Weeknote for 2/11/2024

Posted on February 14, 2024 by Andy

Productivity

😌

I made good progress on my Make integration with Notion, which will register a day’s session of work on a task. I’m switching projects now, so I’ll have to pick up the integration again in a few months when I get back to another iteration on my productivity system. But it was satisfying to fit in a decent amount of project work for a change. And what I’ve done so far accomplished the goals of getting over the initial hump and teaching me more about Notion and Make development.

Programming

😎

I toured the fascinating history of cryptology with Simon Singh’s The Code Book. I finally understood why the Enigma machine was such a big deal. And I now have a clue how public key cryptography works. And I’d wondered if anyone was working on a cipher to stay ahead of the quantum computing cryptocalypse, and it turns out they are with quantum cryptography.

Life maintenance

😐

The next couple of weeks will be my spring housekeeping, where I’ll focus on tidying and investing. I have some piles of clutter that have been accumulating over the months that need storing. And I only have a little research left on my medium-term investing project from way back when, so I’m hoping to get that resolved.

TV

🧐

I started a media tracking project in Notion to remind myself of the shows I’m watching. I’ll expand to other media in the future. My tasks database has a set of statuses I can assign to a task, and these work well for media too. The statuses are suggested, planned, blocked, active, completed, and dropped. I have enough shows in progress (the active status) that I was forgetting about some of them, and there are others I’d paused to return to someday (some of the planned status shows), and I was forgetting those too. Adding shows with a blocked status got me to research when the next season of those shows will be premiering. Star Trek: Discovery will be in April. The others are up in the air.

Spirituality

🤔

This week starts my Lent project of articulating my style of spirituality. I’m expecting that clarifying my views will help me live from them with more consistency and conviction.

The latest addition to my devotional procedure is intercession during the prayer time. I’m accumulating prayer requests very selectively and keeping track of them in a Notion database. This month I’m also following a prayer challenge from my church where each day we pray for a different missionary we support.

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Weeknote for 2/4/2024

Posted on February 4, 2024 by Andy

Productivity

😌

I finished separating my intervals database into iteration and day databases. This week I’ll try to get through creating a Make scenario for automatically registering work sessions for my tasks in Notion. I do it manually now, and although it’s helpful to have that data recorded, it’s an annoying amount of actions when I just want to get started on the task.

I cooked most of the rest of my packaged frozen meals, and now I have food for a month. I haven’t really had a regular routine for my packaged meal prep, but I’m starting to settle into one where I cook several of them at once, and I think doing all of them the week I buy them would be a good policy. That way I can forget about food prep almost completely on my off weeks when I’m not grocery shopping.

Learning

🧐

I started writing a procedure for managing my Anki flashcards. I let the study wagon leave me far behind in the dust months ago, but I’m running to catch up so I can learn some C# and .NET for work. When I was studying math last year, I came up with a spreadsheet I could use as a generic format for most subjects, so I’ve been using it to take notes on these programming ones. Anki has its own learning curve, so during the math project I took a bunch of notes while I figured out how to get the spreadsheet data into the app and operate the study controls, and now I’m reworking the notes into a repeatable procedure for these new subjects.

Nature

🙂

Even when the snow is mostly melted and the land is brown and the ground is muddy, there are still interesting things to see.

 

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Weeknote for 1/28/2024

Posted on January 31, 2024 by Andy

Productivity

🤔

After seeing that my non-project time blocks were taking over my evenings, I began instituting another little productivity hack: a 15-minute timer. I put it in my interval timer app alongside my daily routine timers so I’d see it and remember to use it. It worked pretty well when I did remember, and it got me to decide more consciously what tasks were worth spending that limited time on. As always, my hope with these hacks is that little by little, I’ll clear away project time and learn how to make the best of it.

😐

I started working on separating the project interval types into iterations and days in my Notion workspace. I’m hoping to finish all that this week and move on to learning Make scenarios for Notion.

😎

I listened to The Wandering Mind by Jamie Kreiner, a survey of the ways medieval monks dealt with distraction. A fascinating book that covers several of my major interests. I’d be interested to see a similar treatment of Eastern monks. My main takeaway is that there’s no silver bullet for distraction, at least none that the monastics found. What especially stood out is that external tools and practices and environments won’t focus you on their own; you still have to work to align your mind with them. The book also highlighted that even the advanced monks were just people and had the same struggles as anyone else.

Programming

🧐

I got my feet wet in cybersecurity with Foundations of Information Security by Jason Andress. Aside from dipping my toe in here and there, up till now I’d been avoiding this aspect of programming out of intimidation, but I decided this was the year to wade in. It’s especially important now that I’ll be doing some web dev at work, and it fits in with the preparedness theme I have in mind for the year. This book was a good intro.

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Weeknote for 1/21/2024

Posted on January 24, 2024 by Andy

Productivity

😐

I started fixing some issues in the design of my Notion workspace that had been bothering me. I merged a couple of redundant database columns, which came from the way my data is cobbled together from different sources. I was basically double-entering the status of each task until I could work out how to handle the updates.

I also started investigating the opposite issue, how I can separate two kinds of data I have in another column. It contains different sizes of time intervals, mainly iterations and days, and when I created it, I didn’t realize how differently I would be treating them. But now they’re each integrated with other parts of the workspace, so I need to assess the various relationships before I can create separate iteration and day columns.

Spirituality

🙂

My devotional sessions are settling into a procedure. I listen to the passage during my afternoon or evening routine, then listen to music that sets the tone, then connect with a joyful memory in Immanuel fashion. Then I write my thoughts on the passage, focusing on whatever stood out to me and especially the parts of the passage that relate to the memory. I end with a brief prayer that expresses the main ideas of the session. As I’m writing, I highlight key statements so they’re easy to return to later.

The pattern is working well for me. My sessions feel substantive rather than perfunctory, and themes have been emerging and starting to affect my thinking outside the devotional time. I’m intrigued to see where this project will go.

Nature

🧐

I walked again at my usual lake and, as usual, found interesting little surprises. This time it was the striking lighting and a bunch of footprints over the ice.

 

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Weeknote for 1/14/2024

Posted on January 17, 2024 by Andy

Productivity

🧐

The next four weeks I’ll take care of some work-intensive parts of my productivity system that will set me up for future improvements. The main two are (1) learning how to automate Notion with Make and (2) learning how to script Google Sheets so I can glean better insights from my schedule tracker data.

Spirituality

🙂

I realized I needed more prayer in my life, not just Bible reading, so I started incorporating a light form of Immanuel Prayer into my devotions. It’s how I’m reflecting on the Scripture readings, and it’s giving each devo session its own unified theme. I’ve used this return to Immanuel as an excuse to order the official Immanuel Approach book to review my rusty skills. So I’m looking forward to perusing that.

Nature

🤔

I took another water chloride reading. This time Tim joined me. The chloride level was 329 PPM, higher than last time and higher than the recommended 230 PPM. For some reason I was feeling some dread about filling out all the details on the observation form, so I made a procedure, researched the unclear parts, and got through it.

😎

We’re in a deep freeze now that’s keeping me inside, but before that I got some nice snow photos.

 

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Weeknote for 1/7/2024

Posted on January 14, 2024 by Andy

Productivity

🤔

I spent the first half of the week scheduling my projects for the year. My experiment with full-year project scheduling last year worked well enough that I decided to keep it going with some changes. The main change is that instead of cramming in a bunch of little projects and trying to address a broad sweep of my interests, this year I’m spending more time on fewer projects, basically one project per quarter. Those are productivity, learning, math, and modeling. I’ll try letting other interests come in as side projects.

🤔

I started adding messages to my motivational album, and it was an effective way to keep my latest productivity principles in mind. These are reminders like “It’s easier to take care of it now” and “Keep the the end time in mind” (so I don’t get too absorbed in what I’m doing). The act of writing and displaying these principles has put me in a proactive mindset, and it’s led to some concrete changes. One of these was to move my phone and tablet chargers away from my bed to motivate myself not to lounge and surf randomly when I’m tired, since I hate draining the battery. I have to choose—work or rest, not some hybrid waste of time.

Spirituality

🤔

I started a one-year Bible reading plan for 2024, listening through the Oasis NLT audio Bible. I’m using the simple, chapter-oriented book order plan from BibleStudyTools, and I’m listening on the Life Bible app. The Audible version was having technical issues.

I used to push myself through the Bible in 90 days. But I would always end up with the same reflections, and this time I wanted to see if different insights would come up if I slowed the pace. The main reason for my Bible speedruns was that I didn’t trust myself to maintain a schedule long-term, but I knew I could listen to a lot of audio in a shorter time. Now I have better habits, and my approach is to tie my listening to those. I’m listening during one of my daily routines, usually the afternoon one, and then writing my thoughts afterward. So far the strategy is working well.

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Weeknote for 12/31/2023

Posted on January 8, 2024 by Andy

Christmas

😌

In contrast with our other recent Christmases, this one was so low-key I had to remind myself it had even happened. Even so, in our quiet way we had plenty going on.

  • Sunday we visited the black church my dad attends. It was energizing as usual. I wanted to take the worship band back with me.
  • We didn’t go out for a movie this vacation, but we did watch A Christmas Story, which we hadn’t seen. It didn’t end up in our top ten, but we liked it okay.
  • Christmas morning Abbie and Colleen joined us by Zoom from Tennessee. It was almost like they were in the room with us.
  • I took a few nice walks around the neighborhood, a quick but interesting nature walk, and a long one at the local university with my dad.
  • My college roommate Jason made the trek from Tyler for our customary Christmas visit—a meaningful time as usual.
  • I made my newly traditional train trip home from the airport. Part of my route this time was unexpectedly confusing, so I spent a large part of the next day standardizing my directions for that trip.

My gift labels this Christmas were cards with the names written in Gregg shorthand in gold paint. I attached an alphabet key to the back so they could see how the spelling worked.

 

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Productivity

🤔

I decided to move my Gregg shorthand learning toward a diglot weave approach. I began learning Gregg out of curiosity and to reduce the physical work of writing, which is often how I draft my posts because it helps me think. Shorthand does help, but since I’ve only half learned it, it’s enough mental work that it sometimes contributes to procrastination. So I’m going to experiment with using longhand again with my own abbreviation system while substituting the Gregg words I’m more familiar with. Then outside of that I’ll continue learning Gregg to progressively fill in the gaps.

Nature

🙂

I explored a bit of the local landscape in Texas. I wasn’t into walking growing up, so I missed taking in some of the local sights. This preserve felt both familiar and foreign compared to my usual nature haunts. I don’t usually run across bare, stratified cliffs along stream banks.

 

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Weeknote for 12/24/2023

Posted on December 27, 2023 by Andy

Productivity

🧐

I started redesigning my Admin procedure, the daily session where I do bureaucratic tasks like answering emails. The process always feels unsettled and easily expands to take too much time, so I’m watching how I actually do it and nailing down the specifics.

😌

I made a Notion database to help me pack for travel. I was tired of fumbling with copying and modifying my packing lists every time, and a database had helped with my grocery shopping, so I spent valuable packing time setting one up. Now I have more control over the list, and I can filter the items by trip type, simply exclude them from the current trip, or mark them as archived, as well as checking them off as I pack them.

Nature

🙂

I took my first water chloride reading. Jeremy tagged along and supervised. The process was easier than I expected. And for the tricky part I found websites to help me determine the windiness and recent weather that I needed to record. I believe the concentration of 154 PPM was acceptably low (conversion to mg/L).

 

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Holidays

😌

I finished the Christmas gift labels. As is traditional I had to stay up late, but not on Christmas Eve this time. I needed to get them done early to mail the ones for Abbie and Colleen. I sent them a little late, but luckily they arrived on time. I’ll reveal the final product in the next weeknote.

I made it to Texas, and no one was sick this time. My brother conveniently arrived at the same time so our parents only had to make one airport trip, and we had a nice weekend of getting ready for Christmas.

Posted in Holidays, Nature, Productivity, Weeknotes | 1 Comment

Weeknote for 12/17/2023

Posted on December 23, 2023 by Andy

Productivity

🙂

I bought some small photo albums to display my motivational posters. That’s tidier than scattering them around the apartment. And instead of waiting to find images for all of them, for now they’ll just be written messages.

Holidays

🙂

I remade the Christmas labels and started adding some finishing touches. That, of course, took longer than I wanted, but I still expected to have them done in plenty of time.

AI

😎

I spent the week at work setting up my beefy new computer, which I need for my new AI developer role. It’s a semi-official, exploratory role added to my other programming work. I’ll be investigating how we can use AI in our business processes. Meanwhile, at home I’ve been collecting local LLMs for my similar personal project, considering how AI can be applied to my everyday life and testing out which bots are the most suitable. Plus it’s fun to see what they each have to say.

Posted in AI, Christmas labels, Holidays, Productivity, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 12/10/2023

Posted on December 17, 2023 by Andy

Productivity

😐

This project moved to the back burner. It’ll probably stay there a while longer as I work through miscellaneous other tasks. That’s kind of the nature of my Decembers.

Nature

🙂

I volunteered to test creek water over the winter. The program monitors levels of road salt in waterways, which can harm plants, animals, and infrastructure. I watched the training, picked a site, and visited it to test my sample collecting setup—dangling a bucket on a rope from a bridge. I found out the bridge is an intimidating 12 feet or so above the water.

Video

🤔

The Lighthouse got me thinking about mental stability under stress. Researching how to securely tie a rope to my sample bucket put me in a nautical mood, and I decided to watch this movie I’d been curious about. It was intense and a little baffling, but I somewhat identified with the main character, Ephraim. In times of profound strain I’ve been surprised by my own unpleasant reactions, so it’s hard for me to judge. It made me want to strengthen myself to cope with such situations.

😎

I clarified my interest in the sea. The idea of sea stories appeals to me sometimes, and I’m not sure where it comes from or how to classify the kinds of stories I care about. But some research this time told me what I want to explore is captured in the title of a book by John H. Harland, Seamanship in the Age of Sail—how ships worked in the centuries when ships powered by the wind dominated trade and war. I found this fascinating video to kick off this line of learning.

Posted in Nature, Productivity, Videos, Weeknotes | 1 Comment