On the Benefits of Taking Notes on a Laptop

So I've been taking notes on my shiny new gift from God/my parents: an Apple Powerbook G4, 15" w/ Superdrive. It's easily the coolest thing I've ever owned. It is successfully the beautiful center of my digital life. The book comes with the newest version of Microsoft Office X, which incidentally is the best product Microsoft makes. I cannot understand how such a good product with such genuinely original ideas doesn't cross back over and make the Windows version of office that much better. Anyway, the new version of Word X has a built in template for taking notes. It's really logically laid out, really intuitive, and even looks like a piece of notebook paper. You can add color-coded dots for emphasis, you can highlight, you can even select a particular note and turn it into an Outlook task that pops up near the time that it's due. There is also the added nicety that, because not everything you write is set in stone as you type it, you can go back and add things to different sections of your outline. All in all, the notes take a fuller, more logical character and I feel like I understand the material better. Also, though I haven't done it yet, there is an option to record the audio from all my lectures right into the Word file. That way, even though I'm taking notes and typing, I can go back over whatever I think I missed. The problem is that there is far too much ambient noise. There's no air-conditioning anywhere in St. Stephen's.

Sidenote: The exceptions to this rule are only for the Principal's office and my Political Science professor/Dean of the College's office. The latter is nice because we've been meeting to discuss areas of extracurricular research that I could investigate while I'm here. Talking for hours about contemporary Indian politics and its development since before independence would be fine anyway, but there's extra incentive when the air conditioner is blasting on a 109 degree day.

So if I tried to record voices, all I would probably get would be a low-pitched, all-pervading hum. Perhaps later in the year when the weather is more mild I can try this out. Once or twice, when the lecture is dragging, I'll break out iPhoto and rank old photos and arrange them correctly and whatnot. The other day I got to a particularly hilarious photo of Toby passed out on a couch in a compromising manner and the girls behind me started giggling uncontrollably. My economics professor, whom I've discussed before, was unamused. She stopped lecture and glared at them, then continued on. The only problem is the looks I get. My friends here posit, probably correctly, that not only am I the only person at St. Stephen's College who takes notes in this method, but perhaps the whole of Delhi University, which has maybe 40 000 students. So I stand out, a bit. I'm convinced that it's a superior method, and I don't plan on stopping. I get stared at so often in this country that getting stared at a bit more because I take notes on my powerbook is not an issue. Sleep well, America. Goodnight.