Just another holiday

Today I woke up early. I don't know what time, but it was earlier than I wanted to be awake. I meant to go climb a mountain today, but yesterday's tennis had left me sore and unmotivated. It became a down day.

I made coffee, the kettle building to a plastic clatter before the clack of the mechanism killed the boil, the steam creeping up the old wooden stairs to the bedroom. Shaking out the kernels of freeze dried joe, I pondered my choice, a poor man's pinch hitter, instant coffee, brought to a dark chocolate brown life by the hot water. It filled the need for a hot drink, leaving a galling lack where regular coffee would have filled my nostrils with a rich roast, my mouth with a deep, complex symphony of tastes. As I took my first scalding sip, I remembered something important: I hate being poor.

Well, nothing to do for it at the moment. I quickly peeled and devoured a smallish banana from the baskets hanging by the kitchen window and my coffee mug clutched in both cold hands, climbed back up the stairs to our bedroom, where M lay still in dreamland. She talked for a long time on the phone last night, with a good friend from her university days whom she hadn't talked with for ages. I figured they were up until 2, so I didn't wake her, didn't even make her coffee.

I plunked myself down on the hard little steel stool that currently serves as my computer desk chair and got to work on my spaced repetition software (SRS), going through repetitions of French, German and Japanese sentences, just bringing them up into memory at just the right time to trigger their storage into long term memory. Lately, though, I've been prevaricating about which SRS to settle on.

There are three that I'm puzzling over. The first, Supermemo, isn't even written for Mac, so I'm running it on a windows emulator. However, it's a beauty in terms of life-style learning. It has a feature called incremental reading which I just love. The only thing about it is it seems to be rather buggy and the Japanese interface is sort of awkward. The second is based, apparently, on a Supermemo algorithm, but is open source, which I like, and is a much more vital piece of software. It has a good, active community working on it's development. The only kicker for me is that it doesn't have incremental reading. The third is called Anki. It's also opensource, which, as I mentioned, I like. It also has a funky furigana feature which automatically gives readings for kanji inputed onto cards. Cool feature. I found it kind of awkward to get into though. The start-up is just a little to fast. Once you've opened the SRS, it just starts right into whatever library you had open at the last session. There's no opportunity to chose what to study etc. I find it just a bit abrupt, and there's no incremental reading.
So I really do love supermemo, but it really is buggy, and not for Mac, or Linux, and do I really want to run windows just so I can run supermemo? Hmmm...

Anyway, time passed, as it does, and M woke up, we had breakfast, she hurt from tennis too, so we really didn't get up to much today. We went for a walk, climbed up the local hill and enjoyed the view, looked at some stuff at the stationary shop nearby, made supper, argued about food, and watched some TV. I found myself back in the kitchen, washing up the dishes and making lunches for tomorrow. M got a call from a friend in Tokyo and is still chatting away. All in all, a low energy day, designed to recoup for tomorrow.