Futurism
🤔
The futurism group met on Tuesday, and our topic was gaming and culture. For once it was a topic I was familiar with. We talked about the benefits and drawbacks of video games, PC vs console games, and the controversies around women in gaming.
Fiction
🙂
Continuing my quest to listen to the books I already own, I picked another short horror-related title I had in my Audible purchases, I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. I don’t normally go for stories about undead hordes, but the reviews said this one was well-written and thoughtful, and they were right. It’s still not my favorite book, but it’s a good one. 5/5.
Software development
🤓
After I Am Legend, I shifted gears into software development to anticipate the programming I have planned for next week at work. I need to get a much better handle on test-driven development (TDD), so I’m listening through a few books I have on that subject to give me the gist of what they cover, and then I’ll study them more closely as I’m working.
I finished the first one last week, Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests. Cumbersome title, but good content. Next is Working Effectively with Legacy Code. Growing OO Software is about starting a project from scratch with TDD. Working Effectively is about gaining control of an existing codebase that’s messy and doesn’t have tests.
Life maintenance
Diet
🤔
Friday I went in for a routine physical, and my doctor gave his usual spiel recommending a low-carb diet. When I told him I’d tried that and my lipids had gotten worse, he mentioned a study that claimed that only triglycerides and HDL matter for predicting heart attacks, not total cholesterol or LDL. I’m intrigued, so I’ll do a little research on that. He also ordered a lipid panel for me, so we’ll see how my current semi-diet is working. It’s basically just low saturated fat, around 15 g max per day, though I don’t track it very carefully.
Housekeeping
🙂
The grime is starting to build in my apartment, so I’m back to setting up my cleaning routine. My next step was making my cleaning products according to Melissa Maker’s recipes from her book Clean My Space, and I started that on Saturday by labeling some of the bottles I’ll be using. My labels include the actual recipes so they’ll be easy to refill.
Life agenda
😐
I planned an update but didn’t get far enough to post it. I should be able to do it this week. After that I’m going to shift my focus to my life-as-business project.
Music
🙂
I added some more info to the Composing Music project (intro, chapter 1) and finished another exercise. This one gave me more freedom. I could use the whole C major scale!
Sunday I went to a jazz piano concert at a local library by a composer in the area I’ve had a little contact with. We had a nice chat before and after. He used to play on the worship team at the other location of my church, but I didn’t meet him till years later at one of his other concerts. Last week’s concert was a brief history of jazz piano with pieces from Scott Joplin, Duke Ellington, Horace Silver, and Herbie Hancock. As a jazz ignoramus, I appreciated it.
Projects
🤔
I’m making much slower progress on Composing Music than I’d hoped. But it’s fine. It’s showing me that I can only work seriously on one project at a time.
It also gives me an idea for a project management experiment. Maybe I can still dabble in secondary projects while I work on one main one. Then periodically I can switch my focus to one of those secondary projects for a while. I’ll try it.
Right now my main project is (supposed to be) my goal map/life agenda, though like I said, I’m about to switch to investigating the life-as-business idea.
People
😰
This coming weekend I’m traveling out of town to visit my brother and attend my coworker’s wedding, which will be in the same area. I’m putting my projects somewhat on hold this week while I get ready for that. Visiting people is nice, but for me travel is always stressful.
