Update for 5/28/2017

Posted on May 29, 2017 by Andy
  • Productivity – Working on projects during dinner turned out to be the best idea I’ve had in a while. I worked on them many more hours than I have been, mostly on the code console. I’ll keep this schedule until it stops working.
  • Code console – Despite all the work last week, I’m still not ready to post anything, because the cookiecutter templates I’ve found have given me a lot of software development tools to explore, but also I’ve found that cookiecutter isn’t completely suited for what I want to do, which is to reuse template content selectively for different kinds of projects, so I’ve been planning another approach. I was thinking of coding my own wrapper around cookiecutter for the extra functionality, but in the meantime I’ve discovered static site generators, and now I’m thinking I’ll just use one of them, if I can find one that doesn’t insist on generating HTML, since they’re really designed to create websites rather than software project skeletons.
  • Beliefs report – I’ve posted the seed, and I’ll keep adding to it in the coming weeks.
  • Diet – I’ve been eating through the food I have before I start more seriously on my lowish-carb, highish-unsaturated-fat diet, which will take some planning, but I can already tell I’ll have to stop being lazy and get back to cooking, since most frozen meals don’t fit that diet, but it’ll be the simplest, quickest cooking I can come up with. I’m also not going to be extremely strict about the diet like I was last year, since this experiment is about eating in a semi-normal way that I can keep up long term.
  • Social life – Saturday I went over to Jeremy and Heather’s place for board games with some other friends, and we ate some yummy tacos they made and played the game I bought a few weeks ago, Isle of Skye, and then Race for the Galaxy, which you can play online.
Posted in Beliefs report, Board games, Coding project generator, Cooking, Diet, People, Productivity, Weeknotes | 4 Comments

Update for 5/21/2017

Posted on May 23, 2017 by Andy

I’m experimenting with leaving out the Project/Life/Site Update headings, since it all kind of blends together in my mind into a series of life events, and sometimes for narrative purposes I want to mix the more stand-alone life events in with the more project-like life events.

  • Code console – I started working on creating cookiecutter templates for my projects and immediately got sidetracked by examining how other cookiecutters had been set up in case I needed to incorporate their ideas, and I didn’t get far enough to post anything yet, so I’ll keep working on it this week.
  • Beliefs report – I’ll post my first few thoughts this week, and I’ll add to it here and there.
  • AI – AI has been taking up more of my thoughts over the past few months, and in the past few days I’ve felt like listening to discussions of the subject, but I’ve felt a little frustrated that I don’t have a solid mental picture of the field as a whole, an overall context to put specific topics into, so I’m doing what I should’ve done a long time ago and watching videos from some intro AI courses–MIT’s and UBC’s (Mackworth and Poole), UBC because the professors are the authors of the AI textbook I have that seems to fit the way I think about the subject. In addition to overviewing AI, these lectures are giving me a decent sense of what technical classes are like, which feels challenging but motivating. I’ll probably start some articles on the wiki soon to collect links and my thoughts on AI, and I’m even feeling motivated to research grad programs again.
  • Productivity – These AI videos have reminded me that when I go back to school, I’ll have to spend a lot more time on homework than I currently spend on my projects, and I might as well start practicing now. I’ve also been motivated by this profile of the serious-minded and hardworking Robert Mueller (and James Comey, but I mostly care about Mueller). So this week I’m going to try working on projects while I eat dinner rather than watching TV.
  • Socializing
    • Movies – Tuesday night I went with my geek meetup to see Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2. As with most movies I see, I don’t know if it was good, but I liked it, especially their animation of baby Groot, which seemed authentically childlike to me. Also relevant: this gallery of Mandelbulb art, some of which makes an appearance.
    • Board games – Saturday I went over to a coworker’s house with two other guests for his somewhat spontaneous game night. We played a three-hour game of Deus, and despite coming in last I had a good time.
  • Diet – I had my annual wellness screening (mostly a blood test) at work last week, and my lipids came back only slightly bad, while my weight’s been slowly climbing back up, so in the next couple of weeks I want to start a combined low-carb TLC diet that I’ve had in mind for a while.
Posted in AI, Beliefs report, Blood tests, Board games, Coding project generator, Diet, Movies, Productivity, Weeknotes | 1 Comment

Update for 5/14/2017

Posted on May 16, 2017 by Andy

Project updates

  • Media
    • Comics – Thanks to an all-nighter on Sunday, I’ve posted the reading guide. It was supposed to be a quick project, but it lasted a week longer than intended, so I wanted to get it off my plate so I could get back to higher priority projects, even though I already know of improvements I want to make. But it was helpful to write, and hopefully it’ll help other people who want to get into comics. Right now my own comic reading plans consist of reading through the DC crisis events.
    • Books – I finished listening to Hardwired, which had most of the cyberpunk tropes I was looking for but wasn’t the mindless adventure story I was expecting. It was well written and had some depth, so I might read the rest of the series. But for now I’ve gone back to Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter’s Long Earth series, which I’ve missed.
  • Code console – Now that the comic reading guide is posted, I can get back to programming, and my next step is to create the cookiecutter templates I’ll use to create my future projects, so that’ll be this week’s main project.
  • Beliefs report – This week I also want to get back to writing this, an update on my religious beliefs.
  • Photography – I’ve been waiting for the trees to fill out again after winter, and that has happened, so I’m back out taking pictures, but this time I’m taking 3D panoramas with my Cardboard Camera app, such as this (pan with the right and left arrow keys or your finger if you’re viewing in a web browser instead of the app). I like taking these panoramas because I do almost feel like I’m there when I look at them in the viewer, especially with the audio recording that goes along with them (when you view them in the app), but they also have flaws, such as noticeable seams and the ghosts of moving objects, which makes me want to find a way to justify buying a (cheap) 360-degree camera so I can make videos like this one, which you can pan around in with your mouse or finger if you don’t have a VR viewer.
Posted in Beliefs report, Books, Coding project generator, Comics, Photography, Project updates | 2 Comments

Update for 5/7/2017

Posted on May 8, 2017 by Andy

Project updates

  • Media
    • Podcasts – My library checkout of the Hardwired audiobook expired, and I took the opportunity to take a break from it, since I was in more of a mystery mood, and I listened to the podcast S-Town, an investigative journalism piece by Brian Reed from This American Life. It fascinated me from the very beginning, both the people involved and the storytelling, and it ended up being moving and thought provoking too.
    • Books – I’m about halfway done with Hardwired, and I’ve checked it out again and hope to finish it this week, after which I’ll finish Yancey’s Prayer.
    • TV – I’m pushing myself through Arrow and The Flash, and I’ve reached the end of the first season they share, which turned out much more interesting and exciting than I expected. Recently I learned that Supergirl crosses over with them, and that show started with The Flash‘s second season, which I’m about to start, so I’m adding that one to my lineup this week, which is a little annoying because it’ll slow down my catch-up even more, but I did like the Supergirl pilot episode and planned to watch the rest. Then in the season after this one, I’m sure I’ll be adding Legends of Tomorrow.
    • Comics
  • Public coding guide – I’ve been told I didn’t celebrate the completion of this phase of the guide enough, so I’ll say I’m relieved to get all that writing done, but really the phase isn’t complete until I’ve written and linked the code that relates to it, since the code will show how I’m specifically implementing these topics, so I’m working on that part next. I’ll also be relieved once that’s done, but I think the guide will feel so rough and incomplete that I still won’t be ready to celebrate yet, though I might start asking knowledgeable programmers for feedback.
  • Nostalgia box – I feel like my life has settled down enough that I can spend a little more time on this. My next steps are to finish looking through April’s folder, open May’s, and catch up on the new folder contents for the past few months, which will take some serious thought about how to simplify my ideas so I can get each one done in a few hours.
  • Beliefs report – This has been on the back burner, but Sunday I had a conversation with my pastor (probably the first we’ve had) in which he asked if I was in a small group, to which I replied that I used to be but wasn’t now, and he recommended it and told me who to talk to if I wanted to join. I like small groups in principle, but I’m hesitant for a few reasons, and one of them is the doubt and lack of clarity that plague everything religious I think about doing, and it reminded me again of my beliefs report project, so that’s moving back up the priority list.
Posted in Beliefs report, Books, Comics, Nostalgia box, Podcasts, Public coding guide, TV | 6 Comments

Update for 4/30/2017

Posted on May 3, 2017 by Andy

Life updates

  • Chapel – Last week I forgot to mention that at work the week before, our chapel speaker was Kim Phúc, the “napalm girl” from the famous Vietnam War photo, and she was funny and inspiring, especially her story of meeting John Plummer, who claimed to have ordered the attack, though Wikipedia and some Googling tell me there are problems with this story, so I’m curious to see what ends up in her memoir, Fire Road, which comes out later this year.
  • Board games – Saturday was International Tabletop Day, and I celebrated it with my friend Tim by visiting my friendly local game store and buying Isle of Skye, which we had time to set up and (re)learn but not play, so that’ll happen later.

Project updates

  • Public coding guide – I’ll post the configuration and logging sections this week (spoiler: I did), and that’ll finish this phase of guide writing.
  • Code console – After the coding guide, I’ll start making my cookiecutter templates, which will hopefully only take a week or two and not a month.
  • Car – I’ll probably buy a car sometime in the next couple of months, so I’ll start researching the process to remind myself, since it’s been 12 years.
  • Nostalgia box – On Sunday I opened April’s folder, a series of comics called Sillyman that I drew when I was 9. I read about half of the main series, and I’ll get to the rest soon.
  • Comics – This Saturday is Free Comic Book Day yet again, and sometime before then I’m going to try to post to the wiki a guide to reading comics. I’ll post a link on the blog when that’s done.
Posted in Board games, Car, Chapel, Coding project generator, Comics, Life updates, Nostalgia box, Project updates, Public coding guide | 2 Comments

Update for 4/23/2017

Posted on April 25, 2017 by Andy

Project updates

  • Public coding guide – I posted my documentation updates, and the only thing left for this phase of writing is a couple of sections on configuration and logging, after which I’ll make the boilerplate code that corresponds to the things I’ve written so far, and then I’ll get back to my regular programming projects.
  • Nostalgia box – I didn’t get around to opening April’s folder, so I’ll do that this week.
  • TV – I finished Iron Fist, and my feelings about it are mixed. Danny’s changing circumstances were interesting, and I’m curious to see where the story goes next, but Danny himself still seems like an overpowered child to me, though he grew a bit towards the end, while Ward ended up being one of my favorite characters, and the Hand is currently my favorite villain organization, mostly because I’m not familiar with them from the comics, so they’re still a mystery to me.

Life updates

  • Meetups – Saturday I went with some people from my geek meetup to C2E2, a pop culture convention in Chicago (posts from my experience, including a really short video where I can just barely be seen), and while it was draining enough that I didn’t enjoy every minute, I’m glad I went, and I hope to go to more of them. I went to a couple of panels (all the livestream recordings)–an interview with Frank Miller and Stan Lee and a discussion by a couple of big YouTube channels, Comicstorian and ComicsExplained–but mostly I shoved my way through the very dense crowd on the show floor, looking at all the merchandise and cosplay (a gallery showing a small fraction), but I think of this convention as a trial run, and now I know how such events go and how I can be more prepared for them as a somewhat casual fan. Conventions are basically marketing and sales events, so I wanted to participate and buy stuff, but my cautious buying habits and the additional mental burden of dealing with a crowd conflicted with that goal, and I only bought a trade paperback of the Infinity Gauntlet series, but that kicks off my Marvel collection, so I’m considering it good. After the convention we had a delicious dinner at a Cuban restaurant, where we tried beef empanadas, yucca fries, and a soda called malta that tasted like molasses (maybe because it contained molasses).
  • Death – Sunday I learned that the day before, a Wheaton College student was killed in an accident at a track meet, struck by a hammer during the hammer throw. Reading an article about his life reminds me of a sad and sobering thought I always have when I hear about deaths at the college–that having a promising future on earth doesn’t guarantee it will come to pass.
Posted in Comics, Conventions, Death, Life updates, Meetups, Nostalgia box, Project updates, Public coding guide, TV | Leave a comment

Update for 4/16/2017

Posted on April 19, 2017 by Andy

Life updates

  • Life maintenance – Last week was mostly spent catching up on life from the week before–grocery shopping, laundering, library book returning, and napping.
  • Easter – Easter was good.
    • Friday – I had Good Friday off work, as usual, and I picked up my brother from the airport, had we had lunch at a Greek diner and went to our usual Taizé service, during which I caught up on a little sleep. Afterwards were frozen Chinese dinners at home, accompanied by my long and rambling summary of the plot of Arrow to explain the episode we were trying to watch, and then I dropped Michael off at another Good Friday service and spent the time watching streams because I was slightly too tired and lazy to do anything productive.
    • Saturday – In the morning we slept in and took a slightly long walk before kidnapping Jeremy for a very long lunch at Potbelly, after which was a short stop at Target and then dinner accompanied by the rest of our rather eventful Arrow episode. Then it was time to drop Michael off at another long church service, which gave me a chance to finish my taxes, which I did with a bit of help from Michael when he got back.
    • Sunday – Easter morning I was in a good mood, I’m sure helped by having my taxes done but also by the energy of the service and by visiting a church I like after a long absence, and I found the homily unusually moving and helpful. After church we hung out at Starbucks until it was time for lunch with some friends of mine from church, where I continued my tradition of overstuffing myself with food when the food is Indian, made by Indians, and eaten in their home. When we arrived and met the other friends they’d invited, it turned out one of them lives in my apartment building a few doors down from me, so maybe we’ll run into each other again sometime in her last few weeks here. After a fairly wide-ranging lunchtime conversation from which I took the location of an Indian grocery store and some Indian movie recommendations, I drove Michael back to the airport and then had dinner with Tim and finished the movie we’d been watching.
  • Meetups – On Saturday I’m fulfilling my long-held goal of attending a pop culture convention, heading to Chicago for C2E2 with people from my geek meetup.

Project updates

  • Public coding guide – I wrote some more but didn’t post any updates, which I’ll try to do this week.
  • Nostalgia box – Either this week or next week I’ll open April’s folder, probably this week to give ideas from this month’s content a chance to mix creatively with things I see at the convention.
  • Movies – The movie Tim and I finished was Ip Man 3, part of a series about Bruce Lee’s martial arts teacher. This one had plenty of combat, but it was really about his relationship with his wife, and I thought its treatment of that theme was interesting and compelling.
Posted in Holidays, Life maintenance, Life updates, Meetups, Movies, Nostalgia box, People, Project updates, Public coding guide | 1 Comment

Update for 4/9/2017

Posted on April 14, 2017 by Andy

Life updates

  • Work – In the middle of last week my boss pulled me into the rather large project of reorganizing our typesetting file archive, and that took over my life for several days, including Saturday. It was kind of fun, but it throw off other things I was planning to do, such as laundry and taxes, so this week I’m catching up on life, which is why this entry is so late. But at least with all the extra hours I worked, I didn’t have to use up personal time for my medication infusion on Thursday, and I even earned an hour of comp time.
  • Palm Sunday Orchestra – Sunday was our performance, and although I was a little anxious about it for most of the week, by the Saturday morning rehearsal I found I was settling into the music, and although during the performance my lips got about as tired as I expected, making the sustained notes harder and especially the higher notes, overall I played better than the first rehearsal led me to expect, and afterward people told us how much they appreciated having the orchestra play. I found that it did feel like a special occasion, and I liked the arrangements, and I’ve had some of them running through my head since then, so I’m thinking of looking for recordings.
  • Easter – My brother is making his annual Easter visit this weekend, so I’ll try to get the apartment somewhat ready for him, but especially after the life disruption of work last week, I’m being easy on myself and accepting that most of what I’d like to do won’t happen but that it’ll turn out okay anyway.

Project updates

  • Public coding guide – I’m discovering a lack of satisfying guides on some issues and new tools to learn for handling others, so I’m going to have to leave certain sections in a very incomplete state for now, but doing that will let me get on with the more concrete and usable parts of this project, namely the project skeleton templates.
  • Media
    • Books – Juggling two audiobooks has noticeably slowed me down, but I finally finished Watership Down last week, and although I’m not really qualified to judge these things, I’ve heard it described as a modern classic, and it definitely has that feel. Its tone struck a nice balance between gravity and accessibility, the plot seemed very well constructed, and it even carried a sense of (rabbit) mythology mixing with the characters’ present-day adventures. I still don’t know if it’s a kids’ book, but for anyone at least slightly older I absolutely recommend it.
    • Movies – I watched Snowpiercer with my friend Tim, split up over a couple of weeks, and it was strange and rather implausible but interesting, one of a couple of dystopian SF films about class warfare I’ve wanted to see after watching others like In Time and Aeon Flux, and the next on that list is High-Rise. I’m not sure why these movies appeal to me, other than their sometimes shiny aesthetic, but they tend to stick in my mind.
Posted in Books, French horn, Holidays, Life updates, Movies, Project updates, Public coding guide, Work | 1 Comment

Update for 4/2/2017

Posted on April 5, 2017 by Andy

Life updates

Life events seemed to dominate last week, so I’ll start with them.

  • Car – I spent a worried Monday and Tuesday with my car left at the mechanic to assess a rusted, leaky brake line, wondering if I’d be buying a new car that week and fretting how to arrange all the necessary logistics. But he fixed it affordably, and so although my car does seem to be on its way out, at least now I have more of a choice of when that happens, which may be in a few weeks. If I do replace it this year, I’ll probably delay moving another year to give my finances some time to recover.
  • AI meetup – Tuesday night, since I had my car back, I attended the first meeting of a new meetup I joined for discussing AI and related topics. It was an interesting group, I learned a few things, and I’ll probably keep attending.
  • Palm Sunday Orchestra – At Christmas my church assembles an Advent Orchestra to play on one Sunday near Christmas, and because of my vacation schedule I’ve rarely been able to play, so when they decided to do the same thing for Palm Sunday, I joined (on my other instrument besides the piano, the French horn). Our first rehearsal was Thursday, and although I played better than I expected after two or three years of not even touching it, I played annoyingly worse than if I were playing regularly, so I’ll definitely be practicing between rehearsals. To make the rehearsal more adventurous, my first valve string (which connects the key to the rotary valve to let air through the pipe to change the notes) decided to break fairly early on, so I had to become mechanical and find a workaround, which I did with the help of our trumpeter’s screwdriver, and then on the weekend made a trip to Sam Ash to pick up some new string.

Project updates

  • Public coding guide – I’m still working on the documentation section, but this week I’m posting each subsection as I finish it, and hopefully next week (or the week after, since this one will be busy) I can move on to the last couple of sections in this phase.
  • Code console – During my coding guide research, I found a well-supported project called cookiecutter that lets you create programming project skeletons using templates, which is exactly what my code console was going to do, so I immediately dropped my own project in favor of creating cookiecutter templates, which doesn’t eliminate the work of learning best practices and deciding on code conventions, but it does take care of the actual creation of projects.
  • Knowledge representation – In my controlled language studies I’m starting with Attempto Controlled English. I’ve been reading the reference material, and once that’s done, I’m thinking of translating the examples from Huddleston and Pullum’s Student’s Introduction to English Grammar so I get a better idea of what you can and can’t say with Attempto.
  • Taxes – I keep accidentally putting these off, but I made myself start on them Saturday night.
  • Beliefs report – I don’t think I worked on this last week, but it’s still a current project, even if I only work on it occasionally for now, though I’ll try to finish my thoughts on prayer soon.
  • Games – As an experiment in writing spontaneously on the wiki, I started an article for collecting video and board games about programming I’ve run across. Then I realized there are already very good lists like that on the Internet, so I linked to some, but for now I’m keeping the article because I like adding things to it and I think it has one or two games that aren’t on the others.
  • Nostalgia box – This is sort of on hold until my other projects settle down, but the more time wears on, the more important the simplification aspect of this project becomes–trimming down my initial idea for the month’s project into something I can finish quickly. Overly ambitious project ideas are a continual problem for me, so I expect that learning this skill will help me with all my other projects.
Posted in Beliefs report, Board games, Car, Coding project generator, French horn, Knowledge representation, Life updates, Meetups, Nostalgia box, Project updates, Public coding guide, Taxes, Video games | 3 Comments

Update for 3/26/2017

Posted on March 27, 2017 by Andy

Project updates

  • Knowledge representation – I installed software for the three controlled languages I want to look at, plus Inform 7 because I’m curious how well an interactive fiction engine can be adapted to general KR, and I’ll probably explore some logic programming too, since it’s fundamental to most forms of KR. This week I’ll probably read some reference docs but mostly take a break to work on the code console.
  • Code console – For the coding guide I collected a lot of the links I’d found for documentation, and I’ll finish that section this week, along with relevant code in the console project, and work on the last section for this phase of the guide, configuration. After that I can work on the code console’s main functionality, creating a new project based on templates.
  • Beliefs report – As a context for thinking about my future religious activities, I’ve been starting to round up my current beliefs into an essay, an idea that comes to mind occasionally in church when I’m confronted with other people’s spirituality or exhortations about my own (in the form of sermons rather than personal advice). Last week a friend helped out by asking what I believe about prayer, so I’ve been working on my reply, and some version of that will probably end up in the essay.
  • Media
    • Books – I finished The Divine Conspiracy–finally, after many years of meaning to and starting and restarting it–and although I’d quibble with some of the details, I like its overall vision, especially its focus on eternity and its outline of a discipleship program. Since we’re still in Lent and I need more spiritual reading material, I would reread it, but I see it as more of a signpost than a destination, and I’d rather read something with more detail on one of its themes. Right now my theme seems to be prayer, so I’m moving on to Philip Yancey’s Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference?, which addresses some of my core issues.
    • TV – I’ve progressed in Iron Fist through episode 6, and I’m happy to report it does get better. I was able to relax into it by the fourth episode, and even Ward, my least favorite character, is growing on me.

Life updates

  • Car – This problem has been developing gradually for a while, but Sunday morning my brake pedal was consistently sinking to the floor when I pressed it, so I’m making an emergency trip to the mechanic Monday morning. My anxiety level was up Sunday morning, since I wasn’t sure how safe I’d be driving it even the minimum I needed, or how easy it would be to make my emergency arrangements, or how long the repair would take, so I made a worry list, got through the first couple of items, and felt better.
Posted in Books, Car, Coding project generator, Knowledge representation, Life updates, Project updates, Spirituality, Theology, TV | 3 Comments