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.

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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.

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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.

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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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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.

 

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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.

 

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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.

 

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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.

 

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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.

 

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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.

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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.

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