Update for 8/13/2017

Blog

The bullet list format looks a little overwhelming to me when there’s a lot of text, so this week I’m trying out headings. What do you think?

Sleep

No improvement this week, alas, and I’m starting to feel the effects in the form of hours wasted in the evenings mindlessly scrolling through social media. Hopefully my mediocre progress on the projects I care about will motivate me this week, as well as my upcoming trip that I’d really like to be awake for. The main problem is the one I’ve had all this time, the fact that I try to cram too much into my day, and I’m glad to be aware of that but also trying not to be impatient with my long-held bad habits. The social media dawdling doesn’t help, so I’m thinking I’ll revisit my evening schedule from a while back and target times for eating/projects and bed, since I’ve had better success in recent months with implementation intentions.

Project generator

Still no first release, but I got past my test failure problem, so now I’m back to the documentation. With all the other stuff going on, I’m a little surprised I got to this one at all.

Beliefs report

I’ve posted my spirituality report’s introductory thoughts (actually today and not last week, but cheating is a regular occurrence on this blog), which turned out to be quite a lot, given that I only work on it about 10 minutes a day. I’m kind of proud of myself for pushing myself to work on this the many times I could’ve easily neglected it. For future updates I’m thinking of alternating weeks working on the theology and spirituality essays.

Camera

This was one of last week’s main occupations. My 360-degree camera, a Ricoh Theta S, arrived on Tuesday, but the battery would barely charge, even after plugging it into different power sources for many hours, so I deleted the few extraneous photos and videos that were still on it from previous owners, plus the one I accidentally took because my brain saw the trigger button and thought “power,” returned the camera the next day for a refund, and ordered a non-used one, which is supposed to get here Monday, but via Amazon Logistics, so I’m looking forward to seeing if it arrives at all. My accessories came and were fine, so I’m now the proud(?) owner of a selfie stick, and I’m researching other accessories, a suction cup camera mount for my car window and maybe a stereo digital audio recorder, since there’s only a mono mic on the camera, and at some point I’ll experiment with lighting options.

Eclipse

I’ve decided to take the bus–easier than driving and cheaper than anything else, and it gives me freedom to do stuff while I’m traveling, though I haven’t decided what. As if I haven’t given you enough to read, here are some articles you might like on solar eclipses:

• What You’ll See During the 2017 Total Solar Eclipse – Space.com
• Eclipse Phenomena: What to Watch For – Space.com
• Annie Dillard’s Classic Essay: ‘Total Eclipse’ – The Atlantic (H/T Matt Wolf)

Futurism

The futurism content I’ve been binging has been very rewarding, though managing my already cluttered podcast subscriptions has been time consuming, which made this last week’s other main occupation, and it’s still not done. My favorite discovery of last week was the YouTube channel of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, and listening to Nick Bostrom describe the organization’s mission made me feel kind of like I’d found my people. Also last week I was finally motivated to start typing out my thoughts on futurism and AI, but then I decided I needed to read more before I posted anything.

Security

This is a PSA I forgot to add last week: To thwart some of the hackers who are after your info, set up VPN on your mobile devices for when you’re connecting to the free wifi at places like Starbucks. I’d gotten tired of the voice in the back of my head nagging me about the insecurity of open public wifi, so the next time I was stuck sitting around with only free wifi for company, I spent the time setting up a VPN connection on my Surface, and the service I settled on was TunnelBear. For some reason I had trouble connecting over that location’s wifi, but later I also installed the mobile app on my phone, and everywhere I’ve tried that, it’s worked very well.

Web video

Every once in a while something I’ve followed casually mysteriously catches my attention and holds it for a while, and last week that happened with the Report of the Week, a college student who reviews fast food on YouTube with old-school sensibilities, a dry sense of humor, over 300,000 subscribers, and even a radio show broadcast from actual radio stations.

Birthdays

Happy birthday to my dad!