Weeknote for 9/5/2021

Posted on September 5, 2021 by Andy

Programming

🤔

I’m taking the plunge into Haskell Programming from First Principles by Chris Allen and Julie Moronuki. I surveyed a bunch of learning resources and decided it had the best chance of not frustrating and confusing me. The authors meant it to be a careful exercise in pedagogy, and it seems well regarded by other Haskell learners. My plan is to make a serious attempt to study the book but to intersperse it with other projects, because it’s 1200 pages. Before launching into that, though, I’ll quickly read one or two shorter resources for an overview of the language.

Fiction

😎

Andy Weir’s The Martian made me want to be an engineer. It was free on Audible through September 3, so after much procrastinating I turned it on and got through it at the last minute. It’s funny, nailbiting, inspiring, and very nerdy. And Wil Wheaton is a perfect narrator for it. I always appreciate help visualizing the stories I hear and read (I was grateful to find a map), so I’ll rewatch the movie soon to remind myself of Hollywood’s interpretation.

Space

😎

Spaceflight: A Concise History by Michael Neufeld gave me context for all the disconnected pieces of space exploration I’ve seen throughout my life. The Martian got me back in a space mood, so I’m taking the opportunity for the space book theme I’ve had on my agenda. I have one on current space endeavors to listen to, but first I wanted to rewind to the beginning. Neufeld’s book was just the kind of perspective I needed to adjust my perceptions. For example, I grew up with the Space Shuttle and always thought of it as the essence of NASA. But no, it was basically a long-running but failed experiment at saving money through reuse, and it came after other significant phases in NASA’s history and alongside other important programs.

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Weeknote for 8/29/2021

Posted on August 29, 2021 by Andy

Programming

🤔

I’m reevaluating my approach to learning Haskell. I should get used to that, because I’m trying to learn continuous improvement, so I’ll always be reevaluating. Last week I decided to create a practice project for learning the language. Here’s the Github repo. But the careful way I was proceeding was way too slow, so I need a way to speed it up. That will involve either being less thorough or picking a shorter source to learn from. So this week I’ll look at my options and then keep going in some direction. I’ll probably also give myself a more specific deadline for this project.

Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres gave me another look at the gist of XP. It was good for background info, underlying principles, and a few ideas for implementation, but for detailed guidance you really have to look other places. Maybe Ward’s Wiki.

Analysis Patterns by Martin Fowler covers a mix of topics around the concept of domain models in software. It’s hard for me to get excited about object-oriented programming right now, but I think parts of the book will still be worth studying when I get back into my modeling project. It reminded me that object modeling is different from ontology engineering, which is closer to what I’m after.

Productivity

🤔

I’m considering going full nerd and moving my productivity system to Org-mode for Emacs. I’d been looking into Notion, but it doesn’t really let me mix tasks and notes the way I want, and it’s not scriptable enough to let me add that kind of functionality. Org-mode is very scriptable, so I’m curious what I can do with it. Of course, this means I have a new learning curve to deal with for both Emacs and Org-mode, but for the right productivity tool, a learning curve can be worth it. It would also give me an excuse to learn Scheme, the functional programming language Org-mode uses for its scripting.

Coffee

😐

Barissimo Guatemala Medium Roast: 3/5. It was a little sour a little too often.

People

🙂

After several months, on Friday night I had another picnic with my friend Tim. This time it was at the woods near my home. A bunch of mosquitos thought they were also invited. On our walk back we saw a skunk that luckily did not think it was invited.

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Weeknote for 8/22/2021

Posted on August 22, 2021 by Andy

Today’s weeknote catches me in the middle of a bunch of things rather than at the end when I usually like to report them, so I’ll just run through them quickly.

Programming

🙂

I got through the first three-and-a-half chapters of Learn You a Haskell. I’ve decided Haskell will be helpful enough for my other projects that I want to focus on it for a while, so this week I’ll continue with the book, and possibly every week until I finish it. Last week I tried a pattern of reading and highlighting the book one day and then reviewing the previous day’s highlights the next day. At the end of the week I started trying out what I’d covered. This week I’ll try reviewing by coding rather than just rereading, which seems more efficient.

I’ve been casting about for a new theme for my reading, and it seems software development is it. At work I’m juggling several books on several topics to help us plan a new direction for our in-house tools. At home I’m listening to a book I just bought, Analysis Patterns by one of my favorite writers, Martin Fowler. It turns out this was his first book.

Productivity

🤔

I’m starting to think about streamlining my life maintenance. My overall productivity system goal is to maximize my time for projects while staying on top of my other tasks. I’m not fully satisfied with the way I’m handling those, but I’m starting to think about how I can streamline them so I can reach the primary goal of maximizing my project time. This is motivated by my weekly consternation that my project has been crammed into the last 15 minutes of each day (not literally, but close enough).

I’m continuing to add new timers for everyday routines, and they continue to be extremely helpful. I’ve also been adding more medium and short variations so I can adapt to derailed schedules with less thought.

I continue to think about single-machine scheduling. A simple sort of the tasks on importance, deadline, and duration still seems very useful, but beyond that I’m returning to the idea of treating my life as a business and managing my tasks as a program of projects. Once I get back to this project, I’ll explore what kind of system I can set up in Notion using their new timeline feature that brings them closer to a traditional project management app.

Cooking

🤔

I’m thinking about how to streamline my cooking. I’ve revived my project idea of writing a little program to calculate the cheapest and quickest way to meet my daily nutritional needs (while still eating real food instead of resorting to something like Soylent). I’m not sure when I’ll fit this in.

Nature

🤔

My latest walks in the woods have showed me it’s time to upgrade my photography setup. I’m eyeing the Camera+ 2 app to let me focus on small objects in the foreground, since interesting spiders are not actually blurry in real life.

People

🙂

I spoke with my friend Tim on Saturday, and we may be restarting our regular get-togethers soon. Hopefully we’ll be going on a bunch of walks, since that’s something he likes to do too.

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Weeknote for 8/15/2021

Posted on August 15, 2021 by Andy

Productivity

🙂

I set up a table of fake tasks to help me experiment with scheduling algorithms. I’m hoping they’ll help me automate more of my task management so I can spend less time and mental energy reviewing my to-do lists. My first approach was to order the tasks by finding a simple way to sort them. I started out with columns for due date, importance, time required, and prerequisite task. The basic sorting on the first three columns was easy, and from that result it was immediately clear that the task dependencies would be harder to incorporate and that I also needed to include the amount of time available. I’ll pick this back up after I get somewhere with Haskell, and I’ll probably use the scheduling script to practice.

To impose even more order on my life, I made a timer for my whole weekday evening schedule. It worked out really well the one day I tried it, and if I can keep it up, I’ll actually be able to fit in some side projects. That day I was able to get started on one of my creative projects, working with Keri Smith’s The Pocket Scavenger. The weekends are harder to schedule because they have both more variety and more time to fill. My approach there is to create a template timer with a bunch of typical blocks and make modifications on a copy to fit the particular day.

Programming

😎

This week I’m focusing on learning Haskell. My general goals with Haskell are to dive deep into the functional paradigm, give myself a potentially easier way to program, shape my thoughts on modeling, and explore a functional approach to math. Functional programming has taken over my mind lately, so I’ve been looking forward to this project.

AI

🤔

On Intelligence is a more workable summary of Hawkins’ theory. This is Jeff Hawkins’ earlier book on neuroscience, and it was much more satisfying to me. My guesses about the way the mind works overlap a lot with his, so I’m looking forward to exploring his work programmatically (when I get around to it). A glance at Goodreads told me people aren’t shy about disagreeing with him, so I’m also interested to read their criticisms.

TV

😎

The Orville is a fantastic show, especially for fans of TNG. I caught up on it last week, and I’m pleased to say it just gets better and better. It’s fun to watch them take a Star Trek premise and veer off in another direction.

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Weeknote for 8/8/2021

Posted on August 8, 2021 by Andy

Finances

🤔

I’m planning my investments with the Bogleheads’ Retiree Portfolio Model. My impression is it contains most of the formulas I was going to have to research or guess at, so it should save a lot of time. I might use it for actual retirement planning later, but for now I’m adapting it for my medium-term investing goals. Or at least I will when I come back to this project.

Productivity

🙂

I’m spending a week on my productivity system update. It’s disheartening to leave a project incomplete for a month or more when I switch to another one, so I’m shortening the minimum wait to a week to see how that goes. This week I’ll collect my current productivity system goals, make a plan, and see how far I can get by next week.

Programming

😎

I’m learning Haskell. Domain Modeling Made Functional reignited my curiosity about functional programming, and I’ve reconfirmed that Haskell will be my best starting point for trying again to learn it. It’s both intensely functional and widely used. I’m reading Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!, and I’m finding it much easier to get into than Haskell Programming from First Principles, though I’ll still try to read that one later.

AI

😐

A Thousand Brains by Jeff Hawkins gave me a bite-size treatment of the author’s theory. Hawkins caught my attention with his interview on Lex Fridman, but the book was less engrossing and satisfying than I hoped it would be. There’s only so much enthusiasm I can muster for basic points I’ve heard many times before (deep learning won’t get us to general AI, etc.), and the parts that were newer didn’t give me much detail to sink my teeth into.

Having said that, his framework for understanding the neocortex is an interesting one, and at some point I’d like to look into it further and play around with simulations. He also has an intriguing idea for a stellar-scale monument to human civilization, and I’m curious what he’d think of the proposals of Isaac Arthur and friends on overpopulation, climate change, spreading the human presence off Earth, and other concerns the book raises.

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Weeknote for 8/1/2021

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Andy

People

🙂

My parents drove up to visit for a couple of days and drop off some boxes of my stuff. We spent the time eating at restaurants, playing Isle of Skye, napping, visiting my favorite water tower, and watching the birds at the lake near my home. They left Friday morning to go visit my brother.

Finances

😐

I struggled through some work on medium-term investing. I was able to squeeze in some time on it, but I was confronted by the fact that there’s still a lot of important info I don’t understand. Thanks to the Bogleheads, starting from their wiki article on the subject, my understanding inched forward a little. This week I’ll try my idea for a poor man’s Monte Carlo simulation in a spreadsheet to find good asset allocation timelines for my goals.

Coffee

🙂

Barissimo Dark Roast: 4/5. It was a little blander than the Colombian but still consistently good.

Fiction

🤔

I finished Bob Neufeld’s excellent recording of Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. My department at work is reading this book to discuss in a couple of weeks. “The underground” made me think this would be a story about revolutionaries, but no, it’s about a guy who has shut himself off from the world and comments on his chaotic relationships with past acquaintances. Some of it was uncomfortably relatable. But the story was kind of all over the place, and I’ll need to relisten to at least the beginning to make better sense of it.

Productivity

🤔

Discipline Equals Freedom by Jocko Willink is a mix of disappointing and thought-provoking takes on self-improvement, like a chunk of advice ore. It’s a short book, but I picked up a few ideas that’ll roll around in my mind. The one that especially stands out is that problems are good because every situation contains opportunities. However, I found his “Just do it” message less helpful, because willpower has been the subject of a lot of scientific research that has generated nuanced advice. Two books I recommend are The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal (video of her Google talk) and Solving the Procrastination Puzzle (my notes) by Timothy Pychyl.

Programming

😎

Domain Modeling Made Functional by Scott Wlaschin gives me a very different vantage point on domain-driven design. I read it because I want to try applying DDD at work, and some of our code is in XSLT, a functional language. I’m trying not to get too distracted by F#, the language he uses in the book, but it’s very tempting because functional programming is a playground of ideas I’ve wanted to explore for years, and his explanations of it are the best I’ve seen so far.

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Weeknote for 7/25/2021

Posted on July 25, 2021 by Andy

Finances

😕

I looked a little into estate planning and medium-term investing and defined some deliverables. I struggled to get anywhere on this last week. Fatigue and other tasks kept intruding on my project time. And I didn’t have a good plan of attack on the work itself. Defining the deliverables gave me some concrete goals, so now I feel like I have an anchor for my planning. And I decided that instead of frantically trying to survey a bunch of sources at once, I’ll study the Bogleheads’ advice and bring in others if I have time. This week I’ll touch on my budget algorithm and then spend most of the time on investing.

Productivity

🙂

I made some more timers. One was for my daily Admin sessions, and the others were variations on my morning and evening routines. The routines needed medium and short timers for the days when my schedule is more cramped. The Admin timer is already helping me limit the sessions so they don’t run over into the main event, my project time. Now I just need to limit everything else.

I’m learning about waste and continuous improvement from Agile. I investigate Agile periodically, and each time I take something new from it. This time those are the concepts that are standing out to me. My timers have been a great help for eliminating waste. On continuous improvement, I’ve decided that instead of wringing my hands about project problems while trying to forge ahead with the work, I’ll try being a Toyota assembly line and stop the whole operation to address the problem before continuing.

Health

🙂

My doctor told me not to worry about COVID. The part of the immune system the vaccine works with isn’t affected by my medication. And the part my med does suppress is what makes COVID infections so severe, so the medication will actually help me if I do get infected. So now I’m just following the CDC’s guidelines for vaccinated people.

Posted in COVID-19, Money, Productivity, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 7/18/2021

Posted on July 18, 2021 by Andy

Blog

🙂

I got the new email subscription set up. The signup form is in the sidebar, ready for your address.

Finances

🙂

Last week I reduced my monthly expenses by about $80. I cancelled some subscriptions, went back to doing my own grocery shopping, and did some research on lowering my auto insurance premiums. Friday I called my insurer and was able to apply some discounts. It’s the kind of conversation I don’t like having, so I was proud of myself for pushing through it and getting it done.

This week I’ll start some research on medium-term investing and estate planning. That way I’ll have the rest of the month to process what I learn. I’ll also work on my Quicken budget, since I can never do things the easy way and Quicken doesn’t quite accommodate my complicated budget algorithm.

Business

🙂

Principles of Marketing reinforced the notion of marketing as the company’s general customer-facing role. Whereas before I thought it was almost a synonym of advertising, I now see it as all the activities that shape and communicate the value the business offers. This includes product development, so when software developers determine a minimum viable product to create, they’re performing a marketing function. The book also gave me a sense of the many means marketers have at their disposal to get you to buy their stuff. Just imagine being pulled under by a giant, tentacular squid, and that’s basically any marketing department.

Faith Driven Entrepreneur applies general principles of Christian living to a business context. It pays particular attention to issues entrepreneurs commonly face, such as stress and loneliness. The book is basically a sermon, fairly short and not very detailed, but it reminds you of the broad ideas you already know, maybe correcting some of your misconceptions (such as the idea that religious professions are more spiritual than secular ones), so you can think and live a little more Christianly. The book had a few examples to illustrate its ideas, and it reminded me that examples to study are what I really want from discussions like this. So if you ever write a sermonesque book, just pack it with a ton of examples and I’ll give it an extra star.

Health

😐

Wednesday I crossed the CDC’s threshold into full vaccination. But I’m not quite out of the COVIDy woods yet. The medication I’m on for ulcerative colitis is an immunosuppressant, so there’s a chance my vaccine was less effective than normal, and I’m not sure yet how to tell. Luckily I have a doctor visit scheduled for this Thursday, so I can ask what he thinks and then decide on my COVID policy. Meanwhile, I’m cautiously reentering society with my mask on. On Saturday I got a haircut and did some grocery shopping, and this week I’m going back to the office.

Space

🙂

Sunday morning I watched the age of space tourism begin. Richard Branson reached space on his company’s spaceplane, and this week Jeff Bezos will have his turn. I used to think space tourism was a frivolous idea, but now I think it’ll help people think of space as a normal place to visit, so the idea of living and working there will be less of a leap.

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Weeknote for 7/11/2021

Posted on July 11, 2021 by Andy

Blog

😐

MailPoet has taken a lot of time to set up. However, I’m down to the last few steps, so my email subscribers will be getting a request to reconfirm their subscriptions very soon.

I unsubscribed from my text-to-speech service, Play.ht. It’s a good service, but it costs more than the benefit I get from it. I’m not sure which of its features are available for free, but if it ends up being too restricted, I’ll switch to BingeWith and see how that goes.

Productivity

😐

I failed to create a project map. For the final week of the productivity project month, I tried to start mapping out the relationships among my major projects and missions. My main goals were (1) to give myself a set of predefined projects for easily organizing new tasks that crop up and (2) to move myself toward managing my life like a program of projects. Unfortunately, I didn’t get very far, mostly because I spent too much time on other things. I’ll probably pick it up again after this month’s finance project.

My everyday admin activities are taking too much time. Since I’m switching to another project for this month, I’ll only be able to improve the admin procedure on the side, but it’ll be my top side project.

🙂

Overall, last month’s productivity system project was very beneficial. The routine timers made my mornings and nights more predictable, giving me more time for activities I care about. I turned task management into a daily priority, so I have a basis for getting things done in a timely fashion. I intensified my use of procedures, which should help me continuously improve the way I live. And I reintroduced myself to Notion, which is a potent tool for managing projects and notes.

Finances

😐

July’s project will be a return to personal finance and investing. I plan to reduce some expenses, finish setting up my rather complicated Quicken budget, look into estate planning, and hopefully do some actual investing.

Business

😎

Principles of Management by OpenStax gave me a way to think about my life goals. The whole book was interesting and potentially relevant to me, but the main chapters I cared about were on decision making and planning and controlling. Management along these lines is one of the major mental frameworks I discovered in myself this year, the other being economics.

The planning and controlling chapter especially caught my attention with the idea of domain or directional planning, which defines actions that could lead to a range of acceptable goals within a particular domain, as opposed to goal planning, which defines actions leading to a specific goal. Domain planning is an apt description of the way I’ve been planning my life, since my goals are very general and hazy, but they definitely lie in one direction and not in others, and the plans I’m making will push me in that direction. Seeing this directionality more sharply was the main benefit of the little project mapping I did last week. The chapter’s discussion also brings up hybrid planning, where a specific goal emerges as the situation becomes clearer over time, which is what I expect to happen with my life planning.

Space

😎

To have something spacey to stare at, I made a multistream of space footage streams. It has NASA’s two channels, an ISS stream of Earth, footage from ISS spacewalks, panoramic views from Mars, and a LabPadre cam showing the SpaceX Starship launch site.

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Weeknote for 7/4/2021

Posted on July 4, 2021 by Andy

Blog

😐

I’m working on the email subscription replacement for Feedburner, which will be MailPoet. If you currently get my blog updates over email, in the next day or three I’ll be sending you an email with instructions on how to confirm your new subscription.

Productivity

😐

Through much struggle, I got my administration procedure into a usable state. “Administration” covers all the bureaucratic and technical tasks that keep my life flowing smoothly and legally. The basic idea of my procedure is to choose the projects and tasks for the week during the weekly session, then choose the day’s tasks in the daily session, while also funneling new inputs into their proper buckets, GTD style. This week I’ll see where I can get with mapping out my big list of projects.

Business

😎

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries expands and sharpens my knowledge of agile thinking. Some negative reviews made me think the book would just be a bit of fluff, but instead it added significant insights to my understanding of iterative and incremental development. One that stood out is the need to measure the right metrics in your product and marketing experiments. Not only do you need to measure something, but it needs to be something specific and also not a vanity metric that makes you look good but tells you nothing useful. This book will be another one I’ll study, even if only for managing my personal projects.

Food

🙂

Barissimo Fair Trade Colombia Ground Coffee: 4/5. It was consistently good. I also liked Beaumont’s Colombian pretty well, so I’ll be interested to see if the pattern holds with other brands.

😩

I spent the first half of the week cooking so I wouldn’t have to if my COVID shot made me too sick. I’ve been working through the recipes in Betty Crocker One-Dish Meals, starting with the soups for dinner and the salads for lunch. Letting the cookbook plan my meals saves me time on deciding what to make while keeping me from getting bored. I’ve found that wanting to explore the cookbook conflicts with wanting to cook bigger batches less often, which I was certainly wishing for last week after so much time in the kitchen. But smaller batches means that if I don’t like a recipe, I won’t have so much of it to eat. In a future post, once I’ve rated the recipes I’ve made, I might list my favorites so far.

Health

🤔

I got my second Moderna shot Wednesday afternoon. Thursday was a little rough, with fatigue most of the day and in the evening a fever, so I skipped my walk, but I worked a full day from home, and Friday I was feeling mostly better. I imagine I’ll still take most of my usual COVID precautions even after the vaccination has taken effect, but we’ll see how I feel about things then.

People

😔

Tuesday morning I found out one of my old friends from high school, Peter, had died over the weekend. I didn’t learn any details except that it was unexpected and apparently of natural causes. We’d been mostly out of touch since high school, except for being connected on Facebook. But even in the extra-loner period of my life before I discovered what friendship meant, he’d made it into the circle of people I considered friends. He was vivacious and gregarious, intelligent and creative. I appreciated reading the thoughts and stories of people who’d stayed close to him.

Posted in Blog, Business, Coffee, Cooking, COVID-19, Death, Productivity, Site updates, Weeknotes | 2 Comments