As Robert continues on his 50 Novels in a Year Challenge, I watch in envy as he checks each interesting book from his list. My love of a good challenge and a good book, and my new Sony PRS-505 Reader purchase, finally made me decide to jump in and join him.

I miss reading for fun, as I was a kid who never let a book leave her side but gradually let the academic world steal my reading time (ironic, eh?). OK, I’ll be honest, dating and other social activities also stole that time away :-P.

Since I’m also trying to learn Spanish, I’m including some books translated into Spanish I found online. Reading in my target language has really helped my comfort level and has kept the progress fun. I’m also the type that grew up learning nearly everything through reading books, so it’s only natural (this was largely my dad’s doing–> Me: “Hey, Dad, do you know…” Dad: ”Yes. Here are four college-level books on it, along with some websites that have a lot of info to read.” I love my dad).

So, to the right of this post (those reading on the website and not RSS) I’ll have my book list a-la-Burdock style just for me to track my progress and to pick my next selection from. The Spanish books will be a lot slower than English, but the idea is for those to gradually become faster anyway so it shouldn’t bog me down too much.

By the way, the whole language thing is going great. I can still only create parts of parts on my own, but I can tell I’m improving and I’m actually starting to think in the language at times. I can definitely follow along in written word and I’m getting there in spoken word. A combination of the Michel Thomas method, SpanishPod.com, sentence flash cards, and reading novels in Spanish have really boosted overall progress and I highly recommend a similar approach to anyone reading this.

And thanks to all who emailed me to help me learn. I hope to get to a conversational level pretty soon but right now it just takes so much time for me to produce the language that it’s a largely one-sided conversation! I overestimated my ability to converse with native speakers when I made that post :-P.

That’s right! I gave in and decided I really, really wanted one of these e-book reader things, and the last commenter who mentioned that Target had the Sony PRS-505 was the final straw that just broke my will power!

I didn’t want to wait for the new Kindle or the new Sony, and, hey, the instant gratification factor of the PRS-505 being at Target down the street was a big plus. And this one was cheaper than the Kindle or Sony 700 reader, especially when the wireless would be less useful to me since I have my iPhone.

I’ll review it more but first impression is that I LOVE the screen! As my husband put it, "It looks fake," as in, it looks like you need to peel off the sample "here’s what it would look like if it were on" plastic before using, that’s how clear it is. Awesome. 

And of course, if it’s good enough for my avid-reader co-author, then it’s good enough for me! I’ll be loading books for the rest of tonight :-D.

While browsing John Guin’s blog, I found this cute (yes, I said, “cute”) tip on how he keeps notes on his meetings with coworkers.

I have meetings with all the people on my team regularly, and have a separate section for each.  But that is boring.  I asked everyone to give me a photo, and used MS Paint.net to “fade” the photo.  Then I enlarged them each to about screen size, pasted them onto a page, and made a template for each section with a background photo of the person.  I would post a picture of this, but I had to promise none of these photos would wind up on the internet.

I thought that was fun :-D. Sounds like a good way to keep client notes as well.

Maybe if you’re using OneNote on a powerful laptop or a new, ultra-configured tablet, you may not have noticed any slow-down. Or if you like to keep neat little notes that only use a letter-sized page of writing/text at a time, this likely has never occurred.

But if you use just a half-decent tablet (that’s what I consider my X61T) and you enjoy the freedom of an endless notebook, then you may have noticed the hit that OneNote takes if you start messing with ink and images a few scrolls down the page.

Now, in OneNote’s defense, just having an endless page as an option is cool, but we want perfection! How long has OneNote been out? Years? Let’s get on the ball, wonderful OneNote team (they really do seem like a great team).

But until it’s a non-issue, here are some ideas to help perk up your perpetual page.

Start with the basics

OK, so the problem is with OneNote but if you can’t make the weight lighter, make the muscle stronger!

OneNote increasingly needs more RAM the more words you select, pages you scroll, and images you paste (or so it seemed from my testing), so free up that RAM! Add more if you can. If you only have one gig and you’re running Vista, you really need at least two. If you have two, try three. If you already have three then you’ll probably have better results freeing the RAM you have, but four won’t hurt anything but your wallet.

While messing with your long pages, minimize the use of other RAM-hogging programs, or just other programs in general. Remember that FireFox tends to grab a lot (at least on my machine), especially with numerous tabs open, and often keeps it even after it is closed so you may need to manually end the process in the Task Manager (right click on the bottom Windows toolbar).

I’m not sure if it’s true, but there’s a rumor that just minimizing program windows that aren’t in use can improve the performance of your computer. Worth a shot.

Also don’t forget to end any background services like…well, there are a lot of them so just make sure you know what’s going on. Is Windows indexing stuff? Are you seeding any torrents you don’t know about (not that anyone here would download torrents )? Are there updates to anything downloading or installing? Just keep an eye on this stuff.

There is also the option to sacrifice battery to get better performance, an option I often use. I’d much rather sit by the outlet or only have two-three hours battery if it mean not having any wait time. Your call, but remember it’s an option.

So what is OneNote doing that’s so hard?

I did some research on this and it seems that John Guin, a member of the OneNote test team, explains it best in this post.

Since each line of text from the original file becomes its own element, we track the last modified time for each element and assign it a unique ID. This way, if you (or someone else in a shared notebook) makes a change, we can show who modified which element and at what time the change took place. It does add some overhead to the file.

This is why 20 pages of text in Word acts differently than 20 pages of text in OneNote. A trade of performance for features, and only a performance hit for some users. But I would question Guin’s evaluation when he says,

And there was no detailed case to paste an entire book of prose onto a single OneNote page. This did not surprise me too much - this is not a common operation at all, and I doubt any significant number of people would do this.

OK, maybe not a book of prose, but I have pages upon pages of 50-60 slides in a single OneNote page with written notes on top. I think this has the same effect and I would hardly consider it extreme. Maybe not every user does it like this, but I am sure I’m not the only student who does. You need different test cases, OneNote team.

So what can you do?

We won’t see any major improvement from OneNote for a while, but in the meantime there are some things you can do to help that are internal for OneNote I’d like to thank to reader Julian for help trouble-shooting this problem.

Julian found that changing the Pen Mode (under the Tools menu) to "Create Handwriting Only" and then starting a new page improves the performance of long pages. I think this is because it’s one less thing for OneNote to think about while you’re writing, but do note that this will give you some odd ink-to-text results when it tries to convert that arrow to a word instead of treating it like an image.

You can also check out OneNote’s option panel for some performance options.

• Under the Pen category, turning off pressure sensitivity will make your files smaller and theoretically easier to handle. The only use I find for pressure sensitivity is for highlighting and for using a chisel tip, and since OneNote doesn’t have a chisel tip option, I usually have this option off anyway. My files are big enough as it is.
• I went ahead and turned off the "Automatically switch between Pen and Selection Tool" with the thought that if it’s done automatically, then it’s likely it’s thinking about it while I’m writing. Since I usually know when I want to ink and when I want to select, I turned this off so I can do the thinking for it.
• Under the Audio and Video category, you may have search of audio and video recordings enabled. This happens in the background while you’re plugged in, but if that’s how you usually take notes or mess with your long pages, then it could be indexing those audio files while you work. Like any other process, this can slow you down and you may want to sacrifice audio searching if all else fails.
• Under the Other category, you can disable text recognition in pictures which is technically something that slows down OneNote but it’s one of my favorite features so I never have it checked. I love picture search :-D. Any lag from that is worth it in my book. A better option is the battery performance selector. If you can spare a few minutes of battery life, you might as well have it at Max Performance rather than Max Battery. I’ve found the difference between these two are rather dramatic and if OneNote is ever acting sluggish, this is the first thing I check.

If all else fails, you can always just make subpages instead of long pages, but what’s the fun in that?

Other suggestions?

So those are my suggestions, but I’m fairly sure there are other things you can do that I just don’t know about yet. If you have any ideas that weren’t mentioned or if you’d like to clarify or correct anything I mentioned here, please do comment!

Has anyone ever tried a ModBook, the third party Mac tablet that is a slate made from a normal MacBook? I’m thinking a Mac would be cool for my next computer, or a small Tablet PC slate, but maybe this would be cool. A 13.3″ widescreen, glass slate with a DVD drive, 2.4 GHz processor, and a 160 GB hard drive. Sure, it’s 5.5 lbs, but that’s still on the lighter side of laptops.

And looking at the digitizer, it looks better than the one that most tablets have. It looks like they’re putting one of Wacom’s better digitizers on there, with two button pens, three types of pen tips, and 512 levels of pressure sensitivity (and a screen that’s etched to “feel like paper”).

I wonder what software you would use with this for taking notes? I wonder what type of keyboard support they have, like the Tablet PC Input Panel, and external keyboards. Hmm.

So, I’ve been toying with the idea of getting an Amazon Kindle. Yes, a little pricey, but cheaper than getting a slate Tablet or most UMPCs (not that I was planning on getting either of those anytime soon, however). I thought it could only read Amazon downloaded books and Amazon provided periodicals, but this Top 19 Amazon Kindle Tips article has me seriously considering one of these.

I have so many books in PDF and Word format that I could convert them to Kindle format and have them with me at all times (yes, apparently it IS possible). This thing would fit in my purse. I’m curious if there is a search function for searching your stored library…looking it up…aha! This journalist claims searching is easy. It is odd that there is no backlight but I’m sure that’s what makes the battery life so great (up to a week without the wireless on). It’s also odd that it’s black and white, but I guess most books are :-).

Many of the other features listed on I already have with my iPhone (blog readers, basic email, some audiobook support), but the ebook features look spot on what might just work. And it looks like owners of the Kindle still like it, with only complaints of not being able to flip quickly through a book or accidently hitting buttons.

I know the iPhone can read PDF and Word files, but the screen is much too small for me to read a book on it. I think. Maybe I just haven’t given it enough of a chance. I’ll have to experiment more but my intuition says it’s too small.

But, yes, if any of you who are reading this have a Kindle or looked into it but decided not to get one, please let me know why or what your experience has been. It’s on my short list at the moment.

*Image by JOEKC “JKC”, Kansas City, on Amazon.com

I created a new page on this site called “Open Discussion” that’s an experimental method of chatting about what’s on your mind that’s learning or technology related. Whatever you want. Let it out. Let’s hear it.

If it starts getting confusing or starts branching out, I’ll organize it into subcategories, but I’m interested to see how this works.

You can find the link to the current discussion page and any future links on the right side of the main page —>

¡Hola, todos! (Hello, everyone!)

I haven’t posted as much as I should lately simply because I’ve been engrossed in this whole language-learning thing (and incredibly tired all week). And I just learned how to make an awesome chocolate martini (mmmm, Godiva liqueur and vanilla vodka). Ain’t learnin’ fun?!

But yes, I’ve been busy playing with new toys and reading a LOT. My main focus has been on spaced repetition systems, like SuperMemo and RecallPlus. But before I go into software, I’d like to go into the theory behind using them.

As a side note, if you have any interest in languages and want some reading material, any of the sites mentioned on here and www.how-to-learn-any-language.com are GREAT resources that are overflowing with things to think about and consider. It’s amazing how many languages some of the members of the How to Learn Any Language forums know.

The Sentences Method: Basics

The authors of websites like AllJapaneseAllTheTime.com (AJATT), Spanish-Only.com, and AntiMoon.com promote a system of language learning that involves using flashcards of sentences instead of simple words. This teaches you the structure and grammar of the sentence along with the word in context as many words can have multiple meanings. It also makes it more fun to learn since you can make the sentence whatever you want instead just word after word after word…

But to make the most of this, a system of flashcards that sends to the back the cards you really don’t need to practice every twenty minutes, but frequently asks you the ones you have the most trouble with. You rate how easily you answered the question and then the program does the rest.

Spaced Repetition Software

Before looking around these language sites, I only knew of RecallPlus and SuperMemo. I had actually tried SuperMemo and thought it to be pretty neat but hard to keep everything in there like it recommends. The lack of ink support made it hard to use for equations and formulas which is what I wanted at the time. RecallPlus has ink support but is, well…if you figured out how to use it well, please let me know. It’s just…odd.

So all I really want is a simple program for inputting Spanish sentences and their translations or explanations of certain words. It didn’t need to be fancy, but I’m a fan of stats, reliability, free-ness, and portability. Ink features would be a bonus but not necessary at the moment. OK, I’d really like ink support, but again, not necessary.

Anki seems to fit all these categories. It’s small, free, reliable, and has a lot of stats on each deck of flashcards for me to play number games. It also has a setting for big buttons if you’re using a touch screen (good for us MultiTouch tablet users), which is neat. Even better, it has a free online version so I can sync on my personal computer then study on my iPhone or work computer (during lunch, of course).

The Sentences Method: More

I was skeptical about this whole sentences method since it doesn’t seem much different from regular, single-word flashcards. But I’ve been using it for a week and already there is a significant increase in my comprehension and vocabulary. I was actually able to go to Barnes & Noble and read the titles and descriptions on most of the books in Spanish they offer while last week I only could understand a few.

Here’s my theory behind it:

• Picking sentences to put in you “SRS” (spaced repetition system) forces you to actually look at full sentences in your target language and gain an understanding of that sentence so you can put something in the answer box. I’m sure many students have found how the biggest benefit of making a cheat/crib sheet is the studying you do while making it. It forces you to grab the most important things, the same as how picking out sentences forces you to study words you don’t know and then find their meaning. It’s an active process, not just reading a grammar book.
• As Khatzumoto on AJATT points out, finding sentences and using your SRS is so much more enjoyable, for most, then studying grammar rules and doing worksheets from textbooks. You can read whatever you want to, search whatever you want to, add whatever you want to, etc. Every sentence ever written in that language you’re studying is up for grabs and you get to choose your favorites from all of them. Cool, hu?
• For those of us who really like playing number games, AJATT calls it the 10000 Sentences Method because that’s how many he used to become fairly fluent in Japanese (in 18 months). While it’s emphasized not to painfully search for 10000 sentences and then feel bad when you only have 50 (10000 was a result from collecting, not the reason for collecting), it does give the freedom to add as many as you want, since you can make this database pretty big and then you can look in awe at how much you’ve acquired. Some may find data mining activities like this tedious and would much rather just listen to a language tape, but I LOVE “data mining” or rather, data selecting, and have fun finding fun sentences and their meaning to add to my SRS. This contimues the process.
• Sentences teach you the language just as little kids learn. Not many four year olds know how to conjugate irregular Spanish verbs but they can still speak it just fine simply by imitating those around them. That’s all this method does. It teaches you how to mindlessly mimic native speakers, which helps you improve dramatically.

So yeah, that’s what I’ve been up to lately. I have a three-day weekend to celebrate (OK, it’s just a normal 9-80 work schedule but I celebrate every three-day weekend I get) so I’ll try to get some more posts up. I have a bunch of things on my list to talk about!

After reading about Tracy’s Wannadoeverythingism disease and its ‘nasty’ book collecting symptoms, I remembered something I’d seen a couple of days ago in a Wired article - the personal library of Jay Walker, Internet entrepreneur and founder of Walker Digital. That’s right folks, I’ll say it again - this is Jay’s PERSONAL library, not a public library, but one that he has built up himself; one that the house itself was built around.

Not only is Jay’s library packed with books, many of them rare centuries old editions (including a Indonesian guide to cannibalism :o)), it’s also a teeming treasure trove of knowledge related artifacts. From 300 million-year-old trilobite fossils to meteorite fragments from Russia, early eighteenth century medical illustrations from Italy to medical field kits from the Civil War, Jay has even got a Sputnik 1 satellite hanging from the ceiling.

I’ve only posted one picture above, which on it’s own makes you go WOW, but you really need to get yourself along to Wired and check out the full article. It’s truly insirational!

Now, I wonder if Jay needs an extra cleaner, one who has a quirky English accent? :o)

I’m sorry to have kept this from you, but I’ve been sick for a while. I have a disease that is rare but also goes unreported so it could be more extensive than I know.

I have Wannadoeverythingism.

What are the symptoms?

• A large amount of books on a wide variety of subjects. Barnes & Noble and the library are some of your favorite places to visit, and people often remark, “Wow, you read/have a lot of books.” Constantly filling 300 GB hard drives is a related symptom.
• An intense interest in many widely varying subjects. This is not just a casual, “Hm, that’s interesting,” type of interest, but a strong, can’t-wait-to-get-started interest that usually results in a stop at the bookstore or an all-night surf-a-thon to learn more about that interest. Large amounts of money may be spent in this phase of the disease as you try to jump in to that interest as quickly as possible because your desire to master it is that strong.
• After a burying your nose in the subject 24/7, interest starts to fade once the subject is picked apart piece by piece and all mystery is sufficiently demystified. The fade of interest causes a throbbing sensation above the eyes once all the money spent on this fading interest is realized, combined with a brief moment of clarity where you can identify the illness (but quickly goes away when a new interest is spotted).

So, yes, I have Wannadoeverythingism.

When I decide to pick up a new language, I want to go to the local university and get a degree in it. Or I want become a linguist and learn as many other languages as I can, maybe become a translator. When I’m in church and see someone playing the piano, I want to learn the piano. On the way home I’ll be thinking of what keyboard I can use to practice, when I can fit it in, where best to buy sheet music, and which songs I want to learn first. When I go to a seminar on a topic, I suddenly want to become the industry expert. When I do a site visit, I suddenly want to find a way to work at that site or in that group.

Oh sure, at first it’s cute or makes your family members laugh. Each time you say, “I have an idea,” they’ll learn to expect something insane and over the top.

But then the real sickness starts to surface when you start annoying yourself with all your interest changes. Like a puppy that is cute when he gives you a lick on the cheek, but then drives you crazy with non-stop kisses every time you sit on the couch.

So if you suffer from this illness, please speak out for the cause. Let others know they are not alone and come together for support. Together we can learn to instead harness this sickness and lead a healthy life. Or to put it another way, leave a comment :-).