As I’m writing this (You guessed it with DNS9!), I am just about through Chattanooga, and soon I’ll be heading into the Tennessee Mountains. Going by Ruby Falls and Lookout Mountain. I’m heading to my cousin’s home in St Louis and then a wedding tomorrow.  My cousin has been a firefighter for about 15 years and his wife sells skin care products with Arbonne.

I’ve been to Ruby Falls before, you take an elevator down quite a ways into a great big mountain and then you walk about a mile through a cave to a great big gigantic underground waterfall. The waterfall is pretty spectacular, but it’s really the journey that makes the whole excursion a lot of fun. It’s not exactly claustrophobic for your average person but if you suffer from claustrophobia I wouldn’t recommend it.

There’s also a number of other things in the Chattanooga area including an aquarium, which is somewhat hard to imagine since this is a landlocked little city, it does have a river but an aquarium is not something you’d normally expect.

It’s actually a fairly large aquarium and before the aquarium came to Atlanta, it was one of the larger ones in this area. Also around here we’ve got Rock City, which I have only driven through. 

It was closed the day I went there and unlike Chevy Chase, I couldn’t find a guard to threaten with a toy plastic gun to let me into the city and check it out. As best I could tell Rock City is basically a bunch of river rock’s that have been mortared or cemented together to form something of a cobblestone like city.

A Nice Place to Live

So as I’m driving through Chattanooga, I always have the same thought, I think this would be a nice place to live. I often times have similar impressions about Nashville, Tennessee. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not looking to move anytime soon especially as I’m in the midst of a move from Atlanta to Charlotte, North Carolina.

However there is always something rather homey about Tennessee. Maybe it’s got something to do with the fact that a good portion of my ancestors moved from the East Coast through Tennessee and Kentucky on their way to Illinois and Missouri. Maybe it’s got something to do with my Cherokee ancestors that lived in the same region before Europeans came through.

Maybe there’s something coded into my system at the DNA level some sort of imprint, that it makes the whole area seem familiar, who knows maybe it’s even a past life type of thing.  I don’t know and I’m not really concerned about it, but I do feel it’s important to consider your impressions whether or not you’re dealing with a locale or even a person or group of people.

You don’t always know why you know what you know and sometimes it’s good to go with your gut.  Now that I mention it, that’s actually one of the reasons why I like mind mapping.  Its a skill that helps people diagram out their impressions and move from intuition to knowledge and action.

Regardless I probably won’t be setting up a homestead here in the area anytime soon. There’s no mortgages are realtors or mortgage life insurance salespeople in my future. This will remain for me at least to be an area that I continue to travel through and pass-through. It’s definitely a beautiful country even though it’s rather mountainous and hilly and probably not the best area for farmers to settle, which is why apparently my ancestors moved on to Illinois.

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This morning my family and I woke up early and headed to a local park in Gastonia, North Carolina where there was a short 5K run for cancer scheduled.

I didn’t think about it much at the time, but I woke up and threw on the MindManager T-shirt I received from Mindjet a couple months ago.

My wife and I and our oldest 2 children, Zoe 4 and Corbin 9(yellow shirt above and behind me a bit-just after the end of the race), all ran in the event.

We were standing around after the event awaiting the awards ceremony. 

No awards for us, we were there just for the race, cause and fun.

There was a guy wearing work boots and jeans in the park with the other participants.  There was a band stand playing some seventies disco.

My youngest daughter who had been hanging out with grandma and grandpa, was thinking about dancing but not quite swaying yet.  Mya is 2 years old. 

The guy in jeans and work boots was smoking a cigarette and dancing to the disco.

Now this was an event to raise money and awareness for cancer treatments and cancer survivors, so smoking a cigarette seemed a little out of place bordering on taboo.

The guy may have been a workman, he might have been homeless.  He might have spent the night in the park and called the park home, pleasantly surprised at the celebratory music and free donuts in his living room that morning.

As I sporadically watched the guy dance a bit and looked down to my daughter to see if the mood was taking her too, I thought that the guy dancing in the park possessed an insight that many of the runners for the event had gained and then lost.

We runners had experienced a good time and had lived in the moment of the race.  Then we seemed to lose the moment, even though the memory of the positive feelings lingered with us as we awaited to cheer on the people that had won an award, trophy or medal in recognition that we had all tried hard.

The man dancing and smoking a cigarette was living in the moment however, while the rest of us watched it slip by.  I thought of these things while I was standing there.

I thought momentarily at that moment about the t-shirt I was wearing.  Not just a piece of corporate advertising passed out to spread the message about a product, but also something that represented the achievement of a family that had survived cancer multiple times a decade earlier.

I thought of the book, The Cancer Code.

I thought a bit how mindmapping had changed my perspective on a number of things and how it helped me to capture the moment, the now inside my head on a visual static snap shot on my computer screen.

These days I live in the moment much more than I have for many years.  By mindmapping out my thoughts and plans, experiences and knowledge, I have gained a new found confidence, appreciation and understanding of who I am and where I am going and that enables me to focus on the here and now just a little bit better.

Sometimes, my here and now is online or in a computer screen and that is a bit of a weakness or flaw, but its also an opportunity for me to move on and do better in the future.

All of these thoughts went through my brain in the park today and some of them trickled in the rest of the day.  Clearing out the BS, a kind of neural colon cleanseing like experience.

I think all in all, it helped me recognize something that I had been missing the last couple of weeks.

The shirt, my family, the guy dancing carefree in the park, it all mapped out in my head a clear knowledge or understanding of that particular point in time.

For that point, I was connected to myself and that made the day perfect.

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Maybe you have heard of Twitter.

Its part social network

Part Micro Blog

With Twitter Blocks its also one part three dimensional (two and a half) mind map.

OK, so that is using the term mind mapping rather loosely.

Twitter Blocks enable you to visualize the Twitter movements of your friends or even people that are following you or your friends through the Twittersphere.

I have no idea if Twittersphere is a real thing, but it seemed to fit the bill.  think Blogosphere + Twitter -> a Micro Blog and get TwitterSphere.

This is a great example of a conceptual application for Web 2.0 technology.

Its also one that shows how mind mapping concepts, software and technologies could be adapted to fit into the social networking revolution.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a social network that enables people to submit short text entries from a cell phone SMS message, email or computer.  The short messages provide casual little updates about where a person is, what they are doing, what they are thinking etc.

For example a series of Twitter Entries might look like this

Woke Up Tired

Sweating Profusely after long run

too much traffic

Productive Afternoon

Traffic Lights Suck!

Need to let off steam with the Guys

Hot at the poker tables!

Not so Hot, Going to bed early

Context for TwitterSphere

When I first saw this concept I was reading a short article at Webware.com.  They presented Twitter Blocks well, but they summarized and my first impression was that this could be a MindMapping tool for people.

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This weekend I doubled my RAM on my laptop computer going for 1 GB to 2 GB.

I have a number of memory resource hog programs on my computer and I wanted to see if more RAM would improve the accuracy and speed of Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9.  I’m writing this article right now using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9, and it’s the first time I’ve used Dragon since upgrading my RAM.

Here are some of my early first impressions:

1. Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 put up time is a lot faster
2. fewer small word errors (such as an instead of and or in instead of an or and)
3. Much faster response time for commands like ‘wake up’ and ‘Go to Sleep’

I was worried that I would upgrade my computer and not see any benefit at all.  Fortunately, I am seeing a benefit.  For what it’s worth I didn’t upgrade my computer just for Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9.  Firefox and Dreamweaver and Outlook are bigger resource hogs in Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9.  Unfortunately, I use all of those programs the most and usually at the same time, that is why I upgraded my RAM.

I intend to create a new user profile and test the new user profile with the additional RAM.  I have been curious if my profile has picked up a few bad ~ less correct words lately.  I have a suspicion that I might improve my accuracy if I start fresh.

I will probably use this for a few months while I work at home and travel and then upgrade my RAM again to four gigs before too long.

Keep your eye open for a new speed typing test I am curious to see if I can do better on the speed typing tests with more RAM and a more responsive Dragon Naturally Speaking9!

Past Articles with Typing tests

1. Video Running Dragon Naturally Speaking in a Typing Test
2. Hit 130 - 150 Words Per Minute with Dragon Naturally Speaking!

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