Was going say the same. At least when I have room/power for a laptop, org-mode is the best way to take notes I've found. Outlining things, reworking, summarizing, forces me to think about the topic instead of just listen. Org-mode is as easy as pen and paper, but with my writing, easier to read later. Also generates nice exports if I want to make my notes availiable say as an after trip report. (how I spent the two days you sent me to a conference).

Now if I don't have a table and power, than it works much less well. I'm still looking for a solution to that. (and no it's not mobileOrg, at least not on Android -- OK task list, not for note taking).

I have to agree. Which camera to get is much less important than "take lots of pictures." Some things like composition and editing you can learn on just about anything that takes a picture. True, there are advantages to larger sensors, interchangable lenses, etc. But for a first camera, get something you will carry with you and take lots of pictures. I still miss shooting film on a manual camera. Once you get the hang of it, it's fast and simple. There are still lots of good films, though fewer than there used to be. And nothing digital (under a few grand at least) comes close for image quality. But, and this is a big "but", the one advantage of digital photography is it's easy to take tons of pictures, toss out the bad ones, edit the good ones and learn a ton about composing shots. A typical digital camera stores 100s if not 1000s of photos, and once you upload them you can resuse the card. Compare that to 35mm where 36 exposures was the best you could get without loading your own canisters. Also, editing is a snap. Picassa is free and does a nice job with cropping and red-eye reduction. Gimp or Photoshop will let you do things that take years of darkroom experience to do and without building a darkroom in the basement. While the equipment matters, it matters more to an experienced photographer. Until you get the basics down, composition is way more important than say depth of field. So get a decent point and shoot digital and start taking pictures. Lot and lots of pictures. Read a few books. Take the time to edit and critique your shots.

Later, you'll likely realize the limitations of that camera and want to upgrade to a micro 4/3, DSLR, or perhaps even a classic 35mm SLR. Then it's time to start worrying about technology and features. But by then you'll know better what you want for the kind of shooting you do. And you can keep the digital point and shoot as a "carry camera."

Until recently, I worked on one of the major tools vendor's monitoring
product. I'll avoid product plugs as I'm biased. There are a number
of commercial products. HP, Tivoli/IBM, Platinum/CA, Compuware, and
BMC all have products. There are also some open source packages,
though I'm less familiar with them. All address much of your problem,
but none of them will be an out of the box solution. Like as not the
long term summarizing will remain your problem.

However, I want to address to some issues that I see in your question,
so you avoid some of the mistakes I've seen people fall into.

First, wanting to be "real-time" raises a red flag with me. Be
careful of wanting to collect data on a very fine granularity. In
many cases (cpu utilization, run queue length) the numbers are really
averages over time. Collecting them too often degrades their meaning.
There's also a trade off between how often you collect data and the
overhead of collecting it. Give serious thought to how much you
"care" about short lived perturbations. Would you really do something
about them? Also think about what the numbers you are collecting
really mean over the time frames you collect them.

Second, there is absolutely no way to collect data without impacting
the system. You can minimize the impact a number of ways. Don't
collect extraneous data. Use efficient means of collection. Offload
data analysis and summation to a different machine. But, you can't
eliminate the overhead altogether. The data is on the machine it's
on, and that's where you need to get it.

Third, don't worry too much about precision until you are sure what it
is you are being precise about. By and large all any product can do
is collect what the kernel has to offer and maybe add some value in
terms of summarization and correlation. Give serious thought to what
you really need to track. The more you understand what the OS and
machine are up to the better off you are. There are a number of good
books on tuning and internals.

Most of all, remember that the point of the OS is to *use* the
machine. Sure, it's to use it efficiently and fairly. You want to
detect inefficiency and unfairness as well as any major anomalies, but
to be fair about the stats, you have to take time to understand what
the OS is up to and why the folks who wrote it collected the stat in
the first place. I can't emphasize that point enough.