OneNote

I've been using Microsoft OneNote a lot lately; I really like it.  I like the fact that my writing automatically has the date on it.  It'd kind of like an electronic journal that takes care of the repetitive stuff for you.

And as far as a note-taking tool, it's got a lot of features and is pretty simple to navigate.  If I was still in school and taking classes, you'd bet I'd use this thing for every one. 

One drawback is that you don't have all the functionality of Word.  You can't do shortcut keys for symbols, or write equations via the equation editor (for all you science and math geeks).  On the other hand, I never really found it all that efficient to try and write equations on the computer.  I never was fast enough to keep up with the teacher.  So no great loss.  If you want them you can type them in Word and just paste it into OneNote.

Give it a shot, people!

Left, Right

I used to think that I was good with numbers - a leftbrained person (for the record, I just had to look up on Wikipedia which qualities are left brained and which are right, even though I just asked someone about this a few days ago, which only goes to further the point, I suppose).  

Not that I was every particularly bad at rightbrained stuff like art and music.  I just always thought of myself as a math and science kind of guy.

Then I got to college and started scoring lower on tests.  Math tests, chemistry tests, physics tests - I just kept getting things wrong.  I became used to red ink all over my work.  By the end of college I decided that I was, in fact, rightbrained.  That would explain why I was so bad with numbers no matter how hard I tried.

Now, as I take these MCAT preparatory tests, I'm still making those math mistakes, but I'm evaluating them more closely.  More often than making fundamental mistakes in my analytical approach to solving a numbers question, I tend to just make plain old careless mistakes.  I missed a decimal point.  I left out a constant, or a minus sign.  That kind of thing.

Can a person be strong in his leftbrainedness but still make careless errors?  Or is it part and parcel of being leftbrained to not make those errors.

More importantly, maybe I should go into engineering after all.