Update for 10/7/2018

Posted on October 8, 2018 by Andy

Life management

😎

Monday the mail delivered a sunrise alarm clock I’d ordered. It has a lamp that’s supposed to help you wake up more naturally by gradually raising the light level starting half an hour before your alarm time. So far it’s working well!

If you want your own, I recommend the one I linked over the other low-end models because the others have very few or mediocre reviews after you filter out the apparent bots and reviews for incorrect products. I think some of these sellers are cheating.

Projects

🙂

After another productive debate with Jeremy about my way of life, I added a section to my Life Agenda essay about the goal of goal pursuit. Is it the destination or the journey?

I also made a list of all the things that were making this project difficult, gave myself advice on them, and added it to my task list. I’ve been working through the list, and hopefully I’ll have a more substantial update this week.

Music

😎

In my Composing Music pages I’ve refined the general rules a little and added the rules for the rest of chapter 1. Someday maybe I’ll do some more of the exercises! I’ll try to do that this week.

Tutoring

🙂

Every year our church volunteers for an after-school tutoring program at a local elementary. I’ve been curious about it for years, and this year I decided the time was right to look into it. The coordinator let me come observe before I made a commitment.

The tutoring was on Thursday. I sat at a table next to a first grader who had math homework, so I helped him with that a little while his real tutor helped her other child read a book.

Overall the observation was a good experience, but I decided that tutoring there wasn’t a high enough priority for me for the level of commitment it would take. I’d have to adjust my work schedule a bit throughout the week to accommodate it, and it’d be every week for most of the school year.

Fiction

🙂

While I work on projects related to books I’ve already listened to, I’m listening to fiction and other non-project books.

It’s October, so as a good citizen I’m obligated to listen to scary stuff. Dathan Auerbach’s Penpal is a novel-length creepypasta. Creepypasta is basically amateur horror written for the web. Some of grows to take on the status of Internet folklore. A lot of it is poorly written, but Penpal is one of the gems. I haven’t read a lot of horror in my life, but I find that creepypasta has its own distinctive tone that I sort of prefer, and I hope the publishing industry will pick up on it.

After that I decided to take up Jeremy’s recommendation of The Circle by Dave Eggers. It was like a long episode of Black Mirror. Maybe a tad unrealistic, but still a good examination of where big social media companies might take us if left unchecked.

Posted in Fiction, Goal map, Life management, Music composition, Tutoring, Weeknotes | 1 Comment

Update for 9/30/2018

Posted on September 30, 2018 by Andy

Site

😐

Housekeeping note: My DNS issue turned out to be on my web host’s end, and they’ve fixed it. Everyone should be able to access the site now.

Goal map

🙂

I’ve created a page on the wiki for this project called “My Life Agenda.” So far it covers my high-level goals. This week I’ll keep working on how those are tied to my projects.

Business

🙂

I finished Eric Verzuh’s Fast Forward MBA in Project Management. Then to get a broader view covering business in general, I listened to Kenneth Eades et al’s The Portable MBA.

These are the first steps in an experiment where I see if I can treat my life like a business. Now why would I do this? Have my priorities been scrambled so money landed at the top? No. It’s the result of a few trends in my life:

  • In recent years I’ve come to see that business isn’t all about money. It’s largely about pursuing goals, and this is a concern I share. I spend a lot of time thinking about it.
  • I’ve learned the value of procedures for achieving a consistent and high-quality result with less effort. Business offers a lot of procedures for various aspects of goal pursuit.
  • I like to get the real story on whatever topic I’m investigating. That is, the most in-depth and professional treatment of the subject. My understanding of what that looks like in different areas is always growing, and I’ve found that in the realm of goal pursuit, business is where a lot of the serious thinking is done.

So I want to try using the insights and tools of business to manage my pursuit of goals in all areas of my life.

The Portable MBA has given me a sweeping overview of all sides of business. Once I have that content clear in my mind, I can decide which areas to study in more detail and in what order. But since a lot of my life revolves around projects, I already know project management will be first. Hence the Eric Vorzuh book.

But all of that will come after I’m further along on my goal map.

Audiobooks

😐

With my new attention to project management, I’m reworking how I approach my book listening. Some of my listening is meant to feed into a project, and I want to shorten the gap between finishing the book and using it. So instead of speeding through books for several different projects, I’ll listen to whatever’s relevant to the current project, and then while I’m working on the project, I’ll listen to books I don’t need to study. Maybe that means I’ll get through my mile-long fiction list.

Music

🙂

My exercises from Composing Music: A New Approach are more understandable now. I’ve posted the general rules and the rules for the three exercises I’ve done. I’ll be posting more rules and other details this week. Hopefully I’ll do some more exercises too. I need to catch up with my schedule.

Posted in Books, Business, Goal map, Music composition, Projects, Site updates, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Update for 9/23/2018

Posted on September 24, 2018 by Andy

Programming

🙂

I finished Continuous Delivery. I want to try their advice on my personal projects, maybe at work too. But it’ll take some more research, so I’ll need to wait till I’ve cleared some of my other projects out of the way.

The book has also inspired me to continue procedurizing my life and writing about the strategies I come up with.

Spirituality

🙂

I listened to a short but very good book on the Episcopal liturgical calendar called Welcome to the Church Year by Vicki Black. I chose this one because I’m thinking of somehow incorporating the church year into my spiritual disciplines, once I come up with a plan for those.

I also picked it because I already owned it, and I want to catch up a bit on books I own before I wander too far into new territory.

Fiction

🙂

Keeping to the theme of catching up on books I own, I listened to a novel called Code Junkie by Jeffrey Koval, one of the creators of a popular Slender Man video series called EverymanHYBRID. 4/5. It was even less family friendly than I expected, a little jarring after the liturgy book. But if you like Lovecraftian horror, it might be your thing. The threads of the story came together interestingly toward the end in a way that made me want to listen again with my new understanding.

Business

😎

Now I’m on The Fast Forward MBA in Project Management by Eric Verzuh. I’ve really been looking forward to this book, because I’ve wanted to get a broader context for understanding software development projects, and I’ve needed to get a better handle on managing my projects of all kinds. This is also the start of a larger exploration I want to make of business in general, which I’ll talk about more in a future post.

Goal map

🙂

I made some more good progress and meant to post something, but my weekend was less productive than I’d planned, and I prioritized other projects. Oh well, perhaps this week!

Music

😎

This is the main project I prioritized over the weekend. I’ve started a project page for Composing Music: A New Approach and posted the three exercises I’ve done. Hurray! You can listen to them by following the links on the page for chapter 1. This week I’ll add some notes on each exercise to explain it and make some observations. I’m going to try to do the whole book. If I stick to the plan, it’ll take around 10 months.

Posted in Business, Fiction, Goal map, Music composition, Programming, Spirituality, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Update for 9/16/2018

Posted on September 18, 2018 by Andy

People

🙂

My brother Michael’s visit continued on Sunday. He was in town to see the head priest of their new church plant get ordained. I tagged along and got to see my old work friend and his family, who were also in town for the same reason. I found myself getting absorbed in the proceedings as if I were part of the new church. As it happens, I don’t even live in the same state, but I wish them well, especially since everyone had such sincerity and enthusiasm.

Later in the afternoon Michael and I popped by a traveling exhibit at a nearby church. It was a set of scrolls of the Hebrew Bible, some of them commissioned recently and others centuries old, all handwritten with machine precision. I was impressed.

Music

😎

Monday my reorder of William Russo’s Composing Music arrived, and I wasted no time starting the first exercise. Yes, after however many years away from composing, I’ve written a whole little piece. The rules for these exercises are very restrictive, so I was surprised at how interesting it was write. I’m working out my schedule for these and how I want to set up the uploads of my scores. I should have several of them online by the next blog update.

Futurism

🤔

Tuesday our futurism meetup’s topic was conflicts over water. One of our members works in water treatment and suggested the topic. I’m very ignorant in this area, so it was interesting to hear what he had to say. I was also pleased that a couple of our videos came from one of my favorite channels/podcasts, Stuff They Don’t Want You to Know. It seems that certain corporations are up to no good with the world’s water supply. It was the first I’d heard of it, so I don’t know what to think.

Projects

Evening schedule

🤔

It bothers me that I seem to waste so many evenings. Every once in a while I try coming up with a plan to fix it. Last Thursday was one of those times, and I decided to try treating the evening like an extension of my workday. After a break for errands and dinner, I’d work from 6 to 8 and try to get to bed at 10. It worked decently that day, as you might expect. It worked okay on Friday too, except that I stayed up much later.

I’ve tried an evening schedule before, but this time I want to be more conscious of what goes wrong and how to fix it. For example, judging by those two days, it should really be 6:30 to 8:30, and also I don’t think I should let the weekend be an excuse to stay up later.

Reading Continuous Delivery, a book about effective software development practices, has put me in the mood to work on my general life procedures, so I’ll probably do more of this kind of thinking.

Goal map

🙂

My main evening project has been my goal map. I made quite a bit of progress and learned interesting things about my goal structure, but I’m not ready to post anything yet.

Politics

🤔

Tuesday Bob Woodward’s book on the president came out, Fear: Trump in the White House, and I have opinions. I’d been resisting reading any books about Trump, since I didn’t want to get more cynical than I already was, but there are two topics I thought were worth exploring if good enough books came out, and now they have. The topics are his personality and his dealings with Russia. Woodward’s book deals with the first, and Craig Unger has one on the second, House of Trump, House of Putin. To get more context I’ll probably also read David Cay Johnston’s biography, The Making of Donald Trump.

I’d preordered Fear, and on Tuesday I put Continuous Delivery on hold to listen. Surprisingly, Woodward’s book actually made me a bit less cynical. I thought it managed to humanize most of the players, even the president. Trump might lack empathy in some ways, but I think not in others. Empathy seems to drive some of his decisions, such as his reaction to Syria’s attack on its citizens. And I appreciated his apparent interest in hearing multiple points of view on difficult issues, at least when he didn’t have already entrenched ideas. But those entrenched ideas are no small matter. He hates trade and thinks you can try out an international trade war as an experiment, for example. For that and other reasons he’s still very wrong for the job, and I’ll be relieved when he’s out of office.

Life maintenance

🙂

I didn’t want to get distracted by more interesting projects and neglect my apartment, so Saturday I flipped through Clean My Space and made a shopping list of cleaning supplies I didn’t have yet. An hour or two at Target, and I had almost everything I needed to try out the Maker Method. The next step is to make some cleaning products using her recipes.

Posted in Apartment, Futurism, Life maintenance, Music composition, People, Politics, Productivity, Projects, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Update for 9/9/2018

Posted on September 10, 2018 by Andy

Life maintenance

🙂

It’s been a little over a month since I moved, and I still haven’t unpacked. But my furniture is in place, and now I’ve moved my boxes out of the middle of the living room and into the areas of the apartment they belong.

The next step is to start unpacking and decluttering. I’ll also start putting together a cleaning routine by assembling the supplies from Melissa Maker’s book Clean My Space. I tried out some of her advice to get ready for my brother’s visit (see below), and I was very pleased with the process and the results.

Spirituality

🤔

I finished Adele Calhoun’s Spiritual Disciplines Handbook. 5/5. The next step is to choose some disciplines I can carry out regularly. Even though it’s a reference book, I actually recommend reading it all the way through. Doing that gave me a better sense for which disciplines would be useful.

Programming

🙂

Next in my book listening rotation is professional development, and I’ve gotten about halfway through a software development book called Continuous Delivery. It’s about managing the testing, packaging, and releasing of your software in a speedy and highly reliable way. I’m glad to be reading it because these are important areas of extreme ignorance for me. Sometime after I’m done, my plan is to set up the code, documents, and procedures I’ll need to follow the book’s advice, and I’ll also add something about it to my coding guide.

Speaking of my coding guide, as I’ve begun reading my software development books more seriously, my idea of that project has broadened. I’m going to change the name from “From Private to Public Coding” to the slightly blander but more accurate “Software Development Notes.” I’ll probably still comment on the contrasts between private and public coding, but the goal is mostly to record what I’m learning in general about effective and professional software development.

As a side note, I really like the way Continuous Delivery is written. I’d like to study it a bit as a model for some of my writing. Even though the book isn’t exactly a page turner, and most people would be totally lost, bored, and asleep by page 2, for people who care about the topic, I’d say it’s just readable and engaging enough. It gets the job done and covers a lot of complicated ground in a well organized and efficient fashion.

Career

🤔

Grad school

I spent a lot of the week reading the 100 Reasons blog. My brother has a PhD, so I talked with him about it on Saturday while he was in town, and his contention is that the problems it brings up aren’t universal among grad programs or unique to grad school, so by themselves they aren’t good arguments for avoiding grad school.

Goal map

But should I go to grad school? It depends on whether my goals require it. For that I need to map out my goals. So that’s my current project. Also it’ll help me prioritize my projects as they come up, and it’ll help other people make sense of what I’m working on. So far I’ve been reread my old journal entries on this topic, and I’ve been looking for some diagramming software, because this map really needs to be more than just text.

AI field map

After my goal map I need to map out the field of AI, at least the parts of it that relate to my goals. This will give me a more immediate idea of how I need to prepare to enter it.

Music

🙄

The used copy of Composing Music I ordered got sent to the wrong address across the country. It was rather perplexing watching the tracking number travel from a processing center 5 minutes away all the way to Pennsylvania and then down the coast. But the tracking was helpful because it meant I didn’t have to wait longer to raise the issue with the seller. So I got a refund and ordered the book again (from someone else).

I’m going to try starting on the exercises right away. I feel like I’ve waited long enough to get back into composing. But I’ll try very hard not to let it shove aside my more important projects.

People

🙂

My brother visited this weekend to watch his friend get ordained on Sunday. Saturday we just hung out and caught up on life. In the evening we took a walk around a scenic local lake, and he asked me very helpful questions for thinking through my next career steps.

Posted in AI, Apartment, Career, Grad school, Life maintenance, Music composition, People, Programming, Projects, Public coding guide, Spirituality, Weeknotes | 1 Comment

Update for 9/2/2018

Posted on September 3, 2018 by Andy

Life maintenance

Apartment

🙂

I settled on a furniture layout for my apartment. It’s based on a set of furniture that includes pieces I don’t have yet. My thought is I can place the ones I already have and then add the others later without moving everything around again. I have the bedroom set up and a bit of the living room. I’ll need to move a bunch of boxes to finish that room.

After I finish setting up the furniture, I’ll unpack, declutter, and organize at the same time.

Grad school

🤔

Last week was a week for rethinking my life. You need those now and then. Part one of the rethinking made me wonder if grad school should be a last resort for me instead of the default course.

One evening when I got home too late to move furniture, I decided to do some more research on grad school instead. I’d been realizing I didn’t really have a handle on what I’d need to do to apply, so I Googled “how to go to grad school,” and what I found was a lot of articles on deciding whether to go at all.

Several years ago, articles like these had convinced me not to go into philosophy, because there are no academic jobs in the humanities. But this time I ended up questioning the idea of grad school in general. My main inspiration was the blog 100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School. It helped that I’d been thinking a little along these lines anyway, idly wondering if I should plan my next steps around the idea of an AI job rather than a cognitive science degree. But now thanks to these articles, I’m asking a new set of questions:

  • Would all the requirements and politics of grad school get in the way of the work I want to do while I’m there?
  • Would grad school take much longer than I want?
  • Would it create more stress than I want to deal with?
  • Would it make me poorer than I expect?
  • Is it really necessary for my goals?

So my new plan is to research these and any related questions, especially the last one. The public has a lot of resources these days. I’m curious to see how far I can get on my own and through an industry job (as opposed to an academic one) that’s close to the kind of work that interests me. Eliezer Yudkowsky did it–why not others? And for various reasons the idea of skipping grad school actually feels like a relief to me.

Life agenda

🤔

Part two of my life rethinking was more constructive. I want to take another stab at mapping out my goals and projects. Maybe this time I can arrive at something I can post on the site, maybe a diagram, and then some of my readers will feel less lost when they watch my shifting priorities. (Yes, a debate on that issue is what prompted this little project.) It’ll also help my weekly blog updates fulfill their original purpose, to help me align my active projects with my horizons of focus as part of the GTD weekly review I haven’t been doing.

Fiction

😍

I finished Middlemarch. 5/5. I never thought I’d actually love a classic. I always assumed they were written only to be tolerated, like eating unpleasant vegetables. But Middlemarch kept my interest and sometimes amazed me. The whole way through I felt like George Eliot had dug into the depths of my mind and fanned out my personality in the form of several characters. I got to watch myself deal with major life events as they would’ve taken place in an English provincial town of the late 1820s. If I had to pick a favorite character, I’d say Dorothea, despite some obnoxiousness at the beginning.

Spirituality

🤔

The next book I’ll listen to is Spiritual Disciplines Handbook by Adele Calhoun. Especially after enduring a whole July of stress from moving, I’ve been feeling the need to put some spiritual practices in place. Consuming books about spiritual formation is great, but to actually ground and strengthen and orient yourself, you have to do things. So I’ll use this book to organize my thoughts and get me started.

Audiobooks

🙂

I’ve reworked my audiobook categories a little. I’ve been using three subject categories to schedule my audiobook listening: professional development, personal development, and leisure. I rotate through them, usually in that order, listening to usually one book per category. But sometimes topics come up that don’t fit neatly into my three categories, such as politics.

Now, I could just pick a category for these extra topics. But that would dilute the categories. The purpose of the categories is to feed myself information on these topics on a regular basis so I don’t neglect and lose touch with them and delay the goals I have in those areas. If I make the categories too broad by cramming more distantly related topics into them, the more important topics could easily get pushed aside.

So I’ve added a category for miscellaneous nonfiction and made some others more specific. My new rotation is professional development, spirituality, other nonfiction, and fiction. These categories will probably acquire sub-rotations, such as for the various fiction series I’m working through.

Video games

🙂

The Minecraft server I’m on was being reset and updated to the latest game version, and I hadn’t played there for many months, so my friend Sumurai8 made me join him on Saturday. We had a nice time caving. This is how you get me to play multiplayer games, by the way. We have to schedule it.

Posted in Apartment, Books, Fiction, Grad school, Life maintenance, Projects, Spirituality, Video games, Weeknotes | 6 Comments

Update for 8/26/2018

Posted on August 26, 2018 by Andy

Website

🤔

The .net domain is at its new registrar now, so hopefully the DNS issue or whatever it was has cleared up. My non-US visitors can tell me.

Life maintenance

🤔

In my 3D home design software I’ve been playing with ideas for the living room arrangement. I’m giving the room too much to do for the arrangement to be easy, at least three different major functions. And there are annoying baseboard heaters along three walls that are getting in the way. Fortunately Ellen Fisher’s book tells me to try lots of different arrangements, even wacky ones, so that’s what I’m doing.

Fiction

😎

I’m liking Middlemarch much more than I expected. I identify with several of the characters, which is sometimes gratifying and sometimes troubling. And Nadia May is an amazing reader. I’ll have more to say when I’m done, which will probably be in the next update.

In case Middlemarch launches me into a classics phase, I spent some time picking out an audiobook of Moby-Dick, another favorite of my coworker’s. If I listen to that, I’ll go with the Anthony Heald version.

Music

😎

Music theory is great, but it doesn’t go far enough in helping me develop a whole piece. I need some resources about composition itself, and for that I consulted a few threads in r/composer. I chose William Russo’s Composing Music: A New Approach. It’s a long series of exercises concentrating on specific aspects of composing. I was able to flip through it at a local library, and it looks like just the kind of learning method I need.

Posted in Apartment, Fiction, Life maintenance, Music composition, Site updates, The Thinkulum, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Update for 8/19/2018

Posted on August 23, 2018 by Andy

This update it’s books, books, and more books, even more than usual.

Website

😐

First a little housekeeping note. People outside the US (and maybe some inside?) have been having trouble accessing the website, apparently because of some DNS problem with my domain registrar. So I’ve initiated a domain transfer to another registrar, and that should be taking effect later this week. Hopefully that’ll resolve the problem.

Cognitive science

🙂

It took twice as much listening per day as I expected, but I finished the Bermúdez book, Cognitive Science. I thought it was a very helpful overview of a central issue for the field–the question of how the mind is organized and operates. It gave me an idea of the issues and positions and lots of pointers to further reading.

Futurism

🤔

Tuesday our futurism group met and talked about smart drugs and psychedelics. It was very educational and thought provoking, especially since I was in the middle of the cognitive science textbook. Psychedelics and similar drugs aren’t just an illegal or immoral activity or a way to have a good time. They’re clues to the workings of the mind. So the psychologist in me hopes the way will be opened to more scientific research in that area.

The meeting reminded me that the point of psychedelics for many people is psychological or spiritual insight, and their experiences are like a condensed form of therapy. Assuming psychedelics are gateways to the secrets of the soul, it made me think people who don’t want to engage in them aren’t necessarily missing out–there are other avenues to reaching them.

Side note for anyone who’s wondering: No, I haven’t used any of these drugs, and I have no plans to. For smart drugs it’s because they’ve barely been studied.

Beliefs report

🤔

I used my new powers of text-to-speech to finish an ebook that’s been hanging around on my Goodreads Currently Reading shelf, Trusting Doubt by Valerie Tarico. It’s a critique of evangelicalism by a psychologist and Wheaton College graduate. Unlike many skeptics I’ve encountered, she represents Christianity pretty fairly, in my view, and is concerned with holding it to a high standard of ethics rather than sneering at its absurdities. A lot of her observations were ones I share, but some were new to me. I might interact with this book as a way of organizing my reflections for my essay on my beliefs, which is a project that’s been on hold for a while.

Life maintenance

🙂

My apartment is still in a mostly packed state, though the boxes are somewhat organized. As I’ve pondered my plans for getting it into a normal, livable state, a trio of topics has emerged: tidying, cleaning, and interior design. To get a handle on these, I’ve been finding books that would give me a solid starting point.

For tidying, I’d already listened to The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo and bought her more manual-like follow-up, Spark Joy.

For cleaning, I carefully sifted through the popular options available as ebooks and settled on Clean My Space by Melissa Maker. I chose it because the author approaches cleaning about the way I would–basing techniques on research, aiming for efficiency, and setting up routines. I picked up the audiobook too, which the author reads herself, and she gives it the animated personality it needs to keep the listener awake and (mostly) interested.

For interior design, I again sifted and came up with an intro textbook on the profession from the New York School of Interior Design called Home: The Foundations of Enduring Spaces. It’s written for both aspiring interior designers and people who want to design their own homes. Lots of it isn’t relevant to my situation, but I like having a full picture of the real issues in a subject. That kind of context makes me feel safer and less lost. The parts of the book that are relevant have given me helpful advice.

One principle I’ve picked up from all three topics is that you should organize your space in a way that makes it easy to clean.

My next step is to throw together an initial plan for these activities. I’m thinking the furniture arrangement should come first, and then I can discard and organize my things while I unpack.

Fiction

🙂

At work we’re starting this year’s book groups, and I joined the one that’s reading Middlemarch by George Eliot, a classic British novel that’s been on my mental list but that, left on my own, I probably wouldn’t get to for years. My plan is to listen to an audio version all at once so I actually get through it and then try to at least skim the print version on the group’s schedule. The audiobook should take me a couple of weeks. I picked the Nadia May version.

Spirituality

😐

I’m counting the homemaking books as part of my personal development category in my listening rotation. But I don’t want to start skipping the spiritual formation category just because I’m including other topics in personal development. So after Middlemarch I’m going to jump back to personal development for a bit and listen to Spiritual Disciplines Handbook by Adele Calhoun.

Music

🙂

When I get distracted from a project, I’m in danger of putting it on hold for months or years. So to keep that from happening with music after being preoccupied with my move, I’ve been researching books that will give me some context and guidance for listening and composing. For general music theory I looked at the recommendations on r/musictheory and, after a library visit to compare a couple of them, picked The Complete Musician.

Posted in Beliefs report, Cognitive science, Fiction, Futurism, Housekeeping, Life maintenance, Music, Site updates, Spirituality, The Thinkulum, Weeknotes | 4 Comments

Update for 8/12/2018

Posted on August 12, 2018 by Andy

Life maintenance

😏

I’ve gotten over my bad feelings left over from the move and from a sense that I don’t belong in my nice new place. What helped was the idea of rebelling against it to make it a place I do feel I belong. Hopefully my friends who wanted my living arrangement to improve will be displeased. 😉

So now I’m focused on setting up my furniture layout using Sweet Home 3D. It’s taking more time than drawing or eyeballing it, but a computer model is more stable than the little scraps of paper I used for my last apartment, and this way I won’t have to redraw everything when I rearrange my furniture, which I expect to do once or twice. Plus, measuring tape is way more reliable than my wacky spatial sense.

I’ve also been researching and putting together a cleaning routine. I’m tired of always being embarrassed by the state of my dwelling and of dreading the cleaning part of moving out. This time my home will stay nice.

One thing I like about this apartment is that the parking lot is next to a miniature forest, so I get to say hello to trees and flowers and moths and bees as I pull into my space.

In other news, I’m getting back to researching grad school and other career-advancing activities. Don’t tell Jeremy. He might think he had something to do with it.

Fiction

😎

I finished Blindsight. 5/5. This book is like a novelistic introduction to cognitive science. Peter Watts and I think along similar lines. We clearly have some of the same influences. Unfortunately the resulting worldview is rather bleak, at least in the scenario he paints. I’m hoping the perspective I come up with will be more positive and hopeful.

Cognitive science

🙂

Now that I have this Fire with text-to-speech, I can get through some of the important cognitive science books that have been patiently waiting in my Kindle library. Currently I’m listening to an intro textbook by José Luis Bermúdez, Cognitive Science: An Introduction to the Science of the Mind.

Posted in Apartment, Career, Cognitive science, Fiction, Grad school, Life maintenance, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Update for 8/5/2018

Posted on August 5, 2018 by Andy

Life maintenance

The move is done. Even with help from friends, it was an awful enough experience that next time I won’t mind paying movers to do it for me.

Now is the unpacking, which also felt like it’d be awful, but Saturday I got myself to sort my boxes into types of items, and now I feel a bit better about it.

While I was sorting my boxes, I listened to The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up on my boss’s recommendation, and that also helped me feel more up to unpacking. I’m going to try her system. It’s the perfect time for it, since all my stuff is gathered together, ready to be purged and organized. But it won’t be quick. Honestly I’m expecting unpacking to take at least a month.

I’ve also started laying out the apartment in some free home design software. I already have a brilliant idea of what to do with my bedroom.

Last time I had a one-bedroom apartment, I spent most of my time in the bedroom, which felt like a waste. This time I want to make more use of the whole apartment. It has a balcony, so Saturday night I took my dinner out there. I could see myself eating outside regularly.

Spirituality

I finished listening to Eric Kyle’s Living Spiritual Praxis via my new Fire’s text-to-speech. Despite some copyediting issues, I gave it 5/5 on Goodreads. I’m thinking of using Kyle’s method to create a spiritual formation program for my own life. I’m also intrigued by his example of Tom’s contemplative spirituality course. He includes the syllabus in an appendix, and it includes several techniques and many sources I want to look into, such as Tom Holmes’ Parts Work.

Conceptual modeling

Living Spiritual Praxis doubles as an introduction to conceptual modeling, so it belongs among my sources for this project. So far its contribution has been to raise the questions of what level of abstraction I want my method to address and how opinionated I want it to be regarding types of sources and warrants. He also brings up several synonyms for “model” that could expand my source list.

Cognitive science

A while back this Twitter exchange with my friend Adam prompted me to get a better handle on the computational theory of mind. So while I was supposed to be listening to Living Spiritual Praxis, I cheated a little and started listening to a set of articles from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on various cognitive science topics related to that model. They’re giving me a better picture of the various viewpoints I’ll need to deal with and locate myself within.

Fiction

My online friend Ryan recommended Blindsight by Peter Watts as a look at alien minds, which is relevant to my interests in cognitive science. So that’s what I’m listening to currently.

Posted in Apartment, Cognitive science, Conceptual modeling, Fiction, Life maintenance, Spirituality, Weeknotes | 2 Comments