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

Weeknote for 12/3/2023

Posted on December 8, 2023 by Andy

Productivity

😐

I spent the week procrastinating again. So it’s time to recommit to my productivity tricks. But I tend to forget them because there are so many, and that’s why I need my motivational posters, which I haven’t made yet. More on that below.

AI

🙂

While procrastinating, I dove into AI images. First there was the latest meme trend—“make it more” progressions, where the user asks for an image and then has the AI push one of its qualities to an extreme. For example, this accurate portrayal of geese. Most of the series end up with cosmic imagery, which the memers of Reddit find tiresome, and I thought this response was funny.

I also started gathering images for my motivational posters. It was sometimes a struggle to convey my ideas to the AI, and it still has its own struggles with hands, so for those cases I resorted to traditional Creative Commons photography.

And to explore DALL-E 3 I generated some Christmas wallpaper for my work computer. I got a little carried away and made way too many, but it came up with some good ones.

All the while I was wrestling again with the ethics of AI images. My position is still the same. But I hope artists can somehow organize like the Hollywood writers and actors to protect their livelihoods. Maybe one of the lawsuits will gain traction. But also part of me suspects the situation for artists isn’t as dire as some feel, because plenty of consumers aren’t going to be satisfied with imagery made by non-humans.

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

Weeknote for 11/26/2023

Posted on November 26, 2023 by Andy

Christmas

😌

I finished the wish list. I ended up choosing several pieces of basic survival gear but only one piece of wall art. I got into the art research and realized it was way too big of a task for just a few days. It’d work better to collect it throughout the year. But it started the mental gears turning, and on a weekend visit to Target I took a side trip into the frames section to begin noting my options.

Productivity

😐

I’m extending my productivity iteration another few weeks. It technically ended a week ago for my winter housekeeping that I haven’t started, but I have too much unfinished productivity business to let it go. The projects aren’t going to schedule themselves!

Holidays

🙂

I had Thanksgiving dinner with Jeremy’s family. I brought roasted vegetables and ate their turkey and salmon and chatted about nature walks and examined their wall art for ideas. Then we played the Isle of Skye board game I brought, and I gave their son a tutorial on using AI for coding. A pretty packed Thanksgiving. I was grateful they were in town this year.

Posted in Art, Holidays, Productivity, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 11/19/2023

Posted on November 26, 2023 by Andy

Christmas

😐

I still procrastinated but got a bit farther on my wish list. Each year I pick themes I expect to pursue in my projects over the next year. This year’s themes are critical thinking, survivalism, and art.

Productivity

🙂

I collected ideas for the next year’s project schedule and for some motivational posters. Planning this year’s projects has gone well, so I’m continuing the practice for next year with some lessons learned. The posters are to set up around my home to remind myself of my productivity principles.

Health

😌

Despite my hand-wringing about potential COVID exposure during my recent travels, my colonoscopy took place on schedule, and I got a good report. My friend Jeremy was a hero and took me to the appointment again. But after my worrying this time, I realized I should have back up plans for my rides to these things, since the arrangement always feels tenuous. So I’m looking into my options, which feels much easier when the next colonoscopy is two years out!

Nature

🙂

Here’s a little round-up of some animals I’ve seen on my walks over the past month.

 

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People

🙂

I caught up with my old college friend Josh. We met up the week before last, but I forgot to write about it. He was in town for a conference. It was a great conversation, and we got to know a good coffee shop downtown. And like the quality person he is, afterward he sent me an encouraging email.

Posted in Health, Holidays, Nature, People, Productivity, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

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.

Text

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