Weeknote for 9/1/2019

Posted on September 2, 2019 by Andy

Life maintenance

Work

😐

Last week was swallowed up by work, my final push to get this big pile of ebooks done, and it left me little time for anything else. This week my workload and schedule should be back to normal.

Car shopping

😐

I was going to go to Carmax last week, but work crowded out my plans, so hopefully I can get a car or two transferred and look at them this week. Meanwhile I’m liking my rental Elantra, though I probably won’t buy one, since it didn’t come up in the lists of high ranking cars I consulted.

Money

🙂

I made some calls to help me piece together my medical billing puzzle, and I learned enough to feel okay about paying my mystery bill, though I still have steps after that to resolve the situation to my satisfaction. It’s actually pretty fun to get little revelations in each call and progressively learn how the system works.

AI Field Map

🙂

I didn’t get much further on this, but I did make some plans: (1) to focus only on the lists from Wikipedia for now; (2) to start with the list of AI projects, since it’s a bridge between researchers and topics; and (3) to cheat my project schedule by continuing this one as a learning example during my upcoming project to study Semantic Web technologies. For the rest of this project, I’ll create a basic set of entries from the AI projects list with a few standard properties for each one, which I’ll convert into something more formal when I get to the Semantic Web, which will probably be next month’s project, starting next week.

Video

😎

I continued my AI movie project with the 1927 silent film Metropolis, which felt iconic and mythic to me, and I liked it a lot more than I expected for both its surface aesthetic and its hidden depths. It was about society’s relationship to machines, and the AI occupied a fascinating and troubling blend of roles that reminds me that our relationship to AI will likely be very confused and will also highlight ways we relate to our fellow humans, such as the way we tend to use them as tools.

Podcasts

🙂

I caught up on Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur, which I appreciate not only for his optimism but also for his book recommendations, where I can see the technologies and scenarios he talks about fleshed out in story form.

I’m still not sure what audiobooks I want to listen to next, so in the meantime I’m catching up on my friend Adam’s technology criticism podcast, Device and Virtue.

Posted in AI, Car, Fiction, Futurism, Money, Movies, Podcasts, Weeknotes, Work | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 8/25/2019

Posted on August 27, 2019 by Andy

Car

Selling

😔

Sunday, the day after I’d replaced my car battery, my brakes went bad, so I had my car towed to my mechanic, who was able to look at them Tuesday, and it seemed the cause was a leaky brake line. But the underside of my car was so rusty, it was going to be hard to fix without breaking something else, and my mechanic was feeling unsafe underneath it anyway, so we both agreed that it was finally time to call it quits on the Protégé. So I called a junkyard, and Saturday morning I said goodbye to my little car of 14 years.

Renting

😐

While my mechanic and I figured out what would become of my car, my coworker kindly gave me rides to and from work for a couple of days, and on Wednesday I picked up a rental, which I meant to be a compact car, but what they gave me was a Dodge Challenger, which was definitely not what I was looking for, but I was kind of in a hurry and didn’t know how particular I’d be, so I agreed to it.

It turned out to be a lot of extra stress driving a large, expensive, attention-getting car when I was used to being small and inconspicuous, so after dealing with it for a couple of days, including a long and agonizing day of car shopping, I switched it Friday evening for a Hyundai Elantra, and it was an immediate relief to drive something easy and comfortable again. I consider this rental the true purpose of the insurance payment for my totaled car, and it gives me some time to do my shopping right.

Shopping

🙄

I’d done a fair amount of research in recent weeks, building on the last time I bought a car, but my first day of actual shopping was Friday, which I took off from work and spent dealing with a Toyota dealership, looking at a couple of Corollas. The one I was there to see had allegedly been sold the night before (though I think it’s true, based on its later disappearance from Edmunds), so the salesguy showed me a later model, which was mechanically fine, even according to my mechanic (once I convinced the dealer to let me take the car to him), but it had a very lived-in smell, possibly involving cigarettes, that I wasn’t confident could be removed, so with some back-and-forth I said no to that one and let them show me another one, which had a different smell that was less biological and more industrial, possibly more fadeable, but I still needed to show the car to my mechanic, which met more resistance from the salespeople but which I couldn’t do anyway by that point in the day, and I needed to go switch my rental car before the place closed, so I extracted myself from them and left.

I learned important things from this experience, such as that even a car dealer with a high customer rating will use manipulative tactics, that for me the stress of handling such people comes largely from the friction between resisting these tactics and doubting I’m resisting them the right way, that messaging friends in such circumstances is great moral support and can save you from regrettable decisions, and that I might have been the one with more actual power in that situation, since the dealer seemed to want my business more than I wanted their particular cars, so their power mostly derived from the tactics.

In any case, the experience was off-putting enough that I decided to take a break till at least Monday to return to normal life a bit and get some necessary things done (I never thought I’d be grateful to have laundry to do), then do some more research and planning, expand my search to include Civics, and maybe try Carmax to see if they’d be easier to work with.

Health

😐

My colonoscopy results came back saying they found inactive colitis and that it was in a smaller area than before, which I guess is good even though it still feels active.

Wednesday afternoon (right after picking up the Challenger) was taken up by my ulcerative colitis med infusion at the hospital.

Work

😐

While all that’s been happening, I’ve been cramming in a bunch of work to finalize a largish batch of ebooks. It actually gives me a nice excuse not to car shop 24/7 this week.

Podcasts

🙂

During all this tension and worry, I’ve been holding onto my lifelines to the world outside my problems, and one of them has been the hopeful, fantastical (yet scientific) world of Isaac Arthur, which I’m continuing to catch up on from the past year-and-a-half. I have about 10 hours of listening left.

AI field map

🙂

I managed to get a little done on the field map project, which is a list of the people, organizations, publications, projects, and events in AI research. There’s nothing ready to post, but I was pleased that I reworked my project planning stage so I could get it done in an hour rather than spreading it out over most of a week.

Posted in AI, Car, Futurism, Health, Podcasts, Weeknotes, Work | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 8/18/2019

Posted on August 20, 2019 by Andy

Conceptual modeling

😎

It’s a week late, but I posted v0.2.0 of my essay. The first version was a record of my existing, haphazard method of analysis. This one is the beginnings of a more intentional method based on my reflections and cursory research over the past year. I expect my future research to basically follow the v0.2.0 outline.

AI field map

😐

I didn’t work on this except to find an app I might use for some of my results: myHistro, which lets you make timelines combined with maps. I’ll still be busy with life maintenance this week, but hopefully I can get somewhere with this project.

Futurism

😎

Tuesday my futurism group had a meeting about transhumanism. We weren’t at a video-watching venue, so we just talked, but beforehand in the event’s comments some of us shared some YouTube videos, and I made a playlist of those. After watching them I’ve moved Yuval Harari up on my reading list. This meeting came at a good time, because I’d been missing these topics, and having my attention turned back to them was like a refreshing breeze.

Fiction

🙂

I finished my coworker’s novel, The Means That Make Us Strangers, an intriguing angle on a coming-of-age story. It’s set in South Carolina during the 1960s civil rights movement, but the main character isn’t exactly from there. I rate it a thoughtful page turner!

This concludes my summer reading list of loosely related fiction and memoirs on the Middle East, the military, civil rights, and/or grief. It was different from my usual reading material and very worthwhile. I’m still deciding what books to listen to next.

Video

😎

I caught up on Dark, which I think of as the new Lost, and I recommend it if you like complicated, mind-bending shows (keeping in mind its TV-MA rating). Thankfully it’s been renewed for its third season, and so it’ll get to finish its story, unlike The OA, unless that one gets uncancelled, which it has a moral duty to be.

Now I’m taking a break from TV shows so I can spend more time on my projects. I’ll still continue my AI movie project.

Life maintenance

🙂

Thursday evening I had my colonoscopy prep, which was fine and gave me time to finish the conceptual modeling essay. Friday Jeremy drove me to my colonoscopy, and that was also fine. Truthfully I’m more interested in the experience of consciousness than in my colon, so for me colonoscopies are mostly about the anesthesia, and when it began kicking in, I counted the seconds to see how high I could remember getting, and I remember being surprised at reaching 100 when I expected a max of 5, though I can’t remember going through all the numbers to get there, so for all I know I’d lost the ability to count. After we left I have spotty memories of eating with Jeremy at Portillo’s and getting a movie from the library before somehow making it back to my apartment, and my mind didn’t feel normal till I woke up from a long nap.

🙄

Saturday morning I was planning to catch up on some work at the office, but after my car had sat in its parking spot for over a day, the battery decided it’d had enough and my car wasn’t going anywhere. So after wringing my hands about the best way to proceed, I called AAA, and they came and replaced the battery. It was a little annoying to have to spend money on a car I was about to replace, but the auto insurance paid me for a total loss after my accident at the beginning of July, so I’m considering the battery to be part of that amount.

Podcasts

😎

The futurism meeting put me in the mood for Isaac Arthur, so while I decide on a new reading project, I’m catching up on episodes from his YouTube channel–though I’m listening to the podcast version–starting from February of 2018 with the episode on colonizing Alpha Centauri. His videos are having a similar effect to the productivity and freelancing videos I was watching earlier, keeping my mind on a hopeful future during a present that feels complicated and difficult.

Posted in AI, Car, Conceptual modeling, Fiction, Futurism, Health, Life maintenance, Podcasts, Social issues, TV, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 8/11/2019

Posted on August 11, 2019 by Andy

Life maintenance

🙄

My life has been kind of crowded with life maintenance lately. I’m handling it okay, but it’s giving me less time for my projects and for sleep, and it’s been burdening me with extra worry. See the YouTube section below for something that’s been helping me cope.

At work my current batch of ebooks is more intense than usual, so I’ve had to work late a couple of times, and it’s cutting into some of my other activities. That’ll continue through this week.

Car shopping is on hold until after this crunch time at work, but I can say I’ll be looking mainly for a Honda Civic, Mazda 3, or Toyota Corolla. If I can find a hybrid in my price range, I’ll look at that too, probably a Toyota Camry or Prius. I’m planning to pay cash, so my savings will take a hit.

Medical billing is my main worry right now, because I don’t know how tame or wild my costs will end up being. I’m still figuring out my mysterious bill, and another issue has come up in the process, but I’ve recruited our benefit service provider to help me work it out. I’m expecting to make several more phone calls to various parties.

One thing I’m not worried about is my biannual colonoscopy for my ulcerative colitis on Friday. I’m basically a pro at those now. Thursday is prep day, but that’ll start after work.

🙂

A positive development last week was that I did some cooking. I’d been meaning to carefully plan out a rotation of meals I could cook once a week and take to work for lunch and then a second rotation for dinner, but I got impatient waiting to get around to all that planning, so I just jumped in with the first meal that came to mind. I made beef stew using my dad’s recipe, and it turned out extra delicious, if I do say so myself. I also got a late start and finished cooking at 1 a.m.–oops.

Conceptual modeling

😐

With life maintenance and naps taking up my time and with feeling procrastinatory over the amount of work writing takes, I didn’t get much writing done. So to keep this project from dragging on forever, I’m going to finish up my bullet points and post those. That’s good enough for me, because this essay is mainly a summary and research agenda for my own use.

AI field map

🙂

This week starts the project month of August, and my project this month is an AI field map, where I identify the important people, organizations, events, publications, and so on in the world of AI research. It’ll give me a better foundation for conversations about AI and a better idea of places I’d like to work. If I finish that early, I’ll get back to conceptual modeling research.

Social issues

🙂

I finished the excellent audiobook of While the World Watched, Carolyn Maull McKinstry’s memoir of growing up in Birmingham in the middle of the civil rights movement of the 1960s (here’s an hour-long talk by her on the topic). I appreciated getting an overview of the important events and people of the time and a personal view of what life was like in Black communities, as well as McKinstry’s honest reactions to her circumstances throughout her life and her hopeful outlook. Despite some confusing chronology in a few places, I recommend the book, and I’m grateful she put her experiences and reflections into writing for us.

Video

Movies

🙂

I took an accidental break from my AI movie project because I wasn’t paying attention to my Netflix DVD queue, and I ended up starting what will eventually be some kind of ’80s sci fi project. The movie I watched was The Last Starfighter, which a YouTube video told me was an inspiration for today’s synthwave genre. The movie had less of a Tron-like, synthwave feel to me and more of a light Star Wars feel, largely because of the orchestral score, though I could tell it was trying to stand on its own rather than mimic other movies. Overall I liked it, but I felt it was actually too short and needed more starfighting.

YouTube

😎

In the background of my mindless tasks I’ve been binge listening to a couple of YouTube channels, and they’ve helped buoy me through this stressful time. What helps is hearing their advice for keeping life moving forward and seeing how these ideas have worked for them personally.

  • Thomas Frank, the Uploads playlist, which is everything on his channel. He mainly covers learning and productivity in a bite-size, down-to-earth, and friendly way. Even though I think about this stuff a lot already, I quickly picked up some good tips for managing my time and motivation for applying the principles I knew.
  • Traversy Media, the Developer Discussion playlist. His channel covers tutorials on a wide range of programming topics, mostly related to web development, but this playlist is about the personal and business side of life as a developer, especially as a freelancer. I’ve been looking at freelancing for some extra financial security and to gain experience in the programming topics I want to learn, and his videos make me feel that pushing into new areas of work is doable. I also appreciate his openness about the life challenges he’s faced.

Another channel I could binge along these lines is The Financial Diet, friendly and accessible advice on managing your money.

Posted in AI, Car, Conceptual modeling, Cooking, Health, Life maintenance, Money, Movies, Productivity, Programming, Social issues, Videos, Weeknotes, Work | 1 Comment

Weeknote for 8/4/2019

Posted on August 6, 2019 by Andy

Conceptual modeling

😐

I’m mostly done with the outlining, so this week I’ll write the updated essay and hopefully post it by the end of the week, which is the end of this project month.

Life maintenance

😐

I took my car to the insurance’s auto body shop, which decided it was a total loss. The car still drives fine though, so I kept it for a lower payment from the insurance, and now I’m officially car shopping. It’s been 14 years since I’ve bought a car, and last time I did a lot of research, but this time I’m mostly relying on Consumer Reports. Their most useful info is behind a paywall, which usually I don’t like, but for buying a car it feels like a good investment.

Spirituality

🤔

I listened to Hit Hard by Pat and Tammy McLeod, read by the authors, a memoir of coping with ambiguous loss in the form of their son’s brain damage from a football injury. Their story had considerably less poise and more conflict than Colors of Goodbye, so in that way it felt more relatable, and I found myself identifying with Tammy’s perspective and way of coping. But it’s still a hopeful and encouraging story, and it makes me feel a little more like maybe I too could adapt to a hard change like theirs.

Social issues

🤔

My next audiobook is While the World Watched by Carolyn Maull McKinstry, a memoir of growing up in Birmingham during the civil rights movement of the ’60s. I’m hoping it’ll give me a window on that movement that will help me understand our society’s current struggles.

😕

After many years, the alarmism of the Internet has finally eroded my apathy about the environment. I’m not sure how panicked I should be, so I’m just wading into the material and letting the debates clarify things for me. Interesting people I’ve found so far are David Wallace-Wells with his book The Uninhabitable Earth, Jem Bendell with deep adaptation, Michael Shellenberger, and the people at the Climate Feedback website. With this on my mind, it’s odd seeing the mundane ways we spend our lives when this epic emergency is unfolding around us.

With the general life stress I was already feeling this summer, I question my reading choices over the past month or so, but oh well. I’ve been staying emotionally afloat.

Video

🤔

Continuing my AI movie project, I watched Bicentennial Man. I think it’s extremely unlikely that an AI would spontaneously develop recognizable emotions and want to be human, so I don’t think it was great as an AI story. As an exploration of what it means to be human, I found it to be decently thoughtful, in a ’90s sort of way, and I liked the robot costumes, technology props, and set design. I have a new appreciation for Sam Neill, and it was nice to see Lynne Thigpen.

Posted in AI, Car, Conceptual modeling, Coping, Movies, Social issues, Spirituality, Weeknotes | 6 Comments

Weeknote for 7/28/2019

Posted on July 29, 2019 by Andy

Conceptual modeling

🙂

I got over my procrastination hump on the essay update by making a list of my worries and questions and then adding a list of analytical questions to answer in the outline. I’m in the middle of writing summary answers to them, and then I’ll expand on them to create the actual content. I feel I can finish it by my deadline at the end of next week.

Spirituality

🤔

I finished September Vaudrey’s memoir Colors of Goodbye (book trailer, but don’t watch it if you want to let the book unfold the story) about her family’s loss of her daughter. 6/5, amazing book, about as intense as I expected, and if there’s any chance you can handle the subject, one I recommend to everyone (but get the ebook, because the pictures are in color). Having said that, there’s a certain poise to the Vaudreys’ story that not every experience of grief will share, and I think it’s important to remember that both their story and everyone else’s are legitimate. I’m thinking of these kinds of memoirs as incomplete maps of loss that can each locate some of the dangerous whirlpools and some islands of beauty and relief. This one helped me see what kinds of messages and actions matter to the victims in this kind of crisis, and it’s a book I expect I’ll come back to for study.

Next is a similar memoir, Hit Hard by Pat and Tammy McLeod, about their son’s severe disability from brain damage after a football injury.

Movies

🙂

I watched Her, a thoughtful movie about a relationship between a human and his computer’s operating system. It captured the deep ambivalence we’ll surely feel toward AGI and our struggles to adapt to its changing nature, and it was the high point of this AI movie project (which would have been shared by Ex Machina if I hadn’t already seen that one). In spite of the bittersweet ending, the AI’s general trajectory is actually something I would expect and even hope for if I were designing the system, so I couldn’t be too sad.

Posted in AI, Conceptual modeling, Movies, Spirituality, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 7/21/2019

Posted on July 24, 2019 by Andy

Site update

🤔

I’m going back to the more restricted template I used early on in these updates with a max of four sentences per topic.

Life maintenance

🙂

To prepare for researching my mystery medical bill, I filed the disorganized pile of papers I’d been accumulating, which had the past year’s medical bills mixed in. I finished that, and now my life feels a little clearer and tidier.

Conceptual modeling

🤔

I got as far as making a general outline. I had a late start, but I also felt a bit underprepared and overwhelmed by this essay. This week I’ll identify the blank spots in my ideas for it and see where that takes me.

Spirituality

😌

I listened to War Story (book trailer), Steven Elliott’s account of his recovery after he’d possibly killed Pat Tillman, fellow Army Ranger and former NFL player, in a friendly fire incident in Afghanistan. 5/5: I appreciated his honest and difficult questions and his clarity in identifying the factors that helped him. I was also struck by how well he painted Pat as someone you’d want to know.

Now to get my heart wrung out by September Vaudrey’s Colors of Goodbye.

Fiction

🙂

Last week I made the ebook for my coworker’s first published novel, The Means That Make Us Strangers, a story about the civil rights movement in the ’60s. I’ve added it to my listening queue, where it will nicely complement Carolyn Maull McKinstry’s While the World Watched. Then on Saturday I had a nice time at Christine’s festive and well-attended book launch party.

Posted in Conceptual modeling, Coping, Ebooks, Fiction, Life maintenance, People, Site updates, Spirituality, Weeknotes | 1 Comment

Weeknote for 7/14/2019

Posted on July 19, 2019 by Andy

Site update

🤔

Last week’s very late update reminded me that these weeknotes take me too long to write. I feel like each month’s project is just writing weeknotes and maybe squeezing in my actual project if I have time. So I’m going to think about how I can get them done faster.

Independence Day

🙂

My vacation continued through Monday morning.

Sunday

Sunday after enjoying the US Women’s World Cup win (the rare sports thing I can appreciate), Abbie and I hung out at craft and bookstores until our parents arrived. We went to dinner at our favorite family dining restaurant in the area. My dad and I found it after a long, tiring drive on one of our earliest trips up here for college.

Monday

In the morning we met at a local breakfast place, and then I dropped my car off at the mechanic to look at the damage from the previous week’s accident. Then my family drove me to work, where we said good-bye.

Life maintenance

Last week started with a fuller-than-usual plate of life maintenance concerns. It kinda weighed on my mind. So I made a list of stressors and tasks and then waited to get past them as the week progressed.

Monday

🤔

The police officer at the car accident the week before gave me a motorist report to fill out. It was due in 10 days or I’d get my license suspended or something. Then I went on vacation. I wrote as much as I could while I was away, but for the damage estimate, I needed a knowledgeable person to look at the car. Hence the trip to my mechanic Monday morning. By lunch time he’d determined it’d be hard to fix, and I should have a body shop look at it.

But first I decided to call my insurance company. They started a claim for me and gave me a rough estimate I could put on the form. That took a decently sized weight off my mind.

I debated whether I’d fix this car or replace it. By the end of the week I was leaning toward replace. With all the rust on the underside, this car will only get harder to fix, and next time it might be more than a loose bumper and an out-of-place fuel line.

Tuesday

🙂

Tuesday afternoon I had an appointment with my gastro doctor to lead up to my next colonoscopy. I have one every couple of years to check up on my ulcerative colitis. I’m used to them by now, but my worry is always who I can ask to drive me there and back, since after the procedure I’m too spacey to drive. Jeremy to the rescue! I’d forgotten he took me last year, but a Gmail search reminded me, and he agreed to do it this time too. That’ll be in a month.

Wednesday

😄

At my regular dental appointment a few weeks ago, they found a small cavity. Wednesday I got it filled. After I got there late and then waited a while for everything to get set up, the actual filling only took about five minutes.

Then they tried to charge me $1,000 … for a root canal and a crown. It turned out there were two Andrews there that day, and I was about to be really nice and pay the other one’s bill! My actual bill was only $47.

Waiting

🤔

Speaking of mysterious $1,000 bills (really closer to $2,000), I’d gotten one from the pharmacy that handles my UC medication. Another mental weight to interfere with my vacation. But the more I look into it, the less suspicious it seems, so now my main question is if the manufacturer’s discount program can reduce it.

🙂

Although it was less pressing than my other life maintenance concerns, I wanted to get my cleaning schedule set up. At the end of the week I finished recreating the Clean My Space table as a spreadsheet, so now I just need to fill it in with my intended routine.

And that wraps up my month of life maintenance!

Conceptual modeling

😎

This month’s project is a major update to my conceptual modeling essay based on my thinking and research over the past year. It’ll prepare for the more detailed work on this method that I’ll do in later sprints.

This project is a big deal for me. I see conceptual modeling research as a major subgoal of my life mission of exploring mental and relational potential. I’ve been thinking about it for many years. In fact, even if I never get very far in my career mission of contributing to artificial intelligence, if I do get somewhere with defining a system of conceptual modeling, I think I’ll feel content with my life. So if you see me spending a lot of project months on it in the future, that’s why.

Spirituality

🙂

I finished Preemptive Love by Jeremy Courtney. 5/5. It’s about the author’s philosophy of “Love first, ask questions later.” I thought the story would be sentimental, but it was way heavier than I expected. I recommend it.

After that was Breaking Cover by Michele Assad, which I zipped through. Also 5/5. Very compelling. Overall it was about how the difficult assignments God gives you (in her case, an undercover CIA job in very tough countries) can prepare you for higher purposes he has in mind. A major subtheme was empowerment: You can do more than you think, and you can turn others’ assumptions about you into an advantage.

These two books reminded me of the first principle of improv theater I learned from the book Improv Wisdom: “Yes, and.” When someone makes a suggestion, instead of rejecting it out of hand, embrace it and take it further.

But they also reminded me of survivorship bias. Courtney and Assad took risks and succeeded, but was it only because they were trusting God? Surely they had natural traits and acquired skills that gave them an edge. Their stories left me wondering what can be said about the people in similar situations who don’t succeed. Do those stories tell us anything about taking risks?

Next on my list is War Story by Steven Elliott.

TV

🙂

I finished Jessica Jones season 2. Another 5/5. I liked this season even more than the first one. Both dealt with deep themes and desperate situations, and Jessica’s sarcasm is always entertaining. But this season felt more serious to me, maybe because the villain wasn’t cracking jokes.

Now I’m on season 2 of Dark. Wonderful. Philosophical. Confusing. I’m relying on a couple of Reddit posts to help me sort out all the character relationships.

Posted in Car, Career, Conceptual modeling, Health, Holidays, Money, Site updates, Spirituality, TV, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 7/7/2019

Posted on July 15, 2019 by Andy

It’s a record! 8 days–a new personal best on lateness.

Independence Day

🙂

Last week (technically the week before at this point) we had a little family reunion at my brother’s place in Wisconsin for the 4th of July. My place was on my sister’s way there, so she stayed overnight before we drove the rest of the way together. Our parents drove up from Texas.

Tuesday

I took the afternoon off to finish getting ready for my sister’s visit. She was arriving that evening.

😕

On the way to the store to pick up some things for her stay, I got rear ended by a car that got rear ended by someone else. No one was hurt, but our cars were all damaged. For me the main damage was my rear bumper, which popped out of the wheel well on each side. I need to get it fixed before it falls off and causes another accident. The problem is my car is old and stays outside, so the bottom is really rusty and hard to fix. So I might be buying another car a year or two early. But I couldn’t take care of any of that until I got back the next week.

🙂

Abbie arrived safely. After she got settled, we ate a dinner of frozen lasagna while watching Big Hero 6. More on that in the Movies section.

Before this month’s life maintenance project, my overnight guests had to use my sleeping bag or my huge comforter for a bed. Happily, I now had a sofa bed. I also got all my boxes moved out of the living room, added a towel bar to my bathroom, and did some way overdue cleaning. So now my apartment is much more presentable.

Wednesday

🙂

We weren’t leaving till mid-afternoon, so I spent the morning on more chores to spruce up the apartment. For one thing, I had to wash the sheets I’d bought for the sofa bed because they smelled weird.

🙄

Since Abbie had very long drives on this trip already, I offered to drive between Illinois and Wisconsin. Our trip was uneventful, except that we meant to avoid tolls, and then I made a wrong turn and didn’t avoid them. So later I had to go to the Illinois toll website and reconstruct our route so I could pay them. Thankfully Google Maps creepily tracks your location so you can do things like that.

🙂

Dinner was at a local bar and grill near my brother’s place. It was good but greasier than I was ready for. Lunch had been at a local Mexican place near my place, so it was a day of local dining.

Thursday

🤓

Thursday morning I did a little research to clear up some questions I had about the holiday. How did the colonists win the Revolution against such odds? Why did the allies help? Why did the colonies want independence in the first place? Why is independence day July 4? Why do we celebrate with fireworks? Very enlightening.

😎

After a late breakfast, we rented a paddleboat and circled a few times around the bay near Michael’s home. It was midday, which would’ve been a mistake except that there were lots of clouds and a nice breeze. The boat place has more than just paddleboats, and we passed by kayaks, groups of paddleboards, and a swimmer with a bright pink float tied on. Some of the paddleboarders had their dogs with them standing or lying on the board.

😐

At night we drove to a country club for fireworks. It was a mixed experience. The golf course was nice but a little too hilly for comfort. While we waited for darkness, we were snacked on by Wisconsin’s aggressive mosquitos, which seemed to think bug spray was an appetizer. But I did enjoy hearing the chatter of the other visitors around us.

Finally the warning firework was fired, and after a trickle of intro bursts, the show got started. It was a lot like the shows I was used to at home. We were close enough to feel the booms. But after what I took to be the mid-show climax, the pace trickled off again, as if they were having technical problems. People started leaving, and we joined them.

Friday

🤓

Friday we stopped by Michael’s office at his new job, and then it was off to rural Wisconsin for lunch and a museum.

The museum was The House on the Rock, the massive curiosities collection of the late Alex Jordan, who I had never heard of. But my brother’s description sold me on it immediately, and I felt a kinship with this collector before we even arrived. By the end my opinion hadn’t changed, as overwhelmed and tired as I felt. There’s a corner of my mind that, if you blew it up into a person and a half, would be an Alex Jordan. I even bought both the books at the gift shop–a biography and a museum guide–for inspiration in my home (and life) design.

Being there reminded me of a quote I vaguely remembered from Neil Gaiman’s American Gods about roadside attractions as places of power. Only after we’d finished our tour did I remember that the scene in the book was about the very place we were visiting. I was so shocked by the mental connection that I let out a sudden “Oh!” and startled my sister. Later I found out the American Gods TV series filmed those scenes on location, which makes me more interested in watching it.

Saturday

🙂

Saturday we had lunch with a family friend in the area, Abbie’s math teacher from high school. It was good to catch up and hear about her current work teaching computer science.

🤔

In the afternoon we hung out downtown drinking bubble tea and looking at stationery and books. The area had the kind of hipster vibe I can kind of distantly appreciate online, but I found that actually being there made me uneasy. I felt a little too out of place. I think this just means I need to spend a bunch of time in Wicker Park.

That night I drove Abbie back to my place. We managed to avoid the tolls this time. It’s kind of fun driving down country roads. I should do it more often.

Movies

🙂

Big Hero 6 was part of my AI movie project. I was half asleep for the final boss fight (because of tiredness, not boredom), but when I was alert, the movie was entertaining, though maybe formulaic. The main AI-related insight I took from it was the reminder that a lot of what we value about a person comes from our awareness of their memories and from the traits shaped by their experiences. So if you wipe an AI’s memories and restart it from its original state, it’s like the old AI has died. It’s a loss. Unless, of course, the AI was evil.

Posted in Apartment, Car, Holidays, Life maintenance, Movies, People, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 6/30/2019

Posted on July 3, 2019 by Andy

Life maintenance

🙂

My sofa came a day early on Wednesday. I thought I’d have to lug it up from the lobby, but somehow they delivered it right to my apartment door. Through a fair amount of struggle, I assembled it that evening. Then my rug came on Friday. Much easier to set up. So at last my living room is taking shape. I was even able to use the quilt my mom made me years ago to reinforce my color scheme. She tells me the pattern is a triple Irish chain.

I spent a very sweaty Saturday evening moving my boxed books into a stifling storage room. The storage bins here are pretty small, so now for the rest of my living room junk my bedroom is doubling as a storage space. I have a feeling my next decluttering will be sooner rather than later.

I’m still working on my cleaning schedule. It’s taking a little time because I’m working from Melissa Maker’s book Clean My Space, and I’m converting its schedule chart to a spreadsheet.

Fiction

🙂

I finished The Contract by John Powell and Gwen Plano. It’s a political thriller with an interesting framing device. Heaven is intervening in a global political emergency, and the protagonists are two souls the heavenly authorities send to work through human bodies on earth. It sounds apocalyptic, like a left-leaning Left Behind, but I’m not sure the Second Coming will be involved.

Although I felt the story took a long time to get all the pieces in place (half the book), once the main action started, it carried me along. When I got to the end and found out there was a sequel, the story had intrigued me enough that I bought it and started listening right away.

The sequel is The Choice, which was only by Gwen Plano. It turns out this series is hers, and Powell was only helping. Since the first book introduced the scenario, this one could launch straight into the interesting parts.

This series reminds me that “interesting” is a relative term, because I’m sure someone who’s more into romance would like the first half of The Contract more than I did, and people who are bored by research would probably be watching the clock at many points in The Choice. I think you’d call this story a police procedural. But it was just the kind of “boring” I can get into.

Since this series came right after I’d read Robert McKee’s Story, I paid attention to its use of conflict and “the gap” (between expectation and result). For being thrillers, these stories had less conflict and confusion and failure than I expected. Other than some key plot points, most of the events seemed to flow smoothly, the characters got along, and they got what they wanted. But I didn’t mind too much, because it fed the part of me that thrives on good will and cooperation.

There will be a final book in the series, so I’m looking forward to that.

Movies

🤔

Over the weekend I continued my AI movie theme with Chappie. I’d heard it wasn’t great, and certainly I had to work to suspend my disbelief, but I ended up liking it more than I expected. David Ovienmhada captures some of the difficulty I had, and it’s the main reason I find this movie valuable. Ovienmhada notes that the movie’s AI doesn’t emerge from a “clean room” setting, such as a tech company or government lab. I’m already used to imagining that a general AI could pop up anywhere in a range of contexts. But what I wasn’t considering was an AI training environment that might be as random and foreign to me as a gang of criminals.

Chappie isn’t an orderly, well-mannered, Star Trek AI. He means well, but he’s a product of his rough upbringing, and he’s catching up to the humans around him the whole time. It’s basically a robot coming-of-age story, and apart from what’s probably a typical movie structure, it’s messy. Understanding and accepting it means my mind has some territory to expand into, and I welcome it.

Nature

🙂

It’s official. This is my favorite place I’ve lived since college. On Wednesday just before I put together my sofa, I was sitting in the kitchen and spotted something on the ground outside.

After that the rabbit hopped away from the burrow toward the building, and a third rabbit hopped out of the bushes and joined it. I think that’s the most rabbits I’ve seen in person at once. What other woodland neighbors will I find here?

Posted in Apartment, Fiction, Life maintenance, Movies, Nature, Weeknotes | 1 Comment