Weeknote for 5/1/2022

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

πŸ™‚

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

πŸ™‚

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

πŸ€”

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.

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Weeknote for 4/24/2022

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

πŸ™‚

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.

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Weeknote for 4/17/2022

Productivity

πŸ™‚

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

πŸ™‚

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

πŸ™‚

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

πŸ€”

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

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Weeknote for 4/10/2022

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

πŸ€”

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:

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Weeknote for 4/3/2022

Website

πŸ˜‘

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

πŸ€”

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!

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Weeknote for 3/27/2022

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

πŸ€”

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

πŸ™‚

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.

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Weeknote for 3/20/2022

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

πŸ™‚

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 strategyβ€”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 fictionΒ 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

πŸ™‚

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.

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Weeknote for 3/13/2022

Productivity

πŸ™‚

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

πŸ™‚

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

πŸ™‚

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

πŸ€”

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.

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Weeknote for 3/6/2022

Website

😐

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

Vacation

πŸ™‚

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

πŸ™‚

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

πŸ€”

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.

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Weeknote for 2/27/2022

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.

πŸ™‚

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

πŸ™‚

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

πŸ˜•

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 postΒ 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.

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