Weeknote for 6/29/2025

Posted on August 9, 2025 by Andy

Website

🤔

I decided to switch my regular blog updates from weeknotes to monthnotes. When I started these weeknotes, it was to give myself some accountability to make consistent progress on my projects. They have done that to some degree. The trouble is that writing is a lot of work for me, and many weeks the blog update has become the project. I’ve often wondered if I could be spending that time better. Falling so far behind this year broke the spell of feeling my small audience needed such frequent updates, and taking so long to catch up cemented my sense that they’re a major task to write. By that week the idea of scaling back had become much less a vague potential and more a sharp necessity.

So July begins a new chapter of my blog updates where I’ll post them once a month, still with the same kind of content, hopefully interspersed with other kinds of posts. This will clear time for more project work, more experiments in motivating and reporting my progress, and maybe even more posts to places like Instagram, or at least more timely ones.

Productivity

😌

I dipped my toe into creating Chrome extensions starting with a web page title updater. I use a Windows app called ManicTime to help me recall what I did on the computer throughout the day so I can record it in my schedule tracker spreadsheet, and to do that ManicTime continually records the title of whatever window is in focus. Sometimes the title is very generic, like in the Outlook web interface, which basically just says, “Mail.” So I had Claude get me started on a Chrome extension that would find the active email message and add its details to the page title, which ManicTime could then pick up. It also updates titles for our internal product management system, and I may add other sites. After many weeks of procrastinating on the idea it was surprisingly easy to get something working. It turns out Chrome extensions aren’t complicated to begin with, and Claude filled in the many gaps in my JavaScript knowledge.

Nature

😌

I spied fireflies in my apartment yard. Occasionally I hear worries that fireflies are dying out like the bees. I’ve also heard their imminent demise is just a viral myth. It’s true that I haven’t seen as many here as I did growing up, but they’re still around. I found them meandering in our yard.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum)

Posted in Blog, Nature, Productivity, Website, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 6/22/2025

Posted on August 5, 2025 by Andy

AI

🧐

I used AI to translate some old poetry. I’d been collecting use cases for AI, and I ran across another one while reading World Poetry. I asked Claude for help understanding some of the poems, and it was especially helpful for modernizing the language in Edmund Spenser’s “Prothalamion.” It also gave me some background info on the poem (which checked out), and I was intrigued by the idea of mythologizing a real-world event like the marriages Spenser was commemorating.

Spirituality

🤔

A possible panhandling encounter at the grocery store sparked reflection. As I was returning my cart, a man approached me speaking in such a thick accent I couldn’t understand a single word. After a confused back-and-forth he walked away in resignation, just after trying one last time with something that sounded like “I lost my job.” So I figured he was looking for at least a handout, but my slow brain was thrown off by the confusion even more than regular panhandling would have done, and I let him leave without help.

It definitely felt like a failed test, but it got me to think about how to handle these kinds of random situations. In this case I might ideally try to offer the person something and see how they respond. Later I wondered if I could’ve asked him to speak his primary language to see if ChatGPT could translate for us.

Movies

💭

Marvel’s Eternals sparked my curiosity about my version of a cosmic mythology. It occurred to me that any fictional creation will have its own characteristic slant on everything in its world. My sense is that the Marvel universe is full of superpowered mutants and extraterrestrials using science and magic that blend into each other, so when Marvel turns its gaze to religion and cosmology, they also tend to take on that shape. So if I applied my own aesthetic and thematic preferences across a universe, what would that look like? I might find out, since my memory project seems to be expanding into a whole worldbuilding endeavor.

🤨

Spider-Man: No Way Home highlighted the promise and perils of impulsive good will. Peter Parker is always eager to do what he can to help other people, but with great power comes the great responsibility not only to do good but also to think through your plans, the lack of which kicked off the story’s main problem. The resolution came with a somewhat more considered but no less drastic solution. Having said all that, as someone who tends to hang back in caution and pessimism, I may adopt Peter’s “I’m on it!” as my new inner pep talk.

Posted in AI, Movies, Spirituality, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 6/15/2025

Posted on August 3, 2025 by Andy

Modeling

😎

Michael C. Jackson’s Critical Systems Thinking and the Management of Complexity ticked all the boxes to become a major source for one of my life’s guiding concepts. When you’re trying to improve a situation, it helps to think of it as a system. Then you can change key elements of the system to change its outcomes. The problem is systems are hard to see clearly and often hard to change, so we look for another system to help us do that, a systems thinking methodology. Rather than picking one methodology that may have limited scope, Jackson surveyed ten of the most significant and placed them within a framework, a system of systems methodologies, that indicates where each might be most useful. The book scratches my itch for comprehensiveness, historical context, critical analysis, and practicality. Jackson’s own approach, Critical Systems Practice, is a multimethodology that guides the user in applying the others within a unified but flexible process. Mastering such an approach sounds like a lifetime endeavor, but the journey promises a trove of systems insight.

Spirituality

🤔

Dan Allender’s Sabbath pushed me to consider how I could treat the day as a weekly chance for true renewal. I had mixed feelings about this book, since on the one hand I like Allender’s deep and creative thinking, and the idea of a whole day each week devoted to a glorious enjoyment of life has appeal, yet on the other hand it could become its own kind of burden. Given that this book is in a series called The Ancient Practices, I was hoping for more of a biblical and historical look at the practice, when what we got was mostly Allender’s own conception of the Sabbath colored by the intense way he evidently likes to live. So it left me still looking for the biblical and historical survey, but in any case Allender’s perspective is rich food for thought.

Movies

😎

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings had an evocative setting that sparked my imagination. The plot had some interesting twists and an engaging character (by which, of course, I mean Katy), but it was the visuals that truly caught my eye and got me researching Chinese legendary creatures and wondering what would be involved in creating my own aesthetic. I had never heard of Shang-Chi, but I’m glad Marvel added him to the lineup.

People

👷‍♂️

I helped Jeremy’s family move. They’re farther away now, but I like their new place, and Jeremy still works close enough to be convenient for getting together. I was mainly there to shepherd the computers. My recovering leg didn’t exactly appreciate the stairs, but overall I found the move less strenuous than I was expecting, and I got to know their friends better. It even got me invited to a Fourth of July gathering. I stayed to help as long as I could, until the long drive was turning me into a sleepy road hazard.

Posted in Modeling, Movies, People, Spirituality, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 6/8/2025

Posted on August 2, 2025 by Andy

Productivity

😌

I created a media tracker database in Notion to help me plan my watching, reading, and listening. It won’t cover every single thing, but it’ll lead me through my media journeys when they get more involved. I started with my current media project, catching up on the Marvel Cinematic Universe, starting with Phase Four. I based the columns on a simplified form of Schema.org and got the data largely from Wikidata. The database immediately achieved its purpose of making it very easy to choose what to watch next.

Health

🙄

I paused my walks to let my leg recover. I’d had moderate shin splints or something just below my right knee for a few weeks, and walking slightly slower wasn’t helping, so I decided I needed a break from my walks altogether till the soreness calmed down. Stairs were also out, so I had to keep reminding myself to take the elevator, which was inconvenient when I had to walk down the hall to get to it.

Food

😎

I tried a bunch of great teas from Adagio. I wanted some paper tea filters to use at work, so I took the opportunity to spend my Adagio gift card on some tea too. I ordered their Spring sampler to go with the Winter sampler Colleen had given me for Christmas. The Spring sampler revolves around fruit. As usual, the flavors all blend well, and they’re gentle instead of slapping me in the face like most other fruit teas I’ve had, which have been too tart.

I also ordered one of the teas from my tea-themed Christmas label project from a few years ago, The Amazing Kimberly Tea. The description and review had intrigued me, and I’d wanted to try it ever since then. I loved the fact that it was part of a project where two friends created custom blends for each other. And I’m happy to report the tea lives up to its description.

Spirituality

🤔

In Pentecost, Emilio Alvarez reminded me there are hidden depths of spiritual experience I could be pursuing. In a chapter on Pentecost hymns, prayers, and Scriptures, Alvarez discusses Symeon the New Theologian, who wrote about his own direct experience of God. Life often feels mundane and draining, but examples like Symeon give us clues that on occasion the veil between natural and supernatural may part to give us a taste of the profound. I sometimes feel I need this kind of celestial perspective to keep me grounded in kingdom pursuits. At the same time, I remind myself there’s a danger of running after intense experiences without also chasing a changed heart.

Video

🙂

I kicked off MCU Phase Four with Black Widow. I’d wanted a Black Widow movie since early on in the series, so it was gratifying to finally have one. The movie didn’t disappoint, and it expanded my view of the character. I thought the theme of found family was very timely. The story did feel like a side quest more than the opening of a story arc, but maybe there are some tie-ins to the rest of the phase to watch for.

Posted in Health, Movies, Productivity, Spirituality, Tea, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 6/1/2025

Posted on July 29, 2025 by Andy

Productivity

😬

I brushed up on my techniques for efficient programming. It was crunch time at work again, another chance to ponder the age-old question, how do you manage risk under uncertainty? Namely, how do you manage the risk of blowing the deadline while making a digital mess under the uncertainty of how long it’ll take to solve the chain of problems you’ll progressively uncover? I settled on taking the most direct route I could easily think of and then consulting with my boss as soon as I hit a major snag. That worked out pretty well.

AI

😃

The chatbots both inspired and humbled me with their fictional weeknotes. On a whim during a walk I asked a few LLMs for a blog post each to see what ideas I could pick up on format and content. I was not prepared for their charm. Enjoy these entries from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and OLMo. Maybe once I have my blogging schedule under control, I can put more effort into style.

Literature

😎

I warmed up to poetry with Norton’s expansive anthology World Poetry. Inspired by the childhood reading habits of Katharine S. White, I picked up this anthology I’d bought over Christmas. (I’d started listening to White’s biography the week before, The World She Edited by Amy Reading. The ECPA conference had inspired picking up that one.) To make my way through the poetry I followed the pattern of my Bible reading plan and divided the book into seven sections, and each day I read about five pages of that day’s section. I’ve never been a big fan of poetry, but I found myself looking forward to the readings. A lot of it was just readable enough that making sense of the language was a fun puzzle, and the readings had an interesting variety of styles and subjects and moods.

Movies

🧐

Memento showcased a clever technique for representing short term memory loss. Inspired by looking into Saporta’s Composition No. 1, I decided to watch this nonlinear movie that, like most things, had been on my list for decades. It struck a nice balance between experiment and understandability, and it left enough mystery that fans are still discussing it.

Posted in AI, Biography, Movies, Poetry, Productivity, Programming, Weeknotes, Writing | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 5/25/2025

Posted on July 26, 2025 by Andy

Productivity

🤔

I started reorienting my mind toward project writing. Instead of flopping onto my bed after work every day and scrolling social media in a haze of fatigue, I decided midweek I would give myself a topic to think about on my way home and spend a small chunk of time writing first thing when I got there. It didn’t end up happening quite that way, since I was intent on catch-up blogging instead, but it did get my mind whirring in general, which you’ll hear about in the rest of this post. It helped that I also removed some of the more time-wasting apps from my phone. All the extra thinking wasn’t great for my sleep schedule, though.

Learning

🤓

On my memory project, I considered creating a conculture. I pondered how fleshing out my mnemonic system would ideally create not just a loose collection of techniques and images but an extensive and cohesive fictional culture. This would expand my mnemonic conlang idea into a conculture, mainly featuring folklore and memory-related cultural practices. I also spent some time marveling at how well this project brings together so many of my interests: learning, narrative, modeling, linguistics, productivity, music, and visual arts.

Modeling

🧐

I started thinking through ideas that might go into the next version of my modeling project overview. I might talk about the various modeling languages people encounter in their everyday lives, mainly natural language and math. And I’d probably talk about my wish for an interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary field of modeling. My thoughts on disciplinarity were influenced by this blog post and this discussion with ChatGPT.

Literature

😎

I ventured further into some of my experimental literature topics. I explored how someone might create a shufflable narrative like Marc Saporta’s Composition No. 1. I read a bit of the manual to Inform 7, a text adventure game engine, and had Claude try writing a game for it, which mostly worked. And I stumbled across the experimental music software Argeïphontes Lyre (via this video), which inspired me with its arcane textual elements. Maybe soon I’ll add some more to my page of experimental literature links.

Nature

😮

A couple of deer showed up at one of my very suburban parks. I wondered how they’d gotten there, since I think of this park is being bounded by roads and homes and a school, but looking at the map I saw it’s connected to some of my other usual parks by a creek, so hopefully some visitors at those got to see them too.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum)

Video

😌

I returned to my daily dinnertime TV. I’d stopped that and limited TV to weekends to spend less time on it, but my time management seemed better (?) now, and in the meantime I was spending dinnertime on YouTube and wasting my streaming subscription fees. So I’m seeing how it goes, and you may see a few more TV and movie reviews here.

That week I finished a satisfying last season of Jessica Jones, the show I was nostalgic for during my long break from Marvel TV a while back. At the time my nostalgia was mainly for the setting, but this time around I felt strangely absorbed in the characters’ emotions and had to remind myself their lives weren’t mine. Great storytelling and acting.

People

🙂

Saturday I attended a graduation pizza party. Jeremy and Heather’s son Westley was finishing high school. I hadn’t mingled with their circle in a while, so it was great to connect with both old and new acquaintances. I even got a walk in the woods out of it when I tagged along on their visit to one of my usual haunts, and it was equally great to have people to bond with over nature.

Posted in Experimental literature, Memory, Modeling, Nature, People, Productivity, TV, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 5/18/2025

Posted on July 9, 2025 by Andy

Learning

🤔

I began exploring active learning exercises for learning complex material. My exploration was inspired by finding that working with ONIX feeds taught me a lot more about ONIX than reading the specification. The idea of this approach is to give myself tasks that require searching through the material and reasoning about it for a specific purpose. The purpose gives the information context and significance, which makes the information more memorable. I came up with a bunch of exercises and gave them to some chatbots to see what else they could suggest, and I’d say they organized and supplemented my list pretty well. Here are my conversations with ChatGPT (Learning Specification Tasks), Claude (Structured Strategies for Mastering Specifications), and Gemini (Learning Specification: Task Ideas). I also had ChatGPT list some other specifications to try this approach with (Well-known Specifications Examples).

Nature

🙂

The goslings were out in full force. It made walks in the park a little treacherous. The goose parents get extra hissy.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum)

Posted in Learning, Nature, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 5/11/2025

Posted on July 6, 2025 by Andy

Productivity

🙂

I started using the notes column in my schedule tracker to comment on events as they happen. Before I was only using it occasionally to identify my activities more specifically, but I realized I could make better use of it, such as for mini-retrospectives, recording details for the blog, and basic journaling. It does make my notes overall more scattered because now the tracker is an extra place to look for them, but I already had plans to integrate the tracker with the rest of my system, so the notes issue just gives me extra motivation to get going on it.

Spirituality

🤔

Watchfulness by Brian Hedges introduced me to the Puritan discipline of vigilance against sin. It’s a basic necessity of the Christian life but not one that always gets much scrutiny. Hedges draws a lot from John Owen, John Bunyan, and Robert Murray M’Cheyne. There were lots of quotes from Pilgrim’s Progress and The Holy War. Whatever flaws the Puritans had, I feel they do have contributions to offer on a serious spiritual life, and the book is a good starting point for study and practice. Even though most of the book is about guarding against sin, the concept of watchfulness is broader, and I was gratified to see it also covered a bit of the other kind I’d been pondering—expectancy, which I see as the follow-up to prayer, watching for how God might act.

Nature

😌

I tested my last water sample for this round of winter chloride observations. I happened to give the report some extra description of conditions at the testing site, which felt like a nice send-off for the season. In comparison to last year’s readings at the same location, the chloride level peaked a month later and 20% higher (449 PPM vs 376) and took longer to fall. As for next season, I haven’t decided if I’ll volunteer again or move on to something else.

Music

🙂

I began exploring recordings from the Scripture Hymnal project (Spotify playlist). I ran across the printed hymnal at the ECPA conference on a table of books that had received some kind of recognition. It’s published by Rabbit Room Press, a publisher and artist community I keep half an eye on. The idea of the project is to put direct quotations from Scripture to music to help congregations learn the Bible. The effect is sometimes a bit awkward, but once I got used to it, the songs grew on me. Some favorites are “Let Us Fix Our Eyes,” “The Lord Rebuilds Jerusalem,” and “Those Who Look to Him Are Radiant.” As far as the hymnal itself goes, they’re aiming to publish an SATB edition later in the year, and I’ll probably pick it up then.

Posted in Music, Nature, Productivity, Spirituality, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 5/4/2025

Posted on June 30, 2025 by Andy

Work

🤓

I accompanied my boss to the ECPA Leadership Summit in Nashville. I was mainly there to meet with people from the new file distribution service we’ve signed up with, but the experience reminded me how easily I absorb the atmosphere of a gathering like a conference. Done well, it’s a great way to not only confer on shared issues (AI was a big one), but also to inject some life into the industry. It was good to connect with new acquaintances and old, and the conference added a layer to my motivation to collaborate at work.

People

🙂

Before the conference started, I visited my sister Abbie and sister-in-law Colleen. Free time to see them was my condition for taking the trip. They introduced me to Chuy’s with its interesting art-covered walls (here’s Claude’s translation of one painting by our table), and then we walked around the Opry Mills mall. The highlights there were the fish tank outside Aquarium Restaurant and wandering around Bass Pro Shops. I’d been curious about that place ever since dimly remembering their logo, maybe on one of their catalogs, and wondering what it was from.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum)

Posted in Nature, People, Weeknotes, Work | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 4/27/2025

Posted on June 18, 2025 by Andy

Spirituality

🤔

A period of accumulating insights continued. These mainly crystallize during my morning devotions. The most significant was that life is a mix of experience that has waves and seasons—pain and joy, work and rest. Rather than hindering myself by rejecting the parts I don’t like, I need to expect and accept these cycles and to lean into them, learning to practice both the work and the rest, to benefit from both joy and pain. I can’t say I actually did any of that, but my spiritual agenda was being shaped.

Nature

🙂

White and pink trees have made up my spring. Each year I notice something different about the seasons, and this year spring has been about the white trees lining the roads with many pink ones interspersed. I’ve also noticed all the empty dandelion stalks, which are less nice and remind me of scraggly whiskers. But I did see some geese eating the fluffy seedheads one day, so now I know dandelions serve a purpose (and I’m told people eat the greens).

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum)

Posted in Nature, Spirituality, Weeknotes | Leave a comment