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

Update for 2/3/2019

Posted on February 4, 2019 by Andy

Housekeeping

🤔

January’s apartment tidying project has “concluded.” I’m done dedicating project time to it for now, but I’ll keep working on it in the background. In spite of my lack of work on it during its scheduled month, I had a retrospective for it anyway.

What worked:

  • I initially wanted to purge my possessions while unpacking my boxes from my move. This proved to be more than I wanted to think about at the time. Dropping that requirement let me reduce my procrastinating.
  • I dropped the requirement to have a clearly defined home for everything in advance. My plan became simply to put my things roughly where they belonged and let the resulting lack of space guide my later purge and organization.
  • I gave myself permission to work a little at a time, putting away whatever items I could easily place as I moved around the apartment.

What didn’t:

  • I stuck to my demotivating requirements too long, hoping I could break out of my procrastination.
  • I didn’t think through a plan before beginning the project time period.
  • I didn’t do regular retrospectives or planning sessions.

Conceptual modeling

😐

I meant to do a retrospective for January’s accidental Semantic Web project, but I was too lazy, so I’ll try to get to it this week.

Projects

😎

This year, to give my projects a simple and predictable schedule that fits with my blogging routine, I’m going to try giving them each four weeks. With a normal calendar this doesn’t quite fit with the one-a-month rhythm I was planning, since there are 12 months in the year but 13 groups of 4 weeks to make 52.

However, there is a calendar that’s organized that way, the International Fixed Calendar. The year always begins on a Sunday, each month has 28 days, and there’s an extra month between June and July called Sol. There’s an extra day at the end of each year called Year Day, and on leap year there’s an extra day at the end of June.

I’m going to try a variation on the IFC for scheduling my projects. I’ll call it the Thinkulum calendar. I’m starting the reckoning from 2017, since that year began on a Sunday. Rather than having the IFC’s Year Day and Leap Day, my version will have a leap week at the end of every few years (the first one in 2022) so the project calendar can catch up with the Gregorian calendar. In those cases both calendars will start the year on a Sunday.

Simple, right? Don’t worry. If the experiment continues, I’ll keep track of the project cycles for you.

Programming

🙂

With all that, Thinkulum February started last week on Sunday, Jan 27. So I’m already a week behind on my next project, which is to organize some notes on software development. Fortunately I’ve been working on it because of my related work activities. But I haven’t done my formal planning for it, which I’ll do this week and officially start on the project.

I finished listening to User Story Mapping. The style is more conversational than I like, and I have issues with the organization, but the technique seems like a very good one. I’m going to try it with our project at work.

Now I’m starting on a set of books about some categories of software requirement I’m not very familiar with. The first is Alan Cooper’s About Face, about user interfaces. Other books will be about stability, security, and privacy.

TV

😎

I finished the first season of Dark. There’s purportedly going to be a second season, and I hope so because the end of the first was a cliffhanger that dramatically expanded the setting of the story. The show is even more LOST-like than I realized at first, so I highly recommend it if you like that sort of thing and you don’t mind a TV-MA rating. It’s also a fairly deep and thoughtful show.

Posted in Housekeeping, Programming, Projects, TV, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Update for 1/27/2019

Posted on January 29, 2019 by Andy

Christmas gift labels

🤔

I’ve done enough of a retrospective to call this project done.

The good:

  • It turned out really well. My family liked the cards and stories, and they were curious and asked me questions about the project.
  • I was able to reduce the scope of the work several times, which was one part of project management I wanted to practice.
  • I found a new way to make the work fun: Listening to fitting soundscapes, especially paired with music. In this case it was usually Victorian Christmas music with the sound of a cabin with a fireplace and howling wind.

The improvable:

  • For its relative importance, I spent way too long on it, 10-11 hours per week for a total of 75 hours.
  • I should have iterated on the walking skeleton rather than dividing the work so much into task-related phases. That is, create a very simple but working prototype and then gradually add to it till I run out of time.
  • I need to pick a medium rather than trying to tackle more than one, in this case text, audio, and images. The gift labels each year will always have some degree of visual presentation, but I need to pick extremely simple ones if the main point isn’t visual. The project could’ve been 20-30 hours shorter with a simpler design.
  • I didn’t know how to organize my files, so they were more confusing and time-consuming to work with.
  • I didn’t feel I had time to manage the project properly according to the book I was working from, and my adaptation of the process was kind of disorganized. Next I’m going to try adapting the methods of agile software development.

Housekeeping

🤔

January was supposed to be Month of Tidying, but it really didn’t work out that way. I couldn’t get motivated, and I spent my time on other projects instead. But I want to keep my flow of projects moving, so instead of putting everything else off month after month till I can motivate myself to spend all my time on housekeeping, I’m going to give the tidying project background status. I’ll just try to do a little each day, or whenever I can get to it. Marie Kondo says not to do it that way, but tidying is apparently not giving me enough joy to focus on it now.

Conceptual modeling

🙂

January has actually been Month of the Semantic Web. This falls under my conceptual modeling project. And Protégé, the software I’m learning for making Semantic Web models (called ontologies), covers a lot of the features I was imagining for a modeling tool I was thinking of creating. So instead of writing one from scratch, I can focus on the features I’d like to add in the form of plugins.

Programming

🙂

February will be Month of Software Development. My goals at this point are to summarize the software development reading I’ve been doing and maybe finish version 1 of my coding project generator. I might run out of time and need to put off the generator.

Conveniently, at work we’re starting to look at how we can adopt some of these development practices. So my personal and work projects will be aligned for a while.

To help us kick off the work project we’ll be using to test these methods, I’m reading another book in my software development list, User Story Mapping. It also turns out to apply to my conceptual modeling project, and it has a lot of overlap with the insights I was gaining last year about shaping a model through free-form internal and interpersonal dialogue.

Fiction

🙂

I finished the last book of the the Mortal Engines Quartet, A Darkling Plain. Things that stood out to me about this series, which I loved:

  • It’s a richly developed steampunk world without overly reveling in the genre. The world is a backdrop for the characters.
  • The story balances action and character-oriented reflection. It’s a very human series. Even the not-quite-humans have personalities and issues to resolve.
  • It’s really one long story, so don’t worry if the first book leaves you a little confused. The later books will pick up the threads.
  • It spends a lot of time exploring questions of violence and competition on both individual and societal levels. Also questions of family and identity.

After that I had a little audiobook crisis where I didn’t know what to listen to next. I settled on one of my old Audible purchases, Will Save the Galaxy for Food by Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw. I discovered him long ago when he was a popular adventure game creator. Then he became a popular video game critic, and now I guess he’s a popular novelist. He has the type of cynical wit I’m used to from other British authors like Terry Pratchett and Charles Stross. I guess I’d consider the book light satire. It wasn’t as much a biting commentary on society as it was a parody of various kinds of people combined with an earnest point about life.

Posted in Conceptual modeling, Fiction, Holidays, Housekeeping, Programming, Weeknotes | 1 Comment

Update for 1/20/2019

Posted on January 20, 2019 by Andy

Health

😐

My intestines finally calmed down from the long gap in my ulcerative colitis treatments. That’s a relief, especially since I partly blame all my bathroom visits for the slow start to my projects this year. Only partly though.

Housekeeping

😐

I got tired of procrastinating on my apartment tidying, and I got through sorting my few boxes of clothes. Hopefully that’ll give me some momentum for the rest of my belongings. Since I don’t want to put off other projects after this month and I’ve frittered away so much time, I’ll prioritize the boxes that are cluttering my everyday living space.

That’s going to be my experimental policy for now. I’ll dedicate a month to each project, and if I don’t fit the whole project into that time frame, I’m still moving on to the next project when the month changes.

Fiction

🙂

I finished book 3 of the Mortal Engines Quartet, Infernal Devices, and I’m on to the last book. After slowing down for a while because I wasn’t in a fiction mood, I’m back to my usual audiobook pace. I should finish that book this week, and then I’ll comment on the series as a whole.

TV

😎

My new TV has put me back in a TV watching mode. So that’s taking up my dinnertime rather than audiobooks.

I finished season 1 of Star Trek: Discovery (DISC) and the first episode of season 2, which started last week. I’d forgotten they don’t release the whole season at once, so I couldn’t binge watch it. But that’s okay, because there are other shows I’ve been wanting to get to.

In between DISC seasons, I watched a couple more episodes of the original Star Trek (TOS), picking up from where I left off years ago watching the remastered version. “Mudd’s Women”: I liked Harry Mudd much better in DISC, and I could only take the ending seriously if I took it very metaphorically. “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”: This one brings up issues that are relevant to my AI interests, but it handles them in a pretty cursory and clumsy manner. So these weren’t my favorite episodes.

After DISC I decided to try a Netflix show that kept catching my eye, Dark. I’m three episodes in, and it’s satisfyingly mysterious and eerie so far, like Stranger Things mixed with LOST. The music contributes a lot.

My first surprise was that it’s German. The dub is fine, but I found that I felt the cultural differences a little less if I put the audio on German and read the English subtitles instead. I also decided to skip the audio description (which would mean hearing the English dub anyway). I found I wanted the show to happen to me rather than being guided through it.

Posted in Fiction, Health, Housekeeping, TV, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Update for 1/13/2019

Posted on January 15, 2019 by Andy

Health

🤔

I had my Remicade infusion on Tuesday to manage my ulcerative colitis. Thanks mostly to my insurance, I’d had a two-week gap in my treatments, and my condition had declined noticeably. I’d say my symptoms have improved only 40-50%, so I’m still doing some extra doses of my supplementary medicine. I might make an appointment to see what my gastro doctor has to say.

Politics

🤔

Last week my distraction topic of choice was the rationalist community and its associates. Reddit hooked me with another post criticizing people linked with the LessWrong website. I ended up at some interesting critiques of Bayesianism.

After descending down that rabbit hole for a while, I decided to take a closer look at a community that tends to hang around the rationalists, the neoreactionary movement, which, roughly speaking, is part of the alt-right. They basically want to bring back old societal values and institutions such as racism and monarchy.

I find their viewpoint distasteful enough that I usually avoid reading about it. But since my own ignorance annoys me and I was procrastinating on other things, it seemed like the right time to dive in. Luckily the good people at RationalWiki had done the research for me, so I read their overview article, and then I read Scott Alexander’s two posts explaining the movement and rebutting it. Very enlightening.

TV

🙂

To make use of my new HD TV, I’ve been catching up on Star Trek: Discovery. The new season starts on Thursday. After the first episode or two, back when the first season came out, I wasn’t sure what I’d think. The dialogue’s quality was very lacking. But I’m impressed with how good the show became over the course of the season. I’m especially enjoying Sonequa Martin-Green as Michael Burnham and Doug Jones as Saru.

Gift labels

😐

My remaining task on this project is the retrospective, where I analyze how it went. I meant to finish it two weeks ago. Last week I managed to stop procrastinating enough to outline it. Maybe I’ll make even more progress this week!

Posted in Health, Politics, TV | Leave a comment

Update for 1/6/2019

Posted on January 11, 2019 by Andy

2019 has started out strangely for me. Last week featured epic levels of procrastination and intestinal dysfunction.

Conceptual modeling

😎

With an extra long blog post, a project retrospective, and some apartment tidying on my agenda for last week, I found it necessary to procrastinate. It turned out I found some very engrossing subject matter for procrastination, and it basically ended up shuffling around my project schedule. So instead of doing any of what I’d planned except the blog post, I spent most of my time on conceptual modeling a few months early.

Backstory: Although my life agenda project is more or less on hold, from time to time I add a little to the project map I’m developing for it. Essentially I’m treating my life as a massive project, and I’m charting its task dependencies, where the “tasks” are whole projects.

As I’m mapping these project chains, I’m finding I need a vocabulary to describe the different kinds of tasks and projects I’m encountering. As usual these days when I need to define things, what immediately resurfaces is my wish that I had a formal way to write the definitions. This is because formalizing messy things brings me clarity, and clarity brings me power, power to learn and communicate and make decisions.

Well, I’d done a little more project mapping, and since I needed a way to procrastinate, it was the perfect time to look into the formalizing issue more extensively. I wanted to explore the idea that you should define a term by listing a set of conditions that would uniquely identify it, basically using some equivalent of set-builder notation. This suggested looking at query languages, since they give you results from a dataset based on conditions you specify. To give me the most flexibility, I wanted a query language that had a lot of tool support in multiple programming languages.

The point: I landed on the RDF query language SPARQL, which led me to look more closely at its family of languages, the Semantic Web, which I’d dismissed before as too simple for my needs. It turns out I was wrong, and it actually looks very promising. I spent the rest of the week researching and learning about it.

I also glanced at category theory, an area of math that would also help in conceptual modeling. But it has less tool support and seems harder to learn, so I’m putting it off for now. When I get to it, I’ll probably start with David Spivak’s Category Theory for the Sciences. It’s written for non-mathematicians, and the first chapter tells me the author and I think a lot alike.

Programming

🤓

A side project was installing Debian in VirtualBox on my Windows tablet. That was my New Year’s morning. Other than procrastination, the purpose was to give me a way to explore the design of Linux software as described in The Art of Unix Programming. I haven’t done any of the exploring yet, but it felt good to get it set up, especially since I hadn’t worked with virtual machines before.

Since it was Linux, it was only natural that I ran into problems very quickly. The Debian setup wizard kept failing on the software installation step. It turned out the KDE installation files were too big for my var partition, so I installed Xfce instead, which I’d never heard of. Even though it’s annoying to have to follow the operating system’s agenda for your time rather than your own, the good thing about running into problems is that solving them teaches you more about the system.

Christmas gift labels

🙄

I successfully procrastinated the whole week on writing the project retrospective. Maybe something will happen on it this week.

Housekeeping

😎

I also didn’t do any tidying, but I did upgrade my apartment a little. On Saturday I bought a new TV and a Blu-ray player, which I’d been planning since before I moved. It’s a Sharp 40″ 1080p Roku TV. For the size I followed the guideline of dividing the viewing distance by 2.5, and the result does feel right. I also learned a 4k TV is a waste at that size and distance unless it comes with HDR, which might still not be worth it yet, which saved me some money.

Other than being able to read text on the screen across the room now, my favorite feature is that using the Roku app I can listen to the audio through headphones on my phone. When I’m home alone and I don’t have to make extra noise, I like keeping my apartment quiet.

Fiction

🙂

I finished the second book in the Mortal Engine’s Quartet, Predator’s Gold. 5/5. Like the first one, it kept me guessing, especially wondering how the author would tie together the threads of the plot.

Health

😕

For about 12 years I’ve had ulcerative colitis, an autoimmune disease that for me amounts to chronic diarrhea. Nice topic, I know. My main treatment is an infusion of Remicade at the hospital every 8 weeks. Most of the time, it goes smoothly, and with a little supplementary medicine it keeps my condition very manageable.

This time I had two problems: I was out of town the date I should’ve had my next appointment (Dec 26), and my insurance was taking its time reauthorizing my treatment. The result was my next infusion had to be two weeks late. My symptoms were okay the first week, only a little worse than usual. The second week I was reminded why I need this treatment. I spent what seemed like a fourth of my waking hours sitting in the restroom. Fortunately, my next infusion is Tuesday. (If you want to get technical, it’s happening as I write this.)

Posted in Conceptual modeling, Fiction, Health, Housekeeping, Programming, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Update for 12/30/2018

Posted on January 3, 2019 by Andy

Christmas

🙂

Part 2 of my Christmas vacation, with a catalog of my family’s traditions.

Sunday

  • Doughnuts that our dad picks up from a local shop. This is more of an every-Sunday tradition. I always get a chocolate covered glazed and a blueberry, though this time they were out of the blueberry and substituted a red velvet, which was also good.
  • Church in the morning. Also an every-Sunday tradition.
  • Lunch at Babe’s Chicken Dinner House.
  • The annual sibling walk through nearby neighborhoods. I missed it this year because I desperately needed a nap. I was sad about that.
  • Random movies in the evenings. That day it was The Fantastic Mr. Fox. It was good, though a little odd and sometimes kind of stiff looking. 4/5.
  • Getting distracted by Christmas TV at night when I’m trying to work on my gift labels project. This year it was Christmas episodes of British comedies. It was nice to see Mrs. Bucket and The Vicar of Dibley and discover Upstart Crow and Still Open All Hours, but I regretted the lost time. Afterward I realized there was a comfortable chair in another room I could’ve used, so that’s my new project chair when the TV’s on.

Monday

  • It’s not a tradition, but my brother made Christmas quiche for breakfast, two varieties. One had red and green bell peppers, and since I don’t like those, he made one with spinach and sun-dried tomatoes. Delicious.
  • The annual family Christmas photo. We used to do it around City Hall, but lately it’s been in the church lobby. This year we posed in front of a pile of giant presents.
  • The Christmas Eve candlelight service at church.
  • The annual Christmas Eve gift labels all-nighter. I usually manage to get at least a little sleep, except for last year. This time I got 45 minutes. I’ll talk more about the project in a separate section below. While I worked, I listened to music, starting with some BBC Radio. This got me distracted for about an hour and a half, because the Lancashire station played Blackburn Cathedral’s Nine Lessons and Carols service, which had an intriguing musical setting of a poem by Charles Causley called “Mary’s Song” (at 37:24 in the recording, if it hasn’t expired), and I wanted to find the composer. I didn’t and gave up to keep working.

Tuesday

Christmas at our house has a routine.

  • The opening of the stockings. My sister Kimberly arrives from the place she’s staying at around 9 or 10 am, and that’s our cue to start. I timed things this year, and the stockings took half an hour. My sister Abbie is the official distributor of presents. She rotates through the receivers from youngest to oldest. Stockings are the easy part because she just takes it off the hook and hands it over. The tree phase requires crawling and rummaging.
  • Christmas breakfast, which used to be cinnamon rolls, but lately it’s been coffee cake.
  • The opening of the tree presents. This took three hours. For some reason it felt longer than usual. Some stuff I got: a FangCun Ghost Cube and a handmade card from Abbie, Remarkable Books by DK from Kimberly, the Message Remix audio Bible from Michael, Building Stories by Chris Ware and a Heritage Personal Museum from my parents.
  • Christmas dinner. We basically repeat Thanksgiving dinner, with some variations. This year my brother made curry cauliflower.
  • Random afternoon activities, which for me usually involves a nap. There’s also usually more TV, and that night it was a Christmas episode of Call the Midwife, which was another new one to me. A thoughtful drama based on the memoirs of Jennifer Worth (brief interview). There was also another puzzle, since we finished the first one really fast and Michael got another one for Christmas.

Wednesday

  • The lunch and movie. This year it was Corner Bakery for lunch and Green Book, a historical drama about an Italian-American bouncer driving an African-American pianist on his concert tour through the Deep South in the 1960s. 5/5. Long ago our Christmas movie outings used to be for fantasy, but they were entirely not our dad’s cup of tea, so now we do historical dramas, and it’s reconciled me to stories about real life. I found out I don’t need magic to stay interested.
  • The Half Price Books sale. Our dad takes Abbie and me to one or more locations to get 20% off our purchases. I picked up a couple of books on different kinds of puzzles, mostly math.

Thursday

  • Airport day #1. This one was for Abbie’s flight.
  • More TV. This time I discovered Midsomer Murders.

Friday

  • A supplemental neighborhood walk on my own, because I knew I’d regret it if I skipped it entirely. I picked my default walk of retracing my routes to my schools growing up. It was pleasantly nostalgic, especially since those routes come up in my dreams now and then, and that lends them some extra, imaginary significance.
  • The post office visit to ship things home, which I didn’t have to do this year, for once. Everything fit into my luggage.
  • Airport day #2. This one was for the rest of us. My trip home went quickly and smoothly, but Kimberly’s took all day thanks to multiple delays. My coworker generously gave me a ride home from the airport, and it was the most organized curbside airport pickup I’ve ever had. She waited in the cell phone lot, called me when my flight landed, and asked me to wait outside the end of my airline’s section of the baggage claim, and a few minutes later she was there.

Gift labels

For my annual Christmas gift label project, I try to match the theme to something I’ve been into that year that my family can also appreciate. This time, since my consumption of audiobooks seriously ramped up during the year, they were steampunk-themed cards that linked to recordings of public domain Christmas stories. These were my own recordings, and they used a text-to-speech voice I made from my own voice. I used the mXac NLP Editor to make it. Here’s a video tutorial.

Each card had a main story and a link to extra stories. I edited the main stories down to 800 words so they’d each be 4 minutes. Here’s my personal favorite, part of L. Frank Baum’s mythological origin story for Santa Claus. That one went to my mom. My family was interested in their cards, so I was happy.

I have one more step in this project, the retrospective, where I look at how the project went so I can learn for future projects. That’ll be this week.

Housekeeping

🙂

In 2019 I want to try scheduling my projects by month. So, kind of like in FilmCow’s update videos, each month will have a theme. January will be Month of Tidying, in the KonMari sense where I purge and organize my possessions. Finally my boxes will be unpacked from my move in July!

Fiction

🙂

I’m continuing Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines Quartet with the second book, Predator’s Gold. I’ve had trouble getting myself to listen because I’m more in the mood for nonfiction, but when I am listening, it’s good.

Posted in Christmas labels, Fiction, Holidays, Housekeeping, Movies, Projects, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Update for 12/23/2018

Posted on December 25, 2018 by Andy

Fiction

😎

I’m taking a break from my software development books to explore some steampunk. I started with the pre-steampunk Steam Man of the Prairies. It was a decent adventure story.

After that I whipped through Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve. I really liked it, so I’ll continue with the series. At this rate it might be after I get back home. Vacations tend to distract me from my audiobooks. Anyway, Mortal Engines has the same kind of comfortable and inviting writing style I find in a lot of popular YA series I read. I’m not sure if YA authors do that on purpose or what, but it makes the stories easy to settle into. I like the idea of placing a steampunk world in the far future. It opens interesting possibilities, which Reeve takes advantage of. And toward the end, the story kept me guessing, and the final events left me curious how the rest of the series will follow up on them. 5/5.

Life maintenance

😐

Tuesday after work I had an adventure picking up the refill of my meds. They were on back-order with my pharmacy’s supplier, and I was leaving Thursday, so the pharmacist sent me to another one half an hour away. Meanwhile, I’d run into an old friend from church on the way into the store, so we talked while I worked out the refill mess. Then I gave him a ride home, talked some more, and picked up dinner on the way down to pick up my meds. By then it was around 10 pm. But the refill run was successful.

Christmas

Thursday

🤔

Thursday I left for Texas to visit my family. The trip down went smoothly except that the airport ride service I booked got my schedule wrong. They thought my ride was at 2 pm, which was an hour after my flight. Fortunately I only waited 10 minutes before calling to check on the ride. They sent a car soon after, and they gave me the ride for free. I still tipped the driver. I’ve used this service before, and I still think it’s a good one overall, but this incident makes me think I should look for one with a more automated booking system, especially since this one does their credit card transactions with PDFs over email, which makes me uneasy.

I was pretty tired on the flight, so I slept some, did a little work on my Christmas project, and sat in a daze the rest of the time. It made the flight pass pretty quickly. Also on the flight was a group of 15 kids from a Ukrainian orphan school. I sat next to the teacher and overheard her talking with some other passengers. If I’d been less tired, maybe I would have asked her about it. Judging from the “Welcome Dima” sign some people were holding at the baggage claim, I’m guessing the kids were spending Christmas with host families.

Friday

🙂

Since my family’s Christmas vacations last about a week, the traditions we’ve developed encompass more than just Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. For the most part our time together consists of meals at restaurants, a church service or two, and hanging around the house in-between those events. But there are a few other specific things I expect to happen.

Several of them took place on Friday. We had our family grocery shopping trip, which started last year and could easily become a tradition. Our mom consults us on the meals and, more importantly, desserts we want to have around Christmas, and then she divides the list, and we each take a department. This time I got the frozen foods. Dividing-and-conquering may or may not make the shopping faster.

Another tradition that happened on Friday was the Christmas tree decorating. This one begins with rotating and moving the large quilting table that has a permanent residence in the living room so there’s space in the corner for the tree. Our dad sets that up and brings out the large containers of Christmas decorations, and then with Christmas music in the background, my siblings and I sift through the ornaments and hang a bunch of them on the tree. This year’s music was from another of the Victorian playlists I’ve been listening to. I think we all got tired of the bar songs.

Once rotated, the quilting table becomes the puzzle table. That potential tradition started last year too. Last year’s puzzle was 1000 pieces and took a long time, a picturesque rural neighborhood Christmas scene. This year’s is 500 pieces of a densely illustrated map of Texas.

Saturday

🙂

Saturday featured a couple of meal traditions. In the morning we had brunch at a breakfast place we visit every year. I had my usual French toast, which to be fair I get at practically any restaurant I have breakfast.

Dinner was our tamale tradition. We have homemade tamales my mom buys from a parent at the school she used to work at.

Gift labels

🙄

Ah, my Christmas project. Another annual tradition, my creative gift labels. It’s on track to be done late Christmas Eve, as usual, when I’d hoped to be finished two weeks before my vacation. Oh well, maybe next year will be the year I beat fate. At least I’ve learned to expect the late night, so I can basically take it in stride.

Posted in Fiction, Holidays, Life maintenance, Weeknotes | 2 Comments