Weeknote for 11/12/2023

Posted on November 15, 2023 by Andy

Christmas

😐

I settled on wishlist.com for my Christmas list but barely added anything to it. I’m sure I have excuses, but overall I’ve just been very distracted and procrastinatory lately. Now that I recognize that, hopefully this week I can pull myself together and finish researching what to add.

Productivity

😌

I replaced my detailed schedule tracker at work with a simpler one. This is a spreadsheet I made, along the lines of Cal Newport’s time blocking, that helps me manage my activity and determine what goes on my timesheet. With the old version I was wasting a lot of time updating it each day, and this new one is making the process a lot quicker. It’s an object lesson for me on how much it can cost to operate an overly complicated system.

Nature

🤔

I spent the week removing a mouse from my car. It was spending the nights in the metal tunnel under the windshield wipers. It was very cute, but they chew wires and leave diseased droppings, so it sadly had to go. So I bought some mouse repellent pouches made with balsam fir oil and stuffed one in each end of the tunnel, and now my car smells like Christmas whenever I run the heater. It seems to be working. Apparently mice don’t like nice smells.

 

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AI

🤓

Here’s a list of AI news digests and commentators that I follow. It occurred to me I’d never posted it. These are mostly for keeping up with the current generative AI boom, as opposed to other areas of AI. It looks like a lot, but their posts are staggered enough that it’s not a flood. The ones in bold are my favorites. I’m trying out the ones in italics. If you’re in a hurry to pick one, start with Last Week in AI or, if you want updates more often, Synthedia.

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Audio

Video

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

Weeknote for 11/5/2023

Posted on November 11, 2023 by Andy

Christmas

😐

I have a usable Christmas list for my family now, but I still have a few things to research. One question is how to add non-Amazon products to my list, since the Amazon Assistant browser extension is defunct. I’ll try to finish the list this week so I can move on to updating my productivity system.

People

😌

I flew to Texas for Kimberly’s memorial gathering, which went well. We held it at a family favorite barbecue restaurant, where I caught up with some old friends and met some new people from her life. And through the heartfelt sharing and the display of memorabilia I learned more about who she was. I learned that she double majored in college and still graduated early, which felt very typical of her. I learned she had dreams of going to law school before life took her in the direction of education. And I got a stronger sense of the chosen family she worked so hard to build.

Being there with the trappings of a memorial in the company of people who were close to her showed me why it matters that people gather to remember. It really does help move you toward closure, validating your feelings of loss and giving your loved one their due.

Video

🧐

On Halloween I took a side trip from SCP readings through liminal spaces and the Backrooms. Liminal spaces are transitional places, such as hallways and waiting rooms. If you remove the people from them and treat them as a place to linger, they often gain an unsettling quality, although some of them can be comforting if you like to be alone. The Backrooms are a fictional world that has grown up around this concept.

For Halloween week, I set my Windows background to a slideshow of liminal space images, mostly from this article. I also watched some investigations into the original Backrooms photo and other popular liminal spaces, a playthrough of the game The Complex: Found Footage, and the impressively produced Backrooms series by Kane Pixels.

I also learned that unsettling yourself is a questionable idea when you’re already feeling stressed. It tends to raise your general level of anxiety.

You don’t even need to noclip through reality to get to an unending liminal space. If you walk the wrong way in a conference center, you can get there in real life.

Posted in Death, Holidays, People, Videos, Weeknotes, Weird stuff | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 10/29/2023

Posted on October 30, 2023 by Andy

Christmas

😐

I made a small start Christmas list. It seems like I all I did last week was work, but at the end I fit in a little planning on the list. I’m aiming to cram in the research this week.

Nature

🙂

I took some fall photos on my walks. I’d found in previous years that it’s challenging to catch the time when most of the trees have changed but haven’t yet lost their leaves. So when my friend Tim and I concluded that last week would probably be peak fall, I took the opportunity to capture some of it.

 

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Video

😎

I watched through most of my first SCP readings playlist. This one is an overview of the SCP world that covers the background and structure of the Foundation and its major rivals and threats. SCP Foundation is a massive collaborative fiction project that’s like The X-Files, except that instead of a tiny department of the FBI tasked only with investigating anomalies, the Foundation is a global agency with the goal of containing them. It’s also similar to the TV series The Lost Room. An “SCP” is a Special Containment Procedure that specifies how to handle a specific anomaly. The wiki amounts to an enormous set of worldbuilding notes plus some stories based on them.

Here are my playlists so far:

SCP-001 is like a capstone on the whole collection, so I’m adding it last, if I ever get that far. It’s actually a set of proposed SCPs, so it’ll probably get its own playlist.

For my playlists I’m taking a broad approach that lets me visit my favorite creators in the SCP readings community based on the audio adaptations list on the wiki. If you’re interested in this topic and want an already complete one-stop shop for readings, I highly recommend the SCP Orientation channel on YouTube. It’s extensive, immersive, and well organized.

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Weeknote for 10/22/2023

Posted on October 27, 2023 by Andy

Christmas

😌

I finished the gift labels. I’ll probably make some tweaks, but even if I don’t get around to it, I now have a set I can use.

Next up is two weeks assembling my Christmas list. I need that long because it always turns into a whole research project.

Sustainability

🧐

I sampled a bunch more sustainability podcasts. Most of them made the cut to try out longer term. There are too many to listen to religiously, so I’ll continue to sample them and see what sticks. Here’s the list of those:

Posted in Christmas labels, Holidays, Sustainability, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 10/15/2023

Posted on October 15, 2023 by Andy

Christmas labels

🙂😰

I made a good start on the labels. Having an annual project like this is a good way to gauge the progress of my productivity system. This year’s project is definitely feeling more orderly and doable in a two-week period, although I’m still feeling anxious about it as usual. In any case, I’ll be trying to wrap it up this week.

Sustainability

🧐

I’m returning to my sustainability podcasts and finding new ones. The past few weeks I’ve felt more of a need to shift my focus to content that matters, that doesn’t feel small. There are certainly a number of serious issues going on right now, but my search mainly led me back to the sustainability concerns I wrestled with a couple of years ago. So I’ve picked up some of my old podcasts again (some here, some more here) and engaged my FOMO to hunt for others I might want to follow. A couple of sources turned my attention especially to the idea of ecological overshoot: the Stockholm Impact/Week conference on sustainability investing, in particular the interview with Daniel Schmachtenberger, and this article on conservation. So I’m including some podcasts along those lines. Here’s what I’ve found so far:

  • Everybody in the Pool – a big smorgasbord of climate action hosted by Molly Wood (of the earlier podcast How We Survive)
  • Futureverse – another one by Molly Wood and co-host Ramanan Raghavendran about insights from climate fiction authors
  • Climate Rising – the roles business can play in climate solutions
  • Fusion News – progress reports on fusion power research
  • The Great Simplification – a systems perspective on our global energy and environmental outlook hosted by Nate Hagens, one of the Stockholm Impact/Week conference speakers. This film summarizes his views.
  • Reversing Climate Change – climate tech solutions, especially carbon capture. The first interview I listened to answered my burning question of whether there was a book like Drawdown that catalogued solutions on sustainability more broadly: yes, there’s Regeneration by the same author, Paul Hawken.

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Weeknote for 10/8/2023

Posted on October 8, 2023 by Andy

Productivity

😌

My evening time management gave me much more project time, and at work I practiced focusing. In the evening, targeting times for a few specific activities in my routine worked consistently throughout the week, so I’ll keep that as part of my system. My focusing exercise at work is a short meditation that I assembled from mental actions I knew would help me rather than someone else’s script like I’ve followed in the past. I tried to use it whenever I felt my attention scattering, and it worked well enough that I’ll keep practicing and developing it.

Math

😌

I finished making flashcards for chapter 1 of the prealgebra textbook and got some practice studying them. Now I’m taking a break for other projects, starting with my Christmas labels, but I learned a lot about how I want to study material like this, so I feel prepared for the next math iteration and for other complicated subjects. In the meantime I’ll keep reviewing the flashcards I’ve made so far.

People

😔

Wednesday I learned that my adopted sister Kimberly had died. My sister Abbie called us with the news. It happened suddenly from a health condition. She was 35. Looking through the Facebook messages from her many friends and family, I’m glad to see she was so deeply known and loved. She came into our family after I had moved away, so she and I crossed paths only occasionally—more often during the pandemic with our family’s regular video calls—but I admired her work and her spirit. She was a force for good, and she lived with gusto to the end. She deserved decades more.

Posted in Death, Math relearning, People, Productivity, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 10/1/2023

Posted on October 1, 2023 by Andy

Productivity

🤔

I got past another productivity blocker by pushing through my fatigue. Last week reminded me that when I’m tired, I lie around waiting to recover longer than I’d like. So I tried a new practice of mentally preparing myself on my way home from work to push through my moderate fatigue. Doing this reminded me that feeling tired is often temporary and I can get more done than I expect.

Math

😐

I got through another section of the book. This time I learned it’s a waste to try to type complicated formatting into my flashcards, so now I take a screenshot of anything that needs a visual layout, and that’s much faster. This week with my new productivity techniques I’ll try to get through another few sections before I switch to Christmas projects next week.

TV

😔🙂

Netflix DVD ended on Friday, and I’m finishing out my subscription with Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. The 1995 Ghost in the Shell movie was one of my first Netflix rentals, so ending with this series feels fitting. And so far I’m not disappointed with my choice. I haven’t decided whether to send the discs back afterward. Netflix has gone out of its way to tell us to keep our last rental as long as we like.

Posted in Math relearning, Productivity, TV, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 9/24/2023

Posted on September 28, 2023 by Andy

Productivity

🙂

I started experimenting with ways to regulate my evening schedule. I’m treating it as a coarser grained version of my routine timers. I set alarms for a few target tasks, and using those as a guide, I’m making adjustments to my activities based on my circumstances at the time. As usual it worked decently the first couple of days, so we’ll see how it holds up.

Math

🤔

I got through studying the textbook’s first section. Unbelievably slow progress, but hopefully it’ll go faster if my time management keeps up. I also had to work out the details of getting notes from Google Sheets into Anki. From this first section I found that learning flashcards for complex material is difficult but doable. Also taking notes was slow, so I’ll be looking at how to speed that up. It seems this project is as much about learning how to study as it is about learning math.

Nature

🧐

A skunk joined me on my walk. It was late at night, so I was on the lookout for them. Sure enough, about halfway through one came galloping toward me down the street. But this time instead of hurrying away, I stopped, watched, and started filming.

 

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Weeknote for 9/17/2023

Posted on September 19, 2023 by Andy

Productivity

🙂

I returned to my mini-Pomodoro timer at work—4 minutes of work and 1 minute of break. It sounds ridiculous, but for the most part it keeps my time organized. It’s enabling me to pay some attention to side projects that I would otherwise procrastinate on. I work on them during my mini-breaks throughout the day. This got me through my blog post and a motivation hurdle in my math project. At the same time, it boosted my work productivity, which had been in a slump.

Math

😌

After more deliberation and research on how to approach it, I finally started taking notes for my flashcards. I decided on writing them in Google Sheets to import into Anki. Now I’m experimenting with how much detail to include in the notes. And yes, I’m still in the prealgebra stage. So I’m looking at how I can speed things up without cheating my learning. I’m hoping to at least touch on algebra this iteration.

Fiction

🤔

I tentatively decided on a theme for my October media, which is horror web originals, focusing on the SCP Foundation. I might also pick up where I left off on EverymanHYBRID. If it turns out I’m not in the mood for all that, I’ll switch to weird fiction, probably starting with The Weird, a large anthology edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. And if I’m not in the mood for that, I’ll switch to classic horror with my old Victorian story list and a modern take on vampires, The Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko.

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Weeknote for 9/10/2023

Posted on September 14, 2023 by Andy

Math

😐

I imported my notes from the earlier iterations and began considering how to make my flashcards. I was still distracted by my AI side project and didn’t gain much momentum on this one.

AI

😌

I got past my blockages from the week before. (1) I found out how to free Llama 2 from its excessive false refusals (just change the system prompt), and (2) I learned how to compile the llama-cpp-python code that will enable me to install more language models on my computer (install Visual Studio with the Windows SDK). These solutions open up avenues for a lot more experimentation. Specifically, I want to look for Llama 2 glitch tokens that will make its responses extra random.

Posted in AI, Math relearning, Weeknotes | Leave a comment