Update for 7/15/2018

Productivity

🙂

I’ve been taking a break from my conceptual modeling project to read a book by Jon Acuff called Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done. It took me a week longer than I expected, but I finished the book. (It was this morning, but let’s pretend it was Saturday. We do a lot of pretending about time on this blog.) I took a bunch of notes. It’s the kind of book where the advice is fairly basic and mostly obvious, but it can be helpful to have all the obvious advice in one place as a starting place for your own thinking. After I do some of that myself, I might post the results on the wiki. The book is already helping me get through this blog post.

Life maintenance

🤔

And now, the conclusion: I decided not to move, at least not at the end of the month. Maybe I’ll ask the office about shorter lease options.

Instead of moving, I’m going to do some housekeeping tasks that were related to the move so I’ll be ready for my actual move, whenever that happens. Right now I’m deciding whether I want to upgrade my Internet from my slow DSL. Customer service nightmares of the kind delivered by Comcast are exactly the sort of thing I try to keep out of my life.

Spirituality

🙂

I finished Surprised by Hope. I went in looking for ways of thinking about the Christian view of the future that would stick and orient me. I found them. This quote stood out to me: “Likewise, the majestic but mysterious ending of the Revelation of John leaves us with fascinating and perhaps frustrating hints of future purposes, further work of which the eventual new creation is just the beginning.” To be honest, promises of a symbolically described paradise don’t really work for me, and neither do the prospects of a neverending worship service.

But the mere hint that we’ll have things to do feels like an invitation worth holding onto. I knew about reigning with Christ already, but the difference this quote makes for me is that the new creation always felt like an endpoint to me, and the eternity after it was just an overextended coda. Wright makes it sound like the new creation is just the start of a whole new story filled with things I want to do.

In other news, I’m adding a stream to my spirituality category, a type of scientific theology exemplified by BioLogos. Listening to Wright the New Testament scholar and theologian has reminded me that such people are usually hazy in their scientific knowledge. I’d like to also hear from Christians who specialize in it.

Futurism

🤔

Our futurism meeting last week was about killer robots. It made me think I shouldn’t necessarily open source all the AI technology I eventually work on.

Fiction

🤔

I’m listening to The False Prince because Jeremy was badgering me about it. I’m a little over halfway through. It’s pretty good. I’m waiting for the plot twist he enticed me with. If I’m not horribly disappointed, the book is so short I might tack on the rest of the series before moving on to my next professional development book.

Music

😎

I’ve been looking at the textbook list on r/musictheory for things to add to my collection. I cobbled that collection together haphazardly long ago based on whatever I ran across that looked good, so I wanted to see what people who know what they’re talking about recommend. Amazon and Google don’t have previews of the Laitz book, though. I have used my arcane knowledge of interlibrary loan to summon it to my local library. It’ll take some time for that to take effect.