Update for 12/16/2018

Posted on December 16, 2018 by Andy

Music

🤔

Sunday was our Advent Orchestra performance at church. Considering I only had a week to prepare, it went pretty well. Until the sermon apparently ran short in the second service and I arrived back at the sanctuary late for the last song. Kinda ruined my day. But after a day or three I got over it.

I have a plan for keeping my French horn oiled so the valves don’t freeze again (do it on laundry day). And I’m hoping I can even keep up with some practicing so my lips will be in better shape next December. There’s a lot of public domain French horn music on the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP).

Christmas

🤔

I continued to be overly optimistic on my annual secret Christmas project last week. I wanted to finish it by Saturday, but it’ll still need a few more days. I’m still hoping to finish it before I leave for Texas on Thursday. But if not, I’ll just follow my usual plan of finishing it at my parents’ house. Late Christmas Eve, most likely.

(Okay, I was actually thinking of putting the last steps off on purpose just so I could do that, maybe on an earlier day. There’s something fun about staying up to get the Christmas labels done. … I never said I was normal.)

To accompany my work, I’ve been listening to playlists like this one of Victorian Christmas music, usually overlaid with soundscapes on YouTube like this one of a cottage in winter. It’s contributed to the project’s surreal atmosphere that makes me look forward to doing the work.

The last step of my project will be a retrospective where I analyze what went well and what could be improved. I’ve already learned quite a bit throughout the project, so I’m looking forward to putting all the lessons together.

Programming

🤔

My project to listen through a bunch of software development books is winding down. Last week I finished The Art of Unix Programming, which was very good, and sped through Beyond Requirements by Kent McDonald, which was good but really fit more into my conceptual modeling and business projects, so I’ll feel more like paying attention to it when I get back to those projects.

I also sped through Learning Agile by Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene, which I’d read most of before but only in piecemeal fashion, so I wanted to get through it properly. It was also good, especially the way it integrated the four major agile approaches (Scrum, XP, Lean, and Kanban).

One thing I liked less was that its approach of teaching through narratives and repetitive discussions made the material feel a little too spread out. I wished they’d put a summary of the principles and practices in an appendix or something. But it’s fine, since that’s what note-taking is for.

Fiction

🙂

I’m taking a little break from programming books till after Christmas. In the meantime I’ll listen to a few steampunk stories. I’ve been wanting to explore that genre for a while. First is a short novel from 1868 called The Steam Man of the Prairies by Edward Ellis, which is in a genre called Edisonades that was a precursor of steampunk. After that I’ll listen to Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines, which has a movie that just came out.

Posted in Fiction, Holidays, Music, Programming, Weeknotes | 1 Comment

Update for 12/9/2018

Posted on December 9, 2018 by Andy

A shorter one this time.

Spirituality

🤔

I’m paying more attention to the church calendar this year, starting with Advent. In preparation I listened to Vicki Black’s Welcome to the Church Year. Once Advent started, I was going to use Phyllis Tickle’s The Divine Hours, but right away I realized it was going to be too much work for me to keep up with. Maybe another time. So instead I’ll work with Vicki Black’s book throughout the year. There’s plenty of food for thought, and she has exercises at the end of each chapter.

Christmas

🙄

My self-imposed deadline for finishing my secret Christmas project was Saturday, but it didn’t happen. The first reason is I still had too much work to do on it, and the second is I ran into a severe technical difficulty that I’ll have to work around. So I’m giving it an extra week. But it’s hard to feel too bad about blowing the deadline, because this project has gone so much better than my usual projects and especially my Christmas ones. And also I have time.

Programming

🙂

My reading project in software development is progressing as usual. Last week I finished Martin Fowler’s Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. It’ll be useful when I work on software in that category, but it’s a little too technical to be an enjoyable listen. Now I’m revisiting one I read a long time ago, Eric Raymond’s The Art of Unix Programming (available for free from the author’s site), which is much more engaging. It’s interesting to hear the same software design issues addressed by someone outside the camp of the other authors I’ve been reading. There’s a lot of overlap in the advice, but he expresses it in different ways and from a different starting point, the history of Unix rather than the history of object-oriented applications.

Posted in Holidays, Programming, Spirituality, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Update for 12/2/2018

Posted on December 3, 2018 by Andy

Christmas

😐

On my secret Christmas project I got through about half of what I’d planned last week, but I’d already decided some of it made more sense to do in this week’s phase, and I can reduce other parts of it. That’s actually half of my goal for this project, to practice controlling a project’s scope, since that’s one of my characteristic hurdles.

Programming

🤔

I continued my long phase of listening to software development books with a lifesaving one by Karl Fogel called Producing Open Source Software, which he’s made available for free online. Honestly after hearing about all the pitfalls, I’m certain any open source project I tried to conduct would crash and burn without this kind of advice.

The book has inspired me to raise the idea of innersourcing at work, which is the use of open source development methods in a proprietary software setting. So at our next developer meeting we’ll see where that goes.

Spirituality

🤔

This week is the beginning of Advent. A few months ago I listened to Vicki Black’s Welcome to the Church Year and decided this was the year I could finally take the liturgical calendar more seriously. So starting today I’ll try some strategies for doing that, starting with using Phyllis Tickle’s The Divine Hours as a devotional.

Music

French horn

😐

Story time. Last week I pulled out my French horn to get ready for our church’s first Advent Orchestra rehearsal on Thursday, and immediately I got my annual reminder that leaving your horn sitting untouched for a year freezes the valves so the keys don’t move. Makes the horn a little impossible to play.

So I spent the next couple of days trying to unstick the valves. I had to go to more extreme measures than usual, even giving my horn a soak in the bathtub. I got them all unstuck except the trigger (the thumb key). So I had to find a repair shop that could give me a quick turnaround, and then I sat in the first rehearsal and listened while working on my Christmas project.

That repair shop is now my favorite music store, because they had my horn ready on Friday, and their fee was very reasonable. Okay, it’s tied with the Guitar Center where I got my keyboard.

Synth

😎

In addition to getting ready for the orchestra performance next weekend, this weekend I was scheduled to play with my usual worship band, where I’m playing synth. We use MainStage, a Mac program for live music performances. You connect your keyboard to the computer, and instead of the keyboard directly producing the sounds as you play, MainStage produces them. In the rehearsal the music minister asked if I could use an organ for the first song. So I hunted around in the Vintage B3 patches and settled on the Bebop Organ.

Looking through patches and being confronted again with my insecurity with Gospel music got me doing some research that night. I assume it was Jazz 101 stuff, but for me it was a revelation. I found out “B3” means the Hammond B-3 model, pretty much the most popular jazz organ. Hammond organs were originally meant to be an inexpensive substitute for traditional pipe organs in churches and not for jazz at all. At some point I’ll learn about their history in jazz. I also found out “Vintage B3” is a synthesizer for Logic Pro X that is one of the most accurate replications of the original instrument, even reproducing its mechanical quirks. Armed with my new info, I found a Hammond B3 playlist on Spotify I can use to learn some jazz organ style.

Posted in Books, Holidays, Music, Programming, Spirituality, Weeknotes, Worship performing | 2 Comments

Update for 11/25/2018

Posted on November 26, 2018 by Andy

Thanksgiving

🙂

I ended up visiting my brother and his church friends for Thanksgiving. I met his friends a month ago when I was there for my coworker’s wedding. I didn’t talk a lot either time, but compared to my experiences with most random groups of strangers, I feel remarkably at home with them, so I was glad to be there.

Friday morning Michael joined me for the drive back to Illinois so we could see the David Wallace Haskins exhibit at the Elmhurst Art Museum. I like having Haskins mess with my perceptions. This time we got to live in a Tron world of foggy light shapes for a few minutes. I’m not sure Tron was what he was going for, but that’s where I went.

We don’t go to the museum often, so we looked through the rest of it too. That included the McCormick House, a relocated house designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. So after visiting a synthwave future, we walked into the 1950s. I found that even though that era’s style bores me when I’m looking at photos, physically being there in a reproduction made me appreciate it more.

Over dinner we watched Moana. We mostly liked it but wondered about the cultural appropriation, which led to a good discussion.

Saturday morning I drove Michael to the bus station. I was a little too wrapped up in our conversation to navigate well, so the trip took longer than expected. But he made it to the bus in time, and he fortunately didn’t have to deal with the blizzard that was supposed to be coming Sunday night.

Christmas

🙂

I mostly met my goal for last week’s work on my secret Christmas labels project, despite going a little overboard and despite Thanksgiving. The next couple of weeks will take more careful planning and execution.

Health

🤔

After my accidental break from my supplemental ulcerative colitis medicine, my symptoms flared up a bit, and it’s taken them a while to calm back down. I was hoping for better, since things went so well for a week, but oh well. Maybe I’ll stick to my usual regimen instead of decreasing it like I’d planned.

Music

🙂

For most of the past ten years I’ve joined our church’s December orchestra assemblage. I play the French horn. My friend who used to run those has moved out of the area, but it turns out the tradition will continue. They sent out an invitation last week, so I signed up.

The first rehearsal is this Thursday, so I don’t have much time to get my lips in shape. Hopefully my new neighbors won’t mind my muted practicing. I use the Yamaha Silent Brass system to keep things quiet.

Posted in Art, Health, Holidays, Movies, Music, Travel, Weeknotes | 3 Comments

Update for 11/18/2018

Posted on November 18, 2018 by Andy

TV

🙂

Sunday my friend Tim made his customary visit, and we watched the first episode of the 1994 Middlemarch miniseries to go with the book group I’m in at work. I was surprised at how well the episode captured the plot and characters, assuming I wasn’t just reading everything into it. I don’t know if it came across as well to Tim, who hasn’t read the book. I can at least say I wasn’t disappointed, as I was with the Ender’s Game movie.

Futurism

🙂

This month’s futurism meetup was about copyright and all its annoyances. It included a very good video by CGP Grey. Occasionally I hear about old works that are passing out of the copyright time frame to enter the public domain, so I did some searching for sources of this info and found Public Domain Day. 2019 will be a big year for it. “For several decades from 2019 onward, each New Year’s Day will unleash a full year’s worth of works published 95 years earlier,” starting with 1923. The Public Domain Review will tell you what’s good.

Programming

🤓

In last week’s software development TTS listening, I finished Pattern-Oriented Software Development, Vol 1 and got through Clean Code. I’m about a third of the way into the massive Code Complete 2. At work I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around some of the books from my list so far and to begin to use them in my current programming project.

My main task is a pretty easy one, creating a simple plugin to get Sublime Text to interact with our in-house command-line tools for ebook production. So based on some earlier research with execnet, I did that and in the process applied a few software development techniques I’m learning.

Then I decided the plugin was good enough for now, and I switched to exploring architectural changes we might make to our tools. pyplantuml has been helpful for mapping out our existing structure.

Spirituality

🤔

I listened to John Ortberg’s little book How Do I Know If I’m Really Saved? so I could discuss it with a friend who wrestles with that question. I have mixed feelings about the book. On the one hand, it’s a nice overview of the Dallas Willard perspective on salvation, and it was thought provoking and motivating. Unfortunately it’s also disorganized, as if Ortberg’s writing process was to sit down at the keyboard and let his mind wander. I’d have to rearrange the contents to make sure they answered the key questions. Maybe sometime. The book also reminded me that Ortberg is a pastor of a church, Menlo Church in San Jose, and a search revealed they have a podcast feed, so I’ll probably listen to a few of his sermons.

Health

🙂

Due to a little pharmacy supply chain SNAFU, a little over a week ago I went on an accidental hiatus from my ulcerative colitis supplementary medicine. So I took the opportunity to watch how bad my symptoms would get. It turned out I didn’t need it till a week after I ran out. Fortunately I had the refill by then.

So now I’ll experiment with my schedule of doses. Maybe once a week works, maybe a little more often. In any case, it’s probably less than I’ve been taking it, which is good news, because it’s annoying.

Christmas

🙂

Last week on my secret project for creative Christmas labels, I successfully stuck to my schedule and achieved the intended milestone despite an unexpected bump, so this week I’m on to the next phase. I’m kinda proud of myself.

Thanksgiving

🤔

Thanksgiving snuck up on me this year. I haven’t made any plans. If nothing materializes, I’ll repeat last year’s plan of visiting the local botanical garden. Last year I ended up doing both.

Life maintenance

🤔

I’ve been pondering what project to do after the Christmas labels. As usual it’d probably be something to prepare for future projects. I settled on making my life better in general by continuing the housekeeping projects from my move. That is, unpacking and tidying. Yes, my stuff has been mostly in boxes for the past two-and-half months. But at least my current furniture is in place. Maybe I’ll use this phase to buy the remaining pieces.

Posted in Futurism, Health, Holidays, Housekeeping, Programming, Spirituality, TV, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Update for 11/11/2018

Posted on November 11, 2018 by Andy

Christmas

🙂

This month I’m working on my annual tradition of making creative Christmas labels for my family’s gifts. I didn’t get through all the planning steps last week, but I already knew how I wanted to start the work, so I’ll do that this week. I’ll do more planning as I go.

The form the labels will take is a surprise, but one thing I can say about this project is that I’m using it as a first experiment in learning about professional project management techniques, and I’m already learning quite a bit. Another thing I’ll say is that I’m proud of myself for being way ahead of my usual last-minute schedule and for actually having a plan.

Programming

🙂

I’m continuing to whip through the software development ebooks I own via text-to-speech. Last week I finished Domain-Driven Design, and now I’m about halfway through Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture, Vol 1. I have 4 to 10 more to listen to after this one.

I’ve wondered a few times if it’s really worthwhile to listen all this technical material when there’s so much I don’t retain or even understand. But hearing about software development throughout the day keeps my mind on the topic, and I semi-consciously file away ideas from the books that my mind brings up later. Since I’m still focusing on software development at work, the benefits of listening make me feel that moving on to other audio topics would be an unwelcome distraction.

Learning

🙂

Another effect of listening to all these software development books is that it makes me very aware of how much I have to learn if I want to get anywhere near my technical goals in life. I need faster ways to do it. Projects about learning have been on my agenda for years, and I was already planning on returning to them next year. The software development books are strengthening my commitment.

Something I forgot to say last week is that these books are reminding me of how great the patterns format is for both learning and reference. I’ll probably organize a lot of my website writing that way in the future.

I’ve also been using software development to explore visual thinking by learning some UML. Using the programs Modelio and PlantUML, I’ve been experimenting with UML’s activity diagrams, which are like flowcharts. You’ll probably see a lot of those and other diagrams on the site in the future too.

Music

😎

Half my project time on Thursday was spent being distracted by a musical mystery–identifying the songs in this video of the Mandelbrot set. In the process I discovered a nicely browsable stock music site called Epidemic Sound. There’s another site like that I explore sometimes, Musicbed. Anyway, if you’re curious, the songs from the video are all by Yi Nantiro: “Watchman” (Spotify), “The Way Of The Warrior,” “At Long Last” (Spotify), and “Immovable As The Mountain.”

Health

🤔

For my ulcerative colitis I take two medicines, one I take every day and one I take every two months. The daily one ran out last week, but I couldn’t get it refilled right away because the pharmacy’s supplier doesn’t carry it anymore. So now I’m waiting a few days for them to figure out a solution.

In the past when I’ve been without the daily medicine, my symptoms reared their heads the second day. But now my other medicine might be strong enough that I can get away with it longer. We shall see!

Fiction

😉

I picked up The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe for $2 in an Audible daily deal. I think it’s the unabridged version of the abridged one I grew up listening to. But I don’t have to listen to a book to visit Narnia. I only have to go home.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

See? I live in Narnia.

A post shared by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum) on

Posted in Fiction, Health, Holidays, Learning, Music, Programming, Weeknotes | 1 Comment

Update for 11/4/2018

Posted on November 5, 2018 by Andy

Music

😎

I tuned in to Jacob Collier’s livestream on Monday and found out he’s going on tour next year, and he’ll be in Chicago again. Unlike earlier this year when I found out about his Chicago concert only hours before and foolishly skipped it, this time I know four months in advance, and I’ve already bought my ticket. I almost never go to concerts, so this is very different for me. The concert is two days before my birthday too.

Programming

🙂

I’ve started my latest programming project at work. I’m using test-driven development for it, with advice from Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests and xUnit Test Patterns, and like the past couple of times I’ve tried TDD, I’m finding it’s harder than it sounds. I assume I’ll eventually settle into it.

While that’s going on, I’m continuing to churn through my list of software development books, listening to them via a text-to-speech app. I’ve had these on my reading list for years, so I’m going through most or all of them because I don’t want to lose my momentum and put them off again. Last week I got through Refactoring and Design Patterns–two of the first software development books I ever heard about–and Clean Architecture, the book that got me thinking about software development again last year and led to purchasing half my current list. Now I’m on Domain-Driven Design, which also contributes to my conceptual modeling project.

Projects

🙂

I’m experimenting with applying professional project management techniques to my personal projects. Last week I revisited the book I’m learning from, The Fast Forward MBA in Project Management, to prepare for using it this week. I also started researching project management software. This week I’ll try to sprint through the planning phase of my first experiment: my Christmas labels project, where I make creative labels for my Christmas presents to my family.

Christmas

🙂

I finished my Christmas list, and it feels even more elaborate than last year’s. Oh well. The point was to give my family plenty of options.

People

🙂

Thursday I got invited to a coworker’s game night. I don’t go to game nights often, but last time he invited me to his I had fun, so I went and had fun again. We ate Halloween candy and played Barony. We were all tied just before the end, so it got a little tense vying for first place. I tied for second. After that they set up Pandemic, but I needed to not stay out too late, so I left.

As I ramp up my project work at home, I don’t want to completely crowd out social time, and I’m glad I made the decision to avoid that this time.

Politics

🤔

There’s an election on Tuesday. An important one. The past few elections I’ve tried to take them more seriously and make somewhat informed decisions, so I do a bit of research. But the typical lists of candidates’ positions on the issues don’t really help me, because it seems like there are other relevant considerations that are harder to pick up on.

So now I read endorsements. One site that lists endorsements for some of the races is Ballotpedia. For the rest I just do a general web search for each race. To find out who’s on the ballot, I enter my address into my county’s election website, and it shows me a sample ballot.

Our political system is broken in many ways, I’m sure it goes without saying. One major, difficult change that would improve things is if we picked a different voting system. Here’s a series of videos about that by CGP Grey that I watched last week.

Posted in Board games, General, Holidays, Music, People, Politics, Programming, Project management, Weeknotes | 1 Comment

Update for 10/28/2018

Posted on October 29, 2018 by Andy

Welcome to my (overly long) weekly update, where I review my activities on my personal projects and other life events from the previous week and preview my upcoming plans.

People

🙂

Last weekend I drove to Wisconsin to visit my brother and attend my coworker’s wedding. The wedding was on Saturday (I wrote about it last week), and I stayed overnight at my brother’s place to spend Sunday with him. In the morning we attended his church, a plant from a church in my area. They’re meeting in a high school gym.

I was curious about the church after going with my brother to the priest’s ordination service at the mother church, so I’m glad I went. The sermon gave me things to think about, and I met some nice people. I also got to catch up with a former coworker of mine and his wife. They’d moved up to the area earlier this year.

After the service a couple from the church hosted lunch for a group of them at their apartment, and we joined them and talked some more to the nice people. As you might expect from a new church plant, most of the people were from similar social circles, and since the mother church is one I’ve visited many times, I had a fair amount in common with them.

Fiction

🙂

On the drive this weekend I listened to We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis Taylor, the first book in a sci fi series about a man who gets cryogenically frozen and wakes up as an AI assigned to a galaxy-exploring space probe. It’s fairly lighthearted but still deals with some heavy issues. I got wrapped up in the story, and it helped the drives fly by. Having said all that, the main character did feel a little like a Marty Stu, the plot flowed a little too smoothly, and he also made a bunch of corny pop culture references, so I docked it a point. Still, it’s a nice exploration of some ideas involved in interplanetary colonization. 4/5.

Projects

😎

The past few weeks I’ve had the pleasant experience of actually succeeding at an evening routine for once in my life. I think moving to a new environment has helped, combined with other factors that have been shaping me this year.

The upshot is that I’ve been able to make steadier progress on my projects than I have … probably ever. I’m encouraged. And with the trajectories I’m seeing in how I conduct my life, I’m expecting these things to keep getting better, at least until some circumstance comes up that throws me off. And then I’ll deal with it and eventually get back on track.

Last week the theme was taking care of loose ends. I wanted to get to the next milestones on some of my projects so I could spend this week nailing down some project management practices and then get to my next big project. I’ll talk more about that in later sections.

Life agenda

🙂

One of the loose ends on last week’s agenda was the Mission Scope diagram in my life agenda project. In that project I’m mapping out my goals in life and how I want to reach them, and I’ve grouped those goals into missions. The Mission Scope diagram shows generally how the missions overlap. Last week I remade it to show the overlap in more detail by listing my fields of interest that apply to each region of overlap. In future updates to the project I’ll clarify the meaning of all that.

Music

🙂

Another loose end was finishing my notes on some composition exercises. This project is to work through a book called Composing Music: A New Approach and post my work online along with explanations and observations. I had the rules posted but was lagging behind on my observations. I caught up last week, and now that I know what I’m doing, hopefully my future updates will go more smoothly.

Working on the exercises at a steady pace hasn’t been going too well, so I’m going to work at an unsteady pace while I focus on other projects, and then from time to time I’ll focus on this project and make faster progress for a while. I don’t know if I’ll try to stick to my original schedule of finishing it 10 months after I started. Probably not.

As a side note, on Monday I’m going to try to catch a livestream by jazz composer Jacob Collier. It’ll be my lunchtime activity. I was annoyed with myself for missing his concert in my area earlier this year, so I followed him on various social medias so I wouldn’t miss future activities, and it seems to be paying off.

Life maintenance

🙂

Cleaning

A loose end in my housekeeping projects was making some cleaning products based on the recipes in Melissa Maker’s book Clean My Space. I did that on Saturday, and it was less work than I expected. Next I’ll gather all the products and tools I’ll need in places that’ll make them easy to use, and I’ll also make an initial cleaning schedule to try, which will also be based on the book.

Tidying

The cleaning project will dead end if I don’t finish unpacking from my move three months ago. It’s hard to clean a room that’s half full of boxes. So that’ll be the time for me to do my KonMari tidying project. Then I can get to cleaning properly. I’m not sure yet how I’ll schedule the tidying in relation to my other projects, but in some way it’ll need to happen relatively soon.

Christmas

Wish list

🤔

This next one wasn’t exactly a loose end, but it sort of felt like one. We’re now past the time of year when my family usually pesters each other about updating our wish lists for Christmas, because apparently we like to shop very early. I don’t know what the hold-up is, but I figured I should get my list taken care of while I was in tie-up mode.

My Christmas lists are always a painstaking process of determining what projects and hobbies I’ll be into the next year and how those interests translate into gift ideas. Well, it took more than the few hours than I was expecting, so I’ll need a couple more days to finalize it.

Gift labels

😎

Every year I come up with a creative way to label my Christmas presents to my family. It’s always meant to be a surprise, so I can’t tell you about it yet. But I can tell you that unlike every year in the past, this year I actually have a chance at getting it done before the early hours of Christmas morning. As I mentioned, I’m a lot more organized right now, and I’ve reserved most of November for this project. But I’ve been cheating a little and doing some advance research to see if my idea will be feasible. So far it looks promising.

Business

🙂

Before I get to my Christmas project, I want to spend a week looking at project management. I’ve come to the point in my life where in any area I want to improve, I want to get my input from the best sources. For the area of goal pursuit, some of the best sources seem to be in the business world.

So a few weeks ago I listened to two business books, The Portable MBA and The Fast Forward MBA in Project Management. This week I want to quickly review them to help me manage my next few personal projects a little better. I also have an eye out for what they can contribute to the overall strategizing I’m doing through my life agenda project, but I’ll focus on that one later.

Programming

🙂

At work I alternate between phases of ebook production and programming. Lately I’ve been winding down an ebook phase, and to prepare for my next phase of programming, I’ve been barreling through a bunch of software development books via text-to-speech. Last week I finished xUnit Test Patterns and started Martin Fowler’s Refactoring. Since this type of content takes concentration, I don’t retain everything as I’m listening, but I think I pick up on enough that when I come back to it in the near future, I’ll have a decent basis for studying, integrating, and using the information.

Chapel

😎

Last week at work our guest speaker was Steven Elliott, an Army Ranger who was involved in a friendly-fire incident that killed former NFL player Pat Tillman. He has a book in the works that I’m looking forward to reading. His story of his search for identity and of facing the hard reality of his disintegrating life carried the same sober yet empowering vibe I appreciated about the mythopoetic men’s movement. My conversations and YouTube viewing lately have been moving my attention back in that direction, so it’ll probably bloom into a project at some point.

Posted in Business, Chapel, Fiction, Goal map, Holidays, Housekeeping, Life maintenance, Music composition, People, Programming, Project management, Projects, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Update for 10/21/2018

Posted on October 22, 2018 by Andy

Politics

🤔

Sunday Tim and I finished watching Active Measures (Hulu, transcript), a documentary about Russian interference in other countries’ politics. Of course, it was mostly about Trump. It fleshed out some of the info I’d been reading online and reminded me of the strange and interesting situation we’re in where a conspiracy theory is being promulgated by serious journalists and political figures.

Programming

🙂

As I expected, with my road trip coming up I didn’t get much done on my projects. But I was still able to listen. I’m trundling through my batch of software development books in text-to-speech. I finished Working Effectively with Legacy Code, zoomed through Debugging by David Agans, and started on xUnit Test Patterns. Debugging is a good book on solving problems in general, not just in software.

Music

😎

Friday I drove up to Wisconsin and made it to my brother’s place in time to join him for an orchestra concert. It featured organ pipes in a swoopy design, a demonstrative visiting conductor, an even more demonstrative visiting cellist, and a Tchaikovsky symphony I could sort of follow for once. Usually with classical music I get lost after the first minute or two. The concert reminded me that live music is a more intense experience than listening in headphones. It all added up to a much better time than I’ve had at symphonies in the past. Maybe my music appreciation is growing.

People

🙂

The main purpose of my Wisconsin trip was to attend my coworker’s wedding, which was a half-hour away from my brother. That was Saturday afternoon. The plan was to have it outside unless the weather was bad, which it was, so they had it in a barn instead. I’m not sure that was much better. But at least there were heat lamps and blankets. It was a lighthearted wedding, and it was good to get a sense of the groom, since I’d only met him briefly before. It was also nice to hang out with my coworkers in a different setting.

Posted in Music, People, Politics, Programming, Weeknotes | 1 Comment

Update for 10/14/2018

Posted on October 16, 2018 by Andy

Futurism

🤔

The futurism group met on Tuesday, and our topic was gaming and culture. For once it was a topic I was familiar with. We talked about the benefits and drawbacks of video games, PC vs console games, and the controversies around women in gaming.

Fiction

🙂

Continuing my quest to listen to the books I already own, I picked another short horror-related title I had in my Audible purchases, I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. I don’t normally go for stories about undead hordes, but the reviews said this one was well-written and thoughtful, and they were right. It’s still not my favorite book, but it’s a good one. 5/5.

Software development

🤓

After I Am Legend, I shifted gears into software development to anticipate the programming I have planned for next week at work. I need to get a much better handle on test-driven development (TDD), so I’m listening through a few books I have on that subject to give me the gist of what they cover, and then I’ll study them more closely as I’m working.

I finished the first one last week, Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests. Cumbersome title, but good content. Next is Working Effectively with Legacy Code. Growing OO Software is about starting a project from scratch with TDD. Working Effectively is about gaining control of an existing codebase that’s messy and doesn’t have tests.

Life maintenance

Diet

🤔

Friday I went in for a routine physical, and my doctor gave his usual spiel recommending a low-carb diet. When I told him I’d tried that and my lipids had gotten worse, he mentioned a study that claimed that only triglycerides and HDL matter for predicting heart attacks, not total cholesterol or LDL. I’m intrigued, so I’ll do a little research on that. He also ordered a lipid panel for me, so we’ll see how my current semi-diet is working. It’s basically just low saturated fat, around 15 g max per day, though I don’t track it very carefully.

Housekeeping

🙂

The grime is starting to build in my apartment, so I’m back to setting up my cleaning routine. My next step was making my cleaning products according to Melissa Maker’s recipes from her book Clean My Space, and I started that on Saturday by labeling some of the bottles I’ll be using. My labels include the actual recipes so they’ll be easy to refill.

Life agenda

😐

I planned an update but didn’t get far enough to post it. I should be able to do it this week. After that I’m going to shift my focus to my life-as-business project.

Music

🙂

I added some more info to the Composing Music project (intro, chapter 1) and finished another exercise. This one gave me more freedom. I could use the whole C major scale!

Sunday I went to a jazz piano concert at a local library by a composer in the area I’ve had a little contact with. We had a nice chat before and after. He used to play on the worship team at the other location of my church, but I didn’t meet him till years later at one of his other concerts. Last week’s concert was a brief history of jazz piano with pieces from Scott Joplin, Duke Ellington, Horace Silver, and Herbie Hancock. As a jazz ignoramus, I appreciated it.

Projects

🤔

I’m making much slower progress on Composing Music than I’d hoped. But it’s fine. It’s showing me that I can only work seriously on one project at a time.

It also gives me an idea for a project management experiment. Maybe I can still dabble in secondary projects while I work on one main one. Then periodically I can switch my focus to one of those secondary projects for a while. I’ll try it.

Right now my main project is (supposed to be) my goal map/life agenda, though like I said, I’m about to switch to investigating the life-as-business idea.

People

😰

This coming weekend I’m traveling out of town to visit my brother and attend my coworker’s wedding, which will be in the same area. I’m putting my projects somewhat on hold this week while I get ready for that. Visiting people is nice, but for me travel is always stressful.

Posted in Diet, Fiction, Futurism, Goal map, Housekeeping, Life maintenance, Music composition, People, Programming, Projects, Travel, Video games, Weeknotes | Leave a comment