Weeknote for 10/3/2021

Posted on October 3, 2021 by Andy

Programming

🙂

I finished Get Programming with Haskell unit 1. I’ve had to wrestle with a couple of questionable exercises, but overall the book is still good, and I’m looking forward to the rest of it. It will have to wait a bit, sadly.

Christmas labels

😐

The time has come again to start on my secret gift labels for Christmas. I’ll work on them this week and then see if I’ve gotten far enough to put the rest off till after Haskell.

Fiction

🙂

I’ve assembled some of my Victorian horror reading list. My Octobers have become Halloween and Christmas season at the same time. Here’s what I have so far:

  • Edward Bulwer-Lytton: “The House and the Brain”
  • Wilkie Collins: “The Dead Alive,” “The Dream-Woman,” “Mad Monkton,” “A Terribly Strange Bed”
  • Charles Dickens: “The Signalman,” “The Trial for Murder”
  • Amelia B. Edwards: “The Discovery of the Treasure Isles,” “The Recollections of Professor Henneberg”
  • George Eliot: “The Lifted Veil”
  • William Makepeace Thackeray: “Bluebeard’s Ghost”

These are British from mid-century. Next I’ll add some Americans from that period, Poe from earlier, and some others from later. I’ve also started listening with Wilkie Collins’ “A Terribly Strange Bed” and “Mad Monkton.” I’m thinking I’ll comment on the stories in batches like I did with the drone music project.

Coffee

🙂

Barissimo French Roast Ground Coffee: 4/5. It’s darker than I normally go for, but I didn’t have to struggle to make it good.

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Weeknote for 9/26/2021

Posted on September 26, 2021 by Andy

Programming

😎

I got through lesson 7 of Get Programming with Haskell. At this rate I should be done in five more weeks, though I’ll take some breaks for other projects. I’m having a much easier time with this book, so I think I can complete it without much trouble. Haskell exercises are kinda fun. They’d make good puzzle books.

I’m dipping my toe into Linux with The Linux Command Line by William Schotts. Haskell and Org mode have put me back in touch with what I think of as “the magic of text,” so I’d like to take another stab at getting to know command-line Linux. Linux does have graphical interfaces that look a lot like Windows, but to me real Linux means typing. Incanting, you could say.

I’m dipping my toe into software correctness with Practical TLA+ by Hillel Wayne. I found his blog a while back, and I think of it as my keyhole into this important field. After my last foray into software development literature where I learned the many, many ways software can go wrong, I’m finding it necessary to wrap my programs in several layers of straightjackets. But I don’t really know how, so that’s where Hillel Wayne comes in.

Fiction

🙂

A Charles Dickens project at work put me in the mood for Victorian ghost stories. I think that’ll be my theme for this year’s October, though vampires might also make an appearance. I’m looking through ST Joshi‘s Unutterable Horror for Victorian recommendations, and I’m looking for LibriVox recordings of the ones I pick.

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Weeknote for 9/19/2021

Posted on September 19, 2021 by Andy

Programming

🤔

This week I’m trying out another Haskell intro book, Get Programming with Haskell by Will Kurt. Chapters 4 and 5 of Haskell Programming from First Principles slowed me way down, and the pace wasn’t going to work for my time frame. Plus my frustration with the book was growing. I hope to keep working through it, but I need a tour of the language that’s less abstract. After several obsessive hours of research this weekend, I have some more options, and I’ll start with Will Kurt.

😎

Kanban by David Anderson offers a quantitative approach to process improvement. It’s tied with Lean Software Development for my favorite Agile book so far. I’m looking forward to finding all my bottlenecks and setting my work-in-progress limits.

Space

🙂

Space Is Open for Business by Robert Jacobson is a wide-ranging and inspiring survey of the present and future of the global space economy. Especially interesting were the chapters on the influence of science fiction. The book sparked more thoughts on how I might involve myself in space someday. In the meantime, it gives me a broader basis for researching how to keep track of this field.

I watched the SpaceX Inspiration4 charity space launch benefiting St. Jude Children’s Hospital. I haven’t really been keeping up with launches lately, so I caught it by accident, and it was worth sticking around for, a beautiful launch, complete with jellyfish effect. It was the first all-civilian spaceflight. Imagine having a day job and then moonlighting—as an astronaut. One of the crew, Hayley Arceneaux, is a physician’s assistant at St. Jude and a childhood cancer survivor. I think as a fundraiser it was very well done.

Religion

🤔

I’m putting Christianity in context with Introduction to World Religions, edited by Christopher Partridge. I was planning on putting off my next religious investigations until I’d looked more into rationality, but events have led me into counter-apologetics YouTube, and my boss has been luring me into the world of David Bentley Hart. I’ll check out his Experience of God at some point. But for now I want to get the broad sweep of religious thought.

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Weeknote for 9/12/2021

Posted on September 12, 2021 by Andy

Programming

🙂

I got through chapter 3 of Haskell Programming from First Principles. I’ll continue with the book this week. Even though the book is long, optimistically I think I can get through it in a couple of months total, although that’s probably the planning fallacy talking. The exercises are very helpful, so I’m glad I switched from a book that didn’t have any. Still, Learn You a Haskell taught me enough that I can recognize a lot of the syntax, and it’s nice to know I haven’t immediately forgotten everything.

Lean Software Development by Mary and Tom Poppendieck analyzes agile development from a production process perspective. The key task in the Lean framework is to eliminate waste from your workflow, and its practices generally derive from that. My workflows have a lot of waste, so I’ve been paying close attention to this framework. Especially helpful is the practice of set-based development, where you explore your options so you don’t lock yourself in to an ineffective or inefficient solution just because it’s the first one you thought of.

Math

😎

Humble Bundle has put math on my mind. Over the long weekend I bought a Humble Book Bundle on math by publisher Morgan & Claypool. While researching the bundle’s book on proofs, I ran across the very interesting blog of one of the authors, Daniel Ashlock, a university professor on a quest to improve Canada’s math education. His TEDx talk summarizes a lot of his themes, such as the place of calculus in the curriculum, which interested me because I’m on a quest to self-educate in math, and I’m mapping out my own curriculum. Also helpful is his series on the “Islands of Mathematics.” This has all reignited my interest in exploring math, and various trains of thought on the subject have continued on their way from where I left them.

Movies

🤔

The Seventh Seal explores life in the context of death. The premise is a Swedish knight, Antonius Block, returning home from a crusade while the Black Death is sweeping the country, so death and doom are all around. The film covers a lot of themes, but the ones that stood out to me were Block’s struggle with doubt and the portrayal of Death as a character.

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Weeknote for 9/5/2021

Posted on September 5, 2021 by Andy

Programming

🤔

I’m taking the plunge into Haskell Programming from First Principles by Chris Allen and Julie Moronuki. I surveyed a bunch of learning resources and decided it had the best chance of not frustrating and confusing me. The authors meant it to be a careful exercise in pedagogy, and it seems well regarded by other Haskell learners. My plan is to make a serious attempt to study the book but to intersperse it with other projects, because it’s 1200 pages. Before launching into that, though, I’ll quickly read one or two shorter resources for an overview of the language.

Fiction

😎

Andy Weir’s The Martian made me want to be an engineer. It was free on Audible through September 3, so after much procrastinating I turned it on and got through it at the last minute. It’s funny, nailbiting, inspiring, and very nerdy. And Wil Wheaton is a perfect narrator for it. I always appreciate help visualizing the stories I hear and read (I was grateful to find a map), so I’ll rewatch the movie soon to remind myself of Hollywood’s interpretation.

Space

😎

Spaceflight: A Concise History by Michael Neufeld gave me context for all the disconnected pieces of space exploration I’ve seen throughout my life. The Martian got me back in a space mood, so I’m taking the opportunity for the space book theme I’ve had on my agenda. I have one on current space endeavors to listen to, but first I wanted to rewind to the beginning. Neufeld’s book was just the kind of perspective I needed to adjust my perceptions. For example, I grew up with the Space Shuttle and always thought of it as the essence of NASA. But no, it was basically a long-running but failed experiment at saving money through reuse, and it came after other significant phases in NASA’s history and alongside other important programs.

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Weeknote for 8/29/2021

Posted on August 29, 2021 by Andy

Programming

🤔

I’m reevaluating my approach to learning Haskell. I should get used to that, because I’m trying to learn continuous improvement, so I’ll always be reevaluating. Last week I decided to create a practice project for learning the language. Here’s the Github repo. But the careful way I was proceeding was way too slow, so I need a way to speed it up. That will involve either being less thorough or picking a shorter source to learn from. So this week I’ll look at my options and then keep going in some direction. I’ll probably also give myself a more specific deadline for this project.

Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres gave me another look at the gist of XP. It was good for background info, underlying principles, and a few ideas for implementation, but for detailed guidance you really have to look other places. Maybe Ward’s Wiki.

Analysis Patterns by Martin Fowler covers a mix of topics around the concept of domain models in software. It’s hard for me to get excited about object-oriented programming right now, but I think parts of the book will still be worth studying when I get back into my modeling project. It reminded me that object modeling is different from ontology engineering, which is closer to what I’m after.

Productivity

🤔

I’m considering going full nerd and moving my productivity system to Org-mode for Emacs. I’d been looking into Notion, but it doesn’t really let me mix tasks and notes the way I want, and it’s not scriptable enough to let me add that kind of functionality. Org-mode is very scriptable, so I’m curious what I can do with it. Of course, this means I have a new learning curve to deal with for both Emacs and Org-mode, but for the right productivity tool, a learning curve can be worth it. It would also give me an excuse to learn Scheme, the functional programming language Org-mode uses for its scripting.

Coffee

😐

Barissimo Guatemala Medium Roast: 3/5. It was a little sour a little too often.

People

🙂

After several months, on Friday night I had another picnic with my friend Tim. This time it was at the woods near my home. A bunch of mosquitos thought they were also invited. On our walk back we saw a skunk that luckily did not think it was invited.

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Weeknote for 8/22/2021

Posted on August 22, 2021 by Andy

Today’s weeknote catches me in the middle of a bunch of things rather than at the end when I usually like to report them, so I’ll just run through them quickly.

Programming

🙂

I got through the first three-and-a-half chapters of Learn You a Haskell. I’ve decided Haskell will be helpful enough for my other projects that I want to focus on it for a while, so this week I’ll continue with the book, and possibly every week until I finish it. Last week I tried a pattern of reading and highlighting the book one day and then reviewing the previous day’s highlights the next day. At the end of the week I started trying out what I’d covered. This week I’ll try reviewing by coding rather than just rereading, which seems more efficient.

I’ve been casting about for a new theme for my reading, and it seems software development is it. At work I’m juggling several books on several topics to help us plan a new direction for our in-house tools. At home I’m listening to a book I just bought, Analysis Patterns by one of my favorite writers, Martin Fowler. It turns out this was his first book.

Productivity

🤔

I’m starting to think about streamlining my life maintenance. My overall productivity system goal is to maximize my time for projects while staying on top of my other tasks. I’m not fully satisfied with the way I’m handling those, but I’m starting to think about how I can streamline them so I can reach the primary goal of maximizing my project time. This is motivated by my weekly consternation that my project has been crammed into the last 15 minutes of each day (not literally, but close enough).

I’m continuing to add new timers for everyday routines, and they continue to be extremely helpful. I’ve also been adding more medium and short variations so I can adapt to derailed schedules with less thought.

I continue to think about single-machine scheduling. A simple sort of the tasks on importance, deadline, and duration still seems very useful, but beyond that I’m returning to the idea of treating my life as a business and managing my tasks as a program of projects. Once I get back to this project, I’ll explore what kind of system I can set up in Notion using their new timeline feature that brings them closer to a traditional project management app.

Cooking

🤔

I’m thinking about how to streamline my cooking. I’ve revived my project idea of writing a little program to calculate the cheapest and quickest way to meet my daily nutritional needs (while still eating real food instead of resorting to something like Soylent). I’m not sure when I’ll fit this in.

Nature

🤔

My latest walks in the woods have showed me it’s time to upgrade my photography setup. I’m eyeing the Camera+ 2 app to let me focus on small objects in the foreground, since interesting spiders are not actually blurry in real life.

People

🙂

I spoke with my friend Tim on Saturday, and we may be restarting our regular get-togethers soon. Hopefully we’ll be going on a bunch of walks, since that’s something he likes to do too.

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Weeknote for 8/15/2021

Posted on August 15, 2021 by Andy

Productivity

🙂

I set up a table of fake tasks to help me experiment with scheduling algorithms. I’m hoping they’ll help me automate more of my task management so I can spend less time and mental energy reviewing my to-do lists. My first approach was to order the tasks by finding a simple way to sort them. I started out with columns for due date, importance, time required, and prerequisite task. The basic sorting on the first three columns was easy, and from that result it was immediately clear that the task dependencies would be harder to incorporate and that I also needed to include the amount of time available. I’ll pick this back up after I get somewhere with Haskell, and I’ll probably use the scheduling script to practice.

To impose even more order on my life, I made a timer for my whole weekday evening schedule. It worked out really well the one day I tried it, and if I can keep it up, I’ll actually be able to fit in some side projects. That day I was able to get started on one of my creative projects, working with Keri Smith’s The Pocket Scavenger. The weekends are harder to schedule because they have both more variety and more time to fill. My approach there is to create a template timer with a bunch of typical blocks and make modifications on a copy to fit the particular day.

Programming

😎

This week I’m focusing on learning Haskell. My general goals with Haskell are to dive deep into the functional paradigm, give myself a potentially easier way to program, shape my thoughts on modeling, and explore a functional approach to math. Functional programming has taken over my mind lately, so I’ve been looking forward to this project.

AI

🤔

On Intelligence is a more workable summary of Hawkins’ theory. This is Jeff Hawkins’ earlier book on neuroscience, and it was much more satisfying to me. My guesses about the way the mind works overlap a lot with his, so I’m looking forward to exploring his work programmatically (when I get around to it). A glance at Goodreads told me people aren’t shy about disagreeing with him, so I’m also interested to read their criticisms.

TV

😎

The Orville is a fantastic show, especially for fans of TNG. I caught up on it last week, and I’m pleased to say it just gets better and better. It’s fun to watch them take a Star Trek premise and veer off in another direction.

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Weeknote for 8/8/2021

Posted on August 8, 2021 by Andy

Finances

🤔

I’m planning my investments with the Bogleheads’ Retiree Portfolio Model. My impression is it contains most of the formulas I was going to have to research or guess at, so it should save a lot of time. I might use it for actual retirement planning later, but for now I’m adapting it for my medium-term investing goals. Or at least I will when I come back to this project.

Productivity

🙂

I’m spending a week on my productivity system update. It’s disheartening to leave a project incomplete for a month or more when I switch to another one, so I’m shortening the minimum wait to a week to see how that goes. This week I’ll collect my current productivity system goals, make a plan, and see how far I can get by next week.

Programming

😎

I’m learning Haskell. Domain Modeling Made Functional reignited my curiosity about functional programming, and I’ve reconfirmed that Haskell will be my best starting point for trying again to learn it. It’s both intensely functional and widely used. I’m reading Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!, and I’m finding it much easier to get into than Haskell Programming from First Principles, though I’ll still try to read that one later.

AI

😐

A Thousand Brains by Jeff Hawkins gave me a bite-size treatment of the author’s theory. Hawkins caught my attention with his interview on Lex Fridman, but the book was less engrossing and satisfying than I hoped it would be. There’s only so much enthusiasm I can muster for basic points I’ve heard many times before (deep learning won’t get us to general AI, etc.), and the parts that were newer didn’t give me much detail to sink my teeth into.

Having said that, his framework for understanding the neocortex is an interesting one, and at some point I’d like to look into it further and play around with simulations. He also has an intriguing idea for a stellar-scale monument to human civilization, and I’m curious what he’d think of the proposals of Isaac Arthur and friends on overpopulation, climate change, spreading the human presence off Earth, and other concerns the book raises.

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Weeknote for 8/1/2021

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Andy

People

🙂

My parents drove up to visit for a couple of days and drop off some boxes of my stuff. We spent the time eating at restaurants, playing Isle of Skye, napping, visiting my favorite water tower, and watching the birds at the lake near my home. They left Friday morning to go visit my brother.

Finances

😐

I struggled through some work on medium-term investing. I was able to squeeze in some time on it, but I was confronted by the fact that there’s still a lot of important info I don’t understand. Thanks to the Bogleheads, starting from their wiki article on the subject, my understanding inched forward a little. This week I’ll try my idea for a poor man’s Monte Carlo simulation in a spreadsheet to find good asset allocation timelines for my goals.

Coffee

🙂

Barissimo Dark Roast: 4/5. It was a little blander than the Colombian but still consistently good.

Fiction

🤔

I finished Bob Neufeld’s excellent recording of Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. My department at work is reading this book to discuss in a couple of weeks. “The underground” made me think this would be a story about revolutionaries, but no, it’s about a guy who has shut himself off from the world and comments on his chaotic relationships with past acquaintances. Some of it was uncomfortably relatable. But the story was kind of all over the place, and I’ll need to relisten to at least the beginning to make better sense of it.

Productivity

🤔

Discipline Equals Freedom by Jocko Willink is a mix of disappointing and thought-provoking takes on self-improvement, like a chunk of advice ore. It’s a short book, but I picked up a few ideas that’ll roll around in my mind. The one that especially stands out is that problems are good because every situation contains opportunities. However, I found his “Just do it” message less helpful, because willpower has been the subject of a lot of scientific research that has generated nuanced advice. Two books I recommend are The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal (video of her Google talk) and Solving the Procrastination Puzzle (my notes) by Timothy Pychyl.

Programming

😎

Domain Modeling Made Functional by Scott Wlaschin gives me a very different vantage point on domain-driven design. I read it because I want to try applying DDD at work, and some of our code is in XSLT, a functional language. I’m trying not to get too distracted by F#, the language he uses in the book, but it’s very tempting because functional programming is a playground of ideas I’ve wanted to explore for years, and his explanations of it are the best I’ve seen so far.

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