Tinderbox Weekend West

Great day! Elin's patented Introduction was terrific, despite the laryngitis. And Merlin Mann delivered a wonderful exploration of productivity and trusted systems, emphasizing lots of ways you can be less productive through using too much technology to increase your productivity. Lots of interesting lessons, and much discussion of software design ideas. Here are some of my notes; click to enlarge.

Dr. Jonathan Leavitt did a very interesting talk about using Tinderbox as a tool for better medical record. "Hypertext medical records" was a Googlewhack as recently as this month! He's got some terrific ideas on the importance of flexible, bottom-up, and malleable records that can be available in emergencies and yet confidential the rest of the time.

Leavitt has some fascinating ideas about the relationship between these hypertext medical notes and feral hypertext. He also begins with an important lesson: don't spend lots of work trying to turn Tinderbox (light, fast, malleable, bottom-up) into a database (heavy, scalable, cosnsistent, top-down). I like the idea of scanning lots of paper for import into Tinderbox; I might try working with a scanner at my desk.

Alwin Hawkins couldn't make it at the last minute; it'd have been great to have him on hand for this segment! And we've got to get Merlin Mann and Ryan Holcomb together to hash out GTD and Tinderbox!