Update for 4/2/2017

Life updates

Life events seemed to dominate last week, so I’ll start with them.

• Car – I spent a worried Monday and Tuesday with my car left at the mechanic to assess a rusted, leaky brake line, wondering if I’d be buying a new car that week and fretting how to arrange all the necessary logistics. But he fixed it affordably, and so although my car does seem to be on its way out, at least now I have more of a choice of when that happens, which may be in a few weeks. If I do replace it this year, I’ll probably delay moving another year to give my finances some time to recover.
• AI meetup – Tuesday night, since I had my car back, I attended the first meeting of a new meetup I joined for discussing AI and related topics. It was an interesting group, I learned a few things, and I’ll probably keep attending.
• Palm Sunday Orchestra – At Christmas my church assembles an Advent Orchestra to play on one Sunday near Christmas, and because of my vacation schedule I’ve rarely been able to play, so when they decided to do the same thing for Palm Sunday, I joined (on my other instrument besides the piano, the French horn). Our first rehearsal was Thursday, and although I played better than I expected after two or three years of not even touching it, I played annoyingly worse than if I were playing regularly, so I’ll definitely be practicing between rehearsals. To make the rehearsal more adventurous, my first valve string (which connects the key to the rotary valve to let air through the pipe to change the notes) decided to break fairly early on, so I had to become mechanical and find a workaround, which I did with the help of our trumpeter’s screwdriver, and then on the weekend made a trip to Sam Ash to pick up some new string.

Project updates

• Public coding guide – I’m still working on the documentation section, but this week I’m posting each subsection as I finish it, and hopefully next week (or the week after, since this one will be busy) I can move on to the last couple of sections in this phase.
• Code console – During my coding guide research, I found a well-supported project called cookiecutter that lets you create programming project skeletons using templates, which is exactly what my code console was going to do, so I immediately dropped my own project in favor of creating cookiecutter templates, which doesn’t eliminate the work of learning best practices and deciding on code conventions, but it does take care of the actual creation of projects.
• Knowledge representation – In my controlled language studies I’m starting with Attempto Controlled English. I’ve been reading the reference material, and once that’s done, I’m thinking of translating the examples from Huddleston and Pullum’s Student’s Introduction to English Grammar so I get a better idea of what you can and can’t say with Attempto.
• Taxes – I keep accidentally putting these off, but I made myself start on them Saturday night.
• Beliefs report – I don’t think I worked on this last week, but it’s still a current project, even if I only work on it occasionally for now, though I’ll try to finish my thoughts on prayer soon.
• Games – As an experiment in writing spontaneously on the wiki, I started an article for collecting video and board games about programming I’ve run across. Then I realized there are already very good lists like that on the Internet, so I linked to some, but for now I’m keeping the article because I like adding things to it and I think it has one or two games that aren’t on the others.
• Nostalgia box – This is sort of on hold until my other projects settle down, but the more time wears on, the more important the simplification aspect of this project becomes–trimming down my initial idea for the month’s project into something I can finish quickly. Overly ambitious project ideas are a continual problem for me, so I expect that learning this skill will help me with all my other projects.