I was invited and today attended a workshop on using SAS Enterprise Guide. We worked on computers in the Sprott School of business Lab E this morning. I found out about a meeting of the Ottawa Area SAS Users Society that is happening tomorrow morning. To attend this tomorrow I will go back to normal days with early mornings and early nights.

I installed SAS 8.1 on the WinXP side of the laptop. I also installed R 1.9 from my data mining course CD and then did a virus scan of the whole machine. That scan was done with Norton so it did not scan the Linux side of that computer. I have been using my iPod regularly and been listening to the Cyberpsych meets the PDA guy podcast from Australia.

After listening to the PDA guy I tried out iBlog. I used it to create a blog for my grad studies. I hosted it at my school web space. School internet? Lets just say this was part of the law and disorder internet in the 1990's.

I listened to some podcasts, which are in this case just spoken radio like entertainment. But the difference is that they are digital and thus can seemingly be saved for later use or reference. I have also listened to two or three albums of music. I have two reasons to listen to more music. One I need to put more relaxation into my schedule because even reading is work for me. And two I am taking up my music career a bit more including giving a free lesson today at about midnight, in blues playing and also major and minor scales on the guitar. In my studies today and in the podcast I was learning about PDA's as well and I mention this here because the applications I installed and tested on my Palm PDA today were artistic tools. One is called Fretboard and is very useful and not bad as an interface for what it does. It is able to show the fretboard positioning for chords, scales, and notes for a variety of fretted instruments and this is really its power is that it has many fretted instruments I have never played on nor have played with players of these instruments. Another music tool for the palm PDA was the software Tuning Fork which played throught the speaker on the palm perfect A notes at 440. I tried it to play 880 which it did but then the palm froze and needed to be soft reset.

The other PDA art tool was Q draw perhaps more in line with my school training in arts and I used it to draw a floor plan of our apartment. I was quicker and did a better drawing, than I have with other softwares like Illustrator and Photoshop. The reason perhaps is because doing this on the palm was more like holding a sketch pad with a pen instead of a mouse. Yet the various drawing tools are similar to other computer drawing programs where there are tools such as shapes and fill and of course text my all time favorite tool as I was trained to techincal drawing and map making. These types of drawings are incomplete without text labels.

Apparently this months Mac World has some stuff on using the PSP with the Macintosh computer. I may pick it up later this month. I just listened to a pod cast by the PDA guy on my new iPod 60GB. I have almost put 4 GB of songs on now. I have some podcasts( I have surfed the health catagory for podcasts at iTunes store so far) and about one thousand photos. The 60GB iPod photo took a price dive this week as the new models came out so I took advantage of this and picked up one of the old models at a reduced price. I also got an open box item from future shop for further savings. I got an Otter iPod case, l as I would recommend for an iPod, as these are water proof, dust proof, and some of their cases are crush proof. I have simple Otter case for my PDA not the full PDA case they make but just a box. I can work the iPod while it is protected in the case.

I am tempted to buy a 60GB iPod but have set a goal of debit repayment for next weekend that if I don't make it I don't consider the iPod further. I got my PSP working with the eMac again.

Talking about confusion I am thinking that emacs(which are not eMacs) are an answer to my computer needs from the 1980's. I wanted a word processor in those days but could not afford one for our Vic 20.

I have been reading these critcal works about the internet recently:

Rose, Ellen. User Error: Resisting the Computer Culture (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2003).

Shenk, David. Data Smog : Surviving the Information Glut (San Francisco, Calif. : Harper Edge, 1997).

Stoll, Clifford. High Tech Heretic: Why Computers Don't Belong in the Classroom and Other Reflections by a Computer Contrarian (New York: Double Day, 1999).

Ellen Rose makes some interesting comments about hackers and how she can and can not say who these people are and what motivates them. I am curious to see this attempt being made at all.

on emacs: I think Richard Stallman must have been pretty smart of have assessed our needs as hackers in the 1980s and late 1970's by choosing to build a word processor but perhaps given computing needs of programmers this was not such a great move. He needed emacs for programming in other words writing code. But I cant even be sure that is why he made emacs that is just what I have read. Perhaps I should email him about this or check his web site. As opposed to writers and what we needed I am not so sure Richard Stallman the original author of the emacs software was really creating something free for authors and writers.

A sister worker sent me this link but I haven't checked it out yet. How to encourage women in computing
(http://infohost.nmt.edu/~val/howto.html")

I worked with Dreamweaver for about two hours last night. I also did some Perl research on the web and also on a Perl books CD from O'Reilly. I am updating my blogs regularly. I downloaded all my law course outlines as pdf's to my palm pilot. I chatted at Yahoo using both chitchat and yahoo messenger yesterday. I bought some DVD+R's to use at school where they have DVD burners. I will back up my files soon by taking my USB 20 GB drive to school with the files on it and then burn these files to DVD. I did some planning of this back up Wednesday morning. I also made some back up CD's on my eMac of web files and work related files. I tried the wireless internet at school with my PSP but need to use pop up windows on this wireless network for it to work.

I did not yet buy an iPod. I used the T30 Thinkpad to change the songs on the PSP.

I have my first rack now. It is case for 10 U on wheels and is totally covered but not fully weather proof. It is lockable to a limted extent. I now need a good power bar for this rack. A dual pentium III server for this rack would cost about 400$ US or about 500$ CND. A cheap laptop might be a better idea. I am thinking of writing a book about open source music workstations. I know nothing about Linux music workstations so would present it after and as I learned these workstations.

I am just installing pdf's from my eMac desktop to my palm. I would also like to change the songs on my PSP but it doesn't seem to connect to the eMac and let me access the folder. The PSP does not show up in the finder window when I connect it. I almost bought an iPod yesterday. Maybe I will buy a 20GB iPod today.