Weeknote for 7/10/2022

Posted on July 14, 2022 by Andy

Productivity

🙂

I began setting up the Bulletproof Workspace in Notion. After that’s done, I’ll try adapting Bulletproof for Kanban. I’ve settled on using Notion instead of Org for the new version of my productivity system. It seems easier to learn and to use, and the scripting I was thinking of doing in Org is probably better done in other ways. Looking through the ways people use Notion, I think it has potential as the kind of low-code platform that will fit many of my needs.

Programming

🙂

Practical Object-Oriented Design by Sandi Metz showcases the author’s patient teacherliness. It didn’t quite have the magic of watching her “Nothing Is Something” talk. But I did come away feeling I had a better sense of the SOLID principles. As usual I’m looking forward to studying the book more closely. I’m especially interested in her take on static vs. dynamic typing, since that’s a debate I haven’t fully wrapped my mind around.

People skills

🙂

Difficult Conversations by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen is a deep dive into the dynamics that enable successful conversations of this type. This book reminded me that people study people skills academically, and that gives me more resources to look into. This one came out of the Harvard Negotiation Project. It also highlighted that the many emotional and social skills interact. You’ll have more trouble navigating difficult conversations if you haven’t had certain conversations with yourself.

Thanks for the Feedback by Stone and Heen takes a close look at a specific kind of difficult conversation. I worried it would simply rehash parts of their other book, but it turns out there’s a lot more to say about feedback specifically. It made me realize feedback pervades life, so it pays to have these skills ready to practice at all times.

Active Listening Techniques by Nixaly Leonardo surveys many important communication skills with some applications to specific situations. The first few tools had me thinking the advice would be too cursory compared to the Harvard Negotiation Project books. But later tools were more satisfying, so I’m including it in my books to study when I get to the studying stage of the project. It also gave me some historical context for these communication techniques. I didn’t know active listening came from Carl Rogers, for example.

TV

🙂

Season 4 of Stranger Things was much more gripping for me than the earlier ones. I actually found it stressful, but in a good way. But explaining why would involve too many spoilers, so I will let you find out for yourself! I’m looking forward to the next season.

Season 1 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds ended, and it continues to be good. I might even like it better than Discovery, but that’s probably recency bias. The season finale was especially good. It had extra heft and brought in more of the TOS aesthetic.

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Weeknote for 7/3/2022

Posted on July 4, 2022 by Andy

Productivity

🙂

I made a solid start on setting up my Notion pages for Kanban. I’m using a board view similar to this example. My idea is to base my swimlanes on the areas of my life that I give regular time blocks in my schedule, so things like administration (task management and other paperwork), housekeeping, food management (planning, shopping, and cooking), and, of course, my substantive projects. This week I’ll continue my Notion setup.

People skills

🤔

How to Win Friends and Influence People gives me some thought provoking principles and lots of examples to analyze. The edition I listened to was published this year, a revision of the first edition by the author’s daughter. Her aim was to make only the minimum changes needed to match modern sensibilities.

The book was more concrete and motivating than I expected, and I can see how it became so popular. This part toward the end stuck in my mind: “If you and I will inspire the people with whom we come in contact by giving them a realization of the hidden treasures they possess, we can do far more than change people. We can literally transform them.” It’ll be interesting to compare the advice from different authors on conversation and influence to uncover any conflicting perspectives, which will help me decide on my own approach.

Programming

🤔

In Designing the Requirements, Chris Britton draws from other engineering disciplines to improve the software requirements process. His approach reflects my view that requirements, design, construction, and testing are tightly integrated. I’m not as confident as he is that improving the requirements process and returning to up-front design will minimize the changes you face later in development. But I think his framework is worth looking into, especially since I’m always interested in the engineering aspects of software development.

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Weeknote for 6/26/2022

Posted on June 29, 2022 by Andy

Elections

😐

I researched my primary races and voted. I like to base my votes on some degree of principle, but since I don’t understand the issues or candidates in much detail, I end up relying on proxies, like newspaper endorsements. My favorite is the Illinois State Bar Association’s judicial evaluations. Very clear and objective looking.

This time some of the candidates were impossible to find online, which made them easy to rule out. In my book, if you want to be a public servant, you have to communicate with the public. These days that means leaving a record of yourself on the web in the form of a website or at least media interviews.

Productivity

😐

I’m reorganizing my email and task management around Kanban. This system update project is teaching me that even if your problems would be solved by implementing your grand vision, you can still make a lot of progress by making smaller changes. I’m hoping this Kanban workflow will be an example. But it will at least be an experiment.

Food

🙂

Maxwell House Colombian Ground Coffee: 4/5. It’s a decent everyday coffee with only some occasional sourness, and I stopped noticing the inconsistency after a while.

My opinion of oolong tea has risen. I’ve been getting through my box of it by drinking it at work. Some teas get bitter as they cool. The oolong from Twinings tends to stay mild, so I’ve been content with it as my everyday plain tea. Next I want to see how green tea compares.

People skills

🙂

I’ve started a reading project on people skills. I’ve had this on the backburner for years, and the catalyst to finally start it was Software Estimation‘s discussion of principled negotiation, largely drawn from the well-known book Getting to Yes. I have a reading order for the first few books in my head, so I’ll follow that and then see where things go.

Conversationally Speaking is a nice intro to a central people skill. I found this back in college and picked it as the best general conversation book I’d found. The advice seemed on point and the examples not too stilted. It covers the core dimensions of conversation as well as some key trouble spots.

The Art of Civilized Conversation focuses on etiquette. I picked this up a few years ago just because I liked the idea. One helpful feature is its outline of a conversation’s natural flow. Keeping to this flow lets the interpersonal boundaries shift naturally. You’re not invading people’s space with strong feelings just after you’ve been introduced.

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Weeknote for 6/19/2022

Posted on June 19, 2022 by Andy

Productivity

🙂

I relieved some tension from my daily task management sessions by removing some micromanagement from the procedure. I use an interval timer to lead me through it like I do with other routines. But task management isn’t regular enough for consistent time limits on each step or even a consistent order, so I’ve made the procedure more general while still using a timer to keep things moving.

Even though I’ve moved into an implementation stage in this productivity system update, I’m still collecting ideas for improvements. Last week it was by listening to my notes on this project starting from last April to pick up on any ideas I’d forgotten about. It’s also been enlightening to review the notes in my schedule tracker on the reasons my actual times have diverged from my planned times.

This week I’m pausing the productivity project to vote in my primary, which will take some research on the candidates. But if I have time after that, I’ll work on tidying my tasks and emails to fit them into my new Kanban approach.

Programming

😎

Howard Podeswa’s Agile Guide to Business Analysis and Planning will be a key resource for my software development notes. Its depth, breadth, and organization put it almost on the level of a Steve McConnell book, although it’s lighter on empirical studies. I bought it to get a better idea of Agile’s application outside the programming team, but in addition it incorporated all the other Agile frameworks I’ve been learning about, another cohesive overview of the kind I look for. It’s also intensely practical and includes a lot of checklists I would’ve tried to make myself.

Fiction

😎

Elantris is a fun first step into Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere universe. I knew practically nothing going in except that I liked Sanderson’s contribution to The Wheel of Time and I was looking forward to another universe of stories. Elantris wasn’t as serious and literary as the books I was expecting it to be like, but I got used to the style and settled into the political intrigue, which I was also not expecting. If you read it, make sure you read the back matter too for the “end credits” scenes.

It’s tempting to continue with Cosmere right away with the Mistborn books, but I’m thinking I’ll wander through the other authors I’m following. I also want to vary my audiobooks enough that I don’t get them confused. So I’m switching to science fiction with the next book in Iain Banks’ Culture series, The Player of Games.

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Weeknote for 6/12/2022

Posted on June 13, 2022 by Andy

Productivity

😐

I decided on some next steps in my productivity system update. The productivity framework I was writing was good as a modeling exercise but troublesome as a planning exercise. So I’ve put that on hold, and this week I’ll start working through the areas of my system that feel like obvious priorities. There are some improvements I can make on the side as they come up, but others will take more extended effort, and those will be my focus. The first one is reworking my task management procedure so I’m not fighting it every time.

Movies

😐

The Amazing Spider-Man is a less-endearing origin story that nevertheless has a different kind of appeal. I’d decided that as a purported Spider-Man fan, I should stop neglecting the Andrew Garfield movies, so I put them in my Netflix DVD queue and watched the first one at the beginning of the week.

The negatives: The Tobey Maguire version is my baseline, and this Garfield one felt much less like a bright, packaged comic book, which made it less immediately inviting to me. Yet the plot was very similar to the first Maguire movie, so it ended up feeling derivative and also more rushed.

The positives: I was glad to see a Gwen Stacy story for a change. And the movie’s less polished style made it feel more authentic in some ways. This Peter Parker was less like an archetype and more like an actual high school student who had real conflicts with his family and seemed generally lost. It pulled on different heart strings from the Maguire version, and I gave it a 4/5.

Music

🤔

My latest music mystery gives me food for thought. I was building up my playlist of space ambient, drawing from YouTube mixes by JediMaster, and I recalled one song that stood out. So I listened to them on 10x speed until I found it, an island of melody amid slow waves of spacey chords and noise.

The sound of the synth lead was nostalgic for me, like it came straight out of the kids’ albums I grew up on in the ’80s. And the simple step-down of the melody brought up images of a mother in a quiet moment with her infant, tender and comforting. But like much of my favorite music, I found as I listened throughout the day that it could amplify any sadness I was feeling too—if there’s comfort and hope, there must be a reason it’s needed, and sometimes that context is at the fore.

I also found that the song was a music writing prompt for me. I wasn’t really satisfied with what the composer did with it, so I wondered what I would do instead. Maybe I’ll explore that at some point.

Posted in Movies, Music, Productivity, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 6/5/2022

Posted on June 6, 2022 by Andy

Productivity

😐

I worked on my productivity framework and assessed the progress of this project. It’s taken longer than I wanted, and it seems to be a matter of interruptions, some dead-end learning experiments, random side tasks within the project, and several weeks with low project time. This week I’ll try to focus on the framework so I can use it to wrap up this planning phase.

In the meantime, I made some more system improvements. I shifted some of my project time to the start of the evening to set the tone so I’m more motivated not to waste time. I added a notes column in my task tracker so I can keep track of what throws off my plans. And I tried out an idea for socializing while I cook (see below).

Fiction

🙂

The Ten Thousand Doors of January hooked me with its lyrical style and the progressive revelation of its scenario. I wasn’t entirely in the mood for the book when my library hold came up, so I sometimes put off listening, but I enjoyed it while I was listening. And I appreciated its take on social justice. But its most important effect was to put me in the mood to listen to Elantris, which I’ve put off for years, so I’m finally wading into some Brandon Sanderson.

Programming

🙂

The programming books I’ve listened to lately are piling up, so I’ll run through them quickly. As usual, I hope to go back and study all these as I build my software development practices.

From More Agile Testing, I found out the authors of Agile Testing had enough worth saying to fill another book. I have no plans to become a software tester, but I think the more programmers understand about the other roles they interact with, the better they can tailor their work to the needs of the whole project.

The Domain Testing Workbook is a very organized and practical deep dive into a specific, foundational software testing technique. Programmers can directly use domain testing in the automated tests they write themselves. The book also has a thoughtful appendix on teaching.

I have mixed feelings about Test-Driven Development: By Example. I often fall down rabbit holes reading debates about TDD because of my various frustrations with it, so listening to this influential book feels like confronting my nemesis. But Kent Beck is less dogmatic than some TDD advocates, so I feel a little vindicated. I’m looking forward to revisiting the book and wringing out as much insight as I can from the examples. And of course, reading more debates. I’m especially interested in this response recommending type-oriented testing.

Software Estimating: Demystifying the Black Art is Steve McConnell’s argument that you really can estimate the wild world of software projects. As always, his book sounds well researched and convincing, and I’m looking forward to trying it out on my projects. I also want to incorporate its techniques into my scheduling app.

Nature

😎

On Memorial Day I visited the nearby lake and finally spotted some frogs. I knew they must be there somewhere. The iNaturalist Seek app told me they were American Bullfrogs, and later a web search told me they were indeed the source of the mysterious slow honk I sometimes heard. It’s their advertisement call.

People

🙂

I caught up with my old college roommate Jason. It was a good conversation, as always. It took him a few prods on Facebook before I brought myself to get in touch. I hadn’t really worked socializing back into my life since reorganizing myself. But I realized cooking could be a convenient time to call, and it worked out. Maybe I can make a habit of it and conduct my social life from the kitchen.

Posted in Fiction, Nature, People, Productivity, Programming, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 5/29/2022

Posted on May 29, 2022 by Andy

Health

🤔

My COVID antigen test was negative on Saturday, so I’m ending my isolation. Evidently all my vaccinations plus a breakthrough infection make me possibly super immune now. But I feel more vulnerable, like my immune system has taken a beating and needs to recuperate, or maybe it’s that my trust in my environment has been damaged. And while it’s great that the medical system can prevent serious illness in many more cases now, COVID isn’t an “ignorable” illness yet because it’s not so under control that we can stop disrupting people’s lives with isolation. And obviously it can’t be ignored by people who end up with long COVID or other consequences.

So given that each new variant presents a new opportunity for reinfection, I’m rethinking my rules for myself. I suspect I caught COVID during an indoor dining event, even though it seemed well ventilated, so that’ll be my main change—either avoiding crowded restaurants entirely or staying masked as much as possible when I’m there. I’ll get to experiment this week if I attend our work department lunch.

Productivity

🙂

I narrowed my assessment to a shorter list of topics with a focus on my overall framework for understanding productivity. The framework is like a complicated to-do list, a map that will show me which parts of my productivity system I’ve figured out and which need more work.

Cooking

🙂

I organized my meal rotation. It’s another step in making my food management more streamlined and mindless. The overall idea is I cook one meal to last several days, because I want to minimize my cooking and I don’t mind leftovers. Recently I stumbled into a helpful pattern where I shop for a meal one week, cook it the next week, and eat it the week after that. Each week I’m shopping, cooking, and eating different meals. So to keep it all straight, I codified the cycle in my to-do app with a set of recurring tasks.

I celebrated my negative COVID test with some pumpkin muffins. I had a lot of aquafaba saved from cans of chickpeas, so I substituted that for the egg using instructions from America’s Test Kitchen, and it worked very well.

Fiction

🤔

The Western Canon by Harold Bloom gives me an opinionated and idiosyncratic starting point for exploring classic literature. It did make the authors he covered sound intriguing, and the appendices gave me a big list of works Bloom felt were canonical, so the book achieved my purpose for it. But now I have to narrow down his list. It would also be nice to find a more straightforward introduction to these authors, maybe just Wikipedia. And as usual, I feel compelled to collect more opinions.

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

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