Weeknote for 9/15/2019

Car shopping

😎

At the beginning of last week, even though I’d bought a car the day before, in my mind there was still a question mark over it until my regular mechanic gave it his approval, so on Monday I brought it over, and he took a look and liked it as much as the mobile mechanic at the dealer, and so I felt settled and also pleased, because I like the car too. Compared to the Protégé, it looks nicer, the acceleration is better, and my old car had a whole host of issues that are suddenly “fixed” by having a new one: a broken AC, a loud and broken automatic lock, flakey automatic windows, flakey headlights, a stuck glove compartment door, a non-latching trunk, a back bumper hanging on by two screws, a very rusty underside, and a leaky brake line.

Dave Ramsey has a good summary of the car buying process I ended up using, so if you’re buying a used car, take a look at his plan, though the one thing I didn’t do was negotiate the price, and now that I’ve learned more about the rest of the process, maybe next time I’ll be ready to tackle that … in 20 years when I buy a car again, and in the meantime it’s gratifying that everyone is liking the car I ended up with, because it reaffirms to me that it’s worthwhile to make decisions carefully.

This concludes my summer of stress, and now all that’s left are a few loose ends, and after the past three months, I’ll gladly put up with those small nuisances.

AI

AI Field Map

🙂

I’ve posted my initial stab at the field map, which I’ll continue when I get to the Semantic Web project, probably next month. But it’s already been helpful, and my biggest takeaway is that there’s a name for the research area that interests me–cognitive architecture–and there are quite a few examples for me to look into.

Machine learning

🙂

I finished listening to Müller and Guido’s book, but it’ll take me a while to take notes and try out the examples. I don’t have a schedule for it yet.

Conceptual modeling

🙂

This month’s project is the semantics of infographics, and this week I’ll start (a week late) with some notes on gestalt psychology to understand how people automatically interpret visual compositions.

Music

🙂

Our church bought a Yamaha MX88 keyboard, which frees us from using MainStage on the worship pastor’s computer while improving our voice selection over the old keyboard’s and, in my opinion, even over our patches in MainStage. I got to play our first performance with it on Sunday and had a nice time, though as with MainStage some of the voices are kind of finicky, with volume and attack responses I don’t understand yet.