Weeknote for 4/3/2022

Posted on April 6, 2022 by Andy

Website

😑

It turns out my local wiki installation works already, so now I need to contact the web host for help. What I thought was a local server error was the browser being redirected to the remote website. Once I got all the settings adapted, the local website worked fine, so I need to see what the web host can tell me.

Health

😐

I spent the week getting over a cold or something. I’ll blame that for my extra naps and low productivity. On the bright side, I learned how to use those at-home COVID tests and got a negative result. The remains of the illness are still hanging on, but that’s how it goes these days with my immune-suppressing medications. At least I don’t have a cough this time. Weeks of coughing is very annoying.

Productivity

🤔

I’m taking stock of the strengths and weaknesses of my productivity system. Generally I’ve been able to stabilize some of my everyday life maintenance so that my quality of life is much better than it used to be. I’ve also come up with some better ways to push myself through my knowledge work. But my system still hasn’t resulted in significantly more project time or faster progress on my projects. I still have a lot of thinking to do, but some ideas I’ve had for improvements are (1) coding a script to extract data from Google Sheets so I can analyze all this activity I’ve been tracking, (2) brainstorming ways to deal with fatigue, and (3) coding an activity alert app to help me focus when I’m working at the computer.

I’m trying out managing my personal projects using a Kanban board in Jira. I’ll see if the cards-in-columns format helps me visually juggle my projects more easily. One of the key factors in Kanban is the work-in-progress (WIP) limit, which pushes you not to accept more work than you can handle at a time. I’m expecting this approach to help me make more conscious decisions about when to take on what projects and when to resist interrupting them with other projects, since that’s a pattern that seems to hold me back.

Spirituality

😐

I did nothing on the everyday prayer project. I’m thinking I’ll keep working on this past Easter till it’s done. But I’ll see what I think after the Kanban board gets going.

Life maintenance

😤

This week’s major project will be my taxes. You’d think someone with a productivity system would have them done by now, but no. But I will finish them before the last minute!

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Weeknote for 3/27/2022

Posted on April 1, 2022 by Andy

Website

😐

I got my offline wiki installation to the point of giving me an internal server error. This is the same state the online website was in. My week was taken up with naps and reorganizing my cooking, so this wasn’t much progress, but it was an important milestone. Next I’ll increase the server logging and see what that tells me.

Productivity

😐

I’m spreading out my life maintenance tasks. My weekends were consistently overburdened with chores, so I’m finding ways to spread them out. So instead of planning and shopping for groceries on Saturday, which probably takes me longer than a normal person, I’ll plan on Monday and shop on Tuesday.

I’m making interval timers for my regular recipes. This feels like another level of nerdery, but timers really do help me: (1) They tell me how long to expect the whole task to take so I can fit it into my plans and hopefully limit procrastinating on it. (2) They keep me on task. (3) By breaking down the task and objectively keeping the time, they make it easier to learn how to speed up the activity. The only problem is it takes a lot of time to set up a recipe timer. So that could turn into the main project for this week.

Programming

🤔

In Modern Software Engineering, Dave Farley places software development practices into a cohesive framework built on the core ideas of engineering. I was interested in his take on an engineering approach to software development because of his YouTube channel, especially his criticism of the state of Agile. The core ideas he starts with are the efficiency and economy of software solutions and using an empirical, scientific approach to find them. To follow those principles developers need to become experts at learning and at managing complexity, and these are the two categories Farley places his recommended practices into, plus a category for tools that support the process.

I appreciated his framework and especially the nuances it added to common practices. But I’m still looking for more from the idea of engineering in software development. I’m looking for an in-depth treatment of parallels to other engineering disciplines, which seem to draw a lot more on existing, low-level scientific knowledge, whereas software consultants tend to focus on the high-level design process. Maybe I want something more like the books Cracking the Coding Interview or Elements of Programming Interviews, which are crash courses in computer science in the form of worked word problems that might come up in job interviews. I also wonder what the programming equivalent of a CAD tool would look like. I’m sure it would involve a lot more static and dynamic code analysis than I ever see, and also diagrams, though not necessarily UML.

Food

😐

Signature SELECT Colombia Ground Coffee: 3/5. I liked it better than the Folgers, but it was still sour a little too often.

TV

🙂

Season 4 of Star Trek: Discovery just finished, and while I love the show and this season in particular, my feelings are mixed. The show continues to be sci fi comfort food for me, and I found this season’s themes of cognitive science, linguistics, and the profoundly alien especially relevant to my interests. And there were some moments I really felt.

But it has some quirks, which I just accept: The writers pack too much in, so problems are solved way too quickly, and some of the story elements get shoved in awkwardly, although I do love that each season covers so much ground. And it sometimes promises more than it delivers (e.g., I kept hoping Culber would get better therapy than a mere vacation; and for the season’s threat I was hoping for Nagilum-level weird). These traits aren’t that unusual for Star Trek, but Discovery seems to turn up the dial on them.

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Weeknote for 3/20/2022

Posted on March 24, 2022 by Andy

Website

😐

I finished installing a copy of the website on my local computer. Reminding myself of how to do that and then integrating it with Visual Studio Code took some time. I tested it out on WordPress, since the blog part of the site already works. This week I’ll debug the wiki.

Spirituality

😐

I scanned prayers from Every Moment Holy and began editing the resulting text file. Next I’ll reduce them each down to a few lines.

Fiction

🙂

I started taking stock of my various literature projects. They pop up randomly, but they have common patterns, so I decided to organize them a bit. An Audible sale reminded me I want to get some kind of handle on classic literature, so now I’m listening to The Western Canon by Harold Bloom to help me. That’s my general strategy—find people whose opinions interest me for recommendations, especially if they’ve written some kind of reference, like Grant and Clute’s encyclopedias of science fiction and fantasy or Joshi’s Unutterable Horror. Other categories that come up for me are contemporary fiction and experimental literature. I’d also like to learn some literary criticism so I can get more out of my listening. Since I’m in project management mode these days, I started jotting some notes about my purposes for these projects and the deliverables I have in mind, assuming I get anywhere with them.

People

🙂

My parents came to visit at the end of the week. They were on their way home from making a delivery to my brother, so I didn’t feel a lot of pressure to make the visit a big event. We didn’t do much, but it gave us a chance to rest.

Posted in Fiction, People, Spirituality, Website, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 3/13/2022

Posted on March 13, 2022 by Andy

Productivity

🙂

I relearned I have to aim for target times if I want to hit them. Up till now I’ve mainly been trying to schedule the important tasks for earlier in the day and letting everything take as long as it takes, which means later but still important tasks often don’t get done. Last week’s experiment was aiming to start my project time at 7 (or 7:30 if I had reasons) so I’d have about two hours for it. I’ve done this haphazardly before, but it worked so well this time that I want to train myself to approach my schedule this way.

Website

😐

I made slow but significant progress relearning how to set up my website on my local computer. This is what I spent all my project time on. This week I’ll spend some time analyzing last week’s work so I can choose the quickest methods of solving problems.

Spirituality

😐

I made no progress on the everyday prayer project. Now that I’m having more success fitting project time in, I need to learn how to juggle multiple projects.

Tea

🙂

I was introduced to another 5, Tazo’s Glazed Lemon Loaf. For my birthday my sister sent me a nice card with a bag of her favorite tea. I steeped it without really looking at the package, and I thought to myself it smelled like one of those glazed lemon cakes. Then I looked at the name. Well done, Tazo! Since then I’ve been telling people about it.

Fiction

🙂

The High King is an epic and satisfying ending to the series. I don’t know if literary criticisms have been written of the Prydain books, but the Encyclopedia of Fantasy has an interesting entry.

Politics

🤔

In Twilight of Democracy Anne Applebaum presents an interesting but perhaps limited perspective on the causes of authoritarianism. The causes I picked up were (1) resentment of the meritocracy of liberal democracy by ambitious but less capable people, (2) a desire for simplicity and uniformity in society, and (3) a nostalgia that seeks to recreate one’s image of the past. She doesn’t exactly dismiss the notion of people economically left behind by society, but it’s not what she cares about in this book. I believe this gap is filled by Fiona Hill’s new book, There Is Nothing for You Here, which I’ll get to at some point. Applebaum is a journalist, and her approach focuses on history. I’d like to see how researchers in the various social sciences would interact with her views.

I’ve been appreciating Adam Something’s YouTube posts analyzing the Ukraine conflict. I don’t know enough to evaluate them, but they at least make me feel better. And they introduced me to Francis Fukuyama’s interesting project American Purpose.

Posted in Current events, Fiction, Politics, Productivity, Spirituality, Tea, Weeknotes, Wiki | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 3/6/2022

Posted on March 6, 2022 by Andy

Website

😐

I didn’t do anything on fixing the website. My project time was taken up by invoicing. Maybe this week.

Vacation

🙂

My birthday is this week, and I’m taking the day off. I asked myself what I wanted for my birthday, and it was a free day not dominated by chores where I could work on some of the projects I care about. I still have some planning to do for it, but the topics of the day will mainly be modeling, a bit of Haskell, and maybe some requirements engineering.

Food

🙂

Folgers Columbian Ground Coffee: 3/5. It was good most of the time but sour too much of the time.

I was indoctrinated by a FredrikKnudsen livestream into loose leaf tea snobbery. I haven’t become a snob yet, but his enthusiasm motivated me to try it out. Later in the week my boss gave me some of his Ahmad Green Tea with Earl Grey, so now I can see what it’s like without too much expense.

Fiction

🤔

Like the first time I read it, I felt a strong connection to Taran Wanderer. I too am on a continual quest to define myself. In my opinion a person is too broad and varied to be described by one term, but I came up with “Andy Creator,” and I think that’s a decent starting place. Maybe in that case I should do more creating. Maybe the productivity system I’m creating will help me do that.

Spirituality

😐

I scanned some prayers from Every Moment Holy. Next I’ll edit them each down to a few lines. Then I’ll create audio files for them and find ways to integrate them into my routines.

Posted in Birthdays, Coffee, Fiction, Site updates, Spirituality, Tea, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 2/27/2022

Posted on February 27, 2022 by Andy

Website

😐

I’m taking a break from my main projects to fix my website. Not only has someone asked me about a page on the wiki, but I’m working on something new to post there. So it’s time to prioritize it.

Productivity

😐

I made slight progress on preparing the Emacs commands for mnemonicization. Next I’ll take a close look at my time tracker to see what’s still crowding out my time for projects like this one and what I can do about it. As for the Org project itself, I’ll pick it up again sometime after I fix the website.

🙂

My housekeeping practice is achieving its goal of reducing my cleaning time and procrastination. Last week I trimmed my kitchen cleaning timer from 37 minutes to 15. This week I’ll try to do the same with my bedroom and living room time. A regular schedule for cleaning is also taking shape. It helps that I’m attaching it to my evening routine.

Food

🙂

I’ve come up with a limit of two sweetener packets for making tea enjoyable. Anything beyond that will earn the tea a 2 rating. Otherwise it can probably have a 4. Celestial Seasonings’ Fruit Tea Sampler runs up against the limit, but they all ended up 4s. Most of them are too tart on their own. The exception is the milder Country Peach Passion.

Tazo’s Classic Chai was a 4 all by itself. I think I’ve only had chai once before, and I wasn’t impressed. Maybe the milk dampened the experience. But before trying the Vanilla Chai my friend Heather recommended, I wanted to reacquaint myself with regular chai, and Tazo’s won me over.

Current events

😕

Like many, I’ve been keeping an eye on the unfolding events in Ukraine. The conflict feels dire and consequential. I have no wise words, but this touching Instagram post has lodged in my mind.

The relaxing of COVID rules is making me set my personal policies more carefully. My goal for basically the whole pandemic has been to avoid long COVID. I’m on a decades-long quest to escape brain fog and fatigue, and I’m finally making progress. Now is not the time to risk setbacks. Plus there’s still the possibility of spreading an asymptomatic infection to strangers. So for now I’ll keep wearing a mask in crowded places, and I’ll probably avoid indoor dining. But I’ll keep watching what public health experts are saying.

Spirituality

😐

My Lent project this year is another attempt at last year’s everyday prayer project. It didn’t stick the first time, but I’m in a better position to carry it out this year. I have better tools and practices for following routines, and I have the print version of Every Moment Holy so I’m not just working from the audio.

Posted in COVID-19, Current events, Productivity, Site updates, Spirituality, Tea, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 2/20/2022

Posted on February 20, 2022 by Andy

Productivity

🙂

I’m creating mnemonics for Emacs commands. I’m thinking it’ll help me learn the many, many arbitrary-seeming commands in this software. The keystroke sequences have fairly regular structures, so it shouldn’t be too hard to search and replace the keys to create memorable image descriptions, treating the commands like mad libs. For example, I’ll use one of the typical alphabet mnemonics to represent the commands’ alphabetic characters. Last week I finished adding the basic data to the command spreadsheet, and this week I should be able to add the mnemonics.

Fiction

🤔

The Shadow of the Torturer is a strange book, but I liked it well enough to continue with the series. My boss suggested it because it’s February’s read-along on Media Death Cult, and I happened to have it on Audible. I keep hearing this series is dense with meaning, almost all of which I’m sure glided past my ears unnoticed, though I did notice some mysteries. They reminded me of the artifacts the Wheel of Time characters would run across, strange and sometimes magical relics from a forgotten age. In Shadow some of them were only mysteries because the narrator takes the features of his world for granted and doesn’t explain them. I never feel up to taking the time to analyze these kinds of works myself, but I’m looking forward to hearing everyone else’s deep dives.

The Castle of Llyr is another good Prydain story, but the series is starting to feel formulaic. Still, the formula he’s using is a decent container for the kinds of themes he’s exploring. And there are story arcs across the series, so each book isn’t just a repetition of the others. I remember identifying with Taran’s quest to find himself in the next book, Taran Wanderer, so I’m looking forward to being reminded of where it takes him.

Food

🙂

I tried more tea, and my ratings are becoming more varied as I continue to refine the scale. 4 is now “I like the fumes and aftertaste, or it’s subtle but has grown on me, or I like its flavor less [than the 5s’], at least without additions.” The teas in Bigelow’s herbal collection all get 4s. Twinings’ Oolong gets a 3, and Celestial Seasonings’ Cinnamon Apple Spice was an instant 5.

Posted in Fiction, Memory, Productivity, Tea, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 2/13/2022

Posted on February 13, 2022 by Andy

Website

😐

I’m fixing the wiki side of the website. If you hadn’t noticed, the front page of this site used to point to a page that looks like Wikipedia, and now it points to this blog. At the end of last year I updated the site’s PHP version so WordPress would work, and it broke MediaWiki, so I’ve been troubleshooting in my spare moments. My next thing to try is installing it from scratch and importing the old data.

Productivity

🙂

I organized the Emacs part of my cheat spreadsheet for Org. I’ve added some commands from familiar Windows programs that are equivalent to the Emacs commands, but there are plenty that don’t have Windows counterparts, at least not in software I use. This week I’ll add the Org commands.

I’m trying to be more regular about improving my productivity system. Looking at my life over the past couple of years, I’ve been impressed with how much small changes can build up, and so I’d like to keep the snowball rolling by intentionally looking each day for improvements to make to my system. Last week one improvement was a new routine timer to capture some of my miscellaneous evening tasks, and part of the new evening routine is to practice cleaning every day, since after I replaced housekeeping in my elastic habits, I went back to putting it off.

Housekeeping

🙂

I ran my new Roomba for the first time. It was a Christmas present from my parents. I set it up a few weeks ago, but after that Roma was just sitting on her charger waiting for me to work out how to clear the floor. So that was Sunday’s housekeeping project, which took a long time because I constantly stopped to make notes of what I was moving to where so I wouldn’t have to think about it in the future. It was interesting to watch the Roomba follow its path finding algorithm, but it seemed inefficient, retreading some areas and missing others, so I’ll try walling it off so it can spend its time on one room. I also need to mess with its cliff sensors, because it stops at the edge of my black-patterned rug, apparently thinking it’s an abyss.

Food

🙂

I sampled Bigelow’s assorted black and green teas, and other teas are growing on me. My default score for tea is 3, and this set was a solid 3, but I think my sister’s observation was right, that I tend to like mint, and the Perfectly Mint Classic does get a 4. At the same time I notice myself gravitating toward certain “bland” teas I’ve tried, like Earl Grey, so I’m starting not to trust my initial impressions, and I’ll need to rethink my scoring criteria.

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Weeknote for 2/6/2022

Posted on February 6, 2022 by Andy

Productivity

😎

I got through another page of the Org guide, and then I made a cheat spreadsheet. It’ll let me sort by different pieces of info so I have a more flexible way to review the many, many commands. So far I’ve added the content of the Emacs reference card, and later I’ll add the one for Org. I also have columns to fill in with equivalent commands from Windows and other familiar software so I can use the known to learn the unknown.

The journaling is intensifying. In addition to work journaling, I’ve returned to my old habit of collecting all my random thoughts throughout the day on my current topics of interest. The last time I did this regularly was in college. In the desert years after that I repeatedly discovered that, in addition to sleep, writing is what makes the most difference for me between depression and vitality. The richness that grows out of processing my life in text tells me the wasteland I’ve lived in isn’t all there is. But as with everything else I tried for improving my life, the oasis always dried up quickly. Maybe this time it’ll stay a while.

I collected more ideas on streamlining my tasks. (1) I can define service levels for different kinds of tasks so I have an easy way to gracefully degrade them when I’m short on time. (2) A solid memory lets you reconnect to information faster, so once I learn mnemonic techniques for real, I can use them to spend less time looking up my most needed info. (3) I can use a shorthand for my journaling and note-taking. For handwriting I’d use Gregg, but for typing I’d need something else, which I may have to invent.

Four Thousand Weeks is a thought-provoking exploration of living meaningfully within our limits. Burkeman wants us to let go of the rat race and embrace the inescapable smallness and imperfection of life. It’s written in a style typical of recent self-help books, but it’s dense with countercultural wisdom to dig into. On the surface, following the author’s advice to quit striving for perfect productivity would suggest dropping my scheduling project, but I think the two are compatible. The point of my project isn’t to do more than humanly possible but to gain clarity on my time so I can experiment with ways to make the most of it.

I found that I wasn’t really the target audience for the book, since I’m a slow person who already likes to enjoy life, but since I’m also a person who likes to dream big, it was a good reminder to ask myself where I have unrealistic expectations. The book also pushes me a few steps down the path of developing my “spirituality of coping.” He offers some techniques for dealing with the everyday pain of being human, such as the boredom and fear that drive us to distraction and procrastination. It’s a valuable book, and after finishing the audiobook, I bought the ebook to study it further. Later I might look into his similar book The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking.

Food

🙂

Community Coffee Café Special: 4/5. It was another good, everyday coffee, and it had a little more character than the Barissimo House Blend. I’ve completed my run through the Aldi coffees that interest me, and so now I’m expanding into other brands. My next one is from Folgers. I’ll probably also revisit the coffees I scored as 4 to recalibrate my scale, because some of them probably deserve a 5.

Last week I tried Twinings’ Black Tea Variety Pack. Here were my scores on those:

  • Earl Grey – 3
  • Lady Grey – 3
  • English Breakfast – 3
  • Irish Breakfast – 3

Since this is my “give tea a chance” project, I’ve redefined what 3 means on my scale. Originally it was “kind of bland and forgettable,” but I’m starting to think of tea as a slow and mindful drink, so what bland really means is “subtle,” a tea that needs more attention to appreciate.

Fiction

🙂

I found The Black Cauldron more satisfying than The Book of Three. The characters had settled into the story, and I think the pacing was a little better. And there was a key sacrifice in the book that I really felt, though maybe not for the same reasons the characters did.

Housekeeping

🤔

I finally decorated my home for winter. I tried to make it generically winter instead of Christmas, but it still feels too much like a holiday. It’s also showing me I need something more to make the place feel truly decorated, probably something on the walls.

 

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Weeknote for 1/30/2022

Posted on January 30, 2022 by Andy

Productivity

😐

I made no progress on the Org part of this project. I’ll see if I can prioritize it this week.

🙂

I made lots of progress on my scheduling notes, which are growing into plans for a full-fledged app. In my software development reading I’m learning about requirements, so these plans will become more formal soon.

I’m starting another round of streamlining my tasks to expand my project time. Optimizing a schedule is exciting, but it can only go so far. If each task takes too long, I’ll still be slower than I want. And all my slow tasks will crowd out the time I need for optimizing, not to mention the other projects I care about. So I’m looking again at how I can achieve satisfying results while taking less time for them.

This time I’m taking a few approaches: First, I’m learning to outsource. Specifically I’m researching my purchases less and instead relying on published reviews. That worked really well for buying a new Dutch oven.

Second, I’m work journaling to keep myself unstuck. Even though writing slows things down in some ways, my impression is it speeds them up in others. It unclogs my brain when it tries to think about too much at once or when it stops thinking because the work feels hard.

And third, I’m focusing on practice. I’ve gotten a lot quicker at the routines I’ve made timers for, and it’s because I do them all the time and pay attention to efficiency. So if I do my slow tasks more often, they should get faster.

Food

🙂

Cooking is my first activity to practice in this round of streamlining. During the pandemic I’ve been cooking my way through Betty Crocker One-Dish Meals, starting with the salad and soup sections, which have taken me this whole time. I’ve tried several times to convince myself to pause the project, but I’ve been strangely attached to it.

Well my new agenda has motivated me, and so I’ve rated my favorite recipes on their level of effort, and I’ve chosen the easiest of those to practice. That gives me four recipes. My goal is to reduce the time it takes me to shop for them, prepare the ingredients, and manage the cooking.

I’ve started a tea tasting project. I’ve never been a big fan of tea. There were a few kinds I liked, but they were all the overly sweetened, iced kind. Regular tea was always disappointing to me. It smelled good but only tasted like hot water.

Then my sister brought Celestial Seasonings’ Candy Cane Lane to our Christmas gathering, and at last here was a tea I didn’t have to struggle to enjoy. So now that I feel tea has potential, I’m on a quest to explore it and perhaps join the tea-loving population.

This will go quicker than the coffee because tea has a longer shelf life, so I don’t need to get through a whole box before trying the next one. Plus some of the boxes are samplers. In fact, I’ve started with Celestial Seasonings’ herbal tea sampler.

My scoring scheme:

  • 5 – I like it, and it has an actual flavor or other interesting qualities.
  • 4 – I like the fumes and aftertaste. (In my view, this is what tea is made of.)
  • 3 – It’s kind of bland and forgettable.
  • 2 – Making it enjoyable would take work.
  • 1 – I’d actively avoid it.

My scores for the herbal tea sampler:

  • Chamomile – 3
  • Lemon Zinger – 2
  • Peppermint – 4
  • Honey Vanilla Chamomile – 3
  • Sleepytime – 3

Fiction

🙂

Snuff is a satisfying meal of detective work, action, satire, and human rights. When it comes to fiction, Discworld is my comfort food, but it’s the nutritious sort. Terry Pratchett had a sharp eye on the world from a perch somewhere on the left. But where exactly? In the years since I last listened to a Discworld book, I’ve learned a lot about feminism, and I wonder what the people I listen to would say about this story. He seems to mock many of his characters simply for not measuring up while innocently being themselves, and I imagine that could raise some hackles.

Coming back to the series after my break, one thing that strikes me is how real Pratchett’s characters feel, despite being caricatures. In this story even the laughingstocks of the series get some respect. The message I pick up is the dichotomy between how different people are—how strange, absurd, and sometimes even subhuman we can seem to each other—and that we are all nonetheless fully persons.

Posted in Cooking, Fiction, Productivity, Tea, Weeknotes | Leave a comment