Update for 5/20/2018

Posted on May 25, 2018 by Andy

Brace yourselves. This one’s kind of a doozy.

Life maintenance

😐

Last week’s tasks:

  • Discarding old medical equipment – Done.
  • Budget – No progress. I blame the EU. See my diatribe below.

This week’s tasks:

  • GDPR
  • Budget, if I have time left over

Thinking

🤔

Conceptual modeling is trundling along. Not quickly but pretty steadily. A blog post by Ron Jeffries got me thinking again about how agile software development could apply to my other projects. Jeffries recommends very short iterations for delivering usable versions of your software–a week or a day. Could I post a substantial revision of my modeling project every week? It’s a goal I’d like to work toward. I think it’d mean mechanizing my writing process somewhat, the way programming is fairly mechanized with a lot of regular idioms.

GDPR

🙄

Last week I was listening to Nassim Taleb’s book The Black Swan and wondering what unexpected event might throw off my project planning. Life delivered in a jiffy! The Black Swan of the General Data Protection Regulation.

I wish GDPR were a type of ASMR, but no. GDPR is an EU regulation (nicely formatted here) that lets European users exercise more control over data that organizations have about them. It lets them request the information an organization has about them, export it, have it deleted, and know it’s only being used with their consent and for its stated purpose. The regulation was created two years ago but goes into effect this Friday. It’s a great idea, in principle. Businesses have been sloppy and self-serving in the ways they handle their customers’ data, and it’s resulted in a lot of data breaches and creepy tracking of user activity.

But protecting that data GDPR-style means organizations have to do a lot more record keeping. Also possibly rewriting software, buying new software, hiring more data protection experts and lawyers, rewriting contracts with their data-handling vendors, and replacing vendors that don’t comply with the regulation. The exact requirements aren’t clear, however. To hear some tell it, the regulation is 88 pages of ambiguity, and opinions differ on who has to do what. Some articles offer 5 easy steps to GDPR compliance. But on a stricter interpretation, the burden can be monstrous, especially for a small enterprise with small resources.

And then there are the fines–up to €20 million or 4% of your annual revenue. But each case will (allegedly) begin with warnings, and the fines will (allegedly) be proportional to the circumstances.

When I read about GDPR a few months ago in headlines about Facebook, I knew nothing about it and assumed it had nothing to do with me. Big companies are always facing legal confrontations. But then a couple of recent tweets related to freelancing made me wonder if I should make some adjustments myself, and toward the end of last week the topic had engulfed my attention. The research kept me up late wringing my hands.

At first this reaction was only sympathetic. I was appalled that the EU would place such onerous requirements on even small businesses. It pushed my buttons. But while I do some freelancing, my clients aren’t European, so GDPR didn’t really seem to apply to me.

But I do run my own website, and it collects the IP addresses of visitors like all websites do, and I let people post comments, which requires them to enter an email address. Gradually I realized this might mean I fall under this draconian legislation. But maybe not? See-sawing on that question has been painful.

Everything I’ve just said about GDPR took me a lot of time to figure out. Hence the hand wringing. It’s less the fines I worry about than simply having the legal system’s attention at all. It just seems like trouble. So does complying. A rock and a hard place.

Fortunately, this is just a low-traffic blog, and it’s not likely any regulator will notice it anytime soon. But over the next few days you might notice some changes around here as I try to follow GDPR’s clearer and more relevant requirements. Some of the site’s features might eventually go away. I’m planning to follow a stairstep plan where I degrade the site in major ways only as each becomes necessary. I’ll also have an eye out for ways GDPR degrades the web in general.

I’ve drawn a few personal conclusions from this little adventure:

  • User data is radioactive waste. Try to avoid it.
  • Never start a business. GDPR isn’t the only regulation to deal with, and there will only be more in the future. I come up with business ideas from time to time, but now they’ll be discarded. Too much trouble.
  • Never run an online hobby project. The days of treating the web as a developer playground are basically over. This is the saddest part for me. I’ve had ideas to try, but now that would be a mistake. At least it shortens my project list.
  • Maybe don’t even sell over online marketplaces like Amazon. Your customers might not be Europeans, but how long before the US passes a similar law? At least now I can stop procrastinating on selling my books. Amazon felt like it’d be a pain anyway. Half Price Books is a less lucrative but much simpler option.
  • If I ever create an AGI, one of its first roles will be to deal with the law for me. I sometimes joke that I have an army of minionbots that do my bidding whenever I want to make mischief for my friends. I have spybots, attackbots, and whatever else I make up. The lawyerbots might become a reality.

Having said all that, GDPR does have some upsides for me:

  • It’s gotten me interested in learning about the EU (and euroscepticism). It’s fun to have new topics to research and follow.
  • It’s actually a nice example of conceptual modeling. Yeah, it could be clearer, but it’s laid out more or less the way I would. It could be worth studying for that project.
  • It might get me to learn about data security. I’ve read that the reaction to GDPR from data security professionals is one of relief and triumph–finally, everyone has to follow their advice! It’s just that it’s more pleasant to learn about these things when a dragon’s not breathing down your neck.

Work

🙂

In the middle of my GDPR angst, our workplace held a company-wide minigolf event. It was to celebrate the completion of the department moves and recarpeting that’s been happening over the past few months. Each area of the building created its own hole, and we split into teams by department and played through them. We ended with a pizza lunch for National Pizza Party Day.

Participating in all this was optional. It was the kind of thing I could easily see myself skipping, but I decided to sign up to play, and I’m glad I did. It was fun, and it got me to be a little more social than I usually am at work. (I have it in mind to change that, by the way, but it’s a project that’ll have to wait its turn in line.) And my score wasn’t too bad, pretty much in the middle of our team’s scores, which is where I often end up when I play games. I’m mostly satisfied with that position.

Also the minigolf took my mind off GDPR for a while, which was nice.

Math relearning

🤔

I spent basically all Saturday continuing my GDPR obsession. But I took some time out of my unproductive day to waste time on general social media. A post on Reddit caught my eye. It was about learning by programming, which is the approach I want to take to relearn math. The poster wanted to use it to learn some biology, but they asked for resources on learning that way in general, so I replied.

Well, my reply got the attention of someone else who sent me a private message about collaborating on relearning math. I was expecting to put off that project till after I got somewhere on modeling. So now I need to decide whether this is a good time to return to it anyway (once I’m past GDPR). I’m always in danger of putting things off too long.

Posted in GDPR, Life maintenance, Math relearning, Thinking, Weeknotes, Work | Leave a comment

Update for 5/13/2018

Posted on May 16, 2018 by Andy

Life maintenance

😐

Last week’s tasks:

  • Electronics recycling – Done, except for a few things I have to take to other drop-off sites.
  • Budget – In progress.
  • Sorting housekeeping tasks – Done.

Posting those on the blog last week actually got me to do them. So I guess this weekly update thing is somewhat accomplishing its purpose.

This week’s tasks:

  • Budget
  • Discarding old medical equipment

Beliefs report

🤔

I finished Eternal Living, a collection of people’s reflections on Dallas Willard’s life. It was good, but I got kind of tired of the fawning. It turned up the dial on my skepticism, especially since I already disagreed with some of his ideas. So I found an article by someone else who had Willard criticisms, and I felt better. As with many things I both like and dislike, I found myself wondering what it would look like to adapt Willard’s views into a version I liked more.

Thinking

🙂

After the Willard book, I had a little crisis in which I didn’t know what kind of book to listen to next. I had a few options, but most of them didn’t feel quite right. I settled on something that would help me be less unintelligent, The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb.

When I first heard about The Black Swan, I thought it was a survey of the effects on society that large, surprising developments can have. But it’s really a book on rationality. It’s about how bad we are at taking these unpredictable events into account and how we can be better at it. Right up my alley.

Movies

🙂

I saw Infinity War. I liked it. I’m a big fan of crossovers, so I was glad to see the various teams converge. I was also glad the villain was an actual character and not a prop like in Justice League. There were some gaping holes in Thanos’ strategy that it would’ve been nice to address in some kind of debate, but that’s not really compatible with an action movie. That’s okay. It just means the audience gets to do it.

Side note, this was the first time I’d really noticed that a theater’s sound system makes an action movie tactile. You can feel things crashing around you. This seems like it should be obvious, but I’m a little slow catching on sometimes. Or maybe this sound system was just better.

Posted in Beliefs report, Books, Life maintenance, Movies, Thinking, Weeknotes | 1 Comment

Update for 5/6/2018

Posted on May 6, 2018 by Andy

Comics

😎

I spent a lot of last week getting ready for my annual comics purchases on Saturday, which was Free Comic Book Day. I like to buy things that day to support the stores so I’m not just taking advantage of them for free stuff. I made a couple of trips to the stores I’d be visiting, and I researched some cyberpunk comics to keep an eye out for. Here’s what I ended up with at the end of the day.

I also picked up the first volume of Blame! from the library. I learned about the series and its intriguing setting from the developer of the upcoming architectural puzzle game Manifold Garden. In a Twitch stream he told us that manga was a major inspiration for the game.

Thinking

😎

Peg Boyle Single’s Demystifying Dissertation Writing is giving me a new outlook on my conceptual modeling project. She divides up the process of research and writing in a way that feels much more manageable than what I was trying to do. I feel like I have a better handle on this project. And all my others, for that matter.

Life maintenance

😐

I’ve been too distracted by comics and conceptual modeling to do much of anything practical. Here are the main things I need to work on this week:

  • Electronics recycling
  • Budget
  • Sorting housekeeping tasks

Fiction

🙂

I finished Wingfeather Saga, book 2: North! or Be Eaten. 5/5. This series continues to be very interesting.

Beliefs report

🙂

I’ve started on Eternal Living, a book of people’s reflections on the impact Dallas Willard made on them. Some of it repeats what’s in the biography, but there’s enough new to give me food for thought.

TV

👍

After a break, I came back and finished The End of the F-ing World. It ended not quite how I expected, but more or less. I’ve read they’re looking at making a second season, which I might watch. I saw the graphic novel at the comic store. I only flipped through it, but it looked very different from the show.

Now I’m trying to finish Star Trek: Discovery.

Movies

😎

Tuesday I’m finally going with my geek meetup to see Infinity War. Somehow I’ve managed to avoid any real spoilers. Unfortunately, it’s the same day as the futurism meetup, so I’m missing that one this month.

Posted in Beliefs report, Books, Comics, Life maintenance, Movies, Thinking, TV, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Finding comic collections

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Andy

My wiki article “Navigating the World of Comics” lays out a plan for finding comics to read out of the massive amount that are published every year. There was one piece of the plan missing that was holding me back from my own reading, and that was the question of how to find collected editions of the issues I want to read. I did some research, and I’ve posted an update with my solution.

Posted in Comics, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Update for 4/29/2018

Posted on April 30, 2018 by Andy

A short-ish update for once. I still procrastinated on it.

Life maintenance

😐

My lease is up at the end of July, and this year I’m planning on making myself move into a bigger place. I’ve been putting it off for a few years because moving’s a pain. But last week I took the first couple of steps. I now have a general rent figure to fit into my budget and a list of search results to narrow down.

Work

😏

Work’s been an adventure lately. They’re replacing a bunch of carpet, so the halls are cluttered with moved furniture, and the building has become a reconfigurable maze of places we’re not allowed to walk. On Friday afternoon they started on my department’s room, so I left after lunch to work from home.

Thinking

🤔

While pondering how to explain my modeling project, I discovered that contrary to my assumption, people do recognize a form of modeling that crosses disciplines. It’s called conceptual modeling. So that’s the project’s new name. Unfortunately that’s also the term software engineering has adopted for their own version, so I’ll need to make that distinction. I still need to update the article to reflect these recent changes.

As my notes for this project have piled up, I’ve been casting about for a way to organize them, which will also become part of the method as a recommendation for how to organize other modeling work. For help I’m looking at advice on academic writing, particularly from Peg Boyce Single’s Demystifying Dissertation Writing.

Beliefs report

🤔

Reading Valerie Tarico’s Trusting Doubt is reminding me that when I’m looking at debates about evangelicalism, I want to pay special attention to the replies each side gives to each other’s arguments. It’s one thing to see the claims a worldview makes for itself and the rumors it tells about its neighbors; it’s far more enlightening to see how competing worldviews interact.

Comics

😎

This coming Saturday is Free Comic Book Day. Go to your friendly local comic book store and pick up a few from this year’s list! If you’re looking for a way to get into comics, I’ve written a guide. FCBD snuck up on me this year, so I didn’t get around to the big updates I have planned for that guide, but this week I’ll give it a small update and post a note on the blog when I do.

Something else that snuck up on me was Tabletop Day, which was Saturday of last week. I didn’t do anything for it. Oh well, maybe next year!

Posted in Apartment, Beliefs report, Comics, Thinking, Weeknotes, Work | 5 Comments

Update for 4/22/2018

Posted on April 24, 2018 by Andy

Happy birthday to my brother, who was born on the 22nd a few years ago.

Movies

🤔

Sunday afternoon I went to see Ready Player One with Jeremy and Heather. It’s a Spielberg adaptation of Ernest Cline’s book of the same title. Jeremy and I both read it a few years ago. Jeremy was really excited about the movie, and he was perplexed at my merely moderate interest. The thing is I wasn’t into much of popular culture when I was growing up, so the book wasn’t that nostalgic for me. The same goes for Stranger Things, especially since I was about ten years younger than those characters. But still, I liked the movie. They did a good job of sticking to the overall story while changing it enough that it felt new.

I appreciated the story’s overall point, that the real and virtual worlds have a complicated relationship and that it’s a good idea not to lose touch with the real one. One issue is false intimacy. At least that’s what people used to call it. These days they talk about parasocial relationships and catfishing. People can easily be fake online. But I think it’s important to remember that plenty of people are fake in person. The real world doesn’t necessarily solve the problems of virtual one.

I also think about the relationship between the two worlds when I’m listening to futurists describe advanced technology. For example, someday there might be whole civilizations of digital people. As rich as their virtual lives might be, they’ll still run on physical hardware that has to be constructed, protected, and maintained. They might have robots to do that, but the point is that something will still need eyes and hands on the physical world.

Life management

😐

My grocery shopping system has a long list. It’s divided by frequency (weekly, monthly, etc.). I wanted to sort all the items by their location in the stores. But that would take another couple of hours, so I settled for sorting each sub-list as I get to it. With that, I’m considering my setup done, and now almost every day I have the pleasant experience of knowing I can drive right past the grocery store without stopping on my way home.

For my computer backup, I decided to stick with Jungle Disk for now. It was quicker and easier than switching to a new service, and I’m almost at the backup size limit for the free version of Cloudberry. The price of the cheapest paid version equals about a year of Jungle Disk for one user.

The next job will be sorting through the piles of stuff filling my closet.

Project generator

😐

My irritation with this bottleneck is growing, so after I take care of certain parts of my modeling project, I’m going to try to concentrate on this one till I get it into a satisfying state.

Thinking

😐

I’m feeling a little scattered on the modeling project. I’ve made a task list to keep all its current branches in view so I know which are best to work on. Mainly I want to finish organizing and commenting on the notes I’ve already written, and then I should be in a better position to consult my outside sources.

Beliefs report

😎

I finished Becoming Dallas Willard, the biography by Gary Moon. It was enlightening and inspiring to me. There’s a lot I could say, but I’ll stick to a few comments.

On the enlightening side, I think of it as the missing bibliography. Moon gives some (for me) much needed context to Willard’s books–why he wrote them and what influenced him. It was also illuminating to find out where Willard started–the circumstances of his early life and the kind of person he was at the time. The book’s title was well chosen. The person the public knew is someone he’d had to become.

On the inspiring side, I like the person he became. I want to learn from him, and already the book has me caring a bit more about my flagging spiritual life. After my current audiobook, I’m thinking of getting Eternal Living, the companion volume of reflections by people who knew him. It’ll boost my motivation and give me more to learn from.

I’ve also thought about reading a couple of his books on apologetics, Knowing Christ Today and The Appeal of Gentleness. But I looked at the critical reviews, and honestly I could see myself having the same reactions. So I don’t know that I’d gain much from him on that front, except for one thing. My sense is that Willard’s faith was mostly grounded in his religious experiences, and my respect for him makes me more interested in looking into that topic.

Fiction

🙂

After my brief side trip to Willardland, I’ve returned to the Wingfeather Saga with book two, North! or Be Eaten. Sometimes I put a lot of time between volumes of a series, but in this case I didn’t want to wait too long and risk losing interest. For some reason I haven’t been in a fantasy mood the past couple of years. But this book has been easy to jump into. Starting a new series and discovering its world can be fun, but a lot of the time I’m impatient with a story’s setup. The first Wingfeather book was like that for me.

Posted in Beliefs report, Birthdays, Books, Coding project generator, Life management, Movies, Thinking | 1 Comment

Update for 4/15/2018

Posted on April 16, 2018 by Andy

Another overly long update for you.

Church

😎

Sunday I went back to the Lutheran church. Last time I got there late, didn’t get an order of service, and spent the whole time lost and confused. But otherwise the atmosphere was right, so I wanted to try again. This time I got there way early, got an order, and even had time to figure out which variation they seemed to be following in the Divine Service book (#1 was closest).

I felt much more present this time, and I think this will be my default old-style liturgical church. (My contemporary liturgical church is the one my brother and I attend on Easter.) I do have one more church to visit though. I tacked it on because I decided to give the Methodists a chance. Also it turns out I know their music minister.

Life management

🙂

Monday I completed the next step in the setup of my grocery shopping system: noting which items I could get cheaply at Aldi. I also needed to buy that week’s groceries, so with all that going on between two stores, my shopping trip took about three hours.

The next step will be to sort the items in my lists according to the stores’ layouts. That way I can zip through and pick things up without hunting for them. Then my shopping will take minutes instead of hours.

There are a couple of recurring items I have to get from other stores I rarely visit. I decided that instead of making special trips, I’d order those in bulk from Amazon. So now I have several months of coffee and breath mints sitting in the cabinet over my desk at work.

Between the shopping system and my newly clean apartment, my life is feeling a lot more organized. I still have a lot of stuff to sort through in my closet, but I think the next housekeeping task will be to finish switching my computer backup system from Jungle Disk to the much cheaper CloudBerry.

Futurism

😎

Tuesday my futurism group met and talked about robots. I had a lot to say this time. Our intro question was what we’d want a robot for. My answer was that there’s not much I’d want current robots for, but once they got more sophisticated and if there weren’t annoying business practices attached, I’d absolutely want a self-driving car, and I’d want another robot to do my housekeeping.

But more than that, if robots had respectable AI capabilities, I’d want one as a friend. Basically I want Data from Star Trek to be real. It’s actually one of my main personal motivations for wanting to work in AI.

But as I told the group, it seems unfair to the AI to restrict it to being my friend. It could do much bigger things, so I’d probably want to free it to do them. As long as it was friendly.

Thinking

😐

I’ve decided to rename my analysis project. It will henceforth be called modeling. Analysis only covers a part of the process I’m describing, and I think modeling does a better job of capturing it.

It seems like most of the rest of the week I spent dealing with my anxiety about that project. I was beginning to feel it was too big. A lot of my projects are kind of big, but somehow this one was different. The feeling stuck around for a few days, coming and going until I’d taken care of the most immediate sources of anxiety.

One source was that a few more potential resources had come to my attention, and making decisions about buying books sometimes makes me tense. It was worse this time because finding these books increased my sense that, the way I conceive of it, modeling is a truly vast topic. But I noticed I felt better after I ordered the books from this batch that I felt would be the most useful.

The other source of anxiety was the large hodgepodge of notes I’d written. I knew they’d be easier to think about if I grouped them into topics, and I had some in mind that would be helpful. I felt better after I’d moved most of them into place.

The next step is to ponder these key topics some more and come up with a new version of my procedure. I’m hoping to have an update to post to the wiki in a week or two.

Project generator

😐

I need to do some programming for my modeling project, which reminds me that I have a bottleneck when it comes to programming: my coding project generator. So I’m back to working on that.

Fiction

🙂

I finished On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness, the first book in Andrew Peterson’s Wingfeather Saga for children. I rate it 5/5. I plan to listen to the rest of the series. I mean it does follow a lot of the tropes of the other epic fantasies I’ve read, so it wasn’t startlingly unique. But when I think about reading Christian fiction by authors I don’t know, I get ready to cringe, and in Peterson’s case there was no need for cringing.

I did find it provocative though, which is a much better effect. For one thing, I don’t know what the author’s influences are, but the whole story I felt like Charlotte Mason was peeking out of the bushes. I get the impression Peterson’s the kind of parent who homeschools his kids on the Trivium. I’m ambivalent on the idea of classical education, and I found myself inwardly debating the story and the people it reminded me of who teach their kids Latin. Although I will admit some of these sound like pretty good reasons.

Beliefs report

🙂

Now I’m listening to Becoming Dallas Willard, the recent bio by Gary Moon. I’d barely started by the end of the week, but already the foreword and opening pages had highlighted the reason I was looking forward to it. It’s one thing for someone like Willard to write about how personal transformation is supposed to work. It’s another to see, in some detail, how it happened in the life of an actual person.

Posted in Beliefs report, Books, Church, Coding project generator, Futurism, Life management, Thinking, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Update for 4/8/2018

Posted on April 11, 2018 by Andy

Easter

🙂

Sunday morning my brother and I went to our usual Easter church. Jeremy’s family joined us. The service was good, but it didn’t feel quite as celebratory as usual. I think that was mainly a combination of us sitting in the back, out of the middle of things, and the service being more streamlined.

After church we had a lunch of delicious Indian food at the home of some friends from church. Then I took Michael to the airport and watched some Foyle’s War with Tim. A nice Easter.

Life management

🙂

As part of my effort to organize my life, I made a grocery shopping system. Step 1: I made a list of all the things I buy on a regular basis. Step 2: I divided them into separate lists based on how often I buy them. Step 3: I put the lists into my to-do app (Nirvana) as recurring tasks. Step 4: I made plans to find out which things I could pick up cheaply at Aldi. That would happen during my first scheduled shopping trip this week.

I’ve been wanting a system like that for years, so it’s a relief to finally set it up. I picked up the idea from my mom. I’m hoping now I’ll be able to think much less about grocery shopping.

Fiction

🙂

I finished Powersat. 4/5. It wasn’t the most profound story, but it was entertaining and did the job of getting the series off the ground.

A couple of weeks ago, thanks to an ebook I made at work, I found the singer/author Andrew Peterson and his Wingfeather Saga series. His Rabbit Room site intrigued me, so I thought his novels might be worth reading, and I checked out the first book in the series, On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness. I was pleased to find it’s really good! The British narrator makes it even better.

Beliefs report

😐

I updated my spirituality report with a bibliography of potential sources. Now I’m taking a break from officially working on both that and the beliefs report. Unofficially, I suspect I’ll still be thinking and reading about them.

🙂

For example, after the Wingfeather book I’m going to listen to a biography that just came out, Becoming Dallas Willard. He’s kind of one of my spiritual heroes, so I’m looking forward to it.

🤔

To balance things out, I’m also reading Trusting Doubt, a critique of evangelicalism by  Valerie Tarico, who’s a fellow Wheaton College alum. I found her when an article she wrote showed up in my feeds. It was about the Ancestral Story that forms the core of the conservative viewpoint. I found it very insightful.

Death

😔

Wednesday morning the company held a memorial service for an employee who’d died unexpectedly the day after Easter. His sister also works there. I thought it was very kind of them to host it. I didn’t know him, but during the service I felt a certain kinship with him because he was an introvert who cared a lot about his work. He was also a geek who liked board games and Star Wars. Maybe we would’ve gotten along.

Posted in Beliefs report, Books, Death, Holidays, Life management, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Update for 4/1/2018

Posted on April 4, 2018 by Andy

Music

🙄

To continue from last time, I was able to record from my MIDI keyboard to LMMS. But LMMS doesn’t have a way to export MIDI files. Something about the trickiness of the bass loops. But there is an external tool for converting LMMS files to MIDI, and since I didn’t find another free MIDI sequencer I liked better than LMMS, I’ll just record that way for now.

Ways I want to use MIDI recordings:

  • To easily study what I’m playing wrong when I practice a piano piece. I can do this with a regular audio recording, but a MIDI sequence might make it slightly easier to see what I played.
  • To easily make use of passages I come up with while improvising. Without a recording I have to try to remember what I came up with. With an audio recording I have to transcribe it.
  • To record performances so I can preserve their nuances while letting me manipulate the results, such as to fix mistakes, substitute instruments, or add effects.

Life maintenance

🙂

The first half of last week was getting ready for my siblings to visit. I didn’t get much actual cleaning done, but I boxed up the clutter, took stuff to Goodwill, and vacuumed. I was proud of myself. I’m going to try to develop new habits for keeping things organized.

Socializing

🙂

Wednesday night I took a break from housekeeping to drop in on an open house for my friend from work who’s leaving the state to work at an amazing new job and join an interesting church plant. Fortunately they’ll only be a couple of hours away. I intended to stay for an hour at most. I left about three hours later.

One highlight was learning about the hand game Chopsticks from their third-grade son. It seems more sophisticated than the games we played at that age. Looking that up led me to this interesting study of Australian children’s playlore. I’ve wondered about how children’s traditions got passed along. I didn’t know people actually studied it.

Easter

🙂

Thursday my brother and sister arrived. My sister was passing through on her way to visit a friend. My brother was staying for the weekend. Visiting Chicago requires deep dish pizza, so that was dinner.

Felt Easter bunnies my sister made for my brother and me.

A post shared by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum) on

Friday after breakfast we looked through a local history museum, where my brother picked up some postcards. Then we took a walk through a park featured on one of the postcards and then sat at a picnic table and wrote the postcard together. Afterward Abbie went on her way, and Michael and I attended church service #1, a Taizé-themed Good Friday service. After dinner at Nando’s I dropped Michael off at a second Good Friday service and waited for him at home while working on a project.

Saturday afternoon we met with Tim and Jeremy at Barnes and Noble for a while and then joined the rest of Jeremy’s family for dinner at a Mongolian barbecue. Finally, a repeat of the night before–I dropped Michael off at church and headed home for another project.

Thinking

😐

What were these projects? Bibliographies. Who wouldn’t skip church for that? I added a bibliography of potential sources for the analysis project.

Beliefs report

😐

I also added a potential sources section for this one. This week I’ll create one for the current spirituality essay, and then I’ll probably put this project on hold again. I’ll come back to it after I’ve gotten more done on analysis and rationality.

Posted in Beliefs report, Holidays, Housekeeping, Music, People, Thinking, Weeknotes | 1 Comment

Update for 3/25/2018

Posted on March 28, 2018 by Andy

Last week didn’t feel packed, but you’d think so from the length of this post.

Birthday

🙂

Sunday my friends Jeremy and Heather hosted a birthday party for me. They even made tacos. Tim and Linda joined us. We played some games I brought–Splendor, Magic Maze, and Isle of Skye. My only complaint is they didn’t eat enough of the dessert I brought. I was munching on it the rest of the week. Such a burden.

Elections

🙂

I vote in primaries these days, but I’m not great at keeping up with the races, so I’m left scrambling at the last minute. I’ve found there are two ways to vote: (1) being tormented with indecision in the voting booth and (2) zipping through the list you wrote down beforehand. The second way feels much better. So Monday night I was up late researching candidates and propositions for the next day’s vote.

I was pleased that the main candidate I cared about won. The rest of this race should be interesting to watch.

Beliefs report

😐

The summary I posted the week before last reminded me I have a lot of work to do before I feel my beliefs are settled. It feels like too much to even begin working through right now. But I’m trying to keep working on the project through Lent, so this week I’ll post a list of potential sources to consult when I finally do dig in.

Thinking

😎

The analysis essay still takes up a lot of my thinking time. I’ve been capturing a lot of passing thoughts in my notes. The next update will be a list of potential sources for this project.

Grad school

😐

As I think about things I want to do, I find myself mentally regressing through chains of prerequisite projects till I end up at what I’m charitably calling gateways, projects that will make others possible or easier. When I’m in a grumpier mood, I call them bottlenecks, because I tend to procrastinate on them while being impatient for the projects they’ll enable. Last week I looked through my big list of current project ideas and tagged the gateways.

One of my gateways is researching grad schools. Once I find some likely candidates, I’ll be in a better position to plan some of the basic computer science learning I need to do, topics like computer architecture and operating systems. I’ll also be able to answer people when they ask me where I want to go for grad school.

So last week I picked up my research where I left off way back when. Unfortunately the couple of times I tried, my brain was running on fumes, so I didn’t get very far. But at least the wheels have started turning again.

Project generator

😐

Another bottl–uh, gateway–is my coding project generator. So I briefly looked through my next steps and noted the issues that were holding me back on them. Converting your problems to tasks in a list can make them remarkably easier to deal with. I’m expecting to work more on this project in the coming weeks.

Movies

Somehow I got through three movies last week.

The Cloverfield Paradox

😎

The Cloverfield Paradox was a typical soft sf film where the explanations of what was going on didn’t really make sense, but other than that I liked it. My favorite part was recognizing that the weird things that happen on the station could’ve sprung from the imagination of my 9-year-old self. It’s nice finding creators who speak my language.

Good Will Hunting

🤔

I’ve resubscribed to the Netflix DVD service, and last week I was reminded you have to stay on top of managing your queue, because they won’t waste any time sending you whatever’s next. So last week to keep the queue flowing I watched the one they sent me, Good Will Hunting. I’d added it because of some articles I’d read about South Boston, which is where the characters are from. One of my online friends lives near there.

But also the movie was in the back of my mind because my Christian education professors back in undergraduate days would use it to illustrate something or other. I’d seen the “not your fault” scene at least once in class. So I was watching like a hawk to see how Robin Williams the therapist would make a connection with Matt Damon the troubled genius and get through to him. And I watched too closely, because I ended up contemplating life. But let’s be honest, I would do that anyway. I took away two questions: What counts as authentic experience? And how might I be avoiding it to protect myself from its risks?

The Scorch Trials

🙄

Jeremy and I are fans of the Maze Runner book series. We’d watched the first movie adaptation, and Jeremy wanted to watch The Death Cure, but we hadn’t seen The Scorch Trials yet. So we watched that one on Friday with plans to see The Death Cure the next day at a discount theater. We were very thrown off by the movie. In fact, it changed the premise of the books enough that the first movie didn’t really make sense. With that and the characters’ overreactions and a very cliché plot, we dropped the idea of seeing the third one.

TV

🙂

In between movies, I returned to Star Trek: Discovery and got through episodes 5 and 6. The show definitely improved after the first episode or two.

Death

🤔

A couple of weeks ago my employer’s co-founder died. She was about a week away from being 101. The other co-founder, her husband, died a few years before I started working there. Our chapel last week was going to be a birthday celebration, so they celebrated her life instead. The next morning was her funeral, which we were able to watch in the chapel via a livestream.

As usual, I appreciated people’s eulogies. They reminded me that generosity and hospitality were two of her hallmarks, which challenges me because those are areas I always feel could be improved in my life.

Life maintenance

🙂

Getting my apartment ready for my siblings’ visit over Easter is progressing fairly steadily. I’m feeling pretty good about it, considering I usually put off that kind of housekeeping, to the point that I do practically none of it before my guests arrive.

😎

The week before last, I put half of my new file cabinet together. I finished it late last week and set up my new and improved music filing system in the bottom drawer. What a relief. And getting that done cleared up a lot of space in that area of the apartment.

Music

🙂

Finishing my new file cabinet and getting ready for the next day’s worship performance put me in an easy position to try out some recording from my MIDI keyboard. This is something I had in mind for my Surface several years ago when I bought it, but of course I hadn’t gotten around to it. So I plugged in the keyboard, fired up LMMS, and set about investigating how to get it to record. But it was late Saturday night, and I didn’t get very far. I’ll have more to report next week.

Posted in Analysis, Beliefs report, Birthdays, Coding project generator, Death, Elections, Grad school, Life maintenance, Movies, Music, TV, Weeknotes | 1 Comment