Weeknote for 1/12/2020

Conceptual modeling

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At the beginning of the week I decided my original plan to immediately make a spreadsheet didn’t really fit the material, and if I tried it, I’d end up with only a superficial understanding of the content. So I explored, rethought, and decided to start with learning OWL and the corresponding software Protege and translate the different kinds of Semantic Web statements into the other modeling languages. OWL will perhaps help me take notes on the rest of the project, which will center around learning logic via the book Meaning and Argument by Lepore, and I’ll translate the different kinds of logical statements too.

I spent the rest of the week setting up the way I wanted to work, which involved a private GitHub repository, some scripts to test out the languages I’m learning, and some planning about the note-taking format I want to develop as I go along, which is based on the data serialization format YAML.

Life maintenance

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Last time I lost weight, I was on a low-carb diet, and when I switched to calorie counting, I lost nothing, so I concluded my body didn’t work the conventional way and I’d have to drastically reduce my carbs every time. Well I’m back to counting calories because of this cholesterol control diet, and the eating routine I’ve started with is low enough on calories that I lost almost 4 pounds the first week, about 2 more than you should safely be losing—oops—so I guess it does work after all. I’m making progress on reducing the saturated fat in my diet, and now I’m adding a soluble fiber supplement and one for plant sterols and stanols.

Software development

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I finished Righting Software by Juval Löwy, a well-known software consultant I hadn’t heard of till someone in a blog comment recommended him. I was curious about his book because he offers a somewhat different angle on software and project design than other authors I read, who tend to be friends with each other and work at the same places, so it’s worthwhile to get an outside perspective. I don’t know if his ideas are actually better, but he claims to take an engineering approach to software development, and I want to try them out. If you want an idea of what he says, I’ve made a playlist of videos from his YouTube channel that cover many of the book’s topics arranged in roughly the book’s order.

After that I listened to Microservices Patterns by Chris Richardson, and not in text-to-speech, because it actually has an audiobook for some reason and also a nicely organized website. According to reviews, the book covers all the standard industry solutions to the standard challenges a microservice architecture creates, so I feel prepared if I ever get around to creating that kind of software. I’m thinking about using some of the concepts on our ebook production tools at work, since they’re already a collection of loosely collaborating apps.

Spirituality

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My pastor wants us to read through the Bible again this year, and I decided to make that my Lent activity like it was last year, listening to a whole audio Bible. This year I think I’ll do the NKJV, which has been languishing in my audio Bible collection.

Movies

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Monday Tim and I went to see Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, which I liked okay, but the whole time I felt like I was watching someone’s over-the-top fanfiction. Were all the movies so frantically epic and I never noticed? One of my favorite things about Star Wars is hearing people’s responses to it, so I’ve enjoyed seeing all the critical videos YouTube has been recommending me (warning: spoilers in the links).