Some Thoughts…

Rick Warren opened the Saddleback Forum a couple of weeks ago with the following statement:

I have to tell you up front, both these guys are my friends. I don’t happen to agree with everything either of them teach or believe but they both care deeply about America. They’re both patriots and they have very different views on how America can be strengthened in America. We’ve got to learn to disagree without demonizing each other and we need to restore civility. We need to restore civility in our civil discourse and that’s the goal of the Saddleback Civil Forum.

Barak Obama echoed this sentiment last night in his moving acceptance speech:

But what I will not do is suggest that [John McCain ] takes his positions for political purposes. Because one of the things that we have to change in our politics is the idea that people cannot disagree without challenging each other’s character and each other’s patriotism.

The times are too serious, the stakes are too high for this same partisan playbook. So let us agree that patriotism has no party. I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain. The men and women who serve in our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a Red America or a Blue America — they have served the United States of America.

I enjoy rational political discussion with those who agree with me and those who don’t. But those discussions can soon get uncomfortable when we let our emotions and/or partisanship drive us to attack each other’s character, patriotism, and faith.

I’m convinced that the issues we face today are much more complicated than the black and white picture painted by partisan politicians. There are no easy solutions to the issues we face both at home and abroad. It’s going to take time and a commitment to work together. It’s going to take trying some new things and other things we haven’t been willing to do for awhile (like talking to our enemies).

Still, I’m not convinced that the political process will ever give us the country and the world that we all want. Until you and I stop living for ourselves and start (as Jesus taught) doing unto others as we would have them do unto us, we will never have peace, justice and equality.

The older I get, the less information I seem to be able to retain, and I’m finding it increasingly necessary to write things down so I can reference them later. Since it seems I have forgotten how to use a pen or pencil to make legible characters on a piece of paper, I usually type this information into the computer. I have tried a number of ways to organize these digital "sticky notes". For awhile I was using the Notes feature in Microsoft Outlook , but that doesn’t really allow me to access my notes wherever I am, and it was awkward to use. I discovered I could use Yahoo! Notepad to sync with Outlook Notes, so I began to use that quite a bit – until I moved to Vista and Office 2007. For a long time, there wasn’t a sync client from Yahoo! that would work, and I found myself looking at other alternatives. A couple of weeks ago I discovered an application that is really working well for me. Evernote describes itself this way:

Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere.

What’s nice about Evernote is that it is provides a Windows client that synchronizes with a web interface, so your information is truly available to you wherever you go. There are Mac, Windows Mobile, and IPhone clients as well.

This is not just for text. There is a simple rich text editor for taking notes in meetings or entering the bits of information you need to do your job or manage your life. Beyond that, you can store entire web sites (or just selected portions) quite easily using a Firefox extension. The program will also store scanned images, PDF files, and audio clips, but I haven’t really taken it that far.

Searching works well, and they claim to also search PDF files and text within images. Like Outlook Notes and Yahoo! Notepad, each note is assigned a title based on the first line. Evernote, however, allows you to rename the title. Notes can be organized into folders and assigned tags.

Synchronization also works well – even behind the firewall at work (it appears to use whatever HTTP proxy is configured in Internet Explorer). By default it syncs once an hour, but this is configurable, and you can force a sync at any time. I haven’t really tried using the web client. I have the Windows client running in the system tray so it quickly accessible.

Did I mention it was free? There is a monthly cap, but in my regular use I am not even coming close to the allotted upload allowance. The premium version is $45/year, which gives you SSL encryption as well as a much larger upload allowance.

If you are like me and need an application that will allow you to create your own personal knowledgebase , than I highly recommend Evernote .