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

Update for 7/29/2018

Posted on July 31, 2018 by Andy

Life maintenance

Moving in a hurry is not fun. It’s even less fun when you’re trying to save money by doing it yourself. And when the schedules of the parties involved are clashing. And when your knowledge of the situation is developing as you go. And when you’re possibly facing rain the day of the move. These factors combined to make Monday a day of planning mixed with intense worry and despair. But once I made some decisions, I calmed down and felt better, and the rest of the week went fairly smoothly.

I did have another brief attack on Saturday when I didn’t know if I could get the keys to the new apartment and start moving stuff over. I really didn’t want to move everything in one day. I have a lot of stuff. But it turned out I could get the keys, and Jeremy came over to help, and that made the process much more pleasant.

Unless something goes terribly wrong, the move will be finished Tuesday night.

Conceptual modeling

On Thursday at lunch, for once I didn’t have anything to do besides eating, so I slipped in a sneaky note-taking session on my conceptual modeling project.

After my move is finished, I’m hoping to come back to this project and write the next version of my method. Then I might put it on hold for other projects.

Cognitive science

I finished NeuroTribes by Steve Silberman much sooner than I expected. I was hoping it would cover more of the cognitive aspects of autism, but it was almost strictly a history of the condition and the ways society has handled it, which, aside from some bright spots, have been appalling. But the last chapter or two of the book were much more encouraging. And it’s given me more people, books, organizations, and movies to look into.

Text-to-speech

A couple of weeks ago I ordered a Fire 7, Amazon’s smallest current tablet. My sole reason was to use its text-to-speech function to listen to my Kindle books so I can actually get through them. The Fire arrived on Friday, just in time for me to finish NeuroTribes and start on my next book, one from the spirituality category. I have a few small gripes with the text-to-speech feature, but overall it’s good enough.

Spirituality

The first Kindle book I’ve chosen to listen to is Living Spiritual Praxis by Eric Kyle. It’s a guide to designing spiritual formation programs in a systematic fashion. It really occupies two of my projects at once–spirituality and conceptual modeling. I found the book because it discusses one of my sources on modeling in social science research. It shows up in an appendix that overviews conceptual modeling.

On spirituality, Kyle’s book puts forward the somewhat surprising idea that “[s]piritual discernment is the very core of the craft of theistic spiritual formation.” He spends a lot of time discussing how to carry it out. Though his focus in the book is on developing church programs, his larger goal is to foster discernment throughout the reader’s spiritual life.

Socializing

Friday my dad dropped by to have lunch with me on his way home from my brother’s new place–that is, a few hours into his two-day drive down the middle of the country. He’d called a couple of days before, and we ate avocado chicken salads at Wendy’s and caught up and talked about life. There’s something nice about taking a break from a normal work day to have lunch with someone you don’t see often. It’s like a cool spray of water on a hot day.

Posted in Apartment, Cognitive science, Conceptual modeling, Life maintenance, People, Spirituality, Text-to-speech, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Update for 7/22/2018

Posted on July 22, 2018 by Andy

Life maintenance

Just kidding, I guess. I’m moving after all. At the end of July.

A lot happened last week. My top choice of apartments wasn’t going to be ready till after my lease ended, so I was thinking I’d just renew and try again next year. But then I decided I didn’t want to wait a whole other year, so I looked into getting a lease extension. That worked out, so I set up an appointment to sign the lease at the new place. But in the process I found out they were pushing to have the apartment ready by the beginning of August. So I agreed to start the lease then. I’m expecting to pay a late fee to leave the old apartment on short notice, but at this point I kind of want to get this little mess over with ASAP.

So now I have a week of cleaning and packing and planning. My other projects are pretty much on hold till I’m settled into my new home. Fortunately my belongings are half packed already, and the rest are organized enough to make the job fairly easy. What worries me more is cleaning, the bane of my existence. It’s only surpassed by actually moving. I’m debating whether to hire movers.

Coincidentally, my brother is also moving on short notice, and he’ll be within easy visiting distance again. So that’s something to look forward to.

Productivity

I analyzed my notes a bit from Jon Acuff’s Finish, but I didn’t come up with anything I wanted to post as its own article. I’ll probably just absorb those notes into my larger study of project management.

But here’s a thought I came away with as I thought through Acuff’s book. You can look at your progress through a project in terms of the distance formula, t = dr. t is the completion date. d is the requirements for the goal. r is the speed of your methods and your time on non-project activities. To make yourself more likely to finish, reduce the scope, complexity, or quality of the goal’s requirements, your methods, or your outside activities, or make your methods more efficient.

A lot of the book was about how to make these changes. A lot of the rest of the book was about emotions, both dealing with the obstacles they present and using emotions to maintain your progress. It wasn’t the deepest and most rigorous book I’ve read, but it gave me a lot to chew on and explore.

The advice that’s getting me through these blog posts faster is to work on an airplane. Plane rides have a cluster of productivity advantages. The white noise, lack of normal distractions, and short duration help you focus. Well I’m not actually working on a plane, but I gave myself a short time frame for writing. I put on an album, and I have to finish writing by the end. I also cut the goal in half, another recommendation of the book. I write the main points I want to get across first and then elaborate as much as I have time for.

Fiction

The plot twist in The False Prince wasn’t as surprising as I’d hoped, but it was a good book, so I continued with the series, The Ascendance Trilogy. The one thing I don’t like is that the author repeatedly misleads the reader in a way that feels like cheating. Somehow it’s different from normal author misdirection. But that mostly comes up in the first book, so I could forgive it more easily in the others. The second book was really good, and the third is turning out excellent too.

Cognitive science

I’m out of Hoopla checkouts for the month, so I looked on OverDrive and found NeuroTribes by Steve Silberman, a well-received positive look at autism and the idea of neurodiversity. It’s one of those topics I’ve been meaning to look into for years. So that’ll be this week after The Ascendance Trilogy.

Art

A while back I fell in love with this charming pixel art of a train in Japan (based on this one). Last week some idle searching revealed that this is a real train, part of a well-known and historic train system in Tokyo. I’m wondering if this quiet scene is an actual spot somewhere on its route. This was amazing to me, because a while back this picture had inspired me to search for slice-of-life anime with the same feel (for example, Dagashi Kashi and Garden of Words), and I’d always wondered if I could find such a picturesque place in real life. It seems it is real life.

Posted in Anime, Apartment, Art, Cognitive science, Fiction, Life maintenance, Productivity, Project management, Weeknotes | 4 Comments

Update for 7/15/2018

Posted on July 15, 2018 by Andy

Productivity

🙂

I’ve been taking a break from my conceptual modeling project to read a book by Jon Acuff called Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done. It took me a week longer than I expected, but I finished the book. (It was this morning, but let’s pretend it was Saturday. We do a lot of pretending about time on this blog.) I took a bunch of notes. It’s the kind of book where the advice is fairly basic and mostly obvious, but it can be helpful to have all the obvious advice in one place as a starting place for your own thinking. After I do some of that myself, I might post the results on the wiki. The book is already helping me get through this blog post.

Life maintenance

🤔

And now, the conclusion: I decided not to move, at least not at the end of the month. Maybe I’ll ask the office about shorter lease options.

Instead of moving, I’m going to do some housekeeping tasks that were related to the move so I’ll be ready for my actual move, whenever that happens. Right now I’m deciding whether I want to upgrade my Internet from my slow DSL. Customer service nightmares of the kind delivered by Comcast are exactly the sort of thing I try to keep out of my life.

Spirituality

🙂

I finished Surprised by Hope. I went in looking for ways of thinking about the Christian view of the future that would stick and orient me. I found them. This quote stood out to me: “Likewise, the majestic but mysterious ending of the Revelation of John leaves us with fascinating and perhaps frustrating hints of future purposes, further work of which the eventual new creation is just the beginning.” To be honest, promises of a symbolically described paradise don’t really work for me, and neither do the prospects of a neverending worship service.

But the mere hint that we’ll have things to do feels like an invitation worth holding onto. I knew about reigning with Christ already, but the difference this quote makes for me is that the new creation always felt like an endpoint to me, and the eternity after it was just an overextended coda. Wright makes it sound like the new creation is just the start of a whole new story filled with things I want to do.

In other news, I’m adding a stream to my spirituality category, a type of scientific theology exemplified by BioLogos. Listening to Wright the New Testament scholar and theologian has reminded me that such people are usually hazy in their scientific knowledge. I’d like to also hear from Christians who specialize in it.

Futurism

🤔

Our futurism meeting last week was about killer robots. It made me think I shouldn’t necessarily open source all the AI technology I eventually work on.

Fiction

🤔

I’m listening to The False Prince because Jeremy was badgering me about it. I’m a little over halfway through. It’s pretty good. I’m waiting for the plot twist he enticed me with. If I’m not horribly disappointed, the book is so short I might tack on the rest of the series before moving on to my next professional development book.

Music

😎

I’ve been looking at the textbook list on r/musictheory for things to add to my collection. I cobbled that collection together haphazardly long ago based on whatever I ran across that looked good, so I wanted to see what people who know what they’re talking about recommend. Amazon and Google don’t have previews of the Laitz book, though. I have used my arcane knowledge of interlibrary loan to summon it to my local library. It’ll take some time for that to take effect.

Posted in Apartment, Fiction, Futurism, Life maintenance, Music, Productivity, Spirituality | 4 Comments