I have many times in my past thought of starting a personal journal. I started at first a long time ago with a paper journal, and considered keeping a word processing document, but nothing ever seemed to work for me. In August 2004 with the opening of this blog I got a little closer to being able to do what I wanted to do, at least on the external perspective. I still do not have anything personal. I tried to do it in GITI for a personal way, but I just could never remember to write stuff and it just didn’t quite seem as together and coherent as I would like. I am now considering writing a software that will reside on a desktop computer, but will be able to write information somewhere that GITI can access it. The reason I feel I need to write my own software for this is that I want to keep more information in a journal than just a daily narrative and other plain text information. I want to be able to store sample photos from the day, and maybe a tracklog and other information that seems relevant to the events of the day. In some ways it would be nice to form my daily journal entries from a variety of little pieces of information and just have them grouped by the date. Those pieces include:

• Text of day’s activities
• Report of what is on the calendar
• Collection of status posts and their timestamps
• Photo(s) selected from the day, if available
• Tracklog from the day, if available
• Recipes for foods I create that day

In some ways social media stuff handles a lot of this, except for the more private aspects, but I do not want something like a journal stuck in the cloud. I want control of the information and I do not want to be bound to some type of information system that can loose data, change control or in some other way be subverted by an outside force. This is probably crazy and excessive, but it will give me something to work on in my spare time.