Weeknote for 4/14/2019

Posted on April 16, 2019 by Andy

Comics

😐

It turned out the kind of reading order I wanted to create would’ve taken way too much time. DC’s publishing history is just way too long and complicated for a week or two of effort. So I wrote a procedure for how someone could go about it if they wanted to take up that project. There are also existing resources, so I included some comments about those.

As for my own reading, I’ll probably follow the easy plan I suggested on that page. I’m a lot less ambitious than I was years ago when I first thought of this reading project. I’m more aware of how much time my other projects will take.

Half the reason for this project is to help me make decisions on the one day a year that I actually buy comics, Free Comic Book Day. Learning a little more about the events has helped me decide which ones are worth owning. If I buy something from DC, it’ll probably be DC Rebirth, Flashpoint, or something Convergence related. But maybe Legends, the event after Crisis on Infinite Earths, since I happened to see it in the store.

I have one more set of reading suggestions to make about comics, and they come in the form of my current project. The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature has a chapter on comics, so they get a section in my page of links. Once that section is posted, I’ll link to it from my comic reading strategy guide.

Experimental literature

😐

Last week I collected links for a few more sections, but I haven’t posted them yet. This week I’ll finish the work I’m doing for this sprint. Then I’ll move on to the next project, which will be my coding project generator.

Apologetics

🤔

I finished Michael Licona’s The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach, which argues that Jesus’ resurrection happened. The book clarified the issues for me, and it helped me whittle them down to the ones I care about. I already agree that we can say things about the past and that miracles can happen, so fortunately I don’t have to argue with myself about those.

Licona’s argument takes a minimal-facts approach. He uses the term “historical bedrock” to refer to the facts historians widely grant. When it comes to Jesus’ resurrection, the key facts in the bedrock are that Jesus was crucified and that people saw him alive afterward.

Using a consistent set of criteria, Licona evaluates several attempts to explain the historical bedrock. Mostly what we have to explain is Jesus’ appearances. We can dismiss the idea that he survived the crucifixion. Surviving crucifixion was very unlikely even with medical attention. So apart from the resurrection hypothesis, we’re basically left with the questionable idea of group hallucinations. Licona’s response to this explanation seemed ambiguous to me. Overall the psychological literature doesn’t support group hallucinations, but he gave a couple of examples that sort of do. So I want to look into that.

In response to Licona’s arguments, one obvious step a skeptic could take is to deny the historical bedrock. As I listened to the book, a post by John Loftus along those lines kept echoing in my mind. He basically argues that because the Gospels as a whole are unreliable, their resurrection narratives are too.

So now I’m listening to The Jesus Legend by Paul Rhodes Eddy and Gregory Boyd, which defends not only the reliability of the Synoptic Gospels but also Jesus’ historical existence itself. I like to make sure my bases are covered. This book is turning out to be more interesting to me than the resurrection one, since I’m less familiar with the arguments.

I’ve been weighing the idea of tackling Craig Keener’s large 2-volume work Miracles. Skeptics have some decent criticisms of it, which makes me hesitant to give it all that time. But the existence of modern miracles keeps coming up in these other books, and it makes me think a treatment like Keener’s is at least worth hearing. So that’ll probably be my next one after The Jesus Legend.

Easter

🙂

Easter is this coming weekend. My brother is making his annual trip to my place for our traditional round of church services. Should be fun.

Posted in Apologetics, Comics, Experimental literature, Holidays, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 4/7/2019

Posted on April 12, 2019 by Andy

Site update

🙂

Last Sunday I found out there’s a term for these updates I’ve been posting for the past couple of years. They’re called weeknotes (H/T Baldur Bjarnason). They’ve been around for a while, but apparently they’ve become more popular lately, and there’s a little community of people who post them. So I’ve decided to rebrand these updates so I can join them.

Comics

😐

I didn’t finish my comic reading order by the end of the week, so I decided to take a day or two more and then make myself post whatever I had. I’ll write about it in my next weeknote.

Experimental literature

😎

The rest of this project month I’m going back to last month’s project and adding the rest of the entries to my bibliography of experimental works. In a future phase I’ll add remarks to give people an idea of why they’d want to read them.

Spirituality

😐

I didn’t get around to posting about the audio Bible, but I still plan to. Hopefully that’ll happen this week or next week.

TV

🙂

People in my online circles have been excited about Jordan Peele’s revival of The Twilight Zone. It started last week, so I watched the two episodes they’ve released. They’re on CBS All Access, but they’ve put the first on YouTube so you can watch it for free.

I thought the stories had interesting premises and were fairly clever. But after the mind-bending stuff I normally consume, I ended up disappointed that the concepts and twists didn’t go further. I’m hoping I missed some layers of meaning that online commentators can reveal to me. Still, I’ll keep watching.

This is the first Jordan Peele product I’ve seen. I keep hearing good things about him, so I’m thinking of watching his films, even though, believe it or not, I’m very hesitant about watching horror.

Livestreams

😎

Friday I found myself unexpectedly captivated by a livestream of a bald eagle nest that was in my YouTube recommendations. Usually I find wildlife streams kind of boring because either it’s outside but there are no animals around or it’s a cage and the animals are doing nothing. This camera is outside with a clear, close-up view of a family of eagles–two adults and three babies. We get to see them live their normal lives in their natural environment.

And their environment is impressive. I put on the Lord of the Rings soundtrack as a backdrop, and it was very fitting. It’s especially impressive when you see a bird swooping across the peaks in the background and you realize it’s one of the parents coming home from their hunt.

But what really struck me was how ordinary these animals are and how different their lives are from mine. Sure, they look stern and fierce, but it didn’t take long to realize these are just birds doing birdy things. At times they reminded me of chickens. And their calls are a lot squeakier than I expected, like seagulls.

They spend a lot of their time just standing around. Probably keeping watch, guarding the nation. Or their own little nest, I suppose. (How can they live out in the open like that, I wondered, and in such a small home?) They don’t have Netflix to pass the time, but they also don’t have meetings to get to or playdates for the kids. They’re just living, being animals.

Doing my own hunting online I found some more information. The nest is a lot older than I thought. It’s housed several generations and has seen some drama.

Posted in Comics, Experimental literature, Livestreams, Site updates, Spirituality, TV, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Update for 3/31/2019

Posted on April 1, 2019 by Andy

Comics

🤔

My project for the first half of Thinkulum April is a reading order for DC comics’ crossover events. It might end up mostly being a big planning session. DC’s publication history is very complicated, and I’m not really sure what my project should look like. Last week I did a lot of writing to try to figure it out.

This week I’ll keep thinking through my plan. Maybe I’ll end up with something usable, or maybe I’ll just write a post that discusses the issues. In the meantime, it’s reassuring to know that the Unofficial Guide to the DC Universe understands my pain.

Next week I’m still intending to end the sprint on this project and go back to last month’s on experimental literature.

Spirituality

Audio Bible

🙂

After three weeks of listening, I finished the Message Remix audio Bible. I’m going to write about it in a separate post, but the summary version is (1) it goes into Andy’s approved audio Bible list, and (2) it was helpful.

Assurance

🤔

Since I didn’t have enough to listen to last week, I decided to tack on a book I found at work called How Can I Be Sure I’m a Christian? by Donald Whitney. Assurance of salvation is an issue that comes up in my conversations sometimes, so I wanted to see if it would be a helpful book to share. Assurance is an important issue because it addresses not only the question of how Christians can feel good about their future but also the questions of the central message of Christianity and how Christians should be living their lives.

After listening to the book, my impression is that it gives a lot of good advice and merits further study, but it might contain inconsistencies, and it seemed to skim over some important topics, such as the possibility of false faith. Hopefully I can come back to the book for a closer look.

Apologetics

🤔

I still have time for some Lent-oriented reading before Easter, so now I’m listening to Michael Licona’s book The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach. I’ve had it in mind to read for years, wanting to see how Licona would update William Lane Craig’s work.

I also felt it potentially held a key to renewing my spiritual life. The resurrection is a central issue for Christian apologetics, and if I felt more certain about the underpinnings of my faith, I’d feel freer to wade deeper in. So we’ll see how it goes.

Fiction

😎

For my birthday a few weeks ago, my sister got me some Bandcamp albums. I saw the notification email and then forgot to claim them till she reminded me last week. I’m glad she did, because they were very interesting.

They’re a pair–a music album and an accompanying audiobook by the same people, Jessy Calvin Ribordy and his band Falling Up. Both albums are called Hours. I think of the story as the central piece of the work (and it was released first), so that’s why I’m writing about it under Fiction.

I listened to the music first. Abbie told me it was very catchy, which it was, but what struck me was how every song made me feel like something epic was happening. That impression was based almost completely on the sound. I couldn’t hear many of the lyrics.

I knew nothing about the story going in. I didn’t even know the genre. I only had my sister’s high opinion of the author to make me think I’d enjoy it. It was very interesting to have that extra, meta layer of mystery to unravel as the story progressed. The story ended up being a very good match for my recent entertainment mood.

It’s also interesting to listen to the music again with the story in mind and let their moods–different but I think compatible–blend in my head.

People

🙂

A couple of weeks ago I had lunch with church friend Ken, and he suggested sushi. The only time I’d had sushi was about 10 years ago, and it tasted weird and I decided maybe it wasn’t for me. But I like to keep an open mind, so I said yes to this plan, and we picked a place near work, and to my surprise I liked it. I think the earlier sushi might’ve had wasabi, which I now know does taste weird.

Since that lunch, I’ve had sushi cravings. But I think of it as a special occasion food, so I waited patiently for my next Ken lunch, which was Friday. We went back to the same place, and again it was delicious. So I guess sushi is a thing in my life now.

Posted in Apologetics, Bible, Comics, Fiction, Music, People, Spirituality, Weeknotes | 1 Comment

Update for 3/24/2019

Posted on March 25, 2019 by Andy

Experimental literature

😎

I finished my work on this project for March (technically a day late, on Sunday, but pretend I didn’t say that). I’ve posted the list at Experimental Literature Links. It’s meant to be a starting point for exploring works of experimental literature. I needed a more organized way to find them than the random searches I’d been doing.

The list is far from finished, and I don’t want to wait too long to add to it, so I’m going to try to finish up April’s project early so I can work on this one a bit more.

Since this month’s work on this project got started because a YouTuber I watch challenged us to read House of Leaves, I also wrote a post in his subreddit that summarized the discussions of House of Leaves in the book I’m working from, The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature. Of course the real point was to introduce people to my list. 😉 The post was its own mini-project. It took me 2-3 hours to write.

Comics

😎

April’s project will be an addition to my guide to navigating the world of comics. I want to assemble my DC reading list as an example of how the method works. The reason I’m doing this in April is to have an update to share with people before Free Comic Book Day on May 4.

I’m going to try to do this update in two weeks so I can return to my experimental literature list for the rest of the month.

Spirituality

🙂

I’m 2/3 through my audio Bible now. I should finish it on Friday. Then I’ll write a post to comment on what I heard.

Posted in Comics, Experimental literature, Spirituality, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Update for 3/17/2019

Posted on March 20, 2019 by Andy

Experimental literature

🤔

My goal in this project is to create a list of experimental works and links to other such lists. I’m basing the organization on a collection of scholarly essays, The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature. I got a bit done last week, trying out a method of collecting works by scanning the index so I can correlate the entries to the table of contents.

This is the last week for this project, so I’ll need to put a lot more time in. Fortunately my evenings are freer this week. I’ll also need to settle on my methods for the rest of the work as well as a deliverable I can live with for now. I have a feeling I’ll come back to this project in future months to improve it.

I’ve been listening to Arvo Pärt while I work. He’s my main go-to music for experimental literature.

Spirituality

🤔

This year my Lent activity is listening to the audio of the Message version of the Bible. Last week I got through the first third, Genesis-2 Kings (well, almost–I had to finish 2 Kings the next day).

I’ll wait till I’m done with the whole thing to post my thoughts, but so far I’d say it’s a good choice of audio Bible, a decent performance and mostly a very listenable paraphrase. The exercise is also bringing up a lot of my issues with the Bible, which is helpful.

Movies

🙂

Tuesday I saw Captain Marvel with my geek meetup. I liked it about as well as I’ve liked all the other MCU movies. I knew nothing about the character going in, so the movie version is now my head canon. I especially liked the friendship between Carol and Maria and all the time we got to spend with Nick Fury. Then there was Captain Marvel’s burst of self-discovery near the end. And the mid-end-credits scene.

House of Leaves has put me in the mood for more weird fiction, so Saturday I watched Annihilation, which had been on my mind since I saw the trailer last year. I’d listened to the novels a few years ago, and they confused me enough that I was really looking forward to seeing a filmmaker’s interpretation. I was not disappointed. It was satisfyingly eerie and a much more straightforward variation on the plot, though it had its own mysteries to ponder. I might have to add the soundtrack to my dark ambient collection.

People

🙂

It seems I’ve been a little more social lately. I’ve had lunch with a friend from church a couple of times in the past month, one of which was Tuesday. It turns out his son posts music transcriptions and original compositions on MuseScore.com, which is where I’ve been putting my exercises, so that was kind of motivating.

It was nice to see my geek meetup Tuesday night. I hadn’t been to any events in a while, and I ended up having a good conversation with the former organizer about happenings in the world of church.

And I’ve joined another board game group run by a coworker, this one in the evening once a month. Jeremy and I went to it on Friday. I won Bärenpark and came in last in Queendomino. I like it when the domains of my life mix, so it was fun to introduce my church friend to my work friend.

Posted in Experimental literature, Movies, People, Spirituality, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Update for 3/10/2019

Posted on March 13, 2019 by Andy

Music

😎

Tuesday I took the afternoon off from work, took a long nap, and then headed out to see Jacob Collier in concert.

I came in with only vague expectations, but he met and exceeded them. He was creative, energetic, and uplifting, and he got the audience singing. For “In My Room,” he even had us sit on the floor (the lower level had no chairs) and sing along while the band sat on the edge of the stage, like we were at a big campfire. Like this but in Chicago:

When I think “live version” of a song, I think of just a messier rendition of the studio recording. But that wouldn’t do for Jacob Collier. No, his live versions are completely different arrangements. For example, here’s the album version of “In the Real Early Morning.” And here’s someone’s video of the live version. I wouldn’t be surprised if he improvised it on the spot. Here are some other clips to give you the flavor of the rest of the show.

It was a good experience, and Lincoln Hall did a good job of advertising their other artists. I’m thinking of looking them up to see who might bring me back.

I didn’t really do anything else for my birthday, which was on Thursday, except for getting a bunch of nice birthday messages (thank you!). But I’m considering the concert my celebration, and it was plenty!

Thinking

🤔

To get me through the drive to the concert, I started the audiobook of Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile. Antifragility is the property of benefiting from disorder, as opposed to being damaged by it (fragility) or simply being resistant to it (robustness). I finished the book on Saturday.

It was good, but I wouldn’t say great. I enjoyed his opinionated, gratuitously insulting style in Black Swan, but in Antifragile it seemed extra gratuitous, and I got tired of it quickly. And a lot of his supporting examples sounded like matters of personal preference. A lot of others were based merely on his rules of thumb, which doesn’t count as evidence. But the general idea of antifragility seems like an important one, so I’d like to look into it further.

Despite his snark and combativeness, I did find some personal qualities to admire. He comes across as having a strong sense of ethics. Practicing what you preach (having “skin in the game”) is a key part of his message, he feels it his duty to call out fraud, and he values helping the weak. With all that, I felt more inspired to act with integrity and generosity.

Spirituality

🤔

I’m not doing a great job at keeping up with the liturgical year like I intended, so I’m downgrading that project to my usual level of inattention. Maybe I’ll try again next year.

Lent crept up on me, and I didn’t realize it was Ash Wednesday till my coworker walked in with ashes on his forehead. I hadn’t planned any Lent practices, but I decided it’d be a good time to listen to the audio Bible my brother gave me for Christmas, The Message Remix. It’s The Message read by Kelly Ryan Dolan but with certain sections read by different Christian celebrities. I requested that version so the reading would have some variety.

I’m going to try my high intensity listening pace with this Bible. That amounts to two hours a day, spread over my commutes and meals plus a little extra. At 2x speed The Message Remix is about 40 hours, so it should take me three weeks to get through it. That fits into Lent nicely.

The quickest I’ve gotten through an audio Bible in the past is 90 days. Here are some reflections from one of those listens. I’m curious to see how my impressions this time compare.

Software development

🤔

I finished Refactoring Databases. I love databases as a programming tool, but I don’t know enough about them to evaluate this book fairly, so I’m taking other people’s word for it that it’s great. If nothing else, this one and the other books in the evolutionary distributed software architecture family give me a starting point for learning more about these topics.

Coding project generator

😐

Not only did I put this project on hold to get through House of Leaves, I’ve taken it off this month’s agenda altogether in favor of a different project, which I’ll tell you about in the Fiction section. And then I have another project in mind for April, so I’m planning to get back to the project generator in May.

Fiction

House of Leaves

😎

Last week I pushed myself through reading the 700-page novel House of Leaves. It’s a classic of the found footage horror genre. I read it for a challenge posed by a YouTuber named Nick Nocturne, a lead-up to the first in his series of videos analyzing the book. It’s definitely an R-rated book, but if you don’t mind that and you like having your mind twisted in metafictional knots, it’s a good one. According to Nick, it has inspired and shaped a lot of creative work in the genre.

If this had been an audiobook, reading it in nine days would’ve been no problem. But print reading is difficult for me because I’m so easily sidetracked, and I slow way down when I’m bored. But I remembered I have a trick–I time each page with the stopwatch on my phone, and that keeps me focused enough to maintain a nice pace. After a while of that at the beginning, I realized the story was carrying me along on its own, so then I read normally, and I only had to use the trick a couple of times after that.

The other trouble was setting aside the time to read. I haven’t really solved that yet. But somehow despite days of very little reading mixed with a few multi-hour sessions, I got through the whole thing by Saturday evening.

The dark ambient music from my Pandora station was a fitting backdrop to the novel. I ended up mostly listening to a playlist on my phone that was derived from the station.

Experimental literature

😎

That leads me to my project for the rest of this month. Nick has been very involved in the House of Leaves Challenge, retweeting the participants and putting their book photos in his video. He even retweeted my link to my dark ambient station.

So I was thinking my fellow House of Leaves readers might like some pointers to more experimental literature, and this would be a perfect opportunity to finish a project I started two years ago to collect such a list. My starting point is The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature. It should be easy enough to finish the project in the next couple of weeks. I don’t know how much attention it’ll get, but it’ll at least be worth it for my own reading.

Posted in Coding project generator, Experimental literature, Fiction, Music, Software development, Spirituality, Thinking, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Update for 3/3/2019

Posted on March 3, 2019 by Andy

Housekeeping

🙂

I’ve actually been cleaning up around the apartment … about eight months after I moved here. Sure, I’m mostly just shoving stuff in closets and cabinets, but at least the floor looks less cluttered.

Software development

🤔

My latest project on software development practices is done, but my book listening continues. Last week I completed Building Microservices. This is in a family of books on evolutionary distributed software architecture. Release It!, which I finished the week before, was also in that family, though that one was less about evolution.

The idea of Building Microservices is that splitting your application into many small services can make it flexible enough to evolve easily. Since I haven’t done that much with networks or web development, I only understood bits and pieces of it, but I could sort of see why people think highly of it. The author packs in a lot of advice.

Now I’m on Refactoring Databases, which was written years earlier but also belongs in the family.

Coding project generator

😐

Last week I did some planning. This week I might get to some coding. This project has a lot of little pieces to take care of, but I think most of it will be pretty easy.

Fiction

😎

Part of project management is risk management, and my generator project has already been confronted by a risk of derailment. The cause is an interdimensional shapeshifting cat monster on the Internet. The cat in question is Nick Nocturne, host of the YouTube channel Night Mind, which does analysis of horror media.

Last week Nick posted a video to introduce his next series of uploads, which will be analyzing the novel House of Leaves, and he challenged all his viewers to read the whole 700-page thing in the nine days before the first video goes up. I accepted. I don’t normally do challenges like that, but this book was on my to-read list, and joining the crowd of readers sounded fun.

700 pages in 9 days is around 75 pages per day. How will I juggle the book and the coding? I’m not sure, but I might decide to postpone the coding till next week. Like I said, the tasks seem fairly easy.

And if you aren’t into horror but you’re interested in books with a creative format, S. might be the book for you.

Music

🙂

I have another project interruption this week. Last summer I started getting into the music of Jacob Collier, a jazz prodigy who in 2017 won two Grammys in a row. Last year I skipped his concert in Chicago to my instant regret, so when he announced his next one here, I bought a ticket ASAP. Well the time has come, and his concert is on Tuesday! My birthday is on Thursday, so it’s like an early present.

Posted in Birthdays, Coding project generator, Fiction, Housekeeping, Music, Software development, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Update for 2/24/2019

Posted on February 26, 2019 by Andy

Software development

🙂

I finished February’s work on my software development notes. Despite a late start and general laziness, I think the project went decently well. Here’s the project in its current state. I’m taking the Zettelkasten approach of treating the content as a flat list of entries that I organize in a separate document (in this case, the main project page). I’ll probably make this the default way of organizing my projects.

The purpose of February’s sprint changed as it progressed. I wanted to come up with a basic procedure for my programming projects, but that ended up being too ambitious for the way the project was going. Instead I set up buckets to drop my future software development notes into. My plan is to do a lot of that work incidentally as I do my other programming projects.

In related reading, I finished IEEE’s Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK). I give it 4/5. It’s important and fairly comprehensive. But I have problems with the organization, which is most of the reason I was reading it.

After SWEBOK I started Release It!, a poorly named but respected book on designing your web app to survive in the wild.

Coding project generator

🙂

My next programming project will be for Thinkulum March, which starts this week. It’s a continuation of the project generating program I started writing a couple of years ago. It creates boilerplate code to kick off a programming project. This month I’m going to try to get it to version 1.0. This week is the initial planning and exploration phase.

Posted in Coding project generator, Software development, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Update for 2/17/2019

Posted on February 19, 2019 by Andy

Programming

🤔

February’s main project is my notes on software development. I got a late start, so last week was week 2 of 3.

  • I renamed the project’s wiki article from “From Private to Public Coding” to simply “Software Development.”
  • I added a categorized bibliography of the SD books I’ve collected.

I meant to create an outline of the topics I want to cover, but I ran into multiple problems. Instead I’m going to break up the article’s current content into separate articles, start writing my software development procedure, and link to subtopic articles from the procedure.

I’m pleased with the troubleshooting I’ve been doing.

I finished Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond. It was good, but somehow I was expecting more. Maybe it did all the mind opening I needed it for back when I first read it. Still, I’ll study it in more detail when I get around to organizing my information.

Deciding how to organize my software development notes has turned my attention to IEEE’s Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK), a free book you can download here. It’s an overview of the whole field, and so far it seems like a thorough and balanced starting point for studying the subject.

Research

😎

Recently an Amazon recommendation lodged itself in my mind and wouldn’t leave, a book called How to Take Smart Notes. It’s an exploration of the note-taking system of a prolific German sociologist named Niklas Luhmann. The system is called a Zettelkasten, or slip-box, and it’s sort of like a personal wiki. Here’s a video of a talk by the author. Here’s the book’s website. Here’s another writer’s explanation, and here’s another website dedicated to the system. An academic group studying Luhmann’s notes is here.

The reason the Zettelkasten method caught my attention is that it amounts to a more formalized and advanced version of the note-taking method I picked up last year from Peg Boyle Single’s Demystifying Dissertation Writing. It also overlaps with ideas from information architecture and semantic networks. And I always like methods that have communities that study and use them and share their findings.

Also I’ve run across Niklas Luhmann before. He was a systems theorist and wrote an introduction that I found early in my research. I haven’t read it though.

TV

😎

I’ve been catching up on Dark Matter. It’s a a space-based cyberpunk ensemble show adapted from a comic. I watched season 1 a few years ago, and I’ve missed it. Things that stand out to me now that I’m back:

    • I mainly care about the settings and the characters, but the show has a detailed political layer that would give it some rewatch value if I wanted to try to sort that all out.
    • The set design and music match the genre perfectly.
Posted in Programming, Research, TV, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Update for 2/10/19

Posted on February 13, 2019 by Andy

Programming

🙂

I planned out this month’s software development project. I’m feeling pretty good about its modest goals. At the end of the month I want to end up with a basic procedure for my programming projects, along with a framework to fill in with details over time. This week’s goal is to finish the bibliography I was supposed to post last week and then post a broad outline of the topics I want to cover.

I finished listening to About Face, a very detailed and thorough guide to creating user interfaces. It walks you through gathering the requirements for your software and then discusses aspects of UI from general principles down to specific controls. 6/5. I highly recommend it.

Next is Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond. An earlier edition of this was one of the first software development books I read years ago. It’s good to come back to it.

TV

😎

I took a couple of days to watch a special episode of Black Mirror called “Bandersnatch.” It’s a branching plot story in Netflix form, where the viewer chooses what happens next. It was very well done.

It took me back to my days of reading Choose Your Own Adventure books and playing text adventures. One of my earliest programming books was Christopher Lampton’s How to Create Adventure Games. I’m sure I knew about interactive stories already, but there was something magical about creating a world inside the computer that someone could explore.

People

🙂

On Friday and Saturday I helped my coworker Matt move into his new house. It kinda wore me out for the rest of the weekend. But it ended what I assume was the most stressful period of their move, so I’m glad I could help get it done.

Posted in People, Programming, TV, Weeknotes | 2 Comments