Conceptual modeling
😐
I made another adjustment to my agenda on the modeling language translations project and started with learning RDF instead of OWL, since OWL is built on top of RDF. I got less far than I wanted, but this week I’ll finish the document I’m reading (W3C’s RDF primer) and move on to the OWL primer, since next week I’ve scheduled myself to start on first-order logic with the Lapore book, and getting through that will take longer, so I don’t want to delay it.
As I go, I’m experimenting with creating a note-taking format I’m provisionally calling Structured Notes Format (SNF). It’s basically YAML with other formats embedded as needed, and at this point it looks like this, which I think is pretty readable (note that the text doesn’t matter in this example, only the hyphens, colons, line breaks, and indentation):
- point 1:
- subpoint 1.1
- subpoint 1.2
- point 2:
- subpoint 2.1:
- |
Some lines of
Python code
- subpoint 2.2
Life maintenance
Diet
😕
I stuck with my diet, but last week my scale told me I’d lost nothing (literally, exactly the same reading as last week to the tenth of a pound), which is what happened a few years ago. If it happens again this week, I’ll do some research on the problem and maybe look for a new scale, since this one is a little old, but the reading doesn’t quite seem like a malfunction.
Sleep
😐
Last week I got started on my project to get enough sleep, with a schedule of 10pm to 6am. My impression is that my life has gotten organized enough over the past year or two that I have a chance of sticking to this schedule, at least significantly longer than in the past. I started Thursday night and did fine the rest of that week. If my resolve starts slipping a lot, I’ll move to more intense motivation techniques, including an anti-charity if it gets bad enough. Sleep is such a strong and sweeping influence on my life that I’m serious about finally regulating it.
Software development
😰
I finished listening to Stephen Withall’s Software Requirement Patterns, and I found it good but a little overwhelming, giving us a long, categorized list of typical requirements we might need in our software (along with how to organize and word them in our requirement documents), and the increasing burden I felt as I listened made me realize that a requirement amounts to a problem to solve, so Withall’s book was just giving me a huge pile of potential problems. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s uncomfortable, and it reinforces my sense that I need to go into any software project soberly, and it also makes me want to collect known solutions to these common problems.
