Weeknote for 3/13/2022

Posted on March 13, 2022 by Andy

Productivity

🙂

I relearned I have to aim for target times if I want to hit them. Up till now I’ve mainly been trying to schedule the important tasks for earlier in the day and letting everything take as long as it takes, which means later but still important tasks often don’t get done. Last week’s experiment was aiming to start my project time at 7 (or 7:30 if I had reasons) so I’d have about two hours for it. I’ve done this haphazardly before, but it worked so well this time that I want to train myself to approach my schedule this way.

Website

😐

I made slow but significant progress relearning how to set up my website on my local computer. This is what I spent all my project time on. This week I’ll spend some time analyzing last week’s work so I can choose the quickest methods of solving problems.

Spirituality

😐

I made no progress on the everyday prayer project. Now that I’m having more success fitting project time in, I need to learn how to juggle multiple projects.

Tea

🙂

I was introduced to another 5, Tazo’s Glazed Lemon Loaf. For my birthday my sister sent me a nice card with a bag of her favorite tea. I steeped it without really looking at the package, and I thought to myself it smelled like one of those glazed lemon cakes. Then I looked at the name. Well done, Tazo! Since then I’ve been telling people about it.

Fiction

🙂

The High King is an epic and satisfying ending to the series. I don’t know if literary criticisms have been written of the Prydain books, but the Encyclopedia of Fantasy has an interesting entry.

Politics

🤔

In Twilight of Democracy Anne Applebaum presents an interesting but perhaps limited perspective on the causes of authoritarianism. The causes I picked up were (1) resentment of the meritocracy of liberal democracy by ambitious but less capable people, (2) a desire for simplicity and uniformity in society, and (3) a nostalgia that seeks to recreate one’s image of the past. She doesn’t exactly dismiss the notion of people economically left behind by society, but it’s not what she cares about in this book. I believe this gap is filled by Fiona Hill’s new book, There Is Nothing for You Here, which I’ll get to at some point. Applebaum is a journalist, and her approach focuses on history. I’d like to see how researchers in the various social sciences would interact with her views.

I’ve been appreciating Adam Something’s YouTube posts analyzing the Ukraine conflict. I don’t know enough to evaluate them, but they at least make me feel better. And they introduced me to Francis Fukuyama’s interesting project American Purpose.

Posted in Current events, Fiction, Politics, Productivity, Spirituality, Tea, Weeknotes, Wiki | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 3/6/2022

Posted on March 6, 2022 by Andy

Website

😐

I didn’t do anything on fixing the website. My project time was taken up by invoicing. Maybe this week.

Vacation

🙂

My birthday is this week, and I’m taking the day off. I asked myself what I wanted for my birthday, and it was a free day not dominated by chores where I could work on some of the projects I care about. I still have some planning to do for it, but the topics of the day will mainly be modeling, a bit of Haskell, and maybe some requirements engineering.

Food

🙂

Folgers Columbian Ground Coffee: 3/5. It was good most of the time but sour too much of the time.

I was indoctrinated by a FredrikKnudsen livestream into loose leaf tea snobbery. I haven’t become a snob yet, but his enthusiasm motivated me to try it out. Later in the week my boss gave me some of his Ahmad Green Tea with Earl Grey, so now I can see what it’s like without too much expense.

Fiction

🤔

Like the first time I read it, I felt a strong connection to Taran Wanderer. I too am on a continual quest to define myself. In my opinion a person is too broad and varied to be described by one term, but I came up with “Andy Creator,” and I think that’s a decent starting place. Maybe in that case I should do more creating. Maybe the productivity system I’m creating will help me do that.

Spirituality

😐

I scanned some prayers from Every Moment Holy. Next I’ll edit them each down to a few lines. Then I’ll create audio files for them and find ways to integrate them into my routines.

Posted in Birthdays, Coffee, Fiction, Site updates, Spirituality, Tea, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 2/27/2022

Posted on February 27, 2022 by Andy

Website

😐

I’m taking a break from my main projects to fix my website. Not only has someone asked me about a page on the wiki, but I’m working on something new to post there. So it’s time to prioritize it.

Productivity

😐

I made slight progress on preparing the Emacs commands for mnemonicization. Next I’ll take a close look at my time tracker to see what’s still crowding out my time for projects like this one and what I can do about it. As for the Org project itself, I’ll pick it up again sometime after I fix the website.

🙂

My housekeeping practice is achieving its goal of reducing my cleaning time and procrastination. Last week I trimmed my kitchen cleaning timer from 37 minutes to 15. This week I’ll try to do the same with my bedroom and living room time. A regular schedule for cleaning is also taking shape. It helps that I’m attaching it to my evening routine.

Food

🙂

I’ve come up with a limit of two sweetener packets for making tea enjoyable. Anything beyond that will earn the tea a 2 rating. Otherwise it can probably have a 4. Celestial Seasonings’ Fruit Tea Sampler runs up against the limit, but they all ended up 4s. Most of them are too tart on their own. The exception is the milder Country Peach Passion.

Tazo’s Classic Chai was a 4 all by itself. I think I’ve only had chai once before, and I wasn’t impressed. Maybe the milk dampened the experience. But before trying the Vanilla Chai my friend Heather recommended, I wanted to reacquaint myself with regular chai, and Tazo’s won me over.

Current events

😕

Like many, I’ve been keeping an eye on the unfolding events in Ukraine. The conflict feels dire and consequential. I have no wise words, but this touching Instagram post has lodged in my mind.

The relaxing of COVID rules is making me set my personal policies more carefully. My goal for basically the whole pandemic has been to avoid long COVID. I’m on a decades-long quest to escape brain fog and fatigue, and I’m finally making progress. Now is not the time to risk setbacks. Plus there’s still the possibility of spreading an asymptomatic infection to strangers. So for now I’ll keep wearing a mask in crowded places, and I’ll probably avoid indoor dining. But I’ll keep watching what public health experts are saying.

Spirituality

😐

My Lent project this year is another attempt at last year’s everyday prayer project. It didn’t stick the first time, but I’m in a better position to carry it out this year. I have better tools and practices for following routines, and I have the print version of Every Moment Holy so I’m not just working from the audio.

Posted in COVID-19, Current events, Productivity, Site updates, Spirituality, Tea, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 2/20/2022

Posted on February 20, 2022 by Andy

Productivity

🙂

I’m creating mnemonics for Emacs commands. I’m thinking it’ll help me learn the many, many arbitrary-seeming commands in this software. The keystroke sequences have fairly regular structures, so it shouldn’t be too hard to search and replace the keys to create memorable image descriptions, treating the commands like mad libs. For example, I’ll use one of the typical alphabet mnemonics to represent the commands’ alphabetic characters. Last week I finished adding the basic data to the command spreadsheet, and this week I should be able to add the mnemonics.

Fiction

🤔

The Shadow of the Torturer is a strange book, but I liked it well enough to continue with the series. My boss suggested it because it’s February’s read-along on Media Death Cult, and I happened to have it on Audible. I keep hearing this series is dense with meaning, almost all of which I’m sure glided past my ears unnoticed, though I did notice some mysteries. They reminded me of the artifacts the Wheel of Time characters would run across, strange and sometimes magical relics from a forgotten age. In Shadow some of them were only mysteries because the narrator takes the features of his world for granted and doesn’t explain them. I never feel up to taking the time to analyze these kinds of works myself, but I’m looking forward to hearing everyone else’s deep dives.

The Castle of Llyr is another good Prydain story, but the series is starting to feel formulaic. Still, the formula he’s using is a decent container for the kinds of themes he’s exploring. And there are story arcs across the series, so each book isn’t just a repetition of the others. I remember identifying with Taran’s quest to find himself in the next book, Taran Wanderer, so I’m looking forward to being reminded of where it takes him.

Food

🙂

I tried more tea, and my ratings are becoming more varied as I continue to refine the scale. 4 is now “I like the fumes and aftertaste, or it’s subtle but has grown on me, or I like its flavor less [than the 5s’], at least without additions.” The teas in Bigelow’s herbal collection all get 4s. Twinings’ Oolong gets a 3, and Celestial Seasonings’ Cinnamon Apple Spice was an instant 5.

Posted in Fiction, Memory, Productivity, Tea, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 2/13/2022

Posted on February 13, 2022 by Andy

Website

😐

I’m fixing the wiki side of the website. If you hadn’t noticed, the front page of this site used to point to a page that looks like Wikipedia, and now it points to this blog. At the end of last year I updated the site’s PHP version so WordPress would work, and it broke MediaWiki, so I’ve been troubleshooting in my spare moments. My next thing to try is installing it from scratch and importing the old data.

Productivity

🙂

I organized the Emacs part of my cheat spreadsheet for Org. I’ve added some commands from familiar Windows programs that are equivalent to the Emacs commands, but there are plenty that don’t have Windows counterparts, at least not in software I use. This week I’ll add the Org commands.

I’m trying to be more regular about improving my productivity system. Looking at my life over the past couple of years, I’ve been impressed with how much small changes can build up, and so I’d like to keep the snowball rolling by intentionally looking each day for improvements to make to my system. Last week one improvement was a new routine timer to capture some of my miscellaneous evening tasks, and part of the new evening routine is to practice cleaning every day, since after I replaced housekeeping in my elastic habits, I went back to putting it off.

Housekeeping

🙂

I ran my new Roomba for the first time. It was a Christmas present from my parents. I set it up a few weeks ago, but after that Roma was just sitting on her charger waiting for me to work out how to clear the floor. So that was Sunday’s housekeeping project, which took a long time because I constantly stopped to make notes of what I was moving to where so I wouldn’t have to think about it in the future. It was interesting to watch the Roomba follow its path finding algorithm, but it seemed inefficient, retreading some areas and missing others, so I’ll try walling it off so it can spend its time on one room. I also need to mess with its cliff sensors, because it stops at the edge of my black-patterned rug, apparently thinking it’s an abyss.

Food

🙂

I sampled Bigelow’s assorted black and green teas, and other teas are growing on me. My default score for tea is 3, and this set was a solid 3, but I think my sister’s observation was right, that I tend to like mint, and the Perfectly Mint Classic does get a 4. At the same time I notice myself gravitating toward certain “bland” teas I’ve tried, like Earl Grey, so I’m starting not to trust my initial impressions, and I’ll need to rethink my scoring criteria.

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Weeknote for 2/6/2022

Posted on February 6, 2022 by Andy

Productivity

😎

I got through another page of the Org guide, and then I made a cheat spreadsheet. It’ll let me sort by different pieces of info so I have a more flexible way to review the many, many commands. So far I’ve added the content of the Emacs reference card, and later I’ll add the one for Org. I also have columns to fill in with equivalent commands from Windows and other familiar software so I can use the known to learn the unknown.

The journaling is intensifying. In addition to work journaling, I’ve returned to my old habit of collecting all my random thoughts throughout the day on my current topics of interest. The last time I did this regularly was in college. In the desert years after that I repeatedly discovered that, in addition to sleep, writing is what makes the most difference for me between depression and vitality. The richness that grows out of processing my life in text tells me the wasteland I’ve lived in isn’t all there is. But as with everything else I tried for improving my life, the oasis always dried up quickly. Maybe this time it’ll stay a while.

I collected more ideas on streamlining my tasks. (1) I can define service levels for different kinds of tasks so I have an easy way to gracefully degrade them when I’m short on time. (2) A solid memory lets you reconnect to information faster, so once I learn mnemonic techniques for real, I can use them to spend less time looking up my most needed info. (3) I can use a shorthand for my journaling and note-taking. For handwriting I’d use Gregg, but for typing I’d need something else, which I may have to invent.

Four Thousand Weeks is a thought-provoking exploration of living meaningfully within our limits. Burkeman wants us to let go of the rat race and embrace the inescapable smallness and imperfection of life. It’s written in a style typical of recent self-help books, but it’s dense with countercultural wisdom to dig into. On the surface, following the author’s advice to quit striving for perfect productivity would suggest dropping my scheduling project, but I think the two are compatible. The point of my project isn’t to do more than humanly possible but to gain clarity on my time so I can experiment with ways to make the most of it.

I found that I wasn’t really the target audience for the book, since I’m a slow person who already likes to enjoy life, but since I’m also a person who likes to dream big, it was a good reminder to ask myself where I have unrealistic expectations. The book also pushes me a few steps down the path of developing my “spirituality of coping.” He offers some techniques for dealing with the everyday pain of being human, such as the boredom and fear that drive us to distraction and procrastination. It’s a valuable book, and after finishing the audiobook, I bought the ebook to study it further. Later I might look into his similar book The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking.

Food

🙂

Community Coffee Café Special: 4/5. It was another good, everyday coffee, and it had a little more character than the Barissimo House Blend. I’ve completed my run through the Aldi coffees that interest me, and so now I’m expanding into other brands. My next one is from Folgers. I’ll probably also revisit the coffees I scored as 4 to recalibrate my scale, because some of them probably deserve a 5.

Last week I tried Twinings’ Black Tea Variety Pack. Here were my scores on those:

  • Earl Grey – 3
  • Lady Grey – 3
  • English Breakfast – 3
  • Irish Breakfast – 3

Since this is my “give tea a chance” project, I’ve redefined what 3 means on my scale. Originally it was “kind of bland and forgettable,” but I’m starting to think of tea as a slow and mindful drink, so what bland really means is “subtle,” a tea that needs more attention to appreciate.

Fiction

🙂

I found The Black Cauldron more satisfying than The Book of Three. The characters had settled into the story, and I think the pacing was a little better. And there was a key sacrifice in the book that I really felt, though maybe not for the same reasons the characters did.

Housekeeping

🤔

I finally decorated my home for winter. I tried to make it generically winter instead of Christmas, but it still feels too much like a holiday. It’s also showing me I need something more to make the place feel truly decorated, probably something on the walls.

 

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Weeknote for 1/30/2022

Posted on January 30, 2022 by Andy

Productivity

😐

I made no progress on the Org part of this project. I’ll see if I can prioritize it this week.

🙂

I made lots of progress on my scheduling notes, which are growing into plans for a full-fledged app. In my software development reading I’m learning about requirements, so these plans will become more formal soon.

I’m starting another round of streamlining my tasks to expand my project time. Optimizing a schedule is exciting, but it can only go so far. If each task takes too long, I’ll still be slower than I want. And all my slow tasks will crowd out the time I need for optimizing, not to mention the other projects I care about. So I’m looking again at how I can achieve satisfying results while taking less time for them.

This time I’m taking a few approaches: First, I’m learning to outsource. Specifically I’m researching my purchases less and instead relying on published reviews. That worked really well for buying a new Dutch oven.

Second, I’m work journaling to keep myself unstuck. Even though writing slows things down in some ways, my impression is it speeds them up in others. It unclogs my brain when it tries to think about too much at once or when it stops thinking because the work feels hard.

And third, I’m focusing on practice. I’ve gotten a lot quicker at the routines I’ve made timers for, and it’s because I do them all the time and pay attention to efficiency. So if I do my slow tasks more often, they should get faster.

Food

🙂

Cooking is my first activity to practice in this round of streamlining. During the pandemic I’ve been cooking my way through Betty Crocker One-Dish Meals, starting with the salad and soup sections, which have taken me this whole time. I’ve tried several times to convince myself to pause the project, but I’ve been strangely attached to it.

Well my new agenda has motivated me, and so I’ve rated my favorite recipes on their level of effort, and I’ve chosen the easiest of those to practice. That gives me four recipes. My goal is to reduce the time it takes me to shop for them, prepare the ingredients, and manage the cooking.

I’ve started a tea tasting project. I’ve never been a big fan of tea. There were a few kinds I liked, but they were all the overly sweetened, iced kind. Regular tea was always disappointing to me. It smelled good but only tasted like hot water.

Then my sister brought Celestial Seasonings’ Candy Cane Lane to our Christmas gathering, and at last here was a tea I didn’t have to struggle to enjoy. So now that I feel tea has potential, I’m on a quest to explore it and perhaps join the tea-loving population.

This will go quicker than the coffee because tea has a longer shelf life, so I don’t need to get through a whole box before trying the next one. Plus some of the boxes are samplers. In fact, I’ve started with Celestial Seasonings’ herbal tea sampler.

My scoring scheme:

  • 5 – I like it, and it has an actual flavor or other interesting qualities.
  • 4 – I like the fumes and aftertaste. (In my view, this is what tea is made of.)
  • 3 – It’s kind of bland and forgettable.
  • 2 – Making it enjoyable would take work.
  • 1 – I’d actively avoid it.

My scores for the herbal tea sampler:

  • Chamomile – 3
  • Lemon Zinger – 2
  • Peppermint – 4
  • Honey Vanilla Chamomile – 3
  • Sleepytime – 3

Fiction

🙂

Snuff is a satisfying meal of detective work, action, satire, and human rights. When it comes to fiction, Discworld is my comfort food, but it’s the nutritious sort. Terry Pratchett had a sharp eye on the world from a perch somewhere on the left. But where exactly? In the years since I last listened to a Discworld book, I’ve learned a lot about feminism, and I wonder what the people I listen to would say about this story. He seems to mock many of his characters simply for not measuring up while innocently being themselves, and I imagine that could raise some hackles.

Coming back to the series after my break, one thing that strikes me is how real Pratchett’s characters feel, despite being caricatures. In this story even the laughingstocks of the series get some respect. The message I pick up is the dichotomy between how different people are—how strange, absurd, and sometimes even subhuman we can seem to each other—and that we are all nonetheless fully persons.

Posted in Cooking, Fiction, Productivity, Tea, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 1/23/2022

Posted on January 28, 2022 by Andy

Productivity

😐

On the Org guide, I did indeed have another surprise, and I only got through a couple more chapters. Maybe I can push through the rest of it this week.

The surprise was getting an emergency freelance job, so that took up my evenings last week. I handled it a lot better than I would have in the past. I didn’t get myself in a state of overwhelm, and I didn’t let my work sessions go on without end. I set limits, used my work management tools, and carried on with my regular routine.

😎

I’m training myself to consistently write as I work. I call it work journaling, and it’s a dialogue with myself about whatever I’m doing as I’m doing it. I explain situations I run into, ask myself questions, make suggestions to myself, report on my findings, give myself next steps, and continue on in that vein.

It has the same effect for me as time blocking: It lets me focus on the task in front of me, which dramatically reduces my stress while keeping my work flowing. It lets me capture my thoughts concretely instead of burdening my working memory with them. It makes keeping track of my moment-to-moment tasks much easier. It slows down my thoughts and draws my attention to them so I can question myself and make better use of my own knowledge and second thoughts. And it documents my work so I can refer to it later.

Fiction

🤔

The Book of Three didn’t quite live up to my nostalgia, but there’s substance there. It’s like Alexander had a story all crafted for adults and then decided to shrink it, cover it in felt, and tell it as a puppet show for children. But the serious concepts still show through to be pondered. I’m curious to see (again) how the series develops. Also the best part of the book was Eilonwy.

Posted in Fiction, Productivity, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 1/16/2022

Posted on January 16, 2022 by Andy

Productivity

😎

I got through another chapter of the Org guide. Unless something unexpected happens, this week I should have more time for it. What crowded it out the past couple of weeks were my blog posts, which have dragged on through most of the week like in the bad old days, so I’m making adjustments to get them back on schedule.

Meanwhile I’m still jotting down copious notes on my scheduling extension. It’s satisfying to spell out the complexity I’ve suspected is lurking in the task management I feel I need.

I began learning about operations research, the math behind scheduling and other decision making. This is a subject I’ve wanted to look into for a while, and with its relevance to projects both at home and at work, it seemed like the right time. The only affordable overview book I could find was Schaum’s Outline of Operations Research, so I bought that, and right from the first chapter I feel it’s giving me a good foundation. My approach will be to read the explanatory opening section of each chapter and then dip into the worked examples for the especially relevant chapters.

Self-improvement

🙂

Wintering by Katherine May is a worthwhile, literary look at the ways people and nature cope with the difficult limbo periods of life. I became aware of this book a few weeks ago when my pastor quoted it in a sermon. I found the book very engaging but had mixed reactions to it. On the one hand, the writing was delightful, felt very British, and made me want to go read CS Lewis. The book had a lot to digest, with many unfamiliar insights on an uncommon topic. I enjoyed walking around actual winter landscapes with her words in my ears about the joys and trials of living with snow. And the reader, Rebecca Lee, was very good and fitting.

On the other hand, in spite of some organization around the winter months, the book felt scattered, so I’ll probably revisit it in text to give myself a better sense of the whole. And as pointed out by one reviewer, the author’s life circumstances did show through pretty strongly, so plenty of people would have work to do applying her realizations to their own lives. But in my view a certain amount of that comes with the self-help territory. Overall I recommend the book.

Fiction

😎

Text games and Wintering gave me the final nudge to get back into fantasy. I’d been inching closer over the past few months. Last week I spent an inordinate amount of time deciding where to start. I knew I wanted a genre fantasy, but did I want something more mythological like Tolkien, something more like a fairy tale, or something more Arthurian? And did I want to reread something old, continue a series I hadn’t finished, or start something new?

After I’d collected my long list of possibilities, one kept drawing my attention, and so I settled on a Tolkienesque series from my past, the Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander. It fits with my computer game inspiration, because that’s how I first encountered it, in the Sierra On-Line video game The Black Cauldron, created by Al Lowe based on the Disney movie.

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Weeknote for 1/9/2022

Posted on January 13, 2022 by Andy

Productivity

🙂

I worked through two chapters of the Org Mode Compact Guide. I’m treating it as a tutorial. I would’ve done more, but various excuses happened. But I’m glad to finally be learning it. I’ve also been jotting down a large number of thoughts on scheduling. Once I learn Org, I’ll try writing an extension that creates a schedule for my tasks.

Coffee

🙂

Barissimo House Blend: 4/5. It was good most days. A nice, standard coffee.

Games

😎

Emacs inspired me to look up text-based games. There’s something magical about the spareness of a text interface, where the immersion comes not from pervasive graphics and sound but from your own mind. And for some of us, on top of that is the magic of nostalgia.

A few things I found: Here’s a long list of Linux games and a short one for DOS. Notable on that list is ZZT, the first title published by Epic Games. Emacs itself also comes with games. I delved into an unfamiliar site for interactive fiction (a.k.a. text adventures), IFDB. And I glanced through Aaron Reed’s series of articles sampling the history of text games, eventually to become a book. I even tracked down the sources of my earliest computer games, Monster and Duck!, which I played on our family’s Osborne 1 waaaaay back in the early ’80s.

Meanwhile for the ambience I listened to medieval-sounding music while revisiting an old YouTube gaming channel where Harris teaches his friend Matt Dwarf Fortress, a game with a book-length tutorial (Getting Started with Dwarf Fortress by Peter Tyson). Years ago I made it halfway through that book before giving up. If I go back to DF, my first quest will be to make it all the way through.

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