Weeknote for 1/2/2022

Productivity

🙂

I got through the Emacs tutorial. Somehow this felt like a major accomplishment. Anyway, it was the first step in using Org mode for my task management. And now I know why it’s called Org “mode.” A mode is like a plugin that shapes the behavior of the Emacs commands. I also captured many of my thoughts on task scheduling so they’ll be ready when it’s time to write my algorithms. This week I’ll start exploring Org. I’ll also finish setting up my Elastic Habits tracker spreadsheet.

Self-improvement

🤔

The Art of Making Memories by Meik Wiking set off trains of thought about planning my experiential memories. A lot of the book was review for me, since it covered the major techniques I’ve learned from books on semantic memory, which is memory of facts. But this book is about episodic memory, or memory of experiences, and it does a nice job of integrating the factual memory techniques with others specifically related to experiential memory. And he has suggestions for scheduling memorable experiences. He lays out a year of them organized thematically according to technique, which would be a very me thing to do, so it caught my attention.

Nature

😎

We finally had snow, so I took some walks to take photos. I even braved Saturday’s blizzard. I was glad to see I was not the only person of questionable judgment out at the forest that day. It wasn’t snowy when I started my daily walks last year, so it’s been interesting to observe how the snow changes the look of the land. It highlights the shapes that were there and adds new shapes and patterns. And of course it changes the color scheme. I was not expecting the the brown tall grass to give the images a ’70s look. I feel like I’m looking at old photo albums from my infancy.