Update for 2/19/2017

Life updates

• Work – Most of last week was taken up with finishing a work project that kept me there late a couple of days and had me working on the weekend. I did manage to work a little on my personal projects though, as you will see below.
• Jury duty – I got a jury duty notice a few weeks ago, which means Monday evening I have to check the website to see if they’re calling me in; and if so, I have to show up the next day to see if they’ll need me; and if they do, I’m not sure what to expect, because it’ll be my first jury duty ever. But I’ve just watched Making a Murderer, so I’m prepared to think about a trial, at least more than I normally would be.

Project updates

• Productivity – The Rotating Priorities Board has actually been helping me. I’m finding myself thinking about my most important projects much more, spending my spare moments on them, and trying to work on each of them a bit each day. I’m thinking of adding more projects to it, but I need to make sure I don’t overload myself.
• Code console – I’ve been researching Sphinx (a Python documentation formatter) to decide on my default documentation setup.
• Knowledge representation – I’ve been skimming The Handbook of Knowledge Representation collecting the names of software for each of the KR methods so I can find links for the wiki and decide on a tool to experiment with for each method.
• Nostalgia box – I finished writing my fictional letters for January, a fun exercise I recommend, and this week I’ll open February’s folder.
• Media
  • Books – Last week I listened to Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, and I enjoyed it and will probably listen to the rest of the series at some point, though in many ways it just followed the formula for this kind of story. I suppose it’s the variations that make the story worthwhile, such as the interesting mechanic in the story’s premise, and the writing, which I thought was good. I always wonder, though, why SFF writers make the point that the (real) world is an extraordinary place when it lacks the things that make their story worlds extraordinary.
  • TV – Making a Murderer was stressful but good, though I knew I was only feeling and concluding what the documentarians intended, but I didn’t mind too much. I read some articles afterward to get updates and other people’s take on the case, which I think is really how you have to approach a documentary. I’ll spoil that my favorite person in the show was Dean Strang because he looks at his job philosophically, the way I would, and I appreciated his comments on justice. The series certainly left me with strong feelings about the presumption of innocence and all the issues that arise from it.