Weeknote for 4/20/2025

Website

🧐

I came to some decisions about next steps for my website. Given that my weeknotes were a month behind and writing them was often challenging even on a normal week when I wasn’t catching up, I spent a couple of weeks thinking through my goals and potential solutions. My takeaways: First, in terms of tactics, I’m returning to writing my drafts by hand and following a loose set of templates that I’ll develop further over time. Second, in terms of strategy, I’ll work on sticking to a daily writing session, and I’ll experiment with the weeknote format and schedule. Ideally, I’d like to focus on writing longer topical posts and then shorter weeknotes that mainly just link to them.

Modeling

😎

Sitting in on a video call of Abby Colbert’s Sensemaker Club sparked some inspiration. The topic was the role of information architecture in AI (video recording), which gave me a glimpse into the work that’s been happening around knowledge graphs. I tucked this away for when I jump back into my modeling project. Also the meeting felt so much like a BISG call that I began to wonder where information architecture might intersect with the book industry—probably somewhere in metadata (and, of course, ecommerce and other websites).

Programming

😏

I thwarted the hackers who were messing with my Notion databases. I use an outside service to automate an action in my Notion setup. The service would often shut down my automation script because hackers were accessing the script’s URL with incorrect data and causing errors. So I flexed my meager cybersecurity muscles for an evening and found a way to add a “password” to the trigger URL so their attacks wouldn’t get far enough to cause a shutdown.

AI

😎

I used Claude to play an old text adventure game. The game is from a Christopher Lampton book I grew up on, How to Create Adventure Games. Out of curiosity, I gave Claude someone’s Java version to see what it could do, and it understood the program surprisingly well! It’s a computationally expensive way to run a program, though, and I could only progress a few turns each session before running out of free responses.

Spirituality

🤔

For Good Friday I watched the service at St. Thomas’s. Again it was strangely captivating—the several minutes of prostration, the long Gospel reading sung in plainchant, the sermon on Jesus’ joy in the crucifixion, the variety in the people’s veneration of the cross. Overall my Friday fasts during Lent were a helpful exercise, and I might pick up another regular fasting day after a break for the Easter season, which Wesley Hill’s Easter tells me is a time for feasting.

Nature

😎

I captured two special animal appearances in one day: a hawk in flight and a raccoon in the parking lot.

 

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