Weeknote for 3/22/2020

Posted on March 26, 2020 by Andy

Learning

🙂

I had the notion that Josh Kaufman’s book The First 20 Hours would help me plan my projects, since many of them are about learning new skills, so I listened to that early in the week with the idea that I could wrap up my learning system setup with a plan for future practice based on Kaufman’s method.

Unfortunately I only got as far as taking notes on Kaufman’s method and didn’t get around to applying it to the learning system setup, but I can keep working on that as long as it doesn’t slow down this month’s project too much.

Still, the book was helpful, and so far my main takeaway is that, for the sake of time, I should keep my learning projects simple and stick with the programs others have created rather than trying to do my usual deep dive with original thinking and abundant rabbit trails.

Research

🙂

Thinking about how to learn and write faster brought me back to the idea of Zettelkasten, and reading more about that online led me to the book How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think by Lion Kimbro, which is an intriguing title, so I listened to it to see what it could add to my existing practice.

The first thing I gained was a reinforcement of the notion that I could throw my half-formed products online just to get them done and available, since that’s the way he wrote that book, and even though the result is messy, it’s quirkily conversational enough to stay interesting.

The main things I don’t do that he reminded me of are to maintain an overall map of my notes and to review them regularly and to generally see them as a more integrated body of work than I typically do.

Life maintenance

😐

This COVID-19 situation has been surreal, rapidly developing, and very uncertain, and my church and employer have been following the lead of our governmental leaders in making their decisions. The guideline for the max size of a gathering has gone from 250 to 50 to 10, restaurants and bars in Illinois were ordered to close, and finally on Friday the governor placed the state under a shelter-in-place order, so we can’t leave home except for grocery shopping and other essential purposes.

On Monday my company encouraged everyone who could to work from home, so that’s what I’ve been doing, except for Wednesday when the water was off in my apartment building for plumbing repairs, and our church’s Sunday services have been reduced to a skeleton crew. Friday it seemed the plumbing work had given my bathroom water a strange taste and had enriched my kitchen water with sediment, so after lunch I took a trip to Target for a faucet filter and some other things, and I felt better about my water, though it revealed a peril of working from home–home issues can come up and distract you from work.

Since I’ll be seeing a lot more of my apartment for a while, I’m going to try to squeeze in a housekeeping side project of organizing and cleaning.

Spirituality

🙂

Because of the unfolding COVID-19 situation, my church encouraged us to stay home on Sunday and watch the service’s livestream, so since it wasn’t my week to play on the worship team, that’s what I did, and even though I was watching at home alone, knowing the service was happening live and that others were watching and commenting, I felt surprisingly connected to the community. The church leaders recommended that we stay engaged, so I sang along with the songs and even continued my practice of sketchnoting the sermon.

Saturday I finished listening to The Word of Promise, the NKJV dramatized audio Bible. I’ll write my thoughts in a separate post (for real this time!).

Movies

🤔

Last weekend I was in the mood for a movie and settled on Coraline. This review contains spoilers.

I liked the movie pretty well, but it also reminded me of the trouble I have connecting with Neil Gaiman’s stories. I know they’re supposed to be good, and I can sort of appreciate them, but somehow his grammar of fantasy doesn’t quite fit with mine.

One more concrete problem I have is that his characters automatically know the magical rules of their world, even if they’ve just stumbled upon them, and I am very sure a real person would horribly fail at intuiting such rules. The only way I can reconcile myself to this type of storytelling is to wrap up the characters’ improbable knowledge in the conventions of some genre. Some descriptions of the story call Coraline a fable, and I think that would take care of it.

One misconception I had at the beginning is that this story would dovetail with my recent, mnemonics-fueled musings about adding an imaginative layer to the everyday world. Early in the movie Coraline seems to gaze speculatively at her new home’s drab surroundings and heads down the path away from the house, talking to a cat she meets on the way. I mistook this for having an imagination, but it turns out, as I see it, half of Coraline’s problem is that she’s locked onto whatever she sees in front of her (her harried parents and annoying neighbor boy, the lack of fun things to do), and then over the course of the story her vision is forced to expand.

Posted in Learning, Life maintenance, Movies, Research, Spirituality, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 3/15/2020

Posted on March 22, 2020 by Andy

Life maintenance

Last week an article on my usual political blog advised that we stockpile a month of supplies in case of disruptions because of COVID-19, and it woke my inner prepper, so I acquired a new hobby of somewhat anxious grocery shopping, which I did almost every day, but I decided to stockpile little by little at several stores so I wouldn’t be clearing any shelves.

Learning

I made a spreadsheet to sort out my confusion over these mnemonic systems and help me set better learning goals. Each sheet covers a type of item to learn, the item column lists the items in that category, and the other columns list the substitute words (or components  in some cases) from the mnemonic systems in various sources (Higbee’s Your Memory, Kelly’s Memory Craft, and O’Brien’s You Can Have an Amazing Memory). I got through the main books I’m using, and I also wanted to collect examples from the web but didn’t get around to it, partly because of COVID-19 prepping and partly because it began to seem more important to spell out people’s methods for generating their mnemonic substitutes than to list the substitutes themselves, but I didn’t get around to that either.

This week I’m assessing how to wrap up this sprint, and next week starts the next project month.

Bible

The Old Testament prophets are not the most reassuring thing to hear during a pandemic.

Movies

Friday I watched The Godfather: Part III, which was interesting–the parts I understood–but did somehow feel emptier than the others, maybe because Michael’s life actually was emptier at that point and maybe also because I was extra confused toward the end.

Posted in Bible reading plans, COVID-19, Memory, Movies, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 3/8/2020

Posted on March 9, 2020 by Andy

Learning

🙂

Last week I (1) reread a lot of William Atkinson’s anti-mnemonics book, (2) filled out my list of mnemonic devices, (3) listed over 30 memory palaces I could use from my life, (4) got a handle on the ways Lynne Kelly uses her rapscallions (mnemonic characters), and (5) nailed down one of my key difficulties in using memory techniques, which is my mind’s slowness at forming creative mnemonic associations. This realization has resolved the question of when I’ll get back to working on my mnemonic substitutes dictionary: this week. Mnemonic systems are already good for memorizing numbers, and this dictionary will give me a way to memorize everything else.

I also (6) introduced myself on the Art of Memory forum, and hopefully I’ll have some good conversations there.

Life maintenance

😐

My life maintenance projects could use a boost.

Diet

I’ve been sticking to my diet, but my weight is hovering, and I suspect it’s because my metabolism has slowed to compensate. Maybe exercise would help, so it’s convenient the weather is getting nicer and my memory project has given me a reason to walk around the neighborhood.

Sleep

I’ve had spotty success getting myself back on schedule, and it’s because I’ve been giving myself excuses to stay up in certain circumstances. So I need to reprioritize sleep and sacrifice other things when necessary, and to do that I’m going to set my bedtime intention in the afternoon and plan my evening accordingly.

Music

🙂

Our church’s new sound system was installed over the weekend, and our team got to try it out on Sunday, which mostly worked out well, so now the congregation can hear everything clearly wherever they are in the sanctuary, and the instrumentalists have individual mixers that we listen to through headphones, which is really an improvement over our old setup.

Bible

😐

I got through my Bible listening for the week, Deut 5-Neh 11. Sometimes I end my listening late in the day and don’t really have time to note my reactions, so I’ve gotten a bit behind on that.

Movies

😎

At the beginning of the week I finished The Godfather Part II, and it certainly sets up a rich scenario for reflection and speculation and analysis, so if Part III is as mediocre as I hear, I’d agree that II is the best of the series. My favorite scene was when Kay makes her stand.

Friday I watched Bird Box, which I knew almost nothing about, and it’s another movie that stuck in my mind afterward, with ruminations on its psychology. In some ways it has a typical plot for a survival horror, but it’s also a cosmic horror with very surreal elements, so of course I loved it, and I was intrigued to find out it’s based on a novel, which I will be listening to because I need to know more.

Birthday

🙂

Saturday was my Douglas Adams birthday, and I’d thought about planning something for it, but I ended up waiting too late and not feeling like setting anything up anyway, so I let it be a normal day and hung out at a couple of my favorite spots around town, and I ended up dropping by Jeremy and Heather’s and playing Mamma Mia! with them. Overall a pretty nice day.

Posted in Bible reading plans, Birthdays, Diet, Learning, Movies, Music, Sleep, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 3/1/2020

Posted on March 3, 2020 by Andy

Learning

😎

Last week officially started my learning project, and I dashed out the plan and started the work, since I was so excited about it. The project’s purpose is to set up a learning system to experiment with, and that will take the form of implementing some mnemonic systems and spelling out some study procedures based on learning research.

Last week I listed most of the mnemonic techniques and systems I’d found, and then I got sidetracked rereading and highlighting Memory Craft, since I love that book so much and it has a lot of unfamiliar advice.

This week I’ll start creating my mnemonic devices and sneak in some more notes on my sources and my own thoughts.

When I started researching memory techniques, I thought they’d just be a tool for learning, but the more I learn about them, the more I see they’re an art that can integrate with a surprising amount of my life. My research on them (1) motivates me to learn some foundational topics I’d been putting off that would give me hooks for further knowledge or that would help me develop other memory techniques (e.g., world history, data structures in programming); (2) points me toward some hobbies and practices I’d put on the back-burner that would give me memorable ways to encode information (music composition, sign language) or would give me components for memory palaces (home decorating, taking walks, video games, drawing, origami, knots); and (3) even involves conceptual modeling, since you have to analyze information to encode it in a mnemonic.

History

🙂

Memory Craft inspired me to listen to an intro history I had on my to-read list, E. H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World, which felt like listening to a C. S. Lewis children’s story and was just the kind of history overview I needed, except that it was still very Eurocentric, so I’ll have to look for more in-depth treatments of other regions. But the main thing is it got me to care about the people and events of history, and it gave me some dates to start with for my own History Journey.

Spirituality

😐

Last week on Ash Wednesday I started my listen through the Word of Promise audio Bible. The week’s readings were Gen 1-Deut 4, and this time to give myself material to share, I’m jotting down notes on my reactions to each day’s chapters. I’ll wait till the end to post my thoughts so I can link to them all in one place. So far I’ll say the recording is cinematic, which makes many parts of it very engaging, though I must say large stretches of it are still a challenge to get through, just because the Bible gets very bureaucratic and also far removed from 21st-century Western life.

AI

🙂

At the suggestion of a member of my futurism meetup, I joined an AI meetup, and we had our first meeting last week. The people were very interesting, and the coordinator gave an overview of the state of AI that organized the technology in a simple but helpful way and gave me search terms for further research. I don’t know how involved I’ll get with any projects they cook up, but I’ll keep attending the meetings.

Fiction

🙂

At work this year we’re doing book groups on the theme of diversity. Last year I used the book groups to make myself read Middlemarch, a classic and thus a book I probably wouldn’t get to on my own, and this year I’m taking the opportunity to make myself read To Kill a Mockingbird, which I may or may not have read when I was supposed to in high school. Of course, as usual I’ll be listening to the audiobook, which I started last week when I had some time after the day’s audio Bible assignment.

Posted in AI, Bible reading plans, Fiction, History, Learning, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 2/23/2020

Posted on February 25, 2020 by Andy

Sleep

🙂

After my degraded time management the week before, I had some success getting to bed earlier last week by using a Pomodoro timer to break up my work at the computer, which kept me from losing track of time and gave me stopping points. This is very encouraging, because usually when my self-imposed schedules fall apart, they stay that way.

Conceptual modeling

😐

Events conspired to keep me from getting much further in Meaning and Argument last week, but I’ll probably keep working on it during my learning project. My summary of this modeling language project is that I learned a little about modeling languages and a lot more about taking notes–oops. I also gained a greater sense of urgency about managing my project time, because I need to make a lot faster progress, and my hunch is it’s possible, so I’ll keep experimenting.

Learning

😎

Last week I continued cramming in books on learning before my listening time is taken up by the Bible (see the Spirituality section below).

I started the week with Memory: How to Develop, Train, and Use It by William Walker Atkinson, which argues that mnemonics are time-consuming tricks with limited value that weaken your natural memory from disuse, and the book describes how to remember more using only your natural memory. I disagreed with his assessment of mnemonics, but I was interested in his techniques and thought he did a decent job of explaining them.

Next was Memory Craft by Lynne Kelly, which I ran across in a friend’s tweet last year and then again recently on the Art of Memory forum. I haven’t read many books on mnemonic systems, so I don’t know how its approach compares, except that I imagine most books don’t bring in the practices of ancient indigenous cultures, but I do know this book is delightful and has inspired me to learn history and use it to populate my memory scaffolding. Maybe once I get more advanced, I’ll make some Lukasa-like memory boards.

After that was Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein, which discussed the ways individuals and organizations pursue a broad range of knowledge and skills (sometimes on purpose, sometimes not) and the benefits of having this range for performance, creativity, and problem solving, which are increasingly important skills as society becomes ever more complex. I appreciated the validation of my generalist lifestyle and the encouragement to make the most of it.

At the end of the week I squeezed in You Can Have an Amazing Memory by Dominic O’Brien, who I’d never heard of before the Art of Memory forum, but he’s been the World Memory Champion eight times, and I wanted to find out how such a high performer got to that level. The book was charming and helpful, not only for reinforcing the usual memory advice but also for nuancing it in ways that could speed up my memorization a bit. It also reinforced my sense that the memory challenges at these competitions make good exercises for honing your skills even if you don’t plan to compete.

My main agenda for this month’s learning project is to set up some learning procedures and tools to experiment with, especially some mnemonic systems. This week I’ll do the planning and get started.

Spirituality

😐

Lent starts this Wednesday, and like last year I’m planning to listen to an audio Bible, this time the NKJV Word of Promise, which is a dramatized version I got for Christmas quite a few years ago and haven’t listened to yet. It’s 98 hours, so if I’m diligent (2x speed, 2 hours a day), I can get through it in 25 days. If that works, I’ll have time in Lent left over, and I’ll listen to some other fitting books on my list. I never got around to writing my reflections last year, so I’ll try to do that this time.

Movies

🤔

I watched the next movie in my AI list, Alphaville, which I knew nothing about, but it turned out to be by a famous French avant-garde director, and thus I don’t really know what to make of it. My impression is it had some interesting ideas buried under clumsy execution, but who knows, maybe that was on purpose? I ended up only really caring about the city’s technological philosophy, at least the parts that were delivered by the impressively croaky AI and the engineers, which didn’t make complete sense but felt evocative, like a philosophical Rorschach test. As usual with media that feels sloppy or incomplete to me, I took it as a writing prompt, and I’m curious what a remake by someone like Alex Garland or Denis Villeneuve would be like.

Posted in Conceptual modeling, Learning, Movies, Sleep, Spirituality, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 2/16/2020

Posted on February 23, 2020 by Andy

Conceptual modeling

😐

I got through another two-and-a-half chapters and tweaked my note-taking method to take about half the time, at least in my very limited experiment. Instead of doing all my highlighting in one reading before taking notes, in the first pass I highlighted only the definitions and topic statements I could easily find and then in the second pass took notes while highlighting other points that jumped out. The definitions and topic statements (1) gave me a better sense of what the chapter covered before I began my notes, (2) divided the text into smaller chunks so it felt more manageable and gave me stopping points if I needed them, and (3) gave me a good sense of where the different topics were located in the chapter when I inevitably needed to revisit them.

This week I’ll get as far as I can in Meaning and Argument, and then next week will start the next month’s project, which will be on learning, and I’ll probably continue with that book and my RDF reading as a way to experiment with my learning procedure.

Learning

🙂

Even though my learning project technically doesn’t start until next week (2/23), I’ve been preparing for it with a bunch of reading and research, so yeah I’ve basically already started.

My main book last week was Problem Solving: Perspectives from Cognition and Neuroscience by Ian Robertson, which was about problem solving and adjacent topics, including learning and AI, and in contrast with the usual disappointing scientific treatments of the introspective topics I care about, the discussions in this book were satisfying and gave me a lot of welcome starting points for research. It also covered the whole spectrum of problem alignments (from well-defined “kind” problems to vague, messy “wicked” ones), which was gratifying because I mostly care about wicked problems and am disappointed when a discussion only speaks about problems in terms of predefined puzzles or exercises.

A debate with my foil Jeremy sent me down several rabbit holes of research throughout the week.

The question, “Are flashcards a waste of time?” led me to (1) the site Your Awesome Memory by Bill Powell (who loved them at first and then lost enthusiasm, then regained some of it, all of which gave him interesting things to say), (2) the idea of learning from students in medical school and other high-intensity learning fields like engineering and law, (3) the major flashcard apps Anki and SuperMemo, and (4) the Art of Memory forum, which is a hub of memory activity.

The question, “Is impractical knowledge a waste of time?” led me to two books based on an essay by Abraham Flexner: The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge, containing Flexner’s essay with a commentary essay by Robbert Dijkgraaf; and The Usefulness of the Useless by Nuccio Ordine.

The question, “Why memorize when you can look things up?” led me to various scattered articles, the most helpful of which was “Why Memorize?” by Scott Young.

Bill Powell’s blog raised another interesting question, “Do mnemonics weaken memory?” which led me to the old book Memory: How to Develop, Train, and Use It by William Walker Atkinson (ebook, audio). I’ll say more about it next time.

Sleep

😐

My sleep schedule is regressing to the late-night mean, though still without naps during the week, so I’ll need to make bedtime a priority again and think some more about my time management processes, which I didn’t do last week.

Movies

🙂

Over the weekend I watched The Godfather (in installments), which I’d forgotten I put in my Netflix DVD queue to get an idea of how organized crime works and maybe understand certain political situations. It’s not the kind of movie I expect to like, but it drew me in and stayed in my mind the following days, which for me is one of the signs of a good movie. I’m looking forward to II and III.

Posted in Conceptual modeling, Learning, Movies, Sleep, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 2/9/2020

Posted on February 9, 2020 by Andy

Life maintenance

😐

I did a little better at getting to bed earlier, so my sleep schedule isn’t a lost cause yet. I’m going to start a list of rules for my time management, probably in the form of implementation intentions.

Conceptual modeling

😐

I got through another chapter or so and continued tinkering with the way I take notes to help me learn efficiently. I’m hoping I can find ways to pick up the pace.

Learning

🙂

The major event in my head last week was gearing up for next month’s project on learning, for which I started listening to my books on the topic and researching active learning.

Kenneth Higbee’s Your Memory: How It Works and How to Improve It is one I read ten years ago that resulted in this essay, and I still recommend the book to anyone who wants an overview of memory and some specific techniques for turning your mind into a filing system, some of which you can pick up from these talks by the author.

Benedict Carey’s How We Learn is a bit lighter on details, being written in a more narrative-oriented journalistic style, but it fills in some gaps and thin spots of Higbee’s coverage, focusing on some of the more indirect and subconscious aspects of learning, such as the way forgetting aids learning.

Stanislas Dehaene’s new book How We Learn, which I found while looking up Carey’s, is a neuroscientist’s look at memory, and unlike pretty much everything else I’ve seen on the subject, it gave me the sense that we do know a lot about how memory works in the brain. He also has extended discussions that compare human and machine learning, so the book was relevant to me on both learning techniques and AI.

A question by Jeremy about modern learning methods reminded me to look into an idea I ran across long ago, project-based learning. It belongs to a family of pedagogies called various names, but for now I’ll go with active learning, and it’s effectiveness is debated, so I’m still deciding how much time I want to invest in it.

Movies

🙂

I’ve been neglecting TV shows and movies because they take up time I’d rather use on my projects, but I was missing them, so over the weekend I picked up where I left off on my AI movie list and watched The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008), a remake of the 1951 original. I don’t remember hearing about it when it came out, and the poster didn’t give me high hopes, despite the cast, but it was more thoughtful and creative than the drivel I was expecting, which might be why I liked it better than a lot of the Letterboxd reviewers.

Unlike the original, this story barely even mentioned AI, so it’s questionable whether it belongs on this list, but it’d be interesting to think about how we could create a robot with G.O.R.T.’s architecture.

I rented the movie on Blu-ray, so I watched some of the interesting special features, which included one on Fox’s efforts at environmentally friendly movie production and one on the design of G.O.R.T., which could’ve turned out much different in ways that would’ve been fascinating in another movie, but I think they made the right choice for this one.

Posted in Conceptual modeling, Learning, Movies, Sleep, Weeknotes | 1 Comment

Weeknote for 2/2/2020

Posted on February 3, 2020 by Andy

Conceptual modeling

🙂

I got through 2 1/2 chapters of Meaning and Argument, and inspired by my upcoming project on learning, I’ve decided to format my notes in a way that’s optimized for memorization rather than trying to make them RDF friendly.

Software development

😎

Moving on from Behavior-Driven Development, I switched to the topic of empirical software engineering and listened to Making Software, edited by Andy Oram and Greg Wilson. I picked up on this subject and this book from a talk by Hillel Wayne, one of my favorite programming bloggers. The book covers a lot of interesting and important software development topics, including how you can do research on your own code and coding practices, and while some of the essays were more listenable than others, depending on how conversational or data-heavy they were, overall I loved it.

Life maintenance

Diet

🙂

After another two pounds off my scale reading, I think I can safely say the TLC diet is working for me, at least for weight loss. I’ll find out at our company’s wellness screening in March whether it’s reducing my cholesterol. It helped last time I tried it—not as much as I needed, but this time I’m following it more strictly, except for my lack of exercise, which I’m thinking of adding once I feel confident enough in my time management.

Sleep

😐

I didn’t do as well last week, but I’m learning what I need to do to adjust, such as not starting down “quick” rabbit holes of research when I’m about to go to bed. Fortunately my sleeping habits are still more orderly than they were.

Task tracking

🙂

Making Software told me there’s a name for the way my time management shaped itself up while I tracked my time—the Hawthorne effect—and I tried tracking my tasks at work to see if it would help me stick to my Pomodoro routine. It worked, and it came at the right time, because my ebook schedule is pretty tight right now, so I can’t afford to waste much time, especially when I’m trying to leave work somewhat on time, get stuff done in the evenings, and get to bed on time.

TV

😎

Tim and I watched the first episode of Star Trek: Picard, and they certainly know how to push the nostalgia buttons. The show’s AI theme is right up my alley too, and it’s interesting to compare this show’s take to Discovery‘s. I’m looking forward to the rest of the series.

Posted in Conceptual modeling, Diet, Productivity, Sleep, Task tracking, TV, Weeknotes | 4 Comments

Weeknote for 1/26/2020

Posted on January 27, 2020 by Andy

Life maintenance

Diet

🙂

My weight dropped a couple of pounds last week, so apparently the diet is still working, and I wonder if the week before my body was just holding onto the extra water I’d started drinking to handle the extra fiber. My current task is looking up what I can eat at my usual restaurants, which is turning out to be not much. I also want to start cooking again so I’m not limited by my frozen dinner options, but I don’t want to spend much time on it, so I’m researching cookbooks of quick and easy recipes.

Sleep

🙂

I managed to get to bed before 11 every day except Saturday when I had a few too many things to do. Two results I’ve noticed from my new schedule are that (1) I’m not taking naps after work and (2) on napless days I’m actually doing my night routine instead of flopping into bed out of sudden exhaustion. These somehow feel like small changes, but they’re actually a big deal, since those were nagging problems that dragged down my perception of my life. Not all my sleep problems are solved yet, but I’m counting this as great progress, and so far this bedtime doesn’t feel like a hard schedule to keep.

Task tracking

🙂

Continuing along my self-quantification theme, I returned to another app I used a few years ago, ATracker, which lets you track your time on categories of activity that you define. My initial purpose was to get an idea of where my time disappears to, but it’s getting me to use my time somewhat better while I track it, since (1) I have to think about my activities to track them, which gets me to make more purposeful decisions about them; (2) I’m motivated to organize my time so I don’t have to open the app so much and my activity history doesn’t look like total chaos; and (3) I feel like the app is judging me if I waste too much time, even though it provides no opinionated feedback whatsoever, unlike MyNetDiary and Fitbit.

Software development

🙂

Taking a tip from Living Documentation and Microservices Patterns, I listened to a trio of books on a practice that’s variously called Behavior-Driven Development (BDD), Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD), and Specification by Example (SBE): Bridging the Communication Gap, Specification by Example—both by Gojko Adzic—and Writing Great Specifications by Kamil Nicieja. The idea is that business stakeholders, developers, and testers should work together throughout a project to define and refine its requirements in documents that are clear enough that they both communicate to all the people involved and can be used to automatically test the software as it’s being created. The Adzic books were good for the process of adopting the practice and collaborating on the specifications, and Nicieja was good for the mechanics of designing and using the specifications.

Thanks to a talk I watched by Gojko Adzic, after the BDD books I listened to a short book by him called Impact Mapping, which is about another task that accompanies defining requirements—choosing and monitoring the requirements your project needs, since it’s easy to spend time and resources on tasks that fail to help the customers or the business.

Conceptual modeling

😐

Despite the task tracking, life and poor time management crowded out my project activity last week, so I didn’t get much further in my RDF reading. This week starts Thinkulum project month February, when I’ve been planning to start learning first-order logic with Lepore’s Meaning and Argument, and to avoid uncontrolled delays I’m going to stick to that plan while interspersing some trailing work on RDF/OWL and some meta work. One of those meta tasks will probably be an impact map for my RDF learning, since I’ve realized I have too vague an idea of the kinds of notes I should be taking and what I want to gain from them.

Movies

🙂

Sunday Tim and I watched 1917, which my boss recommended. Even though I don’t normally go for historical movies, this one was very well done, I really enjoyed it, and I hope it wins things. Among its many appeals, a lot of it had an eerie, surreal tinge that connected with me.

Posted in Conceptual modeling, Diet, Movies, Sleep, Software development, Task tracking, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 1/19/2020

Posted on January 25, 2020 by Andy

Conceptual modeling

😐

I made another adjustment to my agenda on the modeling language translations project and started with learning RDF instead of OWL, since OWL is built on top of RDF. I got less far than I wanted, but this week I’ll finish the document I’m reading (W3C’s RDF primer) and move on to the OWL primer, since next week I’ve scheduled myself to start on first-order logic with the Lapore book, and getting through that will take longer, so I don’t want to delay it.

As I go, I’m experimenting with creating a note-taking format I’m provisionally calling Structured Notes Format (SNF). It’s basically YAML with other formats embedded as needed, and at this point it looks like this, which I think is pretty readable (note that the text doesn’t matter in this example, only the hyphens, colons, line breaks, and indentation):

- point 1:
  - subpoint 1.1
  - subpoint 1.2
- point 2:
  - subpoint 2.1:
    - |
      Some lines of
      Python code
  - subpoint 2.2

Life maintenance

Diet

😕

I stuck with my diet, but last week my scale told me I’d lost nothing (literally, exactly the same reading as last week to the tenth of a pound), which is what happened a few years ago. If it happens again this week, I’ll do some research on the problem and maybe look for a new scale, since this one is a little old, but the reading doesn’t quite seem like a malfunction.

Sleep

😐

Last week I got started on my project to get enough sleep, with a schedule of 10pm to 6am. My impression is that my life has gotten organized enough over the past year or two that I have a chance of sticking to this schedule, at least significantly longer than in the past. I started Thursday night and did fine the rest of that week. If my resolve starts slipping a lot, I’ll move to more intense motivation techniques, including an anti-charity if it gets bad enough. Sleep is such a strong and sweeping influence on my life that I’m serious about finally regulating it.

Software development

😰

I finished listening to Stephen Withall’s Software Requirement Patterns, and I found it good but a little overwhelming, giving us a long, categorized list of typical requirements we might need in our software (along with how to organize and word them in our requirement documents), and the increasing burden I felt as I listened made me realize that a requirement amounts to a problem to solve, so Withall’s book was just giving me a huge pile of potential problems. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s uncomfortable, and it reinforces my sense that I need to go into any software project soberly, and it also makes me want to collect known solutions to these common problems.

Posted in Conceptual modeling, Diet, Sleep, Software development, Weeknotes | Leave a comment