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

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