Weeknote for 5/28/2023

Posted on May 30, 2023 by Andy

Housekeeping

🙄

Despite purportedly being on a summer housekeeping project, I did no housekeeping except to replace my carbon monoxide detector. It beeped to let me know it needed replacing at 9:30 at night. So I ordered one to pick up the next day and spent a cold night with the windows open in case of a freak CO incident.

Productivity

😎

Bing AI has been helping me code some small productivity tools. The main one is a time announcer using AutoHotkey. It speaks the time every five minutes to combat my time blindness. AutoHotkey and the Windows text-to-speech feature are a mystery to me, and the chatbot gave me a running start in working with them.

I’m putting cooking on pause while I continue my quest to carve out time for my projects. My latest experiment is family size frozen meals. I still have a few meals to cook before I start on those.

Programming

:thinking:

My software development notes are on hold, but I snuck in some work anyway. I explored requirements management tools and the idea of writing all the requirements as acceptance tests.

Nature

😉

During a spontaneous second walk on Saturday, I caught on video the elusive jumping fish of a neighborhood pond.

 

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Weeknote for 5/21/2023

Posted on May 28, 2023 by Andy

Programming

😐

I did some reading, but not much more. I have some more mental hurdles to overcome before I can make faster progress. I’ll probably extend the project again. But now it’s on hold for a couple of weeks of summer housekeeping.

Life maintenance

😐

The next two weeks are for my second seasonal housekeeping period. I’ll do my periodic admin and housekeeping tasks and miscellaneous catch up. I especially want to sneak in more research on investing.

Fiction

😎

I’ve been having more interesting AI experiences, where ChatGPT gives me a book concept that I then want to read. So I feed its plot summary into the other bots and see what real books they find that are similar. A couple that stand out are Empire Falls for a small town slice-of-life novel and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo for a journalist solving mysteries with lots of intrigue.

Nature

😎

Last week’s walks were filled with animal sightings.

 

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Weeknote for 5/14/2023

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Andy

Programming

:thinking:

On the software development notes, I finished reorganizing the topic outline and wrote a bunch of notes for the longer intro. But I’m still deciding how much of that to post on the wiki. In the meantime, I’ll move on to the software lifecycle topic.

Productivity

😐

I’m experimenting with longer grocery shopping trips. I’m still trying to reduce my time on food management. My latest experiment is shopping for two weeks instead of one. I’m used to once a month from our family routine growing up, but for me two weeks of planning feels like enough of a stretch. Last week was the first of those, so now I have this week free of shopping. But I might spend the extra time catching up on cooking.

AI

:thinking:

I collected AI news digests and more chatbots. AI news is like a firehose right now, and each summary service covers different stories, so I’m trying a bunch of them to see which ones settle as my favorites. And new chatbots come out every week, so I’m collecting the ones that are easily available to use online. Sometimes when I have a question I like to consult several to get their differing perspectives. And it’s interesting to compare their styles of creative writing.

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Weeknote for 5/7/2023

Posted on May 8, 2023 by Andy

Programming

:relieved:

On the software development notes, I posted an updated intro and outline. I’ve also been relistening to SWEBOK and Steve McConnell’s Rapid Development to motivate myself and refresh my memory, and interacting with that material will be my next step. I’m extending this project until at least June 17, with a couple of weeks’ break for summer housekeeping starting May 21.

AI

😎

I took the plunge on a paid account at OpenAI just so I could play around with petertodd prompts. petertodd is a glitch token that evokes weird responses from GPT models. Here’s a fun recent example I got to work. I also spent a fascinated weekend listening to the petertodd folktales from the original report.

Health

🙄

I got the ball rolling on the latest change to my medication. My insurance is dropping their coverage of Xeljanz and requesting that I switch to Rinvoq. They sent me a letter about it. I learned my lesson from my delay on the last change and called the doctor ASAP. Hopefully this change won’t be a problem, but if, so, at least this time I’ll have done what I could. And I appreciate the medical system’s efforts at keeping me from boredom.

Nature

😀

I had surprise animal encounters at a farm where I walked. For some reason I wasn’t expecting cows, sheep, and chickens, only crops. I will definitely be back!

 

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Weeknote for 4/30/2023

Posted on May 2, 2023 by Andy

Programming

:relief:

I got myself unstuck on my software development notes. I used some of my neglected productivity practices and succeeded in taking some notes for rewriting the project’s intro. Maybe I can finish that this week.

Productivity

:thinking:

In my renewed push to focus on my projects, I’m returning to my car picnics from yesteryear to give myself a distraction-free place to work. Sitting in my car I tend to get a lot more done. For a car picnic my meals need to be portable, and in the evenings my lunch bag is occupied with the next day’s lunch, so to set myself up for dinnertime picnics, I spent an hour or two shopping for a second bag and a covered glass dish.

AI

😛

I installed an offline chatbot called FreedomGPT and have spent way too much time messing with it. Judging by its marketing and press coverage, you’d think it was the far-right version of ChatGPT, but really it’s just more cooperative. It’ll take pretty much whatever perspective you give it, though often it still tries to uphold human rights. I’m having fun trolling it with my typical absurdist mode of conversation. It gets more confused than ChatGPT, but it tries to keep up and complains very little. The perfect conversation partner!

Nature

🙂

Now that the world is green again, I’m out exploring new parks and new corners of old parks. I’m thinking of making some maps of unmarked trails using my GPS walk tracking app.

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Weeknote for 4/23/2023

Posted on April 25, 2023 by Andy

Programming

thinking face

I did nothing on the software development notes. I’d been looking forward to this project, but now that it’s here, I’m strangely unmotivated, and I’ve let other activities crowd my time. So the next step is to figure that out, and then hopefully I can make better progress.

Fiction

🙂

I started listening to Ann Radcliff’s Romance of the Forest for a book group at work. It’s a classic Gothic novel that earned some praise from ST Joshi in his Unutterable Horror, so I’m looking forward to it.

Video

pensive face

Netflix announced they’re shuttering their DVD service at the end of September. The news was a little depressing because the service has been such a valuable source for hard-to-access video, but it tells me what shows and movies to prioritize for the next few months before they’re gone.

Space

grimacing face

I watched Starship’s rather surreal orbital test launch on Thursday. It was a successful failure in terms of gathering flight data before the rocket exploded, but its environmental impacts were larger than officially expected, mainly from the way it flung concrete chunks from the launch pad everywhere and blew clouds of dust up to 5 miles away. I hope this pushes SpaceX toward moving Starship away from Boca Chica and its wildlife refuge. But in any case, the launch complex was so damaged the next launch will apparently be delayed an indeterminate time for repair and redesign. This isn’t great news for the Artemis program, where Starship is supposed to be the lunar lander.

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Weeknote for 4/16/2023

Posted on April 22, 2023 by Andy

Programming

😐

On the software development notes, I sorted the topics outline. I wanted to revise the whole project intro, but I’ll have to get to it this week.

Productivity

🙂

I spent Sunday afternoon making a big spreadsheet to hold examples of different shorthand letter combinations. I wrote a small program to generate the combinations, and it was an interesting experiment in comparing the chatbots I consulted for the code. Phind got closest to what I was looking for.

Nature

😎

I visited a great blue heron rookery near a trail I sometimes walk. It was impressive, and on a later trip I’m hoping to see the eagles that are rumored to share the woods with them.

Music

🙂

I set up Cakewalk to practice for the worship team and record music. Saturday I spontaneously decided this was the day to set up a DAW to use with my keyboard. I figured the new virtual instruments would make practicing more interesting. So I installed the free Cakewalk and then spent a lot of time shrinking the sound delay so it would be playable. The culprit was Microsoft GM Wavetable Synth. So now I have a way to record MIDI from my keyboard. This lets me capture random snippets I want to keep as I’m messing around.

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Weeknote for 4/9/2023

Posted on April 10, 2023 by Andy

Housekeeping

🙂

For the final week in this iteration of housekeeping, I finished up some remaining tasks. (1) On audio digitizing, I sorted the rest of the cassettes and copied a few more to the computer. (2) I cleaned my freezer and let it run a couple of days before moving the food. (3) I did some actual tidying and got some donations ready for Goodwill. They’d been sitting in my living room for a year or two.

Programming

🙂

This week my main personal project joins my work project on continuing my software development notes. I did nothing last week on this, so the extra time is welcome. I’ll do some organizing of my notes and plans, and then I’ll start on probably the topic of software requirements. Or maybe a little on lifecycle.

Spirituality

😎

I finished the fantastic Dictionary of Biblical Imagery. I did feel it helped me appreciate the Bible more. I was especially struck by the attention it drew to the Bible’s tenderness toward families and children.

:thinking:

On the everyday prayer project, I settled on the short list of prayers I’ll use for the first version, and I condensed another prayer from Every Moment Holy. After testing all the chatbots I use, I’ve decided this is a project to write myself. But I’m still using text-to-speech for the audio.

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Weeknote for 4/2/2023

Posted on April 2, 2023 by Andy

Housekeeping

🙂

I crammed in some last-minute progress on digitizing and cleaning. I finished recording the family history interview cassettes to the computer, and I researched how to clean my musty upright freezer so I can start using it again. This tidying project iteration has been more about preparing for future housekeeping, but that’s okay. This week I’ll do some actual tidying by taking a few things to Goodwill, and next week I’ll be on to the next project.

Productivity

🙂

I spent half the week shopping for new pens. I was running out of usable pens for writing my blog drafts. For shorthand I really need one with a reliably smooth line. So based on Wirecutter and Pen Addict I picked up some Pentel EnerGel RTX and Pilot Precise V7, plus some Office Depot gel inks I liked at the doctor’s office. And for writing on glossy receipts, I need to order some Uni-Ball Jetstream ballpoints.

Programming

🙂

This week my work project coincides with my next personal one, my software development notes. I’ll be synthesizing some of the programming listening I’ve done over the past few years and defining templates, procedures, and other conventions to standardize my own practice. I’m thinking I’ll start with requirements.

Spirituality

🙂

I got unstuck in my everyday prayer project. All my digitizing put me in the mood to sort out my messy iTunes library, which is where the prayer audio will live. So that freed me to continue with the project’s next steps. I’ve recorded the first prayer, and next I’ll test its volume and then move on to the other prayers in my list.

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Weeknote for 3/26/2023

Posted on April 1, 2023 by Andy

Housekeeping

🙂

I cleaned the bug off the inside of my scanner. It was easier than I expected. Now my archival scans will be smudge free.

I ordered a new tape player for digitizing my old cassettes. It arrived Tuesday. Since I have bad luck with audio cables, I chose a player with a USB connection. I ended the week with copying the first tape of a family history interview with my grandparents.

Productivity

:thinking:

To help with my sleep schedule, I’m turning back to Elastic Habits. Maybe gamification will remotivate me. I’m giving myself more leeway this time with a bedtime around 11 instead of 10.

AI

B-)

I finally tried Stable Diffusion, and it gave me a sense of connection. I was trying to replicate an old image I remembered, and I ended up with one I would usually ignore, but this time it caught my attention and evoked a scenario in my mind. So I asked the chatbot Claude for a story based on my premise, and it gave me a nice little vignette to explore. My investment in this image and story left me caring about the character Claude and I created and the real people in her situation. As I work with generative AI, I’m hoping for more experiences like this.

 

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