Yesterday evening went out for a couple of drinks in Ningbo which was ok, although it being a Monday night it was pretty quiet. This morning I got a phonecall off one of the teachers I didn't meet yesterday inviting me over to have a chat about what to do and introduce herself. I also ended up watching the weekly raising the flag ceremony which is like assembly in the UK. After that I came back for lunch and to do some lesson preparation for the two classes I had this afternoon.
My first class was ok but not brilliant, but then it was my first one. The second went much better though and I enjoyed it. Both classes have about forty pupils and the classes are very much about learning by rote rather than encouraging the students to use the language for themselves but some of the kids are very bright and pick stuff up quickly. I guess it will take time to work out what I need to do to get the most benefit.
It's nice and sunny here at the moment so it has been pretty warm today. I think that it will start to warm up properly in the next few weeks.

Flew into Shanghai last Friday evening. The flight was reasonably comfortable as it wasn't too busy and had a tv in the back of the seat in front of me so it was easy to just keep watching. Didn't really sleep though so was very tired when I arrived. Got the bus into town and checked in to the hotel easily enough and just wandered around a bit getting my bearings again. On the Friday met Noah, one of the other English teachers, for lunch and we wandered down to the Bund and had a bit of a chat. He can speak Chinese too but being much younger is a lot keener... Went back to the veggie restaurant I went to last time and had a nice meal in the evening.

On the Saturday went to the train station to be collected by John Zhu who is the man responsible for hiring us and looking after us while we are here. He seems pleasant enough although probably a little ineffectual at times. Also met Steven from Australia, he has been here for about 3 years teaching in other places.

My apartment is quite nice but a little grubby so I need to spend some time cleaning it up. Today I met some of the Chinese teachers I am going to be working with. They seem nice but their schedules are a lot longer than ours. I have twenty lessons a week with classes mostly of 40 kids about 7-8 years old but I will be helped by their Chinese teacher, at least at first. I start teaching tomorrow afternoon so until then I need to get cleaning and think about my lesson plans...

Will also try and get some photos uploaded.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Britons unconvinced on evolution: "More than half the British population does not accept the theory of evolution, according to a survey."

Noooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!

With my imminent departure to China I have been thinking about my analogue/paper system (inspired by random reading on D*I*Y Planner). I think I have three major requirements for data capture in my daily life:

• Next Action lists
• Random thought/ideas capture (and working on those ideas)
• Organising appointments and dates

For the past six months or so I've been using a HipsterPDA which has been brilliant for Next Actions and not bad for ideas capture. Essentially the cards are disposable notes to myself to do something or remember something and nothing quite beats that sense of liberation when you tear up a card and through it in the recycling bin. A hipster is better than a notebook for this because you can re-order and dispose of entries so easily. This has been backed up with a Moleskine notebook for journal entries and writing - a more permanent record of work and ideas that can then be transferred to a PC/Gmail/etc. (Which leads me to wonder if part of the paper revolution for me is a kind of shift into a different paradigm where digital is permanent and paper temporary).

But there are problems with it. Basically it eats cards so fast, which feels a bit wasteful but also means that I'm constantly running out so I end up sub-consciously rationing them and not capturing everything I want. Also the temporary nature of the system means that it's not so useful for contact information (which I generally keep in my phone or digital anyway) or other reference stuff. But the main gap is that I can't get a calendar working with it and this causes me problems. I've tried D*I*Y calendars, PocketMod, creating my own week planner on an index card and, while they've all worked for a time they've either ended up getting lost, or scrappy/ugly or required too much effort to create.

I'm considering a file-o-fax as that might give me some of the flexibility of the hipster with the clean-ness of the printed page but I think that it will be too clunky. At the moment the best bet is to stick with what I've got but:

• Buy lots of index cards at a time - ideally about five packs.
  
• Buy a small A6 diary for appointments which will barely increase the carry size of the whole package but give me the calendar I really need.

Also have had a look at some of the notebooks that Muji do as lightweight intermediate writing-capture tools for when a moleskine is just too damn big to carry. They are tiny but smart and at only 60p each it's cheap enough to buy a stack of them as well. A part of me wonders whether to simply replace the hipster with a couple of them but I guess I'll have to wait and see. I think I'd miss tearing them in half too much.

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2006 — Page 11: "By transporting contagious flu patients into a series of tightly packed groups of susceptible individuals, personnel fostered transmission from people who were completely immobilized by their illness. Such conditions must have favored the predator-like variants of the influenza virus; these variants would have a competitive edge because they could ruthlessly exploit a person for their own replication and still get transmitted to large numbers of susceptible individuals.

These conditions have not recurred in human populations since then and, accordingly, we have never had any outbreaks of influenza viruses that have been anywhere near as harmful as those that emerged at the Western Front. So long as we do not allow such conditions to occur again we have little to fear from a reevolution of such a predatory virus."

New Scientist Breaking News - Judge rules against 'intelligent design' in class: "Pennsylvania science teachers will not be forced to advocate 'intelligent design' after a judge ruled that that the theory is really religion in disguise."

So it seems common sense does sometimes intrude on reality. What's worrying is that there are moves to teach this in schools here in the UK. Especially when we know it's all really the work of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Well, I've joined a cult, well, kind of. I've been using GTD to help organise my life and my thinking for nearly six months now and I am amazed that it has lasted so long. More than that it doesn't seem a question of "using" anymore, more that's the way I do things. Basically, for me, it works and works well to complement the way I already organised myself.
Of course the system is under constant review and testing. Sites like 43folders offer ongoing ideas to add in and try. Some of the things I've done that I like are:

* Organising my Lotus Notes into GTD type categories and adding icons to quickly file mails into them. Notes isn't exactly the friendliest of email tools and it's hard to change much but the system works well for forcing me to deal with the massive amounts of mail I get at work and make sure that nothing slips by. Basically emails get read and then either deleted, replied to, archived or put into a Next Actions folder. I do have a waiting folder and a someday/maybe folder but they don't get used so much.

* Sharepoint site for my team. I have set up a to-do list for myself which I use to complement the email list. Everything work related should be in one or the other.

* Gmail. It shouldn't be as good as it is but it is. Emails are treated the same as at work. I've also set up filters to detect +... after my address so that I can use it as a kind of todo list for home as well as archiving writing, etc. I've also created entries in my address book for these filters so I just type in "todo" into the address bar to automatically save and file emails when using the Gmail to record stuff.

* Del.icio.us. Part of a general shift to keeping more stuff online. I use a "star" label to mark things out as something I want to look at later and added the feed for that tag into my rss reader. Or I could live bookmark it in Firefox.

Am still having a few problems integrating it into home life. It works well but I tend to find I'm not as focused outside the office. And I still haven't finished the book. It's good, but who has the time to read books on time management?

Recently found out that a story of mine, called "Empty Clouds," has been accepted for publication in the British SF magazine Interzone. My first sale and to a good magazine I've wanted to get published in. It feels like I really don't have any excuses now.
Also looks like I'm off to China in February, after a bit of prevaricating. No idea what that's going to be like but I'm looking forward to it, to change change in lifestyle and job even if it's just for a bit. Basically I'm going to be teaching English in a middle school in Ningbo, a city near Shanghai.