The Thinkulum

Some rethinking, a trip to Chicago, and a workshop

Posted on June 16, 2014 by Andy

Last week I added a chapter to my Pychyl summary, posted my first chunk of epistemology notes, posted some of my drawing exercises to DeviantArt, and began reviewing my project choices.

The epistemology notes are for the book’s introduction, and I’d written them ages ago when my agenda for the project was different, so I wanted to revise them first, but I only got halfway through and decided to just post what I had. So I’ll finish those revisions and then continue adding chapters.

I haven’t felt very enthusiastic about my drawing exercises, so I surveyed my project ideas for the arts, asked myself some evaluative questions, and was reminded that one of my wishes is to contribute insights to my fields of interest. So I’ll probably prioritize projects that express my own ideas rather than summarizing others’. I don’t know if I have much that’s truly worthwhile to contribute at this point, but I’ll let other people decide that.

Along those lines, the procrastination book is going to take too long if I keep going at this rate, so I’d like to try something different, highlighting the parts of the book that stood out to me rather than summarizing everything in it.

Last Tuesday I took the day off of work to hang out with a friend from out of town who had a long layover in Chicago. He was pretty tired, so we didn’t do much, which gave the day a nicely laid back feel. We had lunch scheduled with some local Debian users, so we headed downtown and wandered around the office building we’d be eating in. At one point we descended a moving escalator to the second level of the basement, only to find that there was construction blocking the up escalator, and the only other place to go was through a security door into the office area. So we had fun running up the down escalator toward freedom. It was harder than I expected. After an animated lunch conversation with interesting people, we headed back to the airport, where we found a very cushiony bench to wait on next to the security line. One thing I’ve noticed about pursuing all my areas of interest at once is that it seems to give me a lot more to talk about. It’s nice to find conversation partners who can engage with me on more than one of them. Especially when I have six hours to kill with them! Not that we only talked about the things I’m doing, of course.

On Saturday I attended a workshop for the Immanuel mentor team. One of our trainers is being ordained this week, so the head of the training program was in town and wanted to make good use of her time here. I’m glad, because not only is it always good to see her, the workshop clarified some key themes of Immanuel prayer for me. One facet of integrating the dissociated parts of ourselves is verbalizing those parts together and sitting with the conflict to see what arises from it. In Immanuel we start by establishing a loving connection with the Lord, and we return to it often throughout the session, but at times it serves the recipient to let them experience the pain they’ve been avoiding. It’s part of sharing the truth about ourselves with the Lord so he can address and heal it. I came away from the workshop with a renewed sense of the value of this kind of prayer.

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Accelerating

Posted on June 8, 2014 by Andy

I haven’t gotten as much done in the last week as I wanted, mostly because I’ve been trying to finish a freelance project and because my sleep schedule is still wobbling, which leads to naps, which throws off my productivity. But I did post my first few notes on Timothy Pychyl’s procrastination book. This is a practice I hope to continue, releasing my projects as very rough works-in-progress and then growing and refining them over time. That way they’ll at least have some presence in the world in case I have to put them on hold or drop them. They’d still have some potential for helping people, and maybe I’d be more likely to pick them up again.

As for other projects, I’ve pretty much decided how to organize my epistemology notes, and I’m getting there with my math notes. In my math reading I’ve nearly made it to addition! That’ll be this week. I’m having to skip around in my book because it isn’t organized the way my project will be. In the realm of people projects, I’m sprucing up my social media profiles, and last week it was YouTube and Google+. And I’ve been continuing my basic drawing exercises, exploring ways to draw circles.

A couple of social issues have caught my attention in the last couple of weeks. I don’t know if I’ll post to the wiki about them, but I wanted to at least write a few thoughts here.

The first issue was the #YesAllWomen hashtag from a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t read many of the tweets, but I read a few good articles about it (by Rob Fee, Zaron Burnett III, and Phil Plait). I’ve been encouraged over the past couple of years that the issue of sexual assault has been getting more attention, and it’s very important for people to tell their stories so others will know the problems are real. But these days when people (I’ll call them the advocates) speak out about social problems, what draws my attention is the negative reactions of other people, in this case men, and then the advocates’ reactions against those reactions. I think some bridging would help. If the advocates asked what legitimate concerns could be behind their audience’s reactions, such as a fear of rejection, they could nuance their message and maybe broaden it. In this case one helpful direction would be, alongside the stories of harassment, to talk about the men they appreciate and why, and they could take it further by talking about how they’d like to be treated (especially by male strangers). That would make the safer men around them feel better (and maybe more cooperative) and also give the repentant ones new behavior to aim for. Maybe some advocates are already doing this.

The other issue was the problems of YouTube celebrity (Charlie McDonald’s video is a good starting point, and TheThirdPew’s is also good). Several threads weave through the issue, including the theme of sexual abuse, but what I’ve been thinking about most is the false intimacy some fans feel with the YouTubers they follow, a problem fans of Hollywood stars face but which is made worse on YouTube because the video creators are often speaking informally and sharing parts of their lives on camera. I asked myself what motivates viewers to look for this intimacy or to idolize their chosen celebrities and how those motivations could be reshaped or redirected. Maybe they’re looking for more stable or fulfilling or easier relationships or to raise their self-image by associating with someone they see as higher quality. I wondered if it would help for someone to offer guidance on building real life relationships. But chances are these fans already have a few friendships in person, and it could be worthwhile to build their appreciation for those relationships, such as by writing living eulogies. This is an idea I’ve had before, but I didn’t realize it was an established genre until I searched for it this weekend. I may write about it on the wiki sometime.

On Friday I attended my coworker Brooke’s wedding. It was elegant in the sense of accomplishing its purpose with a minimum of excess. The ceremony was held in a small, picturesque chapel surrounded by farmland, and both the wedding and the reception were short and simple. I imagine the cost was modest, but I suspect they’re making up for it on their overseas honeymoon. As someone who has a low tolerance for ceremonies, I appreciated it. I also enjoyed the feeling of nostalgia I got from sitting in the old-fashioned chapel and seeing the kind of art on the walls my grandparents might have owned.

Posted in Life updates, Projects, Site updates, Social issues, Thought, Weddings, Wiki | Leave a comment

The hive is alive

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Andy

It might not look like it, but I’ve actually been a busy bee around this place. When I actually faced the fact that I now had a wiki waiting to be filled, I felt a bit intimidated and knew I had to get more organized or I’d put off doing anything. But I knew I wouldn’t be able to prioritize my projects because I never can, so I decided to take a clue from Barbara Sher and rotate through them rapidly, picking a project for each area of interest and assigning an area or two to each day of the week: religion and the website on Sunday, philosophy on Monday, social science on Tuesday, arts on Wednesday, STEM on Thursday, people on Friday, and life maintenance on Saturday. I’m holding this schedule loosely, since life will interfere with it often and I’ll also want or need to work on some projects more than one day a week.

The first set of projects was to update the section introductions I carried over from a much older version of the site. So far I’ve done philosophy, social science, the arts, the blog (which has some more details on why I added a wiki), and life maintenance. I’m working on STEM, and I haven’t touched religion, weirdness, or the general site intro yet. Sometime I want to rewrite them all, but for now I just needed to stop them from being so out of date.

For the rest of my projects, to make sure I’m spending my time on things I really care about, I’m partly guiding myself with the question of what I would work on if I only had six months to live and partly with the question of what I need to do to prepare for later projects. So for religion I’m mainly finishing God’s Words in Human Words by Kenton Sparks and reading Paul and the Faithfulness of God by NT Wright for a discussion group; for philosophy I’m reading Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction by Robert Audi; for social science, Solving the Puzzle of Procrastination by Thomas Pychyl; for the arts, I’m doing various drawing exercises, which I will post on DeviantArt; for STEM, reading Math Matters by Suzanne Chapin and Art Johnson. So far I’ve been refreshing myself on my previous work on those projects, reorganizing it for my current work, reading, writing a tiny bit, and being sidetracked by life, but I’m hoping to start posting my notes and reflections on some of these books in the next couple of weeks. My people Fridays are mainly for catching up on emails and other social media, visiting people, generally hanging out, etc.; and my life maintenance Saturdays are for taking care of life maintenance tasks that I can put off till then.

Dividing up my time this way has put me on friendlier terms with time in general. Each day I know I have things to look forward to because I’ve scheduled activities I deeply care about, and that motivates me to impose more structure on my life so I’ll have the time and energy to do them. I’m getting to bed earlier (a major predictor of how well I’ll use my time overall), arriving places on time more often, and using my free time better. I’ll write about this more on the wiki sometime.

Ways to keep up with my site: If you want to see what changed between versions of a wiki article, click the “View history” link at the top of the page, select the radio buttons next to the versions you want to compare, and click the “Compare selected revisions” button. If you want a feed for changes to an article, go to the “View history” page for the article and you’ll see the Atom link in the sidebar; or for changes to the whole wiki, click on the “Recent changes” link in the sidebar and grab the Atom link on that page. If you want a feed for the blog, click the “Subscribe in a reader” link on this page; or to get an email when I post to the blog, put your email address in the form under that link.

Other worthwhile things that’ve been going on: On May 16 I drove down to Champaign to hang out with my family over the weekend and watch my brother graduate with his PhD in educational research methods. The next weekend I helped two different friends move. And last week I attended a worship team meeting and a churchwide barbecue for our music minister, who we’re having to let go after 19 years because we no longer have the money to pay him. It softens the blow to know that he and his family will still be around as long as they can, and I was happy to see them at church today.

Posted in Life updates, Projects, Site updates, Wiki | 2 Comments

Andypedia

Posted on May 7, 2014 by Andy

If you are a frequent visitor of my website (and who isn’t?), you may be have loaded it in the past few minutes and found yourself feeling surprised, confused, perhaps even alarmed, flabbergasted, and other such emotions. This is because instead of the familiar, comforting blog you’re used to seeing, you were confronted with what looks like a heavily vandalized Wikipedia.

Rest assured, what you’re seeing is the same Thinkulum you know and love. Only highly different! Behold, I have created a wiki! My site now consists of two parts, this blog and that wiki. The blog will be for current events like a newspaper, and the wiki will be for time-independent content like a library. Unlike most wikis, however, all the content will be written by me. The contents of the wiki are what I consider the site to be about, so the wiki will be the new home page. And despite the title of this post, I’m not actually calling it Andypedia. I’m not even calling it the Wikulum, as my boss suggested. For now it’s just the plain old Thinkulum wiki.

Why am I splitting my site in half like this? I’ll have a wiki article for that. For now I’ll say that MediaWiki’s features fit the way I want to write better than WordPress does. And maybe this change, along with some others I’ve been making, will free my mind to write more often.

True to the nature of wikis in general, it will always be a work in progress. For now I’ve moved the essays and structural pages from the blog to the wiki, and I’m hoping to start writing stubs for other articles soon. I also really need to update my old content. In the meantime, feel free to poke around!

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A done cake with freedom frosting

Posted on October 27, 2013 by Andy

Today marks the end of a long series of projects that have occupied me since at least January, projects I took on to help out other people. They were all worthwhile, but they did keep me from most of my own projects, and I’ve been eager to get back to those, which is a great motivator! It’s been a very productive year. The last of these was a planning guide for our church’s Blue Christmas service, which I’ve coordinated for the past several years and am finally able to hand off to other people. Very late last night I finished the guide. And I’m free.

I feel less liberated than I expected, partly because I still have some projects for other people to do, including Blue Christmas itself, though I won’t need to put off my own projects for them. And I think partly I’m so used to feeling these projects hanging over me that it’ll take me a while to notice they’re gone. And then partly the next projects I have lined up will also be a lot of work and not all that fun.

Still, my personal goals will begin advancing again, and that’s a good thing. I feel a little uneasy rejoicing that this list is done and I can do my own thing now, as if my days of helping people are over, but I feel slightly better knowing that my personal goals are also aimed at benefiting others at least as a side effect.

My first two projects: cleaning up my increasingly cramped and cluttered apartment and restructuring my website.

Posted in Life updates, Productivity, Projects, Stephen Ministry | 1 Comment

How my projects go

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Andy

You might be wondering why it took me two months to write that little update on my life. I know I am! I’m also wondering why it’s taken me weeks to write this entry when I intended to post it a couple of days after the last one. Part of the answer is that I’ve been sidetracked by my overly complicated search for grad schools. Even narrowing down my career interests to artificial intelligence, I only sort of know what I’m looking for in a CS grad school, especially since I’m very new to the AI field. And since it’s such a large investment, I want to make my decision very carefully. I’m better at that kind of thing now. It’s not like the days when I glanced at a couple of authors I liked and just applied to the college they went to. Although that turned out well, I must say.

I get kind of obsessive about research. It’s not that I forget to eat or sleep because I can’t let things go … usually … but I do tend to get carried away. And it’s not that I plan an overly complicated procedure from the start. It’s more that I plan a vague procedure and then find out it isn’t doing what I want, and so I adjust my plans … over and over again for the same project. Let’s put it nicely and just say I’m thorough.

I’m not sure how a normal person would go about finding a grad school, maybe look at some rankings, locate professors they want to study under, or restrict themselves to a particular geographical area. But what I care about is the subject matter, and while my interests are hazy, they’re particular enough that I suspect some schools will cover them better than others. And so I’ve felt compelled to go through a looooooong and complicated process of clarifying what topics in computer science and related fields I really care about learning in school and then matching those against the dozens of candidate schools I’ve collected. I’ve spent many hours on this, and I’m not nearly done.

So yes, my projects tend to take roughly forever, especially since I typically have several going at once. But I do pick up efficiency tricks along the way. For example, when I was writing that last entry, I discovered I could save myself writing time and you reading time if I restricted myself to four sentences per paragraph and generally one paragraph per section. If I hadn’t come up with that, I’d probably still be writing it.

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Andy’s life, seasons 30-35

Posted on October 6, 2012 by Andy

If you missed it, here’s a recap of my life over the past six years.

Background

In the years after I graduated from college (2000) and almost all my friends had left the area, I lived fairly normally, but it was against a backdrop of depression, loneliness, and insecurity. Just before 2007 I decided that would be the year I started taking care of myself. I went back to the doctor for regular checkups, began rebuilding my social life, and talked with people who could help me work through my emotional and spiritual issues. Here are some of the major story arcs that have come from that decision, some of which I posted about on the blog as they were happening.

Ulcerative colitis

My return to the doctor was well timed, because I had just developed symptoms that were diagnosed as ulcerative colitis on Good Friday of 2007. It’s been a moderate case—it hasn’t put me in the hospital—but very stubborn with no real remission. Occasionally it’s depressing and scary, but most of the time I don’t think much about it. And in some ways it’s been helpful, because I can understand other people with chronic conditions better, and it’s taught me about self-control.

Exercise

After a short-lived attempt in July of 2003, in February through September of 2008 I went to the gym. This time I went in the mornings with my friend, who was much more committed to it than I was. I didn’t think I was making much progress, probably because I was inconsistent about going, but I noticed the improvement I had made when I stopped going and got weaker. Someday I’ll get myself back into it.

Stephen Ministry

In September of 2007 I began training as a Stephen Minister and was commissioned as one at the end of the training in April of the next year. I didn’t get my first care receiver till February of 2009, which really isn’t too surprising because fewer men take advantage of Stephen Ministry than women. I began with my latest care receiver in April of last year. Both were visitation type scenarios, with no major crisis but definitely challenges to deal with on a daily basis.

In 2008 I began helping with our Stephen Ministry’s Blue Christmas service, which is a solemn but hopeful service for people who are hurting during the holidays. I helped in a few areas, but my main role was to write the service based on the input of the planning team. The following year the Stephen Leaders asked me to coordinate the service, and I did that through last year, after which I gave up the reins to whoever the leaders find for this year. Each year it’s been rewarding and has helped people, but I’m not really as organized as I come across, and I’d rather let someone else manage things and let me concentrate on the production work.

Prayer ministry

In January of 2009 I attended my first in a series of seminars for learning Theophostic Prayer Ministry, a type of prayer for emotional healing. I had received a session of Theophostic from a local pastor’s wife in around 2000, and it had transformed one of my early painful memories, and I wanted to have this tool in my belt for helping people. In the summer of 2010 our trainer switched to an offshoot of Theophostic called the Immanuel approach, and the next January I had the honor of joining her mentor team, the set of people who lead the small groups in the training workshops. This September, in addition to helping with the latest training, I also began attending Restarting, a course for learning the principles and practices of the Life Model, which is part of the basis for Immanuel, both so I’d be in a better position to recommend this model to people and so I could work on some of my own issues.

Productivity

On June 19, 2010 I emerged from the pervasive procrastination that had imprisoned me for about the past decade or more. Whereas before I was somewhat depressed and mired in a morass of everyday details that felt too burdensome to deal with and made me feel every day like an irresponsible slob, that Saturday I woke up early and did my laundry, and this led to a weekend of general productivity. It was so satisfying and fun that I’ve kept it going more or less ever since, and it has hugely improved my outlook on life. For the boost in energy and mood that allowed this breakthrough, I credit prednisone, which I was taking at the time for my ulcerative colitis and which has as a side effect an inflated sense of well-being.

Worship team

Here and there in 2010 and early 2011 I was getting little nudges from people to get back involved in music, so finally I gave in and decided to use my church as an avenue. Sometime in June or July I asked my music minister about joining one of the worship teams on the keyboard, and despite a messy audition, he gave me a chance and put me on one of the teams. I had a learning curve in front of me, because the musical styles and mode of playing are different from what I’m used to—improvising from lead sheets using lots of syncopation and seventh chords. It’s been both fun and scary, partly because I ended up in a somewhat leading role on the piano rather than the supporting role I was aiming for on the keyboard, but I’ve improved over the past year, and people have appreciated my playing.

Living situation and job

Because I didn’t want to buy my apartment when they converted it to a condominium, in August of 2007 I moved a city over, from a one-bedroom to a studio apartment, into which I very carefully fit almost all my things. Aside from the very steep slope in the parking lot, sometimes unclimbable when it snows, it’s been a good place to live. My job hasn’t changed much since 2007, even after our company was bought last year, except to give me a larger variety of programming tasks, which is fine with me.

Career

For several years after finishing grad school in biblical studies (2003), while working as a programmer, I alternated between the ideas of philosophy and psychology as a career. In 2009 I thought I’d settled on philosophy, but in February of 2010 I learned that there are few academic jobs in the humanities, and to me the risks weren’t worth the huge investment of getting a PhD, so I looked again at my goals in life and my career options, and I concluded that I would be more financially secure and just as vocationally happy working as a programmer and doing philosophy in my spare time. I’m planning to take care of some prerequisites in the next year or two and then enter grad school for computer science with a concentration in artificial intelligence. At some point I still want to do something with psychology, maybe go back to school again and become a counselor, but my psychological interests need more time to incubate before I come up with any definite plans.

Doubts

In 2007 I put my doubts about Christianity on hold in order to see where I could get with my spiritual life (see here, here, and here). In January of 2012, having found a reassuring spiritual basis in Immanuel prayer, I reopened my questions and have been especially reassessing my theology of Scripture, exploring what can be said for critical biblical scholarship. At the same time, I’ve been collecting resources for taking a more empirical approach to my religious beliefs rather than simply accepting the premises of creeds like the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, mainly by studying miracles and mysticism but also by keeping an eye on positive assessments of the Bible’s historical reports, especially about Jesus’ resurrection; and I’ve been thinking about how Christians might take a different approach to apologetics. I’ll definitely be writing more about all of that.

Wow. I’ve been really busy!

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On the way to the next stop

Posted on August 6, 2012 by Andy

I bet you thought I’d forgotten about the site again. Well surprise! I haven’t. I’m working on my big life update entry. I’ve just been preoccupied with searching for grad schools and dealing with some back end issues with my web host and domain registrar.

By the way, never let your web host register your domain name for you. Learn how to do it yourself and stay in control! That way you can easily point your domain to a new web host if things go south with your old one.

Posted in Site updates | 12 Comments

A new chapter for my site

Posted on July 14, 2012 by Andy

Hello, everybody! If you flip through my archives, you may notice that I haven’t updated this site regularly in, well, years. There are various reasons for this, but I’ve become more focused in the past few months, and I’m hoping to bring the Thinkulum into that stream of activity.

What has brought on all this focus and activity? Largely it’s been the realization that, as always, I have a long list of projects I want to complete and that some of those projects are prerequisites for others. So if I want to get anywhere, I need to get busy and accomplish the prerequisites. For example, a lot of my projects involve programming, and I’ve decided I want to switch from Perl to Python as my everyday programming language. So I needed to learn Python. I was eager enough to get to my programming projects that I was pretty dogged about learning it. And now I know enough to continue my education by doing those other projects.

One major project that’s tying a bunch of the others together and giving them some urgency is my plan to go back to grad school. My first graduate degree was in biblical studies. This one, unless I change my mind again, will be in artificial intelligence. I want to start in the fall of next year. But I have lots to do before then, and I still want to squeeze in some other projects along the way. All of that forces me to think carefully and constantly about my agenda. It also makes me excited about the things I’ll be doing and gets my mind’s wheels turning. My mind is like a train that way. A runaway train.

How does the website fit in? Well, basically I see this site as my publishing platform, a way to share my ideas with people and to give my projects a concrete objective—posting each project’s results online. When my mind is in an active, organized, sharing mode like it seems to be now, my impulse is to make it a goal to post more. So that’s what I’m doing. I’ve also been thinking lately about how short life can be, and I want to share as much as I can in that time and leave a somewhat organized legacy of ideas for anyone who can benefit from them.

So after much neglect, my website has become a project again. Stage one in this renewed attention was to migrate the site from Drupal to WordPress, which I completed Friday morning after several weeks of work. I used Python, SQL, and a tiny bit of PHP to do the migration. Drupal is a sophisticated and flexible content manager, but it’s not the easiest to use, which was a mental barrier to me whenever I thought about posting here. WordPress is much friendlier, and the reasons I switched from WordPress to Drupal several years ago are no longer compelling to me. So WordPress is back, and I’m happy. I feel like the road before me has been cleared. If you subscribe to my feed, you got a long set of updates when I made the switch. Sorry about that. You’ll probably have to put up with more before this is done.

Stage two will be to add a wiki to the site and move my essays from the blog to the wiki. I’ll be using MediaWiki, which is the software that runs Wikipedia. Though it’s more cumbersome to use than WordPress, it has a some information architecture features I like, and right now that’s more important to me than ease of use. (Drupal didn’t offer me enough to counterbalance the difficulty.) But a wiki does make it easy to navigate among articles by topic, which makes it a natural fit for my concept of this site, a network of material on diverse but interconnected topics. I expect to install MediaWiki sometime soon after I research grad schools, which is my next major project.

In the meantime, I’m collecting a list of topics I want to write about, and I’m exploring how to treat my writing as a project. I’m learning that’s how I have to approach tasks I normally avoid, centering my attention on them and planning for them rather than trying to do them casually, hoping I’ll be in the mood when the time comes to do them. I’ll also make some other tweaks to the blog, such as finding a different theme. This one is the WordPress default.

Woops, the train’s leaving without me. Next stop, what’s been happening in the last few years!