Weeknote for 1/2/2022

Posted on January 6, 2022 by Andy

Productivity

🙂

I got through the Emacs tutorial. Somehow this felt like a major accomplishment. Anyway, it was the first step in using Org mode for my task management. And now I know why it’s called Org “mode.” A mode is like a plugin that shapes the behavior of the Emacs commands. I also captured many of my thoughts on task scheduling so they’ll be ready when it’s time to write my algorithms. This week I’ll start exploring Org. I’ll also finish setting up my Elastic Habits tracker spreadsheet.

Self-improvement

🤔

The Art of Making Memories by Meik Wiking set off trains of thought about planning my experiential memories. A lot of the book was review for me, since it covered the major techniques I’ve learned from books on semantic memory, which is memory of facts. But this book is about episodic memory, or memory of experiences, and it does a nice job of integrating the factual memory techniques with others specifically related to experiential memory. And he has suggestions for scheduling memorable experiences. He lays out a year of them organized thematically according to technique, which would be a very me thing to do, so it caught my attention.

Nature

😎

We finally had snow, so I took some walks to take photos. I even braved Saturday’s blizzard. I was glad to see I was not the only person of questionable judgment out at the forest that day. It wasn’t snowy when I started my daily walks last year, so it’s been interesting to observe how the snow changes the look of the land. It highlights the shapes that were there and adds new shapes and patterns. And of course it changes the color scheme. I was not expecting the the brown tall grass to give the images a ’70s look. I feel like I’m looking at old photo albums from my infancy.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum)

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum)

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum)

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum)

Posted in Nature, Personal development, Productivity, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 12/26/2021

Posted on December 27, 2021 by Andy

Christmas

🎅

Over Christmas my family vacationed at a vintage house in a small, southern Illinois town. The house was built by the owner’s grandfather for his wife in the ’70s. They call it Arsula’s House. The owners have modernized it but kept the tone. We think they did a great job.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum)

Since I walk every day now, we took three different sibling walks. The first was around the neighborhood and down a trail that used to be a railroad. There were a lot of small guard cats and dogs around.

The third was more of a saunter around the property, with a lot of standing still using the Merlin ID app to identify the large flock of little dark birds hanging around. We couldn’t decide between starlings and grackles. They’d land together on the grass or by the pond or in the trees and suddenly a few minutes later all woosh away to another spot.

The second walk was a hike around Garden of the Gods in Shawnee National Forest. The weather was overcast and gusty, though not too cold, and we were surrounded by weird rocks and bare trees, and it all made the walk rather surreal and moody for me. Also we weren’t really prepared for a wilderness hike, but through a group effort we avoided getting lost and made it back safely.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum)

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum)

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum)

A theme in the gifts I got was hobbies I want to try out next year. I got a garden tool set from Kimberly and an electronics kit from my parents. I meant electronics to be a prelude to robotics in some future year, but they also gave us Roombas, which have an API, so maybe I’ll start my robotics tinkering early.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum)

Christmas labels

🙂

My Christmas gift tags were photos from my walks throughout the year. I tried to tailor each person’s photo to their interests.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum)

Movies

🙂

Encanto was our Christmas movie. The animation, acting, and music were terrific. It was both an interesting mystery and, as Disney movies go, a thoughtful commentary on family, home, and community. I thought these non-Western cultural values would make the movie feel foreign, but instead it reminded me I too care about these things.

Space

🙂

Early Christmas morning I watched the launch of the James Webb space telescope. The launch was the culmination of 25 years of work and billions of dollars, and the telescope will apparently reshape astronomy, so lots of people were nervous. But the launch was perfect, and the first few of the dozens of steps needed after that have succeeded. NASA has a web page where you can track its progress. I tweeted a creation by the WOMBO Dream AI art app to mark the occasion.

Productivity

🙂

I’m starting 2022 with an update to my productivity system. This week starts the Thinkulum month of January. Several projects feel the most important, but the real most important is the productivity system, since it should put me in a better position to take care of the others. I haven’t planned out the upgrades in detail, but to start with I want to try using Org mode for managing my tasks and sketch out an algorithm for scheduling them.

Posted in Christmas labels, Holidays, Movies, Nature, Productivity, Space, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 12/19/2021

Posted on December 19, 2021 by Andy

Christmas labels

🙂

I’m nearly done with the labels. I came up with a simplified version I liked and went with that. Judging by how much time that version took, simplifying was the only way I could get the project done.

Religion

🤔

After many weeks of inch-wise progress, I finally finished Introduction to World Religions, edited by Christopher Partridge and Tim Dowley. My main purpose in listening to it was to lay some groundwork for venturing further into the philosophy of religion. I’ll be asking questions like, how do the world’s religions justify themselves? And what does the existence of all these religions tell us? I was trying to avoid books on world religions that explain them in terms of their relationship to Christianity, and this one does seem to cover the religions fairly and on their own terms. A secondary purpose in listening was to give myself worldbuilding inspiration for some stories I have in mind.

Christmas

😰

Now that my Christmas project is almost done, I can squeeze in some preparations for my vacation. Travel stresses me out because it gives me a hard deadline for necessary pre-travel tasks, and I’m never sure if I can get them all done in time. This year’s vacation is a test to see how well my new level of organization helps.

Posted in Apologetics, Christmas labels, Holidays, Religion, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 12/12/2021

Posted on December 12, 2021 by Andy

Christmas labels

😕

I made good progress, but I’m feeling the pressure. I’m at the worry stage of the project, where I don’t know if I can come up with the right ideas and make the right decisions at the right times to make it all turn out well. But really it’ll end up fine like it always does.

Movies

😎

I rewatched The Dark Crystal and liked it better this time. I watched it as a prelude to watching the prequel series from a few years ago, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance. I heard about the series on The Climate Pod, which did an interview with one of the executive producers, Javier Grillo-Marxuach.

The first time I watched the movie, I remember being annoyed with the protagonist for being so simple minded. In fact, I thought of it as the movie’s defining feature. This time I was expecting it, so I could pay more attention to the movie’s incredible display of puppetry and its evocative aesthetic. It made me want to rewatch all the other fantasy movies from that period.

I even found a new appreciation for the main character. He really was not prepared for this challenge, and it added palpable tension to the plot. The world’s fate was in the hands of two people who stumbled into their roles, and events could easily have gone completely wrong.

Dune: Part One made me more interested in revisiting the book. I saw this with Jeremy on Saturday, and we were both impressed, but he remembered much more of the book, so he was in a better position to be impressed with the adaptation. What I could say is that the movie made the story’s political situation very clear, which I probably wouldn’t have said about the book. Now I have to relisten and find out.

While being dazzled by the movie, I also felt at home there. It had the kind of aesthetic I would’ve gone for if I knew how to make movies and were making one like this, with a naturalistic feel rather than stylized and polished, probably with a similar kind of slab-like architecture, except that my film would’ve been less inventive. I was especially intrigued by its use of sound and language.

Music

🙂

I’ve been listening to a winter instrumentals playlist. It’s not very Christmasy, which is on purpose, since I’m expecting to listen to this music past the holiday. In fact, it’s a lot like the fall music, so I’ll be looking for more variety in a cold and snowy direction. These playlists are part of a project that’s emerging where I organize more of my life around the seasons.

Posted in Christmas labels, Movies, Music, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 12/5/2021

Posted on December 5, 2021 by Andy

Christmas labels

😐

I continued my progress, but I’ll need to carve out more time for it. That should be doable if I cut down on TV, so I’m putting Person of Interest on hold until this project is in a more comfortable place. I have two weeks left for it.

Productivity

😎

My renewed Elastic Habits had a successful first week. My sleep schedule has returned to normal, and I’ve cut way down on social media. It came just in time, since I was running into a bit of a time wreck. That’s what I call it when several deadlines I’ve procrastinated on happen in a clump. Organization is a great stress reducer, and so I’ve been working through my tasks with pressure but without panic. Once those are all out of the way, I’ll have even more time for the Christmas project.

Cooking

🙂

I found out I like tofu. I had it once at my college cafeteria many years ago and found it to be strange and rubbery, like flavorless mushrooms, which I’ve always considered questionable as a food. Do those things even come from this planet? In recent years I’ve been trying to get over some of my food dislikes. The current effort happens to be mushrooms, partly because I’ve learned what amazing organisms they are. And what better way to make friends with a life form than to eat it?

In the meantime, my cook-through of Betty Crocker One-Dish Meals has run up against a series of beef stew recipes, and I didn’t feel like spending all that money on meat week after week, so I decided it was time to give tofu another try. I went with extra firm so it would hold its shape when I cooked it. The recipe for this experiment was Quick Beef and Vegetable Stew, and it turned out to be really good! The tofu wasn’t like mushrooms at all. It was more like dense bread. And that’s something I need no persuasion to eat. As my old pal Ugluk would say, “Looks like [tofu’s] back on the menu, boys!“

Posted in Christmas labels, Cooking, Productivity, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 11/28/2021

Posted on November 28, 2021 by Andy

Christmas labels

😐

The main task of the project is rolling along. I spent my holiday time less well than I wanted, but I wasn’t too unhappy with my progress.

Programming

🤔

I spent a little too much time on Haskell. It’s supposed to be a side project. Anyway right now I’m sorting out the difference between foldl and foldr. Recursion is a tricky beast, but I will understand it!

Productivity

😎

On Elastic Habits, I replaced my admin habit with social media and moved my tracker to a spreadsheet. Social media has been my foe lately. It’s my Achilles’ heel when I feel too tired to be productive. This conflicts directly with my goal of eliminating waste from my life so I have more time for projects. And since my admin habit is pretty well established now, switching it out seemed like the right move. The goal of this new habit is to limit my time on social media.

Each of my habits has a different relationship to time: Sleep is based on a target clock time (10 pm) with differing degrees of preparation (an Elite score is doing my full night routine by that time). Projects is based on maximizing time (Elite is spending at least an hour-and-a-half on a project). And social media is based on minimizing time (Elite is spending a max of one 15-minute block).

I used to track my habit scores on printouts hung on my whiteboard. Working with physical objects has a certain appeal, but managing the records and calculations on paper was a little too much effort, so I’ve given in to the inevitable and moved it to the computer. It’ll take some experimenting to get the spreadsheet design right, but I have enough to start the tracking.

Coffee

🙂

Barissimo Sumatra Dark Roast Ground Coffee: 4/5. I only struggled a little with the sourness, so I’ll call this one a winner. Wikipedia tells me Sumatra is an island of Indonesia.

Holidays

🙂

I made my own Thanksgiving dinner and celebrated by myself. The crew of the Discovery did join me, but they were stuck in the TV and didn’t know it was Thanksgiving. Dinner was a low-effort affair straight from the cans to my plate, but it was good, and I’m still eating the leftovers. The one exception was my mom’s pumpkin muffins. I worked myself to the bone for several minutes with all the measuring and mixing, and they were delicious.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum)

Posted in Christmas labels, Coffee, Cooking, Holidays, Productivity, Programming, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 11/21/2021

Posted on November 22, 2021 by Andy

Christmas labels

😐

I’m going to try to mostly finish this week. I made a little progress last week, but I was not very disciplined in general, partly from coping with my fraying sleep schedule. In principle the holiday will give me extra time this week, so we’ll see if I can take advantage of it. A side benefit of this project is that managing the materials is pushing me to do some housekeeping.

Productivity

🤔

I’m preparing to pick up my Elastic Habits again (video summary). My recordkeeping dropped off a few months ago, and lately my habits themselves have become spotty, so it’s time for a reboot. This week I’ll set up a graph that will make the scoring more meaningful, and I might create some more rules for my EH system. Then I’ll restart the recordkeeping next week with the new project month.

Music

😎

I’ve been enjoying some fall instrumental playlists. What makes music autumnal? Judging by these playlists, it’s mostly acoustic guitar or piano with a relaxing, carefree, bittersweet, or ethereal mood.

These are good soundtracks for taking walks or for the ambience videos I use as animated wallpapers on my extra monitor. In ambience world you can stop the sun and hang out at the lake in twilight for 8 hours.

Posted in Christmas labels, Music, Productivity, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 11/14/2021

Posted on November 14, 2021 by Andy

Christmas labels

😐

I made decent progress. I’m about at the place I hoped to be a week ago.

Programming

🙂

I snuck in some Haskell learning and finally finished unit 2. Since this is going more slowly than I wanted, I’m thinking I shouldn’t put off my programming projects till I can use Haskell for them. I’ll work with languages I know.

Productivity

😕

I’m getting impatient to update my productivity system. It has weaknesses that are causing my time management to degrade as the weeks go by, which gets me down sometimes. But my life is still in much better shape than it was before this year, and that keeps me grateful.

Space

🤔

I’ve become more selective about the rocket launches I support. I’ve basically lost interest in Starship because it’s such a troubling program, and it seems even Starlink is a bad idea, though I’m open to rebuttals. But I like the ISS, so I watched the SpaceX Crew-3 launch on Wednesday to take new astronauts there.

Sustainability

🤔

I casually followed COP26, this year’s UN climate conference. My understanding is the agreement they came to was definite progress but not sufficient. Fortunately, these conferences don’t make or break the climate all by themselves, and the work continues. I have to say I’m enjoying exploring all the angles on this subject. If you like digging into complicated issues, sustainability is a good one.

Housekeeping

🙂

I decorated my apartment for fall. I wanted some ornamental gourds, but I settled for apples and leaves.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum)

Posted in Christmas labels, Housekeeping, Productivity, Programming, Space, Sustainability, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 11/7/2021

Posted on November 8, 2021 by Andy

Christmas labels

😐

My Christmas labels project was sidelined by my Christmas list. My family likes to be organized and conduct our Christmas shopping via wish lists, and we try to get them settled way in advance. But I like to be careful and thoughtful about my list, and it tends to take a lot of research and planning, so that was what took up my time last week. Also work still hasn’t calmed down, so my evenings were especially short. But the Christmas list is basically done now, so this week I can go back to the Christmas labels.

Space

🤔

Thanks to SpaceX and the FAA, my support for the space economy collided with my newfound support for the environment. In the middle of last week I ran across this tweet that sent me down a rabbit hole of SpaceX criticism on both technical and environmental grounds. The inciting incident was that SpaceX needs an FAA license for their future Starship launches, and the FAA conducted an environmental assessment and opened the draft to public comment, ending in some virtual town halls a few weeks ago (see this coverage by The Verge).

ESG Hound tweeted links to a list of submissions from environmental groups, to an article on complaints from the Fish and Wildlife Service, and to ESG Hound’s own findings posted on their Substack. This was not easy to hear, but I made myself face facts and listen.

Further digging led me to a YouTube channel called Common Sense Skeptic that has its own letter to the FAA and a long playlist of videos criticizing the Starship program. He’s not without his own critics, however (I found Astro Kiwi and Ben Pearson).

Overall the controversy reinforces my impression that Elon Musk is somewhat reckless, and if these concerns have merit, I do hope the FAA has the fortitude to deny the license, even if it sets our plans back to return to the moon.

Posted in Christmas labels, Holidays, Space, Sustainability, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 10/31/2021

Posted on October 31, 2021 by Andy

Programming

😐

I crawled almost to the end of unit 2 in my Haskell book. I have a bit more to do on the final exercise, which I’ll try to finish in the next day or so.

As much as I want to keep going through unit 4, I need to get back to my Christmas project, so that’ll be this week.

Fiction

🙂

I listened to some Edgar Allan Poe. I had read a little of him in school—I remember “The Raven” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”—but he didn’t grab me until I heard PodCastle’s version of “The Fall of the House of Usher” a few years ago. Listening to to more of his best works (according to ST Joshi) this past week, I got a better sense of the breadth of stories he told. He was very good at capturing certain moods and adding layers of interest to simple plots. I kept feeling that you could sit with each story quite a while plumbing the depths. I spent a little too long searching for the recordings I wanted for each story, but here were the sources I settled on:

Sustainability

🙂

I found another few climate podcasts to follow. The climate podcasts and my regular political ones from earlier in the year will get me through the tension of following the climate-relevant Build Back Better Act in Congress and COP26 at the United Nations over the next couple of weeks. Here are my new ones:

Posted in Fiction, Programming, Sustainability, Weeknotes | Leave a comment