Weeknote for 5/22/2022

Posted on May 22, 2022 by Andy

Health

😕

My COVID quarantine might continue this week. The take-home instructions from my antibody treatment say to self-isolate until my symptoms have been gone for 24 hours. So I spent last week waiting for my cough to disappear, remembering that in the past my coughs have lasted weeks—a depressing thought. I also took more naps than I wanted, even though I was generally less tired. Toward the end of the week the cough was starting to subside. But Saturday I took another at-home COVID test, and it was still positive. Coughing with COVID doesn’t sound like a good condition to be out and about in. So Monday I’ll work from home again and ask the doctor what she thinks.

Productivity

😐

In between naps I brainstormed a little more on my productivity system. I’m impatient to get somewhere with the updates, so I’m going to try to wrap up the assessment phase this week and come up with some plans.

Modeling

😎

The Handbook of Knowledge Representation felt like an invitation to work on my modeling tool. It covers a wide range of fundamental modeling topics—logic, description, time, space, physics, and agents—and it showed me that there’s lots of existing work to draw on. I was especially intrigued that it gave a name, qualitative modeling, to one of my central concerns: formalizing the informal reasoning humans normally do. It was also helpful to learn that one of the main tools I want to explore, the Semantic Web, isn’t just an implementation of a description logic; it addresses the additional question, typically ignored in knowledge representation, of how to reason with your model when it doesn’t make up a tidy, complete, consistent package. And some of the book’s topics offer frameworks that seem useful to programming in general, not just AI, such as knowledge engineering, model-based problem solving, and even automated planning.

Politics

🙂 for Rachel, 😕 for the tough issues

Blowout by Rachel Maddow is an engaging tour through the shady history of the oil and gas industry, with a focus on Oklahoma and Russia. The audiobook is read by the author, so it’s like listening to a very long episode of her show. Two points stand out for me: (1) Russia’s current invasion of Ukraine is practically a repeat of the last one, except that this time Ukraine and the West were prepared. And (2) the case of Oklahoma shows that public pressure really can make a difference.

People

😕

I donated to a fellow chronic illness sufferer. A streamer I’ve followed for several years has struggled with severe pain in his ribs for much of that time, and his situation has become difficult enough that he’s asking for help. Here’s his GoFundMe if you’d like to know more.

Posted in Conceptual modeling, COVID-19, Current events, People, Politics, Productivity, Sustainability, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 5/15/2022

Posted on May 15, 2022 by Andy

Health

🤔

I caught a (so far) mild case of COVID. My symptoms started Monday, and I tested positive on Tuesday. But I’ve been able to smell, taste, and breathe the whole time. My worst symptom was an intermittent 102 fever with some pretty heavy fatigue. My doctor recommended monoclonal antibodies because of my immunosuppressing medicine, so I did that on Thursday, but by then I was already feeling better. By Friday night I was feeling practically normal, except for an occasional congested cough that I’m still waiting to clear.

This week I’m watching to see if things stay good or get worse again, which would send me back to the doctor so they can check for pneumonia. I’m planning to stay isolated until Saturday, though now that I’m feeling more normal, I’ve been taking walks outside, away from crowds and with my mask on.

Productivity

🙂

My project time took a dip with my extra napping, but I kept up with my daily routines. I took it as a good sign for my system that it could keep my life together even with that level of fatigue, at least over that short time frame.

I explored the current state of my system a little more. I’ve had a lot to say about my rather annoying Admin procedure where I try to manage my tasks. But I’ve temporarily moved on to pondering fatigue, since that’s become relevant. And I started grappling with certain void-like periods that lead to time wasting.

TV

😎

I enjoyed the start of the new Star Trek series, Strange New Worlds. It normally takes me a while to get used to a new cast, but the first episode did a good job of introducing the characters and making them likable. And even though I live for long story arcs, I’m interested to see what they do with an episodic approach to modern Trek.

I finished Person of Interest, and it gets a 5/5. It’s a gripping action-adventure story, a smart AI story, and an engaging human story. The writers were clearly in touch with some key conversations on AI alignment. The show reinforced my sense that the way an AI turns out will depend on the details—the purposes and capabilities you give it and the circumstances you place it in, all of which depend on the reasons you build it. Of course, we don’t have any real superintelligent AIs to test this on, so all we can do is speculate and plan carefully.

Posted in COVID-19, Productivity, TV, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 5/8/2022

Posted on May 8, 2022 by Andy

Website

😌

I finally fixed my wiki. The summary version is I installed it on my local computer, upgraded it to the latest version, and copied that installation back to the web host. One of my upcoming tasks is to submit everything on my site to the Wayback Machine so I’ll have a browsable backup in case this happens again. I’ve learned you have to help web crawlers along or else their copies have large extra holes.

Productivity

🙂

This week I’m back to planning my productivity system improvements. One of my goals is to make improvements that don’t take a lot of work. After all this time I’m still grabbing low-hanging fruit. Last week I added back into my schedule a regular block for side projects so I’d have less of a mental obstacle to doing miscellaneous lengthy tasks.

Programming

🙂

Agile Testing by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory is a treasure trove of advice for fully integrating testing into the development process. Instead of throwing the code to the testing team at the end of the release cycle when there’s no time to fix the problems, the authors recommend involving them throughout the process. Since testers are attuned to what can go wrong in software, they can even help in the design stage by bringing up situations the software may need to handle.

I discovered this book in the citations of other software books, and I worried it would just be a repeat of the others’ advice, but that was not the case. It had a lot to offer on its own, and it’ll be one I go back and study. I especially appreciated the examples from various software teams, which (like Barbara Oakley’s A Mind for Numbers) made the book feel like a community effort.

Food

🙂

I’m starting the skillets section of Betty Crocker One-Dish Meals. For the salads and soups I tried to make every recipe with few exceptions, but I ended up wasting food when ingredients weren’t shared between recipes. This time I’m being more selective based on the recipe’s taste, nutrition, and effort. Ideally I want to get my cooking down to half an hour.

Nature

😎

I’ve been having a fun time identifying birds with the Merlin Bird ID app. I’m mainly using the Sound ID feature, because I hear more birds than I see. Birds I’ve “spotted” this way are Northern Cardinal, Red-winged Blackbird, American Robin, Blue Jay, House Sparrow, Chimney Swift, Common Grackle, and Yellow Warbler. And with the Photo ID I learned there’s such a bird as a Scarlet Tanager.

 

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Games

🙂

I may be wading back into Minecraft and perhaps other games. Since I finished fixing my website a day early, I decided to give myself a break from my serious projects and get back to Minecraft, which has been on my mind for, well, the past year at least. Alas, a nap got in my way, so I only had time to write some general plans. I’m thinking I’ll set aside some regular time on the weekends for gaming. And I want to see how well my new practice of journaling everything works with it.

Posted in Cooking, Nature, Productivity, Programming, Site updates, Video games, Website, Weeknotes, Wiki | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 5/1/2022

Posted on May 1, 2022 by Andy

Website

😐

I made significant progress on fixing the website’s wiki. This will be my main project until I get it done (or until something more urgent comes up).

Productivity

😎

My productivity system update project is on hold until I finish fixing the website. But I’ve still been making improvements in the background.

My evening schedule has been going so well, I’ve even gotten ahead on my cooking. I cook for several days of lunch and dinner at a time, which means I basically live on leftovers. If I get behind, I have to fill in the gaps with fast food or sandwiches. But if I can keep this up, the next set of meals will always be ready.

To help me focus, I’ve gone back to the Pomodoro technique, but on very short cycles. I alternate 4 minutes of working and 1 minute of break, and the breaks are optional. Every once in a while I take a longer break. I’m hoping with this technique I can stay on task most of the time even on days I’m feeling extra slow or distractible. The idea is that even under difficult conditions I can push myself for a few minutes if I have a timer to tell me how long that is. It’s been working very well so far. But the real test will be in a few weeks when the technique feels old.

I’ve redesigned my schedule tracking spreadsheet so that I can plan a week at a time instead of one day. This should make it quicker to manage the spreadsheet and should help me choose the week’s tasks and plan for the ones that’ll take more than a few minutes.

Programming

🙂

At work I listen to a bunch of programming books. Normally I write about them here unless it’s a reread, but the past few weeks I’ve neglected to do that. So here are the latest few.

Rapid Development is another excellent reference book by Steve McConnell. His books are always well organized and researched, and they’re fun to read despite being long and dense. I’ve been looking for perspectives on the software development process from people outside the usual suspects, and Rapid Development has the added advantage of being written shortly before the Agile movement took off. I think of it as another angle on the movement’s historical context.

Choose Your WoW, Second Edition by Scott W. Ambler and Mark Lines orients the reader to the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) framework. This is another resource from outside the Agile founder sphere. The book does a pretty good job of introducing the framework, justifying its complexity, and giving helpful tips on implementing its major features. The bulk of the framework’s details are on PMI’s website. You can get an overview in this white paper at IBM.

What I like about DAD is (1) it takes a broad, even-handed look at all the available practices and notes the circumstances in which each would be most helpful (enabling you to choose your Way of Working); and (2) it’s part of a larger Disciplined Agile framework that applies to the whole business. Disciplined Agile may answer some of my questions about how an agile team fits into its context and how you can use agile if you’re in some other role. That will be helpful input when I get back to my project of treating my life like a business. Along those lines, I also want to look into Beyond Budgeting.

Software Testing: A Craftsman’s Approach by Paul C. Jorgensen and Byron DeVries is a mathematical look at how to choose test cases. I was only listening, so I couldn’t evaluate its rigor or practicality, but my impression is those qualities were its aims. I’m looking forward to studying the book more closely, because whenever I try to write tests, I quickly run into the problem of knowing what conditions are most helpful to test. Everybody else seems preoccupied with what code the tests should target, how to get the code into a testable state, and how to get the tests to run fast. Those are important but miss the crucial element that trips me up, a gap filled by this book.

People

🙂

Sunday I had a rare get together with Jeremy at a sandwich shop. Even though we chat a lot online, it was nice to catch up in person. I’m still avoiding crowded restaurants because of COVID, especially with the beginnings of a new surge, but I make occasional exceptions for low-traffic ones where the customers can spread out.

Current events

🤔

I’ve somewhat shifted how I keep up with events in Ukraine. I still look through r/UkrainianConflict and listen to The Eastern Border. But I’ve slowed down on YouTube and the other podcasts. I’ve also spent more time with the carefully sourced updates at r/CredibleDefense and Institute for the Study of War.

Posted in Current events, Productivity, Programming, Website, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 4/24/2022

Posted on April 24, 2022 by Andy

General

😐

It’s a short update this time. Last week I was in the middle of everything I was doing, so there isn’t anything completed to talk about. And nothing big and new happened. Even my Easter was a pretty normal Sunday. But since these updates are mainly about progress reports on my projects, I’ll say a bit about the one I did any substantial work on.

Productivity

🙂

I stumbled onto a natural rhythm for my evenings. Even when I have errands or cooking to do, my new schedule easily gives me an hour or two of “discretionary” time that I can use for projects or whatever else. Emphasis on the easily, since I could carve out that time before, but only with struggle. The rhythm consists of several blocks of major activities (eating, task management, a project) surrounded by transition blocks where I do some predetermined miscellaneous tasks, with the schedule controlled by a few consistent but flexible target times.

I started collecting ideas for improvements to my productivity system. This mostly consists of describing what I do now, the problems that come up, and potential solutions. That kind of work is very satisfying to me, but it takes a lot of time, and I have a lot to write about, so I’m expecting the idea collecting to take a few weeks. But I’ve already come up with some improvements I can make now.

Posted in Holidays, Productivity, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 4/17/2022

Posted on April 17, 2022 by Andy

Productivity

🙂

I fixed my sleep schedule. Now to keep it up.

I’m back to my productivity system update this week. I’ve very much been looking forward to it. I’ll start with compiling my wish list of updates and then prioritizing.

Life maintenance

😌

I finished my taxes Friday. It took a few days. Somehow every year I have issues to figure out, even though my basic tax situation stays the same.

Coffee

🙂

Big Shoulders Harbor Roast Coffee: 4/5. Another good, standard coffee, although it was a little weak unless I used about 3 tablespoons per cup instead of my usual 2.

Spirituality

🙂

On my everyday prayer project, I got my scanned prayers ready for editing them down to soundbites. I cleaned up the OCR, removed the irrelevant text, and organized the prayers chronologically so they’re a little easier to think about. I also put the files in a Git repo so I could keep my changes organized. Next comes the heart of the project, the condensing.

Current events

🤔

Here are a few more Ukraine podcasts I’ve been following:

Posted in Coffee, Current events, Productivity, Spirituality, Taxes, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 4/10/2022

Posted on April 10, 2022 by Andy

Productivity

😐

I’m returning to my productivity system update. It’ll continue as my main project until I’m satisfied with the milestones I reach.

My sleep schedule is my main concern this week. My aim is to hold that schedule in place and force my other activities to readjust to it.

Life maintenance

😐

I gathered most of the info for my taxes. Thanks to dragging out my blog post last week, I got a late start on taxes, but info gathering is always the main hurdle, so it should be downhill from here.

Spirituality

😐

I did nothing again on my everyday prayer project. I’m considering it my main side project until it reaches some usable state.

Current events

🤔

The past three weeks Ukraine has consumed a lot of my attention. These have been my main news and commentary sources. I’m exploring others as they come onto my radar.

Forums

Podcasts

YouTube

Mostly I rely on YouTube’s recommendations. They tend to come from these:

Posted in Current events, Productivity, Spirituality, Taxes, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 4/3/2022

Posted on April 6, 2022 by Andy

Website

😑

It turns out my local wiki installation works already, so now I need to contact the web host for help. What I thought was a local server error was the browser being redirected to the remote website. Once I got all the settings adapted, the local website worked fine, so I need to see what the web host can tell me.

Health

😐

I spent the week getting over a cold or something. I’ll blame that for my extra naps and low productivity. On the bright side, I learned how to use those at-home COVID tests and got a negative result. The remains of the illness are still hanging on, but that’s how it goes these days with my immune-suppressing medications. At least I don’t have a cough this time. Weeks of coughing is very annoying.

Productivity

🤔

I’m taking stock of the strengths and weaknesses of my productivity system. Generally I’ve been able to stabilize some of my everyday life maintenance so that my quality of life is much better than it used to be. I’ve also come up with some better ways to push myself through my knowledge work. But my system still hasn’t resulted in significantly more project time or faster progress on my projects. I still have a lot of thinking to do, but some ideas I’ve had for improvements are (1) coding a script to extract data from Google Sheets so I can analyze all this activity I’ve been tracking, (2) brainstorming ways to deal with fatigue, and (3) coding an activity alert app to help me focus when I’m working at the computer.

I’m trying out managing my personal projects using a Kanban board in Jira. I’ll see if the cards-in-columns format helps me visually juggle my projects more easily. One of the key factors in Kanban is the work-in-progress (WIP) limit, which pushes you not to accept more work than you can handle at a time. I’m expecting this approach to help me make more conscious decisions about when to take on what projects and when to resist interrupting them with other projects, since that’s a pattern that seems to hold me back.

Spirituality

😐

I did nothing on the everyday prayer project. I’m thinking I’ll keep working on this past Easter till it’s done. But I’ll see what I think after the Kanban board gets going.

Life maintenance

😤

This week’s major project will be my taxes. You’d think someone with a productivity system would have them done by now, but no. But I will finish them before the last minute!

Posted in Health, Productivity, Spirituality, Taxes, Website, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 3/27/2022

Posted on April 1, 2022 by Andy

Website

😐

I got my offline wiki installation to the point of giving me an internal server error. This is the same state the online website was in. My week was taken up with naps and reorganizing my cooking, so this wasn’t much progress, but it was an important milestone. Next I’ll increase the server logging and see what that tells me.

Productivity

😐

I’m spreading out my life maintenance tasks. My weekends were consistently overburdened with chores, so I’m finding ways to spread them out. So instead of planning and shopping for groceries on Saturday, which probably takes me longer than a normal person, I’ll plan on Monday and shop on Tuesday.

I’m making interval timers for my regular recipes. This feels like another level of nerdery, but timers really do help me: (1) They tell me how long to expect the whole task to take so I can fit it into my plans and hopefully limit procrastinating on it. (2) They keep me on task. (3) By breaking down the task and objectively keeping the time, they make it easier to learn how to speed up the activity. The only problem is it takes a lot of time to set up a recipe timer. So that could turn into the main project for this week.

Programming

🤔

In Modern Software Engineering, Dave Farley places software development practices into a cohesive framework built on the core ideas of engineering. I was interested in his take on an engineering approach to software development because of his YouTube channel, especially his criticism of the state of Agile. The core ideas he starts with are the efficiency and economy of software solutions and using an empirical, scientific approach to find them. To follow those principles developers need to become experts at learning and at managing complexity, and these are the two categories Farley places his recommended practices into, plus a category for tools that support the process.

I appreciated his framework and especially the nuances it added to common practices. But I’m still looking for more from the idea of engineering in software development. I’m looking for an in-depth treatment of parallels to other engineering disciplines, which seem to draw a lot more on existing, low-level scientific knowledge, whereas software consultants tend to focus on the high-level design process. Maybe I want something more like the books Cracking the Coding Interview or Elements of Programming Interviews, which are crash courses in computer science in the form of worked word problems that might come up in job interviews. I also wonder what the programming equivalent of a CAD tool would look like. I’m sure it would involve a lot more static and dynamic code analysis than I ever see, and also diagrams, though not necessarily UML.

Food

😐

Signature SELECT Colombia Ground Coffee: 3/5. I liked it better than the Folgers, but it was still sour a little too often.

TV

🙂

Season 4 of Star Trek: Discovery just finished, and while I love the show and this season in particular, my feelings are mixed. The show continues to be sci fi comfort food for me, and I found this season’s themes of cognitive science, linguistics, and the profoundly alien especially relevant to my interests. And there were some moments I really felt.

But it has some quirks, which I just accept: The writers pack too much in, so problems are solved way too quickly, and some of the story elements get shoved in awkwardly, although I do love that each season covers so much ground. And it sometimes promises more than it delivers (e.g., I kept hoping Culber would get better therapy than a mere vacation; and for the season’s threat I was hoping for Nagilum-level weird). These traits aren’t that unusual for Star Trek, but Discovery seems to turn up the dial on them.

Posted in Coffee, Productivity, Programming, TV, Website, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 3/20/2022

Posted on March 24, 2022 by Andy

Website

😐

I finished installing a copy of the website on my local computer. Reminding myself of how to do that and then integrating it with Visual Studio Code took some time. I tested it out on WordPress, since the blog part of the site already works. This week I’ll debug the wiki.

Spirituality

😐

I scanned prayers from Every Moment Holy and began editing the resulting text file. Next I’ll reduce them each down to a few lines.

Fiction

🙂

I started taking stock of my various literature projects. They pop up randomly, but they have common patterns, so I decided to organize them a bit. An Audible sale reminded me I want to get some kind of handle on classic literature, so now I’m listening to The Western Canon by Harold Bloom to help me. That’s my general strategy—find people whose opinions interest me for recommendations, especially if they’ve written some kind of reference, like Grant and Clute’s encyclopedias of science fiction and fantasy or Joshi’s Unutterable Horror. Other categories that come up for me are contemporary fiction and experimental literature. I’d also like to learn some literary criticism so I can get more out of my listening. Since I’m in project management mode these days, I started jotting some notes about my purposes for these projects and the deliverables I have in mind, assuming I get anywhere with them.

People

🙂

My parents came to visit at the end of the week. They were on their way home from making a delivery to my brother, so I didn’t feel a lot of pressure to make the visit a big event. We didn’t do much, but it gave us a chance to rest.

Posted in Fiction, People, Spirituality, Website, Weeknotes | Leave a comment