
of my mind, for the 3-5 months that I kept my notebooks. (The borders
are fuzzy, because I gradually evolved into the notebook system I am
describing to you.)

I mean, that, right there, is worth the price of admision. The GSMOC
is a pretty impressive thing. =^_^=

Okay. So there are steps and promises that apply beyond the field of a
single subject, and there are steps and promises that apply within the
field of a single subject.

Now extra-subject and intra-subject *float on top of* your
*MATERIALS*. We’re talking about pen and paper and your binders. And
some other things: You’ll need those little donut holes things to
protect your paper, and you’ll need little stickies to put onto your
paper, your maps. This will help with strategy and other map
management functions. So I have a section on materials and all that
stuff. Great stuff. What to look for in picking a binder. Wonderful.

There: We’ve knocked off the first three:
* Intra-subj
* Extra-subj
* Materials

Three more to go:
* The ? of Computers
* Theory of Notebooks
* General Principles

Okay, I’ll take the ? of Computers last. General principles first,
then Theory, then ?’s of Computers.

General Principles:
There are many patterns common in the steps and promises of the
notebook. Things such as “How do I lay out a page?”, the concept of
“Late Binding” and how it applies to the notebooks. “Out cards.” The
use of color. Partitioning strategy. Writing
quality. Psychology. General mapping principles. Important stuff, but
not specific to a particular position in the hierarchy.

Theory of Notebooks:
Why use notebooks at all? (Partly talked about in the introduction.)
How does this work? Observations about how subjects gestate. How
information flows, becomes knowledge, then becomes wisdom as it
integrates into our life. How thoughts integrate. How the speeds
grow. And a theory of (conscious) thinking. Many things to talk about.

Finally, the Question of Computers. My least favorite subject, because
people can get so damn irrational about computers.

I don’t know HOW many times I’ve seen people twiddling about with
their little palm pilots, convinced that because they have
“technology” on “their side”, that they are being more effective than
a man holding a piece of paper and a pen. The absurdity of these
devices is astounding.

I know that there are legitimate uses for these things. I see doctors
carrying them around with up-to-date info dictionaries and what not, I
know that they use them, yadda yadda yadda. And yet the simple fact
is, 99% of the general public using these devices have no need for
them. They’d be much better served with a small pad of paper that they
keep with them, and a pen.

There are exceptions to this: You can argue a good case for using them
to play games (though I’d rather use a Game Boy Advance), or for using
them to use as an addr book. Great. I love it.

But for the Love Of God, if you live within the time period of
2003-2005 at the very least, do NOT try to use one of these devices to
keep your notes!

This extends further to computers.

Now: All this will change. IN THE FUTURE, computers will be the way to
go. But we are not there yet, NOR will we be there in the next 3-5
years. Remember: Even if the computer is fast, you still need software
that won’t get in your way.

I will address this subject again, later in the book. Feel free to
skip it, if you plan to use paper. But if you are one of the “I paid
big money for this thing, and it’s high tech, and it’s sooo cyber,
that it must be better than anything pen and paper can give me,”
please give serious thought to what I have to say.

I’m positioning it later in the book, so that you can have already
have read about maps. I mean, maps right there- these little devices,
and even my big computer, doesn’t get maps right. But you’ll see how
this works as we read- no need for me to go off the deep end now.

SO.

In Summary.

* Intra-subj
* Extra-subj
* Materials
* The ? of Computers
* Theory of Notebooks
* General Principles

That’s what I’m going to be talking about now.

Here, let’s put that in order:

1) Materials
2) General Principles
3) Intra-subj
4) Extra-subj
5) Theory of Notebooks
6) The Question of Computers

By the way- in case I hurt your feelings about computers- I want to
add two things:

1) I am an experienced programmer. I’ve been programming computers
since I was 7 years old, typing in BASICA programs by hand on my
mom’s COMPAQ 8088. I formatted her hard drive by accidently going
into low level format instructions using “debug”, experimenting
with assembly language, when I was about 10. I am now 25. I love
computers. I just happen to recognize the limitations of where we
are at right now, that’s all.
2) Computers will be the SALVATION of this whole system I am
describing right now. So if you feel offended knowing that I am
dumping on them right now, know that that’s not going to be the
case for long. Paper is unwieldy, large, requires storage, and a
host of other ills. Copying from page to page to page is just a
nightmare. It is a necessary nightmare, right now, but it is a
nightmare. Computers will save us from it.
3) Hah! I’m sneaking in a #3. (Part of my “no-edit policy” when
spitting stuff out. Apologies.) I WILL DESCRIBE, if I DO NOT
FORGET, just WHAT steps you can take NOW, IF YOU ARE INTERESTED, to
“get the ball rolling”. There are some easy programs that you can
make right now that would make this system AWESOME. I just don’t
have the time to code them up right now. But I will describe them,
and if you like, you can code them up. Hell, I’ll even throw in a
description of the ideal computer notebook system- assuming I have
“magic paper”- and how it will dramaticly increase our
intelligence, provided that we can solve the versioning problem as
well. (Note: Ted Nelson & Company went pretty batty wrt the
versioning problem. Did they solve it? I don’t know. I have heard
rumors that some of Ted’s protege’s work for the CIA now, though.)

Speaking of the CIA- I want to include in this book somewhere (right
here I guess) a comparison between this notebook system, and an
Intelligence Agency. INTELLIGENCE is having Good Information available
at the Right Time at the Right Place. Notebooks help with that by
moving information to a place where it will be seen at the right time-
when you access the notebook. There are a lot of similarities there
with an Intelligence Agency. Okay. I’m done. Interlude out. (Yes, I do
recognize the irony. I’m just spitting this out with poor
organization. But dammit, I’m not a skilled writer, and I have SO MUCH
I want to express, so you’ll just have to make do for now. Sorry.)

Where were we.

1) Materials
2) General Principles
3) Intra-subj
4) Extra-subj
5) Theory of Notebooks
6) The Question of Computers

(NOTE FROM THE FUTURE:
I’ve added a 7th section: “Getting Started”.
It is number 7.)

Okay. And be aware I’ll probably need to skip back and forth a little
bit. Sorry, just one of the problems of having a straight linear text,
rather than a fully mapped out domain.

—————————————-
I. Materials
—————————————-

Some topics for “Materials”:

* Paper
* Pen
* Binders
* 3-hole punch
* donut rings
* stickies (NOT yellow sticky tabs!)
* tab dividers
* pockets

And associated issues:

* Storage
* Carrying
* Archival
* Handling Optimizations

So lets start with the materials- what you need to have with you.

PEN.

You need a pen. Actually, you need three. And they need to have little
four color clippies- Red, Green, Blue, and Black.

Theoretically, you can do this all with a black pen, but TRUST ME, you
don’t want it. Your ability to very rapidly switch colors will way
more than make up for the nicer line that the G2 gel pens give
you. Really.

You need one to carry with you, you need one for backup, placed in a
trusted place, and you need one to be a backup to the backup. YES, you
really need this. If you are wasting time looking for a pen that you
lost, you are just wasting time. The pen will come back. In the mean
time, you need to write, so you’ve got to fetch your backup. You have
a backup to the backup. If you have ready access to a store, you need
to buy another pen, should you not find your first pen by then.

These 4-color pens are expensive. Remember: Buy 3. YOUR PEN IS YOUR
LIFE. DON’T LOSE IT. But when you do, don’t hesitate to start in with
the backup.

Next: You want to have a list in your notes of the locations to search
for your pen. Mine looked like this:

* Jacket Pockets Pants Pockets Buried Inside Notebooks.

Re: the last: “Buried Inside Notebooks.” IF YOU DO THIS SYSTEM, that
will actually be a VERY common occurance. Because you’ll have 2-3
inches of paper. Those 4-color pens are BIIIIG and FAT. But they
aren’t so big that they can’t get completely lost amidst a big fat
chunk of paper. Trust me. So actually open up the book and flip
through sections,looking for your pen.

I’m not going to talk about this much; This is just something you’ll
find with experience.

So that’s the deal with the pen. I’ll talk more about what the colors
are for in the “General Principles” section.

Next.

PAPER.

You want lots of it. Always have at least 2 reams unopened, of about
150 sheets each.

Get COLLEGE RULE. You want as many lines on these as you can, because
information density is the name of the game. 3 holes, of course, so
it’ll go in your binder.

8 1/2″ x 11″, or the new 8″ x 10 1/2″ ?

Don’t laugh- it’s a serious question.

There are tradeoffs to both.

I used 8″x10 1/2″ for most of my notes. It was good because they fit
within the larger tab dividers. Yah. 8×10.5 is also a lot
cheaper. With the volume of paper that you will purchase, price can
become an issue.

But if I were to do this again (and I intend to- I intend to do this
once, for three months, once every 3-5 years, to gain a “situation
awareness”), I would use full 8.5×11″.

Why? It’s not really the “extra bit of page” that is important (it
isn’t- having a better rule is far more important), but rather that
your paper conforms to the global standard for paper.

You are invariably going to want to include leafs from outside your
notebook system. And you should eventually make your own templated
papers: You’ll make standard form sheets, print them onto printer
paper, and include it in your notebook.

Printer paper doesn’t come in 8.5″x11″. So you have some big pages and
some little pages. Yuck! When it comes to quickly flipping through
pages to find a particular page number- yuck! It gets difficult.

So get 8.5×11″ college ruled 3-hole-punch paper.

BINDERS.

Major important.

First, let me dispell notebooks:
Don’t use them. I’m talking about spiral bound notebooks.

I used to use them. I have a huge collection of spiral bound notebooks
in my closet. I love them, they are so cute and self-contained. And
partitioning them is kind of fun, even.

But the binder system just so completely blows them out of the water,
that I will just never go back to those things.

This isn’t to say that notebooks don’t have a place- THEY DO! Just not
in this system.

Notebooks are great when you are doing a straight chronology. Or you
are keeping JUST RECORDS. Not a big fat intricate
total-thought-keeping system that I am describing here, but rather,
I’m talking about- you have a business, and you are keeping records
for it, and so you buy a notebook because it’s nice and self contained
and stuff like that. Another nice thing is that you know the pages
aren’t going anywhere. There are times where that’s not what you
want. And you can turn pages easier. It’s just easier.

But this system that I am describing:

Impossible. You cannot do it like that.

In this system I am describing, you MUST be able to insert pages
between pages. And it’s so incredibly useful to be able to lift 50
sheets and put them in another binder entirely.

Okay, so, please don’t use notebooks. You will die. Quickly.

Now, on to Binders.

What you want to look for:

* Inside Pockets
* Transparent Outside Pockets
* Obstructions on the Outside Spine
* Sheet lifters
* Ring Type
* Width/Size
* Durable vs. Sucky

So, let me start with the last one. I forget what they call the
“non-durable” ones. They cost less. Maybe “Economy” or something like
that. DON’T GET THEM! YES, they are CHEAPER. BUT, even on the budget
that I’m on, you do NOT want them. Because they are going to snap open
when they shouldn’t. Believe me, there’s nothing worse than being on
the bus, hitting the notebook the wrong way, and suddenly WHAM- 100
pages on the floor. Luckily they are numbered and you can put them all
back in the original order, but-

TRUST me- Go with Durable.

You’ll have to unchink both sides to open the ring, but you’ll do so
with the knowledge that it’s keeping your data safe!

DURABLE! All the way!

Okay, next, we’ll talk about width/size and the ring type.

If you are getting, say, a 1″-1.5″ notebook (my carry-about notebook is
somewhere in there), then just get the normal rings. They are three
loops, bound to a metal binding, blah blah blah.

But if you are getting anything larger (and you should have at least
one of these, for your common store- it’s going to be BIG), then you
want to get what I call a “half-loop”. I’m sure there’s formal names
for this stuff, but I don’t care. These things look like one half is a
loop (as normal), but the other half is straight, and has a 90 degree
crook at the end. ALSO, it’s not attached to the binding of the
binder..! It’s attached to THE BACK SIDE of the binder.

These things are SO great. It costs more, but GET IT.

What it does is it keeps your papers from flying out all over the
place when you open your deeply packed notebook. That little 90 degree
crook stopes the pages. It’s great. You’ll have to see it to believe
it, but do. It’s wonderful.

So: Big Notebook, get the half-loop. Small notebook, I think they are
all just normal full-loops. Never seen a small notebook with a half
loop.

Sheet lifters. If your binder has a sheet lifter, Awesome. I like
these. I’m not sure why. They just seem to help. This is more of a
spiritual belief on my part; I’m not really sure. But I leave them
there and they seem to be useful.

Now I’ll talk about inside and outside pockets, and then the possible
obstructions on the outer spine. Then we’ll be done talking about
binders. (It’s a fetish thing, I guess.)

The inside pockets are really useful. I use them to store tabs in when
they aren’t in use.

Oh- REMEMBER that you (if you could) bought those pockets, right?
Stick one at the front of every binder. Store donut holes and stickies
in them. That’s just the place to do it. And you’ll store the tabs’
“guts” in there too. You know, these long sheets of 1″ wide paper,
periforated at about 1/6″ in height. You write whatever the tab’s name
is on them, tear them off, and put them in the tab page, right? And
then you put the tab page into your notes, and you can quickly flip to
them. Tab page guts- you know what I’m talking about, right?

Good. (One day, I may, or someone may, put pictures in this
description. Then those of you who don’t get “tab guts” can see what I
mean.)

In the inside pockets, you’ll store larger things like your tab pages
themselves. And when people give you stuff, and of course they didn’t
triple hole punch it, you’ll put it in there until you get home and
punch it yourself.

Outside pockets. This is really important.

You’re going to identify your notebooks quickly by the outside
pockets. You can get away with not doing this, but it’s a pain in the
butt. Pay the extra money (this is becoming a theme, is it not? trust
me, I’m not rich, if you haven’t picked up by reading this yet- [HEY,
I'm a PROGRAMMER, and it's the year 2003] but pay the extra money
nonetheless) and get the pockets.

Here’s what I do with them:

For archive notebooks, I put the letters that are archived. For
example, “A-M” and “N-Z”.

My common-access notebook (a big fat one) doesn’t have covers. I think
that’s because I got it for free at a college giveaway, and wasn’t
being picky. No matter, it is jet black, and none of the others are,
so I can easily identify it.

My carry-about notebook has, “default”, two pictures of Lions on
it. My name is Lion, so I put Lions in there, and people are able to
put it together that it’s mine. The Lions are smiling, and it
communicates something of my nature to people. I think.

But usually the “default” isn’t there. I keep a varient of the GTD
system running (”Getting Things Done” by David Allen), and so I
generally have my day’s alerts, options, and chores on the very
front. (Not that this is strictly defined in GTD, but I’ve adapted it
a bit.)

And I usually have on the back cover, covering a Lion, a general plan
for how my day will go out and bus trips (http://transit.metrokc.gov)
for the day. It is very, very useful.

Finally, you want to look at the spine, if you have outside pockets,
and make sure it is not obstructed. Frequently there are three “bolts”
on the outer spine, and they sometimes pass it through the transparent
pocket on the spine. NOOOOOOOO! We don’t want that!

That means you can’t stick an identifying paper back there! Or if you
can, you can only dig it in half an inch. No, that’s not for you! You
want to be able to put a paper in there that has the name of the
binder on it, so you can quickly ID it when a bunch of binders are
stacked in a row.

There. I am done dissecting binders. If I omitted something, mail me
at lion@speakeasy.org

Next: 3-hole punch.

Again- you’re going to want to print out sheets, and then include
them. Or you’re going to want to include things that people give
you. Very well then, you’re going to need to x3 hole punch it. It’s a
wonderful tool to have, and it will go a long way. I absolutely adore
mine.

Lets go through these small items quickly:

* Donut Rings

I don’t know what the official name is for these things. They are
flat, round, have a hole in the middle, and they reinforce paper.

When you have a lot of papers in your notebook, they will eventually
start to rip at the holes. The rip will grow, and grow, and the next
thing you know, your paper doesn’t stay inside your notebook. The
solution is to, when one hole tears, immediately reinforce all three
with these donut rings. I don’t know if you need to, but to be safe, I
put 6 O-rings to a page. Three on the front of the holes, and three on
the back.

I’ve never had a problem since. I’ve never seen a donut tear.

* stickies

Okay- these are NOT yellow sticky tabs!

What these are, are these little tiny stickers that look like small
rectangles. They are about .5″ wide, if that. You can stick and
unstick and restick them to paper, AND THE PAPER DOES NOT TEAR OR DROP
INK AS YOU DO SO.

These are AMAZINGLY useful.

You will use these extensively as you STRATEGIZE over your notebook.

A brief explanation for now:

Strategy is ultra-time-sensitive. It also involves a lot of
prioritizing, and the priorities will change- rapidly.

You don’t want to mix up your rapid-change stuff with your low-change
stuff. That is, you don’t want permanent marks on your pages for
things that are changing rapidly. So you use these stickies.

On your GSMOC (Grand Subject Map of Contents), you’ll have stickies
pointing you to major important areas of work or thought. You’ll take
them off when they cease to be important, or when you fulfill
them. The same goes for the subject maps within each subject.

That’s basically it. Small idea, but EXTREMELY useful. I’ll write more
about it when it comes time to talk abou it.

* tab dividers

You will use these to keep your subjects apart, and a few other
things.

* pockets!

Now I REALLY don’t know what these things are called. My girlfriend
got them for me by stealing a few from work. When I saw them, I
understood why.

These are little pockets, that you can stick ANYWHERE. They have a
plastic white back, and a transparent front. The back and front form
the pocket, which opens from above, and is sealed around the edge. But
the back ALSO has a sticky thing. You peel off a layer, and you can
stick the whole pocket ANYWHERE. This is VERY useful.

I use the pocket to store the following things:

* my donut holes
* my stickies
* stamps (as in, postal stamps)

It has worked like a charm.

So in recap, your shopping list is:

* paper - get about 8 reams, college rule, 8.5×11″, to start with.
* pen - 3 four-color pens.
* x3 hole punch - get it at a thrift store if you want it cheap.
* donut holes - get 1-2 packages of many sheets.
* stickies - get 1-2 packages of many sheets.
* tab dividers - get about… 50 tabs. To start with.
* pockets - if you can find ‘em, get at least 4 or 5.

Now we talk about transport issues:

* Storage
* Carrying
* Archival
* Handling Optimizations

Storage, Carrying, and Archival will be one big topic here. It’s all
intermingled.

SO.

You are keeping notes. You have papers. Here is a sort of scale of
your papers:

1) scrawled notes on fortune cookie papers, backs of napkins, etc.,.
2) scrawled notes on blank paper.
3) notes collected onto pan-subject speed lists.
4) notes collected in your carry-about binder.
5) notes collected in your common-store binder.
6) notes in the archive.

There is another category, hovering around 5.5: special purpose
collections. For example, I have a binder for “Computers”. In it, it
has subjects such as “Networking”, “Debian”, “Programming”,
“Software”, “XSLT”, etc., etc.,.

I should mention there is also item ZERO:

0) stored in your mind on a peg list.

I’ll talk about that later. If I forget to, mail me, and let me know
that I forgot: lion@speakeasy.org. Yes, I know that I could keep a
list of promises to keep here in my emacs buffer. But to be frank,
after having been keeping so many lists for so many months, that I
really just don’t feel like making one. Pardon my rudeness, but if you
actually DO what I am describing here, you’ll understand what I’m
talking about. Back to the subject at hand.

So let me describe each of these sources.

SCRAWLED NOTES ON FORTUNE COOKIE PAPERS

Some times, you just flat out DON’T have your carry-about binder
with you. And you don’t have your pan-subject speeds paper. And you
don’t even have a blank paper. And your peg list is full, or you don’t
feel like cycling it.

So you just have to make do with what you have.

You put a note on the back of the envelope and stuff it in your
pocket. Or you take that fortune cookie slip out and write on it. Or
whatever.

GREAT!

I mean, it sucks. But at least you got that thought! Good for you.

SCRAWLED NOTES ON BLANK PAPER

Or maybe you have a blank piece of paper in reach. Write the thought
of it, and put it in your pocket.

PAN-SUBJECT SPEEDS

But if you can, be prepared in the morning, and put a pan-subject
speeds page in your pocket.

I’ll talk much more about speeds in my exposition on “Intra-Subject
Architecture”, but a little bit should appear here.

The Pan-subjects speeds page is optimized to have graduate-student
rule. This is beyond College rule. You want 40+ lines on a
pan-subjects speed page to cram thoughts into. Again: DENSITY is the
name of the game.

Furthermore, the pan-subject speeds is partitioned. It has:

* Transcription Checkoff
* Subject
* Hint
* Content

You can put whatever you want in there. Mine also has a place for a
“Psi” marker. That’s where you list what type of thought it is, in
terms of “Principle” or “Observation” or “Warning” or “Possible
Action” or “Goal” or “Problem” or “Starting Point” or a host of other
glyphs. I’m not going to talk about these because they are beyond the
scope of Notebooks. They go more into mental techniques; Has to do
with mental structure and the anatomy of thought. While related and
quite fascinating, I’m just not going to go there. Whole ‘nother
discussion for a whole ‘nother day.

The point is, the format is maleable. Include whatever you want. I
also have a date marker at the top of the page, for the Chrono
archives. Whatever you want.

DO NOT PUT THOUGHT NUMBERS on the Pan-Subject Speeds page though. Bad
idea. The purpose of the Pan-Subj speeds is to be a TEMPORARY
placeholder for ideas.

So what are these four things:

Transcription Checkoff: You check the box after you have moved the
idea OUT to where it needs to go. Don’t check it when you first put
the thought in.

Subject: This will tell what subject the thought will go
into. Remember: The subjects are the big things divided by the tab
delimiters that have their whole own infrastructure on their own, that
I will describe later.

Hint: Now, this is a quick 1-2 word, maybe 3 word, description of how
this thought fits into things.

Something I learned late, but that is very important, and very
essential to this whole process, is that:

WHEN A NEW THOUGHT APPEARS
IT DOESN’T DO SO IN A VACUUM
IT DOES SO IN A CONTEXT.

Words to the wise.

So the “hint” describes the context. This is VERY IMPORTANT!

The context is fresh in your mind when you get the thought! It would
take a while to recognize the thought, and then identify the context,
if you didn’t.

I used to try to think of every context a thought could fit in, and
then try to place it in as many places as I could. WHILE THIS IS THE
STRATEGY TO PERSUE WHEN USING A COMPUTER SYSTEM (see
http://speakeasy.org/~lion/weird.html to see an example of this), this
is NOT the strategy to persue in the paper system..!

Besides, the thought is MOST useful in the ORIGINAL context, 95% of
the time.

And your hint- that’s going to be USED. In some respects, it’s EVEN
MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE THOUGHT ITSELF! Because, as you will see if
you do this for a while, it is STRUCTURE and INTEGRATION that is
important- the actual contents of the thoughts are far less
meaningful. Once you have the structure in front of you, the content
because almost obvious..! We’ll use that fact in a bit, as we shorten
titles to just Speed#’s. Don’t worry about that now, though.

And then there’s the content of the thought itself.

Now, say you’re in a hurry- right? You just want to jot down a
thought. You’re running medical records, and you can’t carry your
carry-binder with you as you do so. Hey, there are limitations in
life. But you were good, and folded up a pan-subj speeds with you to
carry around. You unfold it, and write down the content of the
thought, greatly abbreviated, into an open “content” slot.

Do you have to fill in the hint as well? And the subject?

NO!

Just wait for break. In break, you can flesh out the content if you
like, and you can also fill in the subject and the hint. It won’t be
hard. Just don’t wait a whole day to get to it- do it SOON.

Now focus your thoughts on the very next work step, because you want
to STOP thinking ASAP.

Note that the pan-subj speeds paper is FAR better than a blank piece
of paper, because it provides order and space to fill in. Believe me:
When you start transcribing off the pan-subject speeds to the speed
pages, you’ll understand how useful this is.

NEXT:

NOTES COLLECTED IN YOUR CARRY-ABOUT BINDER

Your carry-about binder will be YOUR BEST FRIEND.

That’s right: You are going to carry this EVERY PLACE THAT YOU
CAN. Going to the movies? Riding the bus?

Wherever you go, your carry-about binder is going with you.

Thus you will want to be very particular, even religious, about your
carry-about binder.

(Note: As mentioned, there will be times where you will be ripped
apart from your carry-about binder by force of circumstance. If you
can, bring a pan-subject speed with you. Always keep your carry-about
well stocked with pan-subj speeds so that when you depart, you can
carry a catch away with you.)

A “Catch”: “Catch” is a word I use to describe any device that is used
to keep thoughts as they come.

There are two basic types of thinking: Intentional and
Incidental. Intentional is you sitting down, thinking some issue
out. You’ll be doing that, mostly amidst POI’s (”Point-of-Interest
Pages”). But most of your thoughts will come while you are
out-and-about. So you’ll have to catch them. There are various traps,
called “catches”, that do this. The speed lists are the first good
line of defence. You have some poor ones to: the aforementioned
napkins and fortune cookie slips and envelopes, and blank pages. You
also have the peg’s (”Tie Noah Ma Rye Law Shoe Cow Ivy Bee Dice Tit
Ton Tomb Tire Towel Dish Tack Dove Tub Nose…” - yes, I chose
Dice-Tit-Ton, I know… Though Toes-Tot-Tin were harder to work with.)
But those require a lot of processing and rotation and can get pretty
funky when overused.

Back to topic.

Your carry-about binder. It shouldn’t be too thick- not more than
1.5″. But it shouldn’t be one of those thin things either- you’re
going to be carrying A LOT of STUFF in there.

What kind of stuff is going to be in there?

You’re going to have:
* BLANK PAPER - say, 30-50 sheets.
* Blank form paper - such as pan-subj speeds, blank speeds, map pages,
and whatever other templated form paper you invent.
* A Zillion Speeds & References - Speed lists for your myriad
subjects. Some will be accompanied by references lists.
* Other Stuff - (I personally keep a lot of GTD related materials in
there.)
* Perhaps a Subject - Sometimes you carry a subject around from the
common store, because you are processing it, or adding new content to it.

You won’t be carrying ALL of your subject speeds in there- only the
speeds that you are still filling out. For example, if you have 140
speeds in a subject, and the last page of speeds starts with S127,
then the last page, with S127-S140, is the only speed page that will
be in your carry-about binder. The rest are back wherever the subject
is presently residing (probably the common-store binder, or maybe in
the archives).

All of your references go there, however, because you want to be able
to give people references quickly. When you talk with people about a
subject, show them your list of references, so that you can recommend
good references to them.

Next: NOTES COLLECTED IN YOUR COMMON-STORE BINDER

Particularly, the notes will be organized into subjects. You’ll also
have a place called “CHAOS” (which will be quickly dumped to archive,
because it is nearly the most useless thing you will have, though very
occasionally used), and a place called “UNPLACED”, for pages that are
important but haven’t been placed, and for pages that would be placed,
but that they aren’t numerous enough to warrant a full-on
subject. (You’ll indicate the subject that they WOULD belong to at the
top. Organize A-Z by would-be subject. When reach about 5-10 pages,
make a full-on subject for them, with all that entails.)

But mostly, the common-store is just the subjects you have been using
lately- say the last 20-40 days.

Ocassionally, you’ll go through the common-store, and take subjects
out that you haven’t touched lately, and put them into…

Lastly: NOTES IN THE ARCHIVES.

These are big binder that store old subjects that you won’t be putting
anything into for a while. Start with A-Z, split into A-M/N-Z, and
further as you fill them up. Make sure they have transparent covers
and transparent spines that you can put papers into in order to
declare their letter ranges quickly.

The “Chaos” subject- a non-subject, should go under “C”. Dump chaos
into the archives frequently.

The archives have a second use as well: In addition to storing
subjects that aren’t being used, it is also used as an archival space
for subjects that ARE in use, but have archival content.

Some subjects have old junk in them, but old junk that you still want
to be able to follow up links to. You mark old junk with a red mark at
the bottom of the page (I use the Japanese/Chinese mark for “Old”),
and then you store it at the end of the subject space. (We’ll talk
about this later, in the Intra-Subject pages, discussing page layout.)
The archival content is at the back. When you decide to get around to
it, you can take the archival content and throw it into the Archive
subject. Even though you are still using the majority of the content
in the common-store binder, or perhaps even carrying it temporarily in
your carry-about binder.

So. We’re about done discussing Materials; The last topic is handling
optimizations. That is, tricks for dealing with papers.

I’ll talk about papers you are going to throw away, and then I’m going
to talk about handling speed lists.

Paper you will throw away.

Put a gigantic big “X” over any paper you are throwing away. You don’t
want to keep running back and forth to the trash. Just start a stack
of pages you are throwing out. Put a big X on them as you decide to
throw them out. In RED, if you can.

If you have a page that you are GOING to throw away, but are still
using, temporarily, put a DASHED X on the page. That signifies to you
that the page is on its way out, but still in use. THEN, when you are
done with it, put a solid X over the dashed X.

Speed lists.

It is always best to put a speed onto the subject page’s speed that
the speed is going to.

Let me make this clearer: You do NOT want to use the pan-subject
speeds list! Yeah! You don’t! Even though we made them! Because it’s
another transcription step, and we want to minimize
transcriptions. What you want to do is put it on the destination speed
list first.

The only reason we have the pan-subject speeds lists is because we
don’t always have access to the carry-around binder, where we are
storing the latest speed list for every subject.

But when you CAN, when you have access to the carry-around, put the
thought directly into the carry-around.

NOW: Frequently, you’ll be thinking about some subject, but thoughts
about another subject are also coming to you. What you want to do is
to TAKE OUT those speed lists that thoughts are going to frequently,
and you want them close by your side. That way you don’t have to go
rifling through dozens of speeds. You just have 3-7 by your side, and
work through those. Much quicker.

Next: When you have a big pan-subject speed list, with multiple
entrees to a single subject, you want to use that to your
advantage. You want to check them all off onto the one subject speed
list while you are there. Yes, seems like common sense, but I had to
figure out a lot of this stuff over time, so I’m telling it to you,
even though you may already know. Just in case you don’t.

But remember: Avoid using the pan-subject speeds.

And now, having just told you that, I am going to give you another
case where you should use pan-subject speeds. Some times, you are
trying very hard to work on one thing, but thoughts just keep coming
at you from all angles. But you are trying so hard to stay on one
topic, and don’t want to deal with all of the maintenance promises. In
this case, use the pan-subject speeds. Yes, it means more work for you
later, but, at least, you get to concentrate on your task at hand, and
trust that everything is caught into your pan-subject speeds.

There you are.

That is what I have to say here about handling optimizations:

* Trash X’s
* Pull out speed lists that are frequently accessed during a writing
session.
* Transcribe pan-subj speed lists in batch.
* Avoid pan-subj speeds, save when you absolutely need them, either by
being unable to carry your carry-about binder, or by difficulty
concentrating amidst flipping from speed list to speed list.

So in recap:

We talked about:
* Raw Materials
* The carry-about, common-use, and archival Binders
* Handling Optimizations

So you know what I have to say about the materials that the notebook
system rests on.

Next, I’ll talk about general principles that apply across the entire
notebook system.

Then, we’ll go into the intra-subject architecture, followed by the
extra-subject architecture.

Then I’ll talk about the Theory of how this all works together.

Finally, for those techno-philes out there (and you are many), I’ll
write about the Question of Computers. Why they suck for what we are
trying to do, why it doesn’t HAVE to be that way, describe a simple
program, that, if written, could alleviate 50-90% of the burden of
this system (albeit at a cost…), and I’ll describe my notion of the
ultimate note-keeping computer system.

I will also talk in that last section about the versioning problem, a
problem that plagues even the existing notebook system, as I have
described it, though it is a bit more managable on paper. Maybe Ted
Nelson has solved it. Maybe he hasn’t. I don’t know. He’s not telling
us. I do not believe it can be solved. Not in a way that we really like.

—————————————-
II. General Principles
—————————————-

This is a description of some general principles, some general themes,
that apply to the entire notekeeping process.

1) Information Presentation issues:
* Page Layout
* Partitioning
* Info Density
* Page Numbers
* (Maps)

2) Process:
* Late Binding
* Out Cards
* Tolerance for Errors
* “Starting in the Middle”
* “Divide when Big”

3) Writing Form:
* Color
* Quality

4) Psychology

5) Maps

We’ll start with Information Presentation issues:
Page Layout, Partitioning, Information Density, Page Numbers.

We’ll start w/ Info Density, then Partitioning, then Page Layout, than
Page Numbers.

Information Density has to do with how much information we can cram on
to one pages. There are times where you are going to want a loose
density, and times where you will want very tight density.

When you are working with things like MOC’s, TOC’s, or any other
form of presenting raw *data*, then you want to make things as tight
as possible.

There are many ways of doing this, but one of the best ways is to have
a template that helps you write small and cram things together. For
example, I have standard form speeds (both subject and pan-subject)
that keep ~45 lines of text- far more than a college rule. It makes
you write small. And it’s not just height- when you write small, you
write small in width too, so something that once took 3 lines now only
takes 2.

Information density is a MUST for tables of contents. No double
spacing, unless you love flipping pages and scanning with your eyes!
You want to be able to see as much as possible in as small a space as
possible.

On the other hand, there are times where you will want things spaced
out. If you are writing in a POI, you’ll want to have plenty of room
for comments from the future. You’ll want to have space to interrupt
yourself, or maybe later draw diagrams. You will want LESS information
density.

So keep these things in mind as you work on your notes.

Next: Partitioning.

Partitioning will be a recurring theme as you keep your
notebooks.

Let’s take the example of a single page: Do you have a space for the
Title? How big will you want it to be? How about the page number? How
much space will you allocate for revision? How about the page’s date-
do you want to leave space for that?

Content. As mentioned in information density, you’ll want space for
future comments. Perhaps you are anticipating a lot of work in the
future, so you’ll allocate more space for that possible future
content.

Now lets get off the page, and talk about namespace.

Whenever you create a system for naming things, you are working in
partitioning. You have only so many letters. True, you have infinite
glyphs, but they are kind of hard to make indexes out of- they have no
intrinsic ordinality, the way letters do.

Some time you may want to reserve a space of page numbers for some
particular thing to be filled in in the future. We’ll talk about page
numbers in a moment.

Partitioning is difficult for me to talk about in the abstract, so I
just want to leave you with understanding that “Partitioning is
something that I’ll be spending some time thinking about.” When the
particulars of your immediate situation become clearer to you, you’ll
see what needs to be done. You will have options. The strategies in
this book will describe many to you. Over time, you will gain skill in
partitioning.

Page Layout.

The last two topics have been pretty vague: “Think about info density,
think about partitioning.”

This one is going to be pretty specific.

On a given page, you can find the following things:

* Content
* Date
* Title
* Page ID (”Page Number”)
* Sequence Identification
* Archival Mark

You are probably familiar with the first four, the last two may be a
little bit of a mystery to you.

The details of the first four:

Content will fill most of your page. I need not explain it.

The date goes in the top right corner. It reads something like
“(Sunday) 25 May 2003.” I use the Japanese characters for Sunday,
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. I highly
recommend learning those particular characters. They are not hard,
they are very useful, and they look far more different than one
another than the letters for Sunday Monday Tuesday etc.,. You’ll be
able to mark down the day of the week a lot quicker, and you’ll have
greater information density. Highly recommended.

The Title appears at the top of the page, centered. Usually the title
will include some sort of identification. For example, a title may
read: “POI #26 - the Kitty Model”. The title is “the Kitty
Model”. “POI #26″ is the identification for the sequence of pages:
This is Point-of-Interest #26. You needn’t always have a title, nor
need an identification. But it’s best to have both.

Titles are most important for POI’s, because they delimit the
boundaries of the POI. Anything that goes beyond the boundary of a
POI’s point of agreements or title are basically lost, as far as
retrieval at a later date goes. That is, if it isn’t described by the
title, you won’t be able to find it. Stay in bounds, spark new POIs
when you need to. I’ll talk about this more later, when talking about
POIs.

Now we have the “Page ID”. It’s a whole topic on it’s own, so I’ll
talk about it after I talk about “sequence marks” and “archival
marks.” For now, let’s just say that the page number goes in the
bottom right corner, so that you can flip pages and find what you are
looking for.

Sequence Marks.

When you create POI #28, it may consist of 1 page, it may consist of 3
pages, it may consist (you want to avoid this) of 27 pages.

But you don’t want to have to turn the page to see if there is more
material or not. That’s a waste of time. So what we have are “Sequence
Marks”. They effectively say whether there is another page in the
sequence or not.

As we see when we talk about Page ID’s, some times you can tell just
by the Page ID. (”P27″, alone, means that there is no next page, that
this is a one-sheeter. But if it reads “P27-1″, than you know that
this is the first of several.)

But generally you can’t.

In the bottom right corner, you put a little glyph- a little arrow
pointing to the right- to mean “Continues on the next page.”

And if there is nothing on the bottom right corner, that means that
you were too busy to put the arrow there, but that you can still,
probably go to the next page as well.

However, if you see a little “box”, a little square, drawn in the
bottom right corner, then that means that that’s the end of the
sequence.

Unless! Unless! You might extend the POI (or whatever sequence it is-
maybe some Research, or a Reference, or whatever) later, in which case
you need to put an arrow through the box.

The box is made transparent, so that you can later put something in it
to cancel the box.

So if you see a box with an arrow on top, that means that once this
was the last page of the sequence, but that you later extended it, so:
Turn the page.

The sequence mark appears ABOVE the page ID.

Archival Marks.

Archival Marks appear to the LEFT of the page ID. (This is all in the
bottom right corner of the page, now.)

The archival mark is a RED mark (unlike the BLUE page numbers and
Sequence markers). It can look like whatever you want, I personally
use the Japanese Kanji for “Old”.

It looks like this:

|
—–
|
—
| |
—

Looks sort of like a tombstone.

If you put that mark there, that means that the information on this
page is no longer required in the subject, in the common-store
binder. However, it may still be the target of some links you set up
some time long ago, so you want to keep it around. (In the Archives!
Not carrying it around with you everywhere.)

So what you do is POINT to the MOST RECENT information on the page-
put a note in red saying, “SEE ALSO: (page id of more recent
information)”, and then at the very bottom of the page, to the left of
the page ID, put your red glyph for “Archive.”

Archival pages are in the back part of your section, in terms of
physical page layout. Not the VERY back- that special page is for
abbreviations and shorthand. But generally, you throw archival stuff
out back. Then when you want to save space, you take all of the
archival stuff, and merge it into the archive binders.

Finally- Page Numbers.

I use the word “Page Numbers”, but I should really be saying “Page
Identification”, because it’s actually much more than a number.

Here’s are some actual “page numbers” from my notebooks:

“Notebook S27-S47″
“GKI REF 1-II-1, 1-III-1″
“Mental Technique P7-1″
“P2-3″

The first one means: “This is a page in the Notebooks subject,
representing Speed Thoughts numbered 27-47.”

Next: “This is a page on the Global Knowledge Infrastructure; It’s a
commentary on reference number 1; In particular it is commentary on
sections II and III of the document.” (In the references list, you
would see that reference number 1 was “Towards High-Performance
Organizations: A Strategic Role for Groupware”, by Douglas C Engelbart
in June 1992.)

Next: “This is a page on mental techniques, the first page in POI #7.”

The last, “P2-3″, says nothing more than “This is page #3 of POI #2.”
How do you know what the subject is? Because it’s in the tab “Personal
Records.” Since you don’t move pages around (we’ll actually talk about
that later on- there ARE times when you do- see the section on “Out
Cards” below), there’s no need to worry that you won’t be able to put
it back, unless there’s some freak disaster (such as hitting an
economy binder the wrong way, pages spill out, and then something
happens to ALSO, further, put the pages radically out of order- I’ve
never seen that last part happen).

So the parts of a page ID are:

Subject - Segment - Segment ID - Page ID

It’s a little different for reference segments, because they adapt to
the form of the book that they are commenting. But I’m getting ahead
of myself.

The “Subject” part is optional. You don’t HAVE to repeat the subject
over on every page. I’d argue that it’s not even good to do that,
unless you have good reason to believe that your binder is going to
explode and all the papers fly out in completely different, unordered,
directions. If you fear that kind of thing, put the Subject on every
single page. Or at least an Acronym for the subject. (Replace “Global
Knowledge Infrastructure” with “GKI”.)

There ARE places where it’ll be good to put the subject on EACH page,
and you’ll even want to spell it ALL the way out.

In particular, I am thinking of the Speeds pages, and your P&P
pages. Your latest speeds pages, and your P&P pages, from myriad
subjects, will all be living right next to each other. You will need
to flip between them, thus necessitating the appearance of the subject
name in the Page ID. More than that though, you will need THE FULL
SUBJECT NAME spelled out, because otherwise you are going to have to
expand out the full name of the acronym when you are ordering the
speeds. “Does MTK come before or after MP?” quickly grates on the
nerves. (This is “Mental Techniques” vs. “Metaphysics.” N is #12, and
T is #19, so MTK does indeed come before MP, even though by acronym,
it would appear to go the other way.) So just spell everything out on
your speeds and on your P&P’s.

After the (optional) subject is the (required) segment.

The segment signifiers I use, in no particular order, are:

* PJ - “Project”
* POI or P - “Point of Interest”
* RS - “Research”
* REF - “Reference”
* A/S - “Abbreviations/Shorthand”
* P&P - “Purpose & Principles”
* I - “Index”
* SMOC or M - “Subject Map of Contents”
* S - “Speed Thought”
* Cht - “Cheat Sheet”

We’ll talk about these segments more in “Intra-Subject Architecture.”
All you need to know for now, is that there are these segments, and
that they have a short identifier, and you’ll be sticking that
identifier in your page ID.

Most common will be:
* S (Speeds)
* M (Map, or more appropriately, Subject Map of Contents [SMOC])
* P (POI, the Point of Interest), and
* REF (Reference).

Sometimes I use “R” rather than “REF”, but it’s problematic because it
is easily confused with “RS”- Research. Quite different things, though
similar.

Immediately following the Segment Identifier, you will have a NUMBER.

That number can mean one of either two things:

It can be a TOC #, or it can be a VERSION #.

They are only slightly different.

The TOC number means “Ordinality in a table of contents.” Even if you
aren’t keeping a table of contents yet (there’s not much reason to
make a table of contents over only 2 or 3 POI), you still have the
notion of ordinality, and that the pieces in the segment are in some
sort of addressible order. So that’s the first.

The second, “Version#”, is when you have things that don’t really have
a table of contents.

Consider A/S (”Abbreviations & Shorthand”) for example. You never have
multiple A/S’s. There’s just one- the A/S. Holding all of the
abbreviations and shorthands that you use.

Ah, but maybe it’s getting over stuffed. Maybe you’ve filled out all
your hash tables in the A/S section, so you need to make a new
version- “A/S2″. You’ll copy all of the original A/S (just “A/S”;
though you can write in a “1″ if you like) into the new, larger
tables, you’ll archive A/S1, and then just use A/S2.

There you go.

The same goes for the maps. You usually start with just a single page
map. But eventually, you need to scrap it, and replace it with four
pages of map. So the first map was v1, and the next map is v2.

Your first map page was just “M”, meaning “This is a map page, the
first map page ever, and there isn’t even a sequence for it, it’s just
a single page.”

But your next map pages will be “M2-1″, “M2-2″, “M2-3″, “M2-4″,
denoting their pages within Map #2.

You can later expand out with “M2-5″, “M2-6″, “M2-7″ if you like.

And eventually, you’ll do a major reorg, and you’ll go afresh with
“M3-1″, “M3-2″, “M3-3″, and so on.

So these are more like Version numbers, in this case, rather than TOC
entry numbers.

Finally, after the subject, segment, and TOC/ver number, you have the
page ID.

Most of the time, this is straight forward.

You start with 1, then you go to 2, then you go to 3, yadda yadda
yadda.

But there are two special things to note:

1) It’s totally different in the REF segment.
2) Sometimes you want to put a page between two existing pages, so you
give it a “half number” or a decimal value. For example, if you want
to put two pages between P7-4 and P7-5, so what you do is you make
P7-4.3 and P7-4.7. Hey! There’s no binder police. You can do whatever
you like, as long as it works for you.

By the way- I want to briefly comment on that principle. “There’s no
binder police.” I’m writing this complex system to you, explaining how
I made it up, and how it works. What’s most important is that you get
the IDEAS here, not that you actually replicate my entire system
exactly. In fact, I hope that you *DON’T*. For one, you are living in
a different mind than I am, so you are going to probably want to put
things in a different way than I do. But more than that, I WANT TO
HEAR NEW IDEAS. I want to know what people do with this. And if you
just say, “Hey, I did it exactly like you,” well, what growth is there
in that? I mean, it might be good for a little while, but I really
want to see what else is out there. My system changed in a major way
at least once every 2-4 months. And it was always a positive
change. So I want to hear what you all do. And remember: There’s no
Binder police, like my girlfriend always tells me about cooking. “You
want to put paprika in there? Throw paprika in there. There’s no
cooking police that are going to go after you.”

So get the meat of what I am saying, the IDEAS on how you can organize
stuff, and then adapt it to your domain.

THEN TELL ME ABOUT IT LATER! YaH! I’d be astonished to hear that
people are doing this- for one- but to hear that you even carried it
FORWARD and tried out NEW Things. That’d just validate my life right
there, on the spot.

Okay. So where were we. Decimal pages. All’s fair in love, war, and
binders. Decimal pages if you like. This isn’t BASIC programming,
where you have to renumber if you want to put something between lines
2 and 3.

But References.

I have found that it is best to annotate references by using the
book’s own organization.

For example, say a book (or web page) is organized into three parts
(I,II, and III), and those parts are divided into chapters (1,2,3…)

Then as you annotate, USE THAT STRUCTURE.

The page ID for comments on chapter 3 of part II should begin with
“II.3″.

At the VERY END of the book’s structure id, THEN put your normal page
numbers, “1,2,3…”

So for example, if you wrote three pages to go along with “II.3″, they
should be ID’d “II.3-1″, “II.3-2″, “II.3-3″.

Or more completely, assuming this is reference #7, in subject
“Robots”: “Robots REF7-II.3-1″, “Robots REF7-II.3-2″, and “Robots
REF7-II.3-3″.

And that’s that for page numbers and Information Presentation issues!

We talked about page layout, partitioning, info density, and page
numbers.

Maps are related, but we’ll talk about them independently.

Next we’ll talk about general PROCESS principles:

* Late Binding
* Out Cards
* Tolerance for Errors
* “Starting in the Middle”
* “Divide when Big”

I want to start with my favorite of these: “Tolerance for Errors.”

This is ALL IMPORTANT.

You can’t do this and be a perfectionist. (Well, okay, it does require
some sort of perfectionism to insist on recording and integrating
every meaningful thought. But lets ignore that for the moment.)

I had a good friend in high school. Every day, he would make sure that
the entire classes notes fit onto 1 page. This wasn’t done for any
good reason, it was just the sort of thing like “step on a crack break
my mothers back”, and you just get into it and can’t stop. So he write
REALLY REALLY SMALL on the page. And each page was perfectly,
identicly formatted.

That will absolutely NOT work here.

Now, suppose you are stuck in this. Just say.

Then THERE IS A CURE.

What you must do, first, is realize that the imperfection is
imperfect, because it is getting in the way of optimal experience of
life.

The second, is to INTENTIONALLY FUCK UP YOUR PAGE. And you must do it
a different, unique, creative way, each time, until you no longer have
a phobia of imperfection.

Take a big fat pen, of the “wrong” color, and put a big line down the
middle of the page.

Or!

Intentionally- On Purpose- Completely Mis-ID the page. Say it’s a page
from another section, another segment, and a TOC entry ID number like
“Infinity” or draw a little happy face where the page ID goes.

Put “Yesterday” as the date. Or whatever.

Just mess it up. On purpose.

And then sigh a breath of relaxation.

You’ve screwed the virgin. There’s no need to worry now.

Similar to this notion of Tolerance for Errors is “Starting in the
Middle.”

Suppose you have a new idea on how to organize your notebooks. That’s
GOOD! You want to evolve your system. Most of your ideas will be good!
You’ll have some bad ones, but all in all, most will be good, and
you’ll want to encourage the process of evolving.

What you DON’T want to do is go back to your months worth of previous
notes, and adapt them all the the new system.

Absolutely not. If you do that, you’re going to be stuck forever in
your old thoughts, whenever you get a new idea.

So the trick is to “Start in the Middle.” Just start NOW with the new
system.

If you want, you can partition out part of your namespace for a new
experiment. Maybe have a segment named “X” for a while, until you
figure out whether you like it or not. Then you can rename it if you
like. (When devising naming systems, always leave “outs” if you can.)

So we’ve talked about tolerance for errors, and starting in the
middle. These are process issues we’re talking about, again.

Now lets go back now and talk about Late binding, and out cards.

Out cards: When you move a page from one place to another place, you
need to put an “out card” in the old place. That is, you put a page in
the old place that the same PAGE ID as the old place, that points to
the new page.

That’s because sometimes you have links to the old place. You don’t
know, and you don’t care to keep track. If you had bidirectional links
all over the place (this seems to be one of Ted Nelson’s favorite
ideas), it would take forever to do (you couldn’t refer to something
without actually digging it up and then linking back), and you’d have
all these irrelevant links all of ther place. Sometimes a forward link
matters a lot more than knowing that you are linked. Anyways.

You don’t know if you are linked to or not, or by how many. I suppose
you could count, but it seems like a waste of time. The solution is
the OUT CARD.

If you find that a bunch of out cards are next to one another, you can
just consolidate them into one, with a wide-range page ID. For
example, “POI3, Pages 4-7″.

Now that we’ve talked about out cards, it’s easier to talk about late
binding. Late binding is a common theme in the notebooks.

You want to do work that doesn’t apply to the present moment, and
that might be rendered completely unnecessary, AT THE LATEST TIME
POSSIBLE.

A demonstration.

You make a page, but later move it. So you have an out card.

Now you move the page AGAIN, so you have two out cards.

Out card 1 points to Out card 2 points to the page.

Now, suppose you find a link to out card 1. “That’s interesting,
what’s this?” You find out it goes to Out card 2. “Curious and
curiouser!” Finally you find the page.

Now, generally, if you follow a link, you are more likely to follow it
again in the future. It’s a subject of thought and what not. So what
you do, after looking up the final link, is that you go to outcard 1,
and correct it to point not to card 2, but to the final
destination. And then you go to the ORIGINAL