Update for 8/21/2016

Posted on August 22, 2016 by Andy

Project updates

  • Life maintenance
    • Diet – After six-and-a-half long weeks, I’ve completed my gluten-free experiment, and with no improvement in my ulcerative colitis symptoms, I’ve concluded that gluten is not the problem, unless I’m super sensitive to microscopic contamination from restaurants, factories, utensils, and so on, which seems to me a flaw in the use of elimination diets for diagnosing things like gluten intolerance. So now I have only one diet running, the TLC diet, and it’s a relief to be able to eat mostly normally again and not worry about being a burden on people, though Heather and Jeremy were kind enough to accommodate me last week at the Star Wars marathon without feeling burdened; and if gluten had turned out to be the problem, as it is for many people, I would’ve worked harder to find ways to live with the diet in the future and not complain so much. And I would like to add that because of this experiment and against all my expectations, I have found a brand and variety of ice cream that can compete with Blue Bell, and it’s one of the few gluten-free foods I’m keeping in my diet–fat-free creamy vanilla by Breyers, which needs no toppings and should be savored in thin slices. Cooking experiments: for the ice cream (no toppings needed, but they’re still allowed!), this chocolate sauce with half-and-half for the heavy cream and with unsweetened cocoa and Smart Balance spread for the baking chocolate, which all worked really well.
    • Exercise – Saturday morning, for the first time in about eight years, I used the weight machines at the gym, with the goal of figuring out the details of my workout, and my muscles are still sore. Now I just need to decide on a schedule (twice a week?) and settle on a workout logging app, and I can get my probably-doomed (since I’m on a calorie deficit) weight training program moving. Meanwhile, to my surprise, my daily walks are gradually speeding up as I get used to the rates I set on my metronome app.
    • Daily routine – Last week one of my main projects was to try to get to bed on time, which ideally is 9:00; and as usual when I really try, I succeeded at the beginning of the week and then pushed my bedtime back further and further as the week wore on; but I’ll try it again this week and maybe learn a little more about what it’ll take to become consistent. Time on social media still eats too much into time for more important things, so I’m gradually cutting it down to the sites I really care about that don’t completely suck me in, which basically leaves me with Twitter.
  • Math relearning – With a more relaxed diet and a renewed attention to my use of free time, I’ve managed to carve out more time to spend on this project; and so to continue the theme of ending long delays, after years of thinking it would happen one day, I’ve finally created a project on GitHub, a place for people to share computer programs they’re writing, and my GitHub project is the programming part of my math relearning project, a program I’m calling Math Student Simulator. So far I’ve posted a brief explanation of the project and one of the scripts I’ll use to manage my code, which means I now have code out in public for other programmers to verbally rip apart like a pack of wolves, so … have at it, I guess! I’ve achieved enough momentum on this project that I’m able to think about it at times when I’m not physically at a computer, which is a state I’ve been hoping to reach, and it makes me think my progress will accelerate a bit. This week one of my goals is to post on the wiki a longer explanation of the programming aspect of my math relearning for people who want to understand why I’m doing it.
  • Movies – I’m watching more of these than usual right now, and the latest was Jason Bourne on Sunday with Tim. It was interesting, and I found I could follow its plot better than I normally can in a political thriller, and I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting better at paying attention or because it was dumbed down to my level.
  • Dusk – I’ll leave you with these. I went back to the park from two weeks ago and still didn’t get good pictures, but I did get some from the lake in another area of forest preserve #2.

    A different area of forest preserve 2.

    A photo posted by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum) on

    The lake at forest preserve 2, dusk deepening.

    A photo posted by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum) on

Posted in Cooking, Daily routine, Diet, Dusk, Exercise, Math relearning, Movies, Programming, Project updates, Sleep | 2 Comments

Update for 8/14/2016

Posted on August 15, 2016 by Andy

Project updates

  • Life maintenance
    • Diet – I finished my dairy-free experiment, and with no change in my digestive symptoms, I’m considering dairy safe. This Wednesday my gluten-free experiment will finally be over, and if I decide gluten’s safe, I’m celebrating with oatmeal, real bread, and a wrap from Chick-fil-A. Then the next step on my ulcerative colitis will be to talk to my gastroenterologist about switching from Humira to Remicade, but I want to know if my Humira is the cause of my stubborn lipids, so I’ll probably wait on that conversation till I test my blood at home at the end of September after being on the TLC diet for two months, which will tell me if the TLC diet helps even with Humira in the way. Last week’s cooking experiment: dairy-free chicken tikka masala, with the heavy cream replaced by rice milk and butter substitute and the yogurt replaced by pureed tofu, and it all worked fine, I’m sure mostly because it’s all covered up by 1/3 cup of spices.
    • Exercise – Wednesday I read about a study that said for an adequate reduction in certain major health risks, we should really be getting something like 90 minutes of exercise a day instead of the WHO’s recommended 30. I’m already doing 30, and I refuse to steal an extra hour per day from my substantive projects, so I’m thinking of getting a pedal exerciser to use at my desk at home in order to work and exercise at the same time. Or maybe I’ll wait on more research. In other news, I’ve learned 123 beats per minute is a good minimum walking pace for me, and about 133 is my minimum pace on the stationary bike.
    • Daily routine – My mornings still feel iffy but basically okay, so now I need to concentrate on my evenings. I’m thinking of making sleep this week’s main project: What would it take to get myself to sleep by 9 every night, and what would that do to me?
  • Math relearning – I’m still working on the infrastructure of my program rather than programming the actual math, but I got a few steps closer to posting something, mostly by sacrificing sleep.
  • Media
    • Books – Jeremy started reading Accelerando, one of my favorite books, and he didn’t like some of Stross’s predictions, so he recommended Beggars in Spain to me, and being a newly minted sucker for trans- and post-humanist fiction, I found it and started listening, and it’s been very interesting so far, with the bombastic action that’s usual in my SF reading refreshingly replaced by philosophical discussion.
    • Movies
      • V for Vendetta – To me pizza and movies go together, so Friday night I wanted something to watch with my pizza, and I settled on this one, which I hadn’t seen, so I’ve been watching it over the past few days, and I was surprised to find that I like it. I expected a character rather mindlessly violent like the Punisher, but what I got was a cultured and gentlemanly British Deadpool/Tyler Durden.
      • Star Wars – On Sunday Tim and I went over to Heather and Jeremy’s place for our long-awaited marathon of the original, unedited Star Wars trilogy, half of the point of which was to introduce Jeremy’s 9-year-old son to the series, though he already knew some of the plot from playing Lego Star Wars. It had been about two decades since I’d seen any of the original movies, and my memory for stories is terrible, so it was like introducing me to them too, and it was fascinating to watch the isolated scenes in my head get filled in with details and woven into coherent narratives.
Posted in Books, Cooking, Daily routine, Diet, Exercise, General, Math relearning, Movies, Project updates | 2 Comments

Update for 8/7/2016

Posted on August 9, 2016 by Andy

Project updates

  • Life maintenance – My schedule still feels cramped from this stuff, but I felt more hopeful last week than the week before.
    • Diet – The last day of the dairy-free experiment is Tuesday (technically today, but pretend I posted this two days ago), and the next Tuesday is the last for the gluten-free one. Cooking: Gluten-free, dairy-free, low-sugar brownies (based on this), which were also low carb because I tend to eat slightly too much of carbs and not quite enough fat and protein, so I used almond flour instead of the other gluten-free flour I bought. If I have to plan my desserts carefully, I might as well make them do work for me. A diet is like a game, balancing multiple factors to reach a goal, and part of my hopefulness last week was that after bumping up a bit, my weight decreased again to slightly lower than the previous week, which makes me feel like all this effort isn’t completely futile.
    • Exercise – I continued to exercise every day last week, walking on a nice tree-lined path nearby, but I’ve noticed that by the end of the day, the memory of those walks feels dreamlike, I think because it’s early in the morning, the setting looks like something from a movie, I’m kind of zoned out listening to whatever’s playing in my earphones, and the other people on the trail pass by without interaction, like ghosts. On Saturday I finally went to the gym to test the idea of getting my cardio by walking there and back and using the exercise bike, which worked well, especially setting my pace with the RockMyRun app, which plays curated playlists of music at whatever tempo you select, though it uses too much data for me, so for now I’ll just use my metronome app. I also started exploring workout log apps.
    • Daily routine – My morning schedule has settled down enough that I can make it to work consistently on time again, and much of it was because I didn’t have to wash the dishes or make my lunch in the mornings because I stayed on top of the dishwashing better and spent some time making several lunches at once, so I’ll try to continue that pattern.
  • Math relearning – I made a decent amount of progress on this last week, but it was mostly reading, so it didn’t feel like much. I did, however, write some comments about the project that I’ll post on the wiki this week. I think I can also post something on GitHub this week finally. And on Friday I had dinner with Jeremy, and our conversation about the book he recently read, In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations that Changed the World, motivated me to keep moving on this project.
  • Dusk – After my dinner with Jeremy, I took a spontaneous side trip to a park I’d been wanting to explore, and I took a few pictures to test out different viewing spots and angles, but I didn’t find the sky very inspiring that night, so I didn’t posted them, but maybe some other night I’ll take pictures there that will find their way online. On this visit I was reminded that walking down wooded trails in semi-darkness is a little scary, since I didn’t know what random criminal might be lurking, but I felt reassured by the fact that I was in the middle of a residential area and had seen a police car nearby.
  • Media – I decided to succumb to the Stranger Things hype, and I ended up binge watching the whole thing over the weekend. It was like the movie Super 8 if Spielberg had collaborated with Guillermo del Toro instead of J J Abrams. I was especially impressed with Millie Bobby Brown and might look for more of her work. Speaking of movies, a few have come out that interest me–Star Trek Beyond, Jason Bourne, and Suicide Squad–so on top of our Star Wars marathon hopefully sometime this month, I’ve been making plans with Jeremy and Tim to watch those, which is nice because I’ve been feeling an unusual itch lately to watch something in a theater.

Life updates

  • Apartment – As an addendum to last week’s story about my lease panic, I forgot to mention that I took the opportunity to observe my coping mechanisms, and the steps that helped me were (1) taking action ASAP by calling the apartment office, (2) writing a list of my worries, (3) making preliminary plans for worst case scenarios, (4) joking about the situation in a conversation with Jeremy, and (5) distracting myself with lunch.
Posted in Apartment, Cooking, Daily routine, Diet, Dusk, Exercise, Life maintenance, Life updates, Math relearning, Movies, Project updates, TV | 4 Comments

Update for 7/31/2016

Posted on August 1, 2016 by Andy

Project updates

  • Life maintenance – One of my greatest fears is that the activity of managing my life will consume so much time that it crowds out my substantive activities–the projects I actually care about–and my life will become a container that contains nothing. In the past couple of weeks this fear has been distressingly close to being realized, and it has layered a film of sadness over my days, which tells me the people who say you’ll be happier if you make (physically) healthy choices are lying.
    • Diet – 16 more days of my gluten-free experiment, and to distract myself from that countdown, this week I’m starting a 10-day dairy-free experiment (which required another long grocery store visit), both of which are to see if they affect my ulcerative colitis, so if my symptoms clear up while I’m off both dairy and gluten and come back when I start on dairy again, then I’ll take it as a clue that dairy is a problem. Meanwhile I’m attempting the rather complicated TLC diet till at least around September 25 to see if I can budge my lipids and maybe lose a final few pounds before I try to gain the right kind of weight, though the lipids might be helped by going off Humira, which I expect to do once these diet experiments are over, since it’s not really helping me anyway. I might feel happier about all this time spent in life maintenance if I felt I was making progress, but the scale says I’ve actually gained a pound in the past week (and another in the past day) rather than losing one, and even though I know weight fluctuates from day to day, it’s still a little depressing and certainly not encouraging when for once in my life I’ve been doing this stuff right. But even if I gain weight the whole time I’m on this diet, I know I can go back to low-carb and probably lose it again.
    • Exercise – I’ve been walking every morning, which I admit is kind of nice, and I’ve been using the time to sort of have devotions. Last week to give myself more options, especially on rainy days, and to maybe start weight training again, I rejoined the gym I went to several years ago. I haven’t used it yet because I’m trying to stabilize my morning schedule before I complicate it with a longer workout, and I haven’t really settled on the workout I want to do or how I want to track it. Plus I’m not sure it makes sense to try to build muscle while cutting calories, so I have stuff to learn and plan.
    • Daily routine – One thing has been a success, my idea of moving activities to the morning to do them consistently, so maybe I’ll move everything there and wake up at 2:30 every morning. Not really, I hope, since morning is the time I do things to forget about them, since that’s what happens; and so if I moved everything, I’d do the activities I care about, but they’d slip out of my mind and my life would end up feeling pointless, though maybe I’ll try it anyway just to see what it’s like. And in spite of my sadness and worry about fitting everything in, I know there are some things I can do to tighten up my time management, such as assembling a whole week’s worth of lunches at once, so I’ll be trying some of those ideas. I’m sure getting enough sleep would help a lot, such as by letting me feel alert enough on the weekends to not waste them on mindless web surfing, general sluggishness, and catch-up sleep.
  • Math relearning – I got a miniscule amount done on my programming. Maybe I can do more this week.
  • Fringe theories – One thing I have been able to do is sample a bunch of skeptical podcasts, since I can listen while I do other things. For example, here’s an interesting interview with a skeptic who went on a conspiracy cruise. I’ll probably add these podcasts to my Fringe Theory page at some point, if I can find where my spare minutes are buried.

Life updates

  • Work – My employer worked out the issue that was keeping my coworker and I from speaking at the conference, but today (Monday) I found out they’d found another speaker in the meantime. It’s a relief, though, because right now my life is crammed full of too much to think about.
  • Apartment – A few weeks ago I realized my apartment managers hadn’t asked me if I was renewing my lease at the end of July, and last week in a small panic I realized I still hadn’t heard from them, so I called them on Wednesday and Thursday trying to get in touch with the lease renewal person, who was out of the office both days. Finally Friday morning she called me back, and we got it sorted out. So that added some unwelcome drama to my week, but at least it’s over now and I didn’t have to do anything extreme like finding a new home in two days, though I did locate an available apartment nearby that I think would’ve worked well.
  • Socializing – Not everything good is being crowded out of my life. I hung out with Jeremy Wednesday night and Tim Sunday night. Sometimes it’s nice to abandon responsibility to spend a few hours with a friend.
Posted in Apartment, Daily routine, Diet, Exercise, Fringe theories, Life maintenance, Life updates, Math relearning, People, Podcasts, Project updates, Work | 6 Comments

Update for 7/24/2016

Posted on July 25, 2016 by Andy

Project updates

  • Math relearning – I started the week learning about literate programming just in case I wanted to succumb to the temptation to overdo things by using it, but by Thursday my project time had been taken over by diet planning, so I’m giving myself yet another week on math before I officially break for other projects.
  • Diet – I had my blood test for lipids on Monday morning and got the results back in the evening, and the new verdict (drumroll): A low-carb, high-fat diet is (maybe) still bad for my health, with total cholesterol about the same, LDL slightly better but still bad, and triglycerides significantly worse than its earlier bad amount, though HDL was slightly better than its earlier good amount, but my HDL has been fine since way before I tried a LCHF diet. My doctor thinks the problem might be a side effect of my medications, which with Humira is possible (hypercholesterolemia common, hypertriglyceridemia rare, though hyperlipidemia is apparently common, and that covers both), and he wants me to continue the LCHF diet. But I’m a selective rebel, and I have something else in mind to try–the TLC diet (PDF) I mentioned a while back, which is a low-fat diet recommended by the government, so last week I gave LCHF its last hurrah while I planned my new diet (which included three hours of shopping, half of which I blame on my annoying gluten-free experiment), which I will track with the impressive MyNetDiary app and evaluate in 9 weeks with another lipids test using my home kit, which on my first trial gave numbers that were in the ballpark of the lab’s test but somewhat worse.
  • Ulcerative colitis – 3 1/2 weeks left for my gluten-free experiment, then 1 1/2 weeks for a dairy-free experiment; and if both of those fail, as I mightily hope, I’ll talk to my gastroenterologist about Remicade. Yes, potentially expensive medical treatments that require visiting an office for two hours every two months sound better to me than cutting large categories of food out of my diet.
  • Daily routine – On Wednesday I finally took the plunge and moved my exercise and devotions/meditation to the mornings so they’d happen more consistently and so my evenings would be simpler and easier to manage, so now my next scheduling problem to tackle is getting more sleep. The last straw that got me to switch my routine was my new TLC diet, which includes regular, moderate exercise, and I really want to give this diet a fair shot, which incidentally feels more possible for me now than it ever would have before, partly thanks to my time on the LCHF diet, I have to admit. I even tried jogging a couple of days, but it was miserable, so I’ve gone back to walking, and I’m looking into getting a bike, which I never thought I’d do.
  • Spirituality – My morning routine now includes half an hour of meditation, which will be following the exercises in The Mind Illuminated, though I view this meditation as mental training rather than spiritual development, so I’m thinking of adding some actual devotional time somewhere in my schedule, probably centering on lectio divina. I finished listening to The Pursuit of God during my walks, and it was good, but the reader’s tone of voice was a little stern, and I felt like I was being scolded the whole time.
  • Fringe theories – I’ve been binge listening to skeptical podcasts, specifically Exposing PseudoAstronomy and QuackCast, the latter of which was motivated by my frustration while reading the comments on an article that evaluated the GAPS diet, which some people use as a treatment for ulcerative colitis (but I won’t).
  • Books – I’ve been impulse buying semi-pricey academic ebooks lately, and I only feel slightly bad about it because these topics are so important to me. Last week it was Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem, and I’m eyeing a few others on related cognitive topics.

Life updates

  • Work – The interesting opportunity from last week was that I got a surprise email inviting me to speak about ebook production at a publishing conference. It didn’t end up working out, but I was pleased and grateful to be invited, and it gave me a little more insight into the kinds of circumstances that can lead to opportunities like that: relationships you’ve built with people who are doing important work in your field, especially if the work you’re involved with is also of interest to them. But I like authenticity, so I think it’s important to build these relationships for their own sake and not just for self-serving purposes, though I think there will be some degree of self-interest mixed in with any relationship.
  • Worship team – Sunday our new worship minister caught me after church to ask if I’d be open to switching to his team to balance out the leadership between the teams better, to which I said yes, so that might be happening.
Posted in Blood tests, Books, Daily routine, Diet, Exercise, Fringe theories, Health, Life updates, Math relearning, Programming, Project updates, Spirituality, Work, Worship performing | 2 Comments

Update for 7/17/2016

Posted on July 18, 2016 by Andy

Project updates

  • Math relearning – I spent most of last week’s time on this project learning Git, a version control system, which helps you keep track of the changes you make to your files, so I can post my code on GitHub, which is a code sharing site that uses it. I have a little more of that to learn, and then I can decide on my basic folder and file structure and start on the actual programming. I’m going to extend this phase of the project to this week so I can get all that out of the way.
  • Wiki – My mind has been doing the thing where it squirms to get out of the cage of whatever I’ve been working on for an extended period, and this time that mostly looks like collecting a bunch topics to start wiki articles about, so after this phase of my math project, I’ll probably try posting something on a few of those. My vision for the site is to collect my thoughts and other products on a large variety of topics, so it would be nice to actually see more of that happen, especially since there are several topics that are of central concern to me that I’ve barely addressed on the site.
  • Diet – At long last, my cholesterol blood test is this Monday. I’ve told my boss I’m coming in late because I’ll need some extra time in the morning to run my home blood test for comparison, which will have the side benefit of giving me a clue about my results right away. Whatever the outcome, I’m going to keep limiting sugar and using substitutes, so last week bought sucralose (cheap) and xylitol (expensive) and mixed the remnants of my other substitutes together. Cooking experiments: my usual muffins, baked for 20 minutes and with sugar-free blueberry preserves smoothly mixed into half of them, which turned out pretty well; and grilling chicken, asparagus, and squash on my George Foreman grill, which I’ve had for years and used about once.
  • Ulcerative colitis – Okay, I’ve decided to try the gluten-free thing, which really I’ve been doing for at least the past couple of weeks, so I’ll go for another month to see if it clears up my symptoms. If it doesn’t, I’ll try going off dairy for a week because of this old-ish study, though it’s the only place I’ve seen milk connected with UC.
  • Daily routine – I didn’t try moving my devotions and exercise to the mornings last week because I want to see how I can organize my evenings better using ATracker, an easy time tracking app I started using last week, which is already giving me a better idea of where my time is disappearing to. I did managed to exercise some, which for now will consist of walks, push-ups, and planks (as a replacement for sit-ups, which I’ve never liked).
  • Spirituality – Read a little more of Culadasa and Merton and listened to a little of The Pursuit of God. I tried a meditative devotion early in the week but ended up sleeping through most of it, which really I was expecting, and I was okay with it because Richard Foster is, but of course I don’t want to make sleep a regular feature of my devotions/meditation, so maybe that’ll be motivation to regulate my sleep better. I’ve wanted to experiment with aromatherapy for a while, and this meditation stuff seems like a good excuse, so this weekend while I was buying xylitol at the Vitamin Shoppe, I looked around the aromatherapy section and decided to base my meditation combination on patchouli, because it smells exotic but not too weird and I don’t already associate it with other things, though I want to do more research before I buy anything.
  • Anime – I watched an episode of Tamako Market, which was funnier than I expected.
  • Video games – I haven’t played anything in a few weeks, but the augmented reality aspect of Pokémon Go intrigued me, so this weekend I started that, though I probably won’t play it much, since Pokémon is the kind of game that has never interested me.

Life updates

  • Work – An interesting opportunity came up at work on Friday, but I don’t think I should say more about it here until things are more certain.
  • Worship team – My team played this weekend, and for the first time in a few months we had a full team, thanks to some kind substitutes. Having all the instruments really makes a difference.
Posted in Anime, Aromatherapy, Blood tests, Cooking, Daily routine, Diet, Exercise, Health, Life updates, Math relearning, Programming, Project updates, Sleep, Spirituality, Video games, Worship performing | 2 Comments

Update for 7/10/2016

Posted on July 11, 2016 by Andy

It’s strange to me that I find so much to write every time when I normally start out thinking it was a quiet, simple week.

Project updates

  • Math relearning – This week I’ll start on my programming approach to this project, and I am really looking forward to it, since it’s a method of learning I’ve had in mind for ages but haven’t actually tried. I’ll be posting the code on GitHub, which is another first for me, both using GitHub (or Git at all, since I’ve always used Subversion) and publicly posting any significant amount of my code. So that’s pleasantly scary.
  • Ulcerative colitis – After going back on all my medications and intensifying them somewhat last week, I’ve finally gotten my symptoms back to a calmer level. I might start a 6-week gluten-free experiment next week after my low-carb experiment is over, which in some ways would only be slightly difficult because I’m practically gluten free now, but it would take an extra level of vigilance that would need more preparation and determination.
  • Diet – One week till my blood test, and my cholesterol self-test kit should arrive in the mail this week, in time for me to compare the results. Cooking experiments: following this chocolate sauce recipe exactly this time, which turned out well; and eating chicken taco salads every day, which was fine, except that I think I used too much sour cream on one I made myself, because the salsa-and-sour-cream dressing ended up bland yet sweet in a sickening way, so I think 1 tablespoon is better than 2, and the salad green mixes I normally buy have some type of bitter lettuce that’s really out of place.
  • Daily routine – My bedtimes weren’t really better than they have been, but other than a couple of cases I don’t really know why because I wasn’t tracking my time, which I’m planning to do this week with the ATracker app. I’m warming up to the idea of moving my devotions and exercise to the morning to make sure they happen, so I might try that this week, which would mean getting up an hour earlier, but at this point in my life I think I could do it. I’ve even thought about joining a gym again, but I expect that would complicate my mornings more than I want, so if I get into more than just walking, I’ll start with simple exercises at home.
  • Spirituality – Last week in order to learn more focus and lift the tone of my thoughts, I started exploring meditation again, more seriously than I have in the past, and I’ve been taking a two-pronged approach, looking into both Christian and Buddhist versions. For Christian meditation I’ve listened to the audiobooks of Richard Foster’s Sanctuary of the Heart and the shorter classic works he recommends that I could find on LibriVox, The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence and A Short and Easy Method of Prayer by Madame Guyon; and for Buddhist meditation I’ve (barely) started reading Culadasa’s The Mind Illuminated, which synthesizes various Buddhist traditions with neuroscience to create a very organized and well-presented method for Westerners. I think some Buddhist techniques can be separated from their religious elements and used by Christians, so that’s one of the main goals of this project, and I’m reading Zen and the Birds of Appetite by Thomas Merton, a Catholic monk with an appreciation for Buddhism, to see how he integrated them. I’ve been in info-gathering mode so far, so I haven’t done any actual meditation in the past week, but I’ll probably start that this week. I’ve also started writing an article for the wiki about how to choose a spiritual discipline, based on Adele Calhoun’s Spiritual Disciplines Handbook, but I don’t really have enough to post yet.
  • TV
    • Catch-up – I’m catching up on two families of shows right now, Doctor Who and Arrow, and I’ve reached milestones in both recently: the end of the 10th Doctor a couple of weeks ago and the end of Arrow season 2 last week, so this week I’m starting the 11th Doctor and season 1 of The Flash, an Arrow spinoff, both of which I’ve been looking forward to.
    • Anime – About a week ago I ran across some Japanese pixel art animations, and they’ve put me in the mood for anime again, specifically slice-of-life with nice everyday scenery (along the lines of this piece). I found a few possibilities and ended up watching an episode of Dagashi Kashi, which I liked, though what I really want to see is The Garden of Words, so hopefully that’ll become available someday.
  • Fringe theories – In spite of my intention to turn my mind in a more positive direction, I’m not done with conspiracy theories and pseudoscience yet, so I did some more listening last week, mostly to the Exposing Pseudoastronomy podcast, and I got my Conspiracy Encyclopedia in the mail, which I’ll be reading completely as soon as I’ve put the entries in chronological order. I also found some academic lectures on conspiracy theories, which surprised me because I didn’t think academics would pay so much attention to them, and I suspect these lectures will shape the way I approach the topic. I’ve started a fringe theory page on the wiki, mostly to collect links at this point.
  • Nostalgia – I’ve been on an online ordering binge lately, and on a whim I decided to include a nostalgia purchase I’ve had in mind, a View-Master, along with a set of reels I remember having, Sesame Street Visits the Farm. They came in the mail last week, and nostalgia did indeed occur, and it put me in the mood to order other things from my childhood, so I’ll probably do some of that soon, and maybe it’ll motivate me to finally finish my nostalgia box.

Life updates

  • Socializing – Independence Day I didn’t go to fireworks because my friend Tim that I usually see them with didn’t want to stay up late and I didn’t feel like dealing with the crowd on my own, so instead I played games at Jeremy’s place, where I ended up seeing some fireworks anyway. Then Thursday night I went back to his place to play more games.
  • Worship team – I substituted for another team’s pianist again this weekend, and it was one of those sets that required some extra practice and only really came together at the last minute for me, but people told me they appreciated my playing, so it worked out and was worth the extra effort.
  • Shootings – By now probably everyone knows that shootings are a regular occurrence in the US, but last week felt like an especially tough one because two national stories about shootings of black people by police were followed by shootings of police at an otherwise peaceful protest of the earlier shootings, plus other shootings around the country, and all of it followed another mass shooting a couple of weeks ago where 50 people in Orlando were killed. To be honest I usually refrain from commenting on social issues because they’re so complicated and I worry about saying the wrong thing, but the intensity of recent events makes me feel the need to say something, and the main things I want to say are that, yes, black lives do matter, and LGBT lives matter, and I think that whatever the solutions are, they won’t be simple or easy, but one thing that gives me hope is my sense that the US is a place with many creative, compassionate, courageous people who won’t give up until we’ve resolved our society’s problems.
Posted in Anime, Art, Blood tests, Board games, Conspiracy theories, Cooking, Current events, Daily routine, Diet, Doctor Who, Health, Life updates, Math relearning, People, Project updates, Spirituality, Worship performing | 2 Comments

Update for 7/3/2016

Posted on July 4, 2016 by Andy

Happy Independence Day to those of you who are Americans.

Project updates

  • Math relearning – I’ve added the Grade 1 article, and as I explain there, I’ve decided to try a different approach to my notetaking, writing my notes in the form of a program that tries to mimic the way a person does math at each grade level. I’ll also start another part of the project, assembling a table of methods for accomplishing various math operations in various programs and programming languages. But this week will be a break.
  • Diet – Two weeks till my blood test, and as soon as I find my Amazon gift card, I’ll be ordering a CardioChek Cholesterol Analyzer to get a rough count of my lipids on my own later as I (hopefully) experiment with different diets. Speaking of different diets, it continues to annoy me when I read food blogs and see them contradict each other with conviction about what constitutes a healthy diet, and this leads me to another project idea, a table of foods that are allowed and forbidden in each diet, so maybe one of these weeks I’ll squeeze that in. Last week’s cooking: muffins, as usual, which were okay, but next time I’ll dump in a whole cup of Swerve, mix in 3 tablespoons of preserves, and bake them for 20 minutes instead of 25; chicken tikka masala, which I put off making until I decided to forget about grinding up the cauliflower for “rice” and just cook it in chunk form with the chicken; and chicken taco salad, which is part of my new experiment to basically eat the same thing every day, since I was pretty much doing that anyway and it lets me think less about food.
  • Ulcerative colitis – My symptoms have been getting worse as I’ve removed meds, so I’m adding them back, and at some point I’ll talk about it again with my doctor, but I may have another experiment to do first. People often give me dietary advice for my UC, even though scientists think diet is irrelevant to the condition, and the latest advice came from one of my long-time online friends in the form of a documentary she recommended, What’s with Wheat?, which I found depressing because cooking all my own food, as they recommend, would take up more time and would make many social situations more difficult. My gastroenterologist tells me to eat gluten, and I’m suspicious of the anti-wheat crowd, but who knows, maybe there is a connection, so I’m considering giving it a try, which would mean 6 weeks without gluten. The things I endure for science.
  • Daily routine – I had moderate success with the idea of working from bed just before bedtime, meaning that I at least got ready for bed on time, even if I stayed up late anyway, and I’m going to keep taking that approach, hopefully pushing my actual sleep time earlier. I still didn’t do my walks or devotions much last week, and I’m still sort of hoping I can learn to get everything in each day rather than choosing between things, and the problem is surely that I waste too much time, so that’s what I want to focus on, and I’m wondering if part of the solution is mindfulness meditation, a practice I bob into from time to time when I take seriously my need for more focus. I was tempted to try to kill my enjoyment of life again, since enjoyment for me translates into a complete lack of discipline and sleep, but depression isn’t as fun when you know it’s something to avoid, and I can’t sustain it anyway, so I think part of the solution is to enjoy life without equating it with absolute freedom, and I think meditation could help. I bought The Mind Illuminated to help me, and I’ll probably make that my main reading this week.
  • Devotions – Saturday night I felt that my mind had been immersed in darkness too long–too many conspiracy theories and not enough spiritual contemplation–and I decided I needed to reverse or at least even the mix, so my main project this week is to find practices and sources of inspiration that will benefit me without raising too many of my doubts and objections.
  • Board games – A couple of weeks ago I ordered some more supplies for my board game box, some blank dice, dice stickers, and cloth bags (small, medium, and large). I used the dice to make some Treehouse dice right away, since they were relatively easy, and this Sunday I made Icedice dice, since I’m going over to Jeremy’s place for the 4th to play games. Someday I’ll describe my game box in a wiki article.

Life updates

  • Chapel – Last week we had a missionary who grew up Muslim in Ethiopia, converted to Christianity as a child or early teenager, and shortly after became a refugee in a neighboring country, which made me curious how he eventually became an internationally known church leader (though not known by Google, apparently). The answer is that he was granted asylum in Sweden, where he joined a church and then planted one for Ethiopians in the area, after which he made his way to the US (for education, I think). I’ve noticed that when you get involved and start leading things, it puts you in another world of social connections and opportunities.
  • Music – The latest song to stick in my head is Vanic’s remix of Major Lazer’s “Be Together,” which made me want to cry the first time I really listened to it (I have a thing about loss), and the official music video paints an even sadder picture than I was imagining. But I don’t cry now, just appreciate the nice counter-melody. I’m looking forward to buying it whenever it becomes available.
Posted in Board games, Books, Cooking, Daily routine, Depression, Devotions, Diet, Focus, Health, Holidays, Life updates, Math relearning, People, Programming, Project updates, Sleep | Leave a comment

Update for 6/26/2016

Posted on June 27, 2016 by Andy

Site updates

  • Wiki comments – You can now comment on my wiki articles! Certain ones I’ve enabled it on, which is currently only the Math Relearning set, but I’ll be adding it to other articles later. The comments extension uses Disqus, so you’ll have to sign up with that the first time you comment. I’m wondering if I should switch my blog comments from the WordPress feature to Disqus so there’s one place to find all the site’s comments, but I’ll put off that decision till later.
  • Other housekeeping – I’ve added a contact form, since random visitors didn’t really have a way to get in touch except through Twitter. I would just put up my email address, but a form lets me find out which emails are coming through the site. I’ve also unified the search across the blog and wiki by connecting both search forms to Google Site Search, though the wiki’s Google search is somewhat hidden in the sidebar, and the regular wiki search is still at the top, but I’ll keep it there for now because that’s sometimes the way I create new articles. Next on my agenda for website housekeeping are adding SSL and updating the site and topic intros, but those will happen sometime after my next math update.

Project updates

  • Math relearning – This week I’ll look at grade 1. I’ve been studying my addition and subtraction flashcards during my break, but just a little here and there, which will make it take roughly forever, since there are 700 cards and the algorithm repeats them until I get them right often enough.
  • Diet – 3 weeks left till my blood test. I’m thinking of testing some home cholesterol testing kits by using them the same day as the lab’s test and comparing the results, so I need to investigate and buy those before then. My muffins were edible this week but blander, which I attribute to using Swerve when the recipe was apparently expecting a sweeter sugar substitute, and they were somehow drier, even though I went back to almond flour, but I smothered them in sugar-free fake maple syrup, and it was fine. I also tried out the idea of topping a salad with tuna salad, which worked nicely.
  • Daily routine – Even though I still like the idea of cramming in all my regular activities each day, in practice last week on days when I had less time, I did make choices based on what felt most important, which was usually my projects, though I did get in my devotion and walk one day, and overall this seems like a decently realistic approach for my level of self-discipline, so I’ll stick with it for now. I didn’t keep track of my sleep schedule, but my impression is that it was less terrible last week, and I’ve concluded that part of my tiredness during the day, especially in the morning, has been because the days I wake up at 5, I try to sleep a little more before I have to get up, which ends up interrupting a sleep cycle, so I’ve decided just to stay awake in those cases; and I’m going to try getting myself to bed a little before I want to sleep and finishing whatever I was doing from there, so at least I’ll be ready for bed even if I stay up later than I’d like, rather than throwing myself into bed whenever exhaustion overtakes me and immediately sleeping. Also I think I could waste less time and get more done on the things I’ve planned if I somehow addressed my tendency to mindlessly follow whatever interests me at the moment, which is basically half of all my problems in life, so I’ll look at that again this week, though I think that problem would be helped with more sleep, which is the other half of my problems. I like the idea of tracking my time so I’m not left wondering how exactly I used it, but I need to find a method that isn’t tedious, so I’ll look into that too.
  • Books – I’ve been on a bit of a book buying binge lately, which I’ll talk more about in the conspiracy section below, but one I’ll mention here is Philosophy of Mind by Jaegwon Kim, which I chose on the strength of its Amazon reviews. I wanted to follow up my purchase of a metaphysics textbook with that one because philosophy of mind, an area of special metaphysics, interests me more than general metaphysics because it relates more directly to my probable career field of cognitive science and to my day-to-day philosophical ponderings. I still don’t know when I’ll get around to reading it, but maybe I’ll sneak in bits here and there until I set aside some official time for it.
  • Conspiracy theories – This topic has graduated from a life update to a project, since at this point it’s less something that’s happening to me and more something I’m pursuing, I’m sure to the chagrin of some of you. I’ve gotten to the stage of buying books, four so far: The Illuminatus! Trilogy (the novel from last update), Conspiracy Encyclopedia (a well-regarded overview of theories, according to Wikipedia), A Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory (another overview, self-published, that covers some alien-related topics that Conspiracy Encyclopedia misses), Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions (on Western esotericism, which overlaps with many conspiracy theories but is also a topic I’ve been curious about for a long time). I’ve also been thinking about what I could post to the wiki in this area. Last week’s interesting podcast find: Kingdom Intelligence Briefing, about how the Elite are using the technology of fallen angels to create an army to battle God via transhumanist manipulation of our DNA, while they also use the Large Hadron Collider to open a portal for the fallen angels to enter our dimension (see the host’s book The Shinar Directive).
  • TV – Last week I reached a milestone in my Doctor Who catch-up when I finished the Tenth Doctor, David Tennant, certainly the most poignant regeneration I’ve seen so far.

Life updates

  • Chapel – Last week in chapel we had Stuart Garrard, formerly of the band Delirious?, and he talked about his Beatitudes Project, which collects some remarkable stories of ways Jesus is working in and through people (more on the project here in the “Author” section). He also sang a couple of songs, one of which used an acoustic guitar that he also somehow got to sound like a bass. To top it off, my getting to see Stu made my friend Jeremy intensely jealous, which is secretly the point of everything I do.
  • Brexit – Last Thursday the UK shocked themselves and the world by voting themselves out of the EU, a move nicknamed Brexit (for British exit). Normally I pay very little attention to current events, but this one touched a nerve or three for me, and I’ve dumped several hours into reading articles and comments to try to get a handle on the events and issues surrounding this referendum. I’m very sympathetic to the Remainers, but there’s Euroscepticism to consider, which I know practically nothing about, so I may be taking my friend Ciro’s advice and reading some Yanis Varoufakis. I might even start an article about Brexit on the wiki to keep track of my investigations. My new conspiracy detecting skills are telling me this is a plot by somebody to get me interested in history.
  • Worship team – This weekend my regular worship team performed, and it went decently, except for the new song. I was supposed to play the intro, and I got flustered at the last second because my metronome wasn’t ready, so I’d have to guess at the tempo, not a strength for me, and I counted the rests in the melody wrong and ended up playing it in 3/4 rather than 4/4, and the poor vocalists followed my lead in confused, halting fashion until the chorus, which was clearly in 4/4. So that was fun.
Posted in Blood tests, Books, Brexit, Chapel, Conspiracy theories, Cooking, Daily routine, Diet, Doctor Who, Life updates, Math relearning, Philosophy, Podcasts, Project updates, Site updates, Sleep, Worship performing | 4 Comments

Update for 6/19/2016

Posted on June 21, 2016 by Andy

Site updates

  • Wiki comments – I’m on a break from my math project, and this week my main project will be adding a commenting feature to my wiki, plus any other website housekeeping I can fit in.

Project updates

  • Math relearning – Last week I started on some exercises based on the Kindergarten material, which I wrote about in my comments. On Thursday I had a surprise Twitter follow from Scott Baldridge, who it turns out is the lead author of the EngageNY curriculum I’ve been using, so I thanked him for following and told him about my project, which he thought was interesting. Now that I have his attention, I feel like the pressure is on and my updates need to be substantive, but I’ll try not to let it get to me, since I’m not a math teacher or curriculum developer. In any case, I’m considering myself mostly done with Kindergarten, other than continuing the exercises and writing a few more observations, and now I’ll take a break from this project for a week or two to work on other things.
  • Diet – Last week I was too lazy to do much cooking, but I did manage to mostly succeed at hot fudge sauce and completely fail at muffins. It’s rare that I give up on a cooking attempt, but I foolishly tried to substitute coconut flour for almond flour without consulting the Internet, and the result was a dozen crumbly, pasty, flavorless clumps. I hope the trash can enjoyed them.
  • Daily routine – Recording my sleep time hasn’t helped me get any more sleep, so I’m dropping that idea and going back to focusing on target times for my evening activities (life maintenance activities till 7:30, then projects till 9:30). I’ve also thought about alternating days for my activities (errands and cooking one day, projects the next, etc.), but this week I’ll try for my usual schedule. I’ve been feeling lazy the past couple of weeks; and when that happens, I eventually get tired of drifting through life, kick myself gently in the pants, and begin pushing myself to get more done, which started to happen this weekend and hopefully will continue this week. I’m going to try making use of implementation intentions.
  • Artists – On Friday and Saturday I accidentally spent a lot of time using Google Images and TinEye to identify some mystery images I’ve collected over the years, which gave me some artists to add to my list of favorites, which I’ll probably post to the wiki soon, partly so all that time feels less wasted, though really I was planning to post it sometime anyway.

Life updates

  • Work – Last week was spent making a long and complicated ebook of a Bible commentary, and I took it home a few evenings, so it felt all my time went into work, even though it really didn’t. Fortunately this was a volume in a series, and last time I’d written myself notes on how to do the complicated parts, so the work wasn’t as painful as I was expecting, and I was able to finish it on time for the ebook’s deployment, though I might need to submit corrections later.
  • Health – I went to see my gastroenterologist last Tuesday, and he decided I was doing well enough that I didn’t need to switch medications, so for now we’ll stick with the main two I’m on and gradually remove the others. It’s honestly a bit disappointing because I was looking forward to maybe being normal, and right now my symptoms aren’t as calm as they have been, but we’ll see how it goes. He also said I don’t need to avoid gluten as my primary doctor suggested, which I’d also concluded from my reading, and it’s a relief, because low carb + gluten free is surprisingly difficult.
  • Conspiracy theories – Last week my major preoccupation was more weirdness, this time YouTube videos and podcasts about conspiracy theories. These are interesting to me for the epistemological and psychological issues they raise, which are both intriguing and frustrating, and for creative writing inspiration, since the theorists are essentially evolving new mythologies, and watching their process helps me develop my own ideas. My favorite podcast on the theorist side was Out of Darkness, Into the Light for being the strangest, and on the skeptic side it was either Exposing PseudoAstronomy for being so scientific or Conspiracy Skeptic for being fun and for recommending The Illuminatus! Trilogy, which I ended up buying. I’ll probably post about conspiracy theories on the wiki sometime, if I don’t get sick of them first.
  • Compassion Experience – The theme of last week’s chapel at work was Compassion International, and we heard Olive Aneno’s inspiring story of growing up in their child development program. Afterward we visited the Compassion Experience, an exhibit featuring the stories of other Compassion kids, in this case Jey and Yanneley. It was all very well done, and although it takes me a while to make decisions like this, sponsoring someone is starting to sound like a really good idea to me.
  • Worship team – I subbed for a pianist on another team this weekend, and it happened to be the first time our new music minister was leading in the early service, subbing for the team’s normal leader. It was nice to get to work with him. I don’t think I was especially creative this time, but I feel like I played more vigorously than usual, which was satisfying, and I learned a slightly tricky piece at the last minute for offertory, which was also satisfying.
Posted in Art, Cooking, Daily routine, Diet, Ebooks, Health, Life updates, Math relearning, Podcasts, Project updates, Site updates, Sleep, Twitter, Weird stuff, Worship performing | 2 Comments