Weeknote for 3/1/2020

Posted on March 3, 2020 by Andy

Learning

😎

Last week officially started my learning project, and I dashed out the plan and started the work, since I was so excited about it. The project’s purpose is to set up a learning system to experiment with, and that will take the form of implementing some mnemonic systems and spelling out some study procedures based on learning research.

Last week I listed most of the mnemonic techniques and systems I’d found, and then I got sidetracked rereading and highlighting Memory Craft, since I love that book so much and it has a lot of unfamiliar advice.

This week I’ll start creating my mnemonic devices and sneak in some more notes on my sources and my own thoughts.

When I started researching memory techniques, I thought they’d just be a tool for learning, but the more I learn about them, the more I see they’re an art that can integrate with a surprising amount of my life. My research on them (1) motivates me to learn some foundational topics I’d been putting off that would give me hooks for further knowledge or that would help me develop other memory techniques (e.g., world history, data structures in programming); (2) points me toward some hobbies and practices I’d put on the back-burner that would give me memorable ways to encode information (music composition, sign language) or would give me components for memory palaces (home decorating, taking walks, video games, drawing, origami, knots); and (3) even involves conceptual modeling, since you have to analyze information to encode it in a mnemonic.

History

🙂

Memory Craft inspired me to listen to an intro history I had on my to-read list, E. H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World, which felt like listening to a C. S. Lewis children’s story and was just the kind of history overview I needed, except that it was still very Eurocentric, so I’ll have to look for more in-depth treatments of other regions. But the main thing is it got me to care about the people and events of history, and it gave me some dates to start with for my own History Journey.

Spirituality

😐

Last week on Ash Wednesday I started my listen through the Word of Promise audio Bible. The week’s readings were Gen 1-Deut 4, and this time to give myself material to share, I’m jotting down notes on my reactions to each day’s chapters. I’ll wait till the end to post my thoughts so I can link to them all in one place. So far I’ll say the recording is cinematic, which makes many parts of it very engaging, though I must say large stretches of it are still a challenge to get through, just because the Bible gets very bureaucratic and also far removed from 21st-century Western life.

AI

🙂

At the suggestion of a member of my futurism meetup, I joined an AI meetup, and we had our first meeting last week. The people were very interesting, and the coordinator gave an overview of the state of AI that organized the technology in a simple but helpful way and gave me search terms for further research. I don’t know how involved I’ll get with any projects they cook up, but I’ll keep attending the meetings.

Fiction

🙂

At work this year we’re doing book groups on the theme of diversity. Last year I used the book groups to make myself read Middlemarch, a classic and thus a book I probably wouldn’t get to on my own, and this year I’m taking the opportunity to make myself read To Kill a Mockingbird, which I may or may not have read when I was supposed to in high school. Of course, as usual I’ll be listening to the audiobook, which I started last week when I had some time after the day’s audio Bible assignment.

Posted in AI, Bible reading plans, Fiction, History, Learning, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 2/23/2020

Posted on February 25, 2020 by Andy

Sleep

🙂

After my degraded time management the week before, I had some success getting to bed earlier last week by using a Pomodoro timer to break up my work at the computer, which kept me from losing track of time and gave me stopping points. This is very encouraging, because usually when my self-imposed schedules fall apart, they stay that way.

Conceptual modeling

😐

Events conspired to keep me from getting much further in Meaning and Argument last week, but I’ll probably keep working on it during my learning project. My summary of this modeling language project is that I learned a little about modeling languages and a lot more about taking notes–oops. I also gained a greater sense of urgency about managing my project time, because I need to make a lot faster progress, and my hunch is it’s possible, so I’ll keep experimenting.

Learning

😎

Last week I continued cramming in books on learning before my listening time is taken up by the Bible (see the Spirituality section below).

I started the week with Memory: How to Develop, Train, and Use It by William Walker Atkinson, which argues that mnemonics are time-consuming tricks with limited value that weaken your natural memory from disuse, and the book describes how to remember more using only your natural memory. I disagreed with his assessment of mnemonics, but I was interested in his techniques and thought he did a decent job of explaining them.

Next was Memory Craft by Lynne Kelly, which I ran across in a friend’s tweet last year and then again recently on the Art of Memory forum. I haven’t read many books on mnemonic systems, so I don’t know how its approach compares, except that I imagine most books don’t bring in the practices of ancient indigenous cultures, but I do know this book is delightful and has inspired me to learn history and use it to populate my memory scaffolding. Maybe once I get more advanced, I’ll make some Lukasa-like memory boards.

After that was Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein, which discussed the ways individuals and organizations pursue a broad range of knowledge and skills (sometimes on purpose, sometimes not) and the benefits of having this range for performance, creativity, and problem solving, which are increasingly important skills as society becomes ever more complex. I appreciated the validation of my generalist lifestyle and the encouragement to make the most of it.

At the end of the week I squeezed in You Can Have an Amazing Memory by Dominic O’Brien, who I’d never heard of before the Art of Memory forum, but he’s been the World Memory Champion eight times, and I wanted to find out how such a high performer got to that level. The book was charming and helpful, not only for reinforcing the usual memory advice but also for nuancing it in ways that could speed up my memorization a bit. It also reinforced my sense that the memory challenges at these competitions make good exercises for honing your skills even if you don’t plan to compete.

My main agenda for this month’s learning project is to set up some learning procedures and tools to experiment with, especially some mnemonic systems. This week I’ll do the planning and get started.

Spirituality

😐

Lent starts this Wednesday, and like last year I’m planning to listen to an audio Bible, this time the NKJV Word of Promise, which is a dramatized version I got for Christmas quite a few years ago and haven’t listened to yet. It’s 98 hours, so if I’m diligent (2x speed, 2 hours a day), I can get through it in 25 days. If that works, I’ll have time in Lent left over, and I’ll listen to some other fitting books on my list. I never got around to writing my reflections last year, so I’ll try to do that this time.

Movies

🤔

I watched the next movie in my AI list, Alphaville, which I knew nothing about, but it turned out to be by a famous French avant-garde director, and thus I don’t really know what to make of it. My impression is it had some interesting ideas buried under clumsy execution, but who knows, maybe that was on purpose? I ended up only really caring about the city’s technological philosophy, at least the parts that were delivered by the impressively croaky AI and the engineers, which didn’t make complete sense but felt evocative, like a philosophical Rorschach test. As usual with media that feels sloppy or incomplete to me, I took it as a writing prompt, and I’m curious what a remake by someone like Alex Garland or Denis Villeneuve would be like.

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Weeknote for 2/16/2020

Posted on February 23, 2020 by Andy

Conceptual modeling

😐

I got through another two-and-a-half chapters and tweaked my note-taking method to take about half the time, at least in my very limited experiment. Instead of doing all my highlighting in one reading before taking notes, in the first pass I highlighted only the definitions and topic statements I could easily find and then in the second pass took notes while highlighting other points that jumped out. The definitions and topic statements (1) gave me a better sense of what the chapter covered before I began my notes, (2) divided the text into smaller chunks so it felt more manageable and gave me stopping points if I needed them, and (3) gave me a good sense of where the different topics were located in the chapter when I inevitably needed to revisit them.

This week I’ll get as far as I can in Meaning and Argument, and then next week will start the next month’s project, which will be on learning, and I’ll probably continue with that book and my RDF reading as a way to experiment with my learning procedure.

Learning

🙂

Even though my learning project technically doesn’t start until next week (2/23), I’ve been preparing for it with a bunch of reading and research, so yeah I’ve basically already started.

My main book last week was Problem Solving: Perspectives from Cognition and Neuroscience by Ian Robertson, which was about problem solving and adjacent topics, including learning and AI, and in contrast with the usual disappointing scientific treatments of the introspective topics I care about, the discussions in this book were satisfying and gave me a lot of welcome starting points for research. It also covered the whole spectrum of problem alignments (from well-defined “kind” problems to vague, messy “wicked” ones), which was gratifying because I mostly care about wicked problems and am disappointed when a discussion only speaks about problems in terms of predefined puzzles or exercises.

A debate with my foil Jeremy sent me down several rabbit holes of research throughout the week.

The question, “Are flashcards a waste of time?” led me to (1) the site Your Awesome Memory by Bill Powell (who loved them at first and then lost enthusiasm, then regained some of it, all of which gave him interesting things to say), (2) the idea of learning from students in medical school and other high-intensity learning fields like engineering and law, (3) the major flashcard apps Anki and SuperMemo, and (4) the Art of Memory forum, which is a hub of memory activity.

The question, “Is impractical knowledge a waste of time?” led me to two books based on an essay by Abraham Flexner: The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge, containing Flexner’s essay with a commentary essay by Robbert Dijkgraaf; and The Usefulness of the Useless by Nuccio Ordine.

The question, “Why memorize when you can look things up?” led me to various scattered articles, the most helpful of which was “Why Memorize?” by Scott Young.

Bill Powell’s blog raised another interesting question, “Do mnemonics weaken memory?” which led me to the old book Memory: How to Develop, Train, and Use It by William Walker Atkinson (ebook, audio). I’ll say more about it next time.

Sleep

😐

My sleep schedule is regressing to the late-night mean, though still without naps during the week, so I’ll need to make bedtime a priority again and think some more about my time management processes, which I didn’t do last week.

Movies

🙂

Over the weekend I watched The Godfather (in installments), which I’d forgotten I put in my Netflix DVD queue to get an idea of how organized crime works and maybe understand certain political situations. It’s not the kind of movie I expect to like, but it drew me in and stayed in my mind the following days, which for me is one of the signs of a good movie. I’m looking forward to II and III.

Posted in Conceptual modeling, Learning, Movies, Sleep, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 2/9/2020

Posted on February 9, 2020 by Andy

Life maintenance

😐

I did a little better at getting to bed earlier, so my sleep schedule isn’t a lost cause yet. I’m going to start a list of rules for my time management, probably in the form of implementation intentions.

Conceptual modeling

😐

I got through another chapter or so and continued tinkering with the way I take notes to help me learn efficiently. I’m hoping I can find ways to pick up the pace.

Learning

🙂

The major event in my head last week was gearing up for next month’s project on learning, for which I started listening to my books on the topic and researching active learning.

Kenneth Higbee’s Your Memory: How It Works and How to Improve It is one I read ten years ago that resulted in this essay, and I still recommend the book to anyone who wants an overview of memory and some specific techniques for turning your mind into a filing system, some of which you can pick up from these talks by the author.

Benedict Carey’s How We Learn is a bit lighter on details, being written in a more narrative-oriented journalistic style, but it fills in some gaps and thin spots of Higbee’s coverage, focusing on some of the more indirect and subconscious aspects of learning, such as the way forgetting aids learning.

Stanislas Dehaene’s new book How We Learn, which I found while looking up Carey’s, is a neuroscientist’s look at memory, and unlike pretty much everything else I’ve seen on the subject, it gave me the sense that we do know a lot about how memory works in the brain. He also has extended discussions that compare human and machine learning, so the book was relevant to me on both learning techniques and AI.

A question by Jeremy about modern learning methods reminded me to look into an idea I ran across long ago, project-based learning. It belongs to a family of pedagogies called various names, but for now I’ll go with active learning, and it’s effectiveness is debated, so I’m still deciding how much time I want to invest in it.

Movies

🙂

I’ve been neglecting TV shows and movies because they take up time I’d rather use on my projects, but I was missing them, so over the weekend I picked up where I left off on my AI movie list and watched The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008), a remake of the 1951 original. I don’t remember hearing about it when it came out, and the poster didn’t give me high hopes, despite the cast, but it was more thoughtful and creative than the drivel I was expecting, which might be why I liked it better than a lot of the Letterboxd reviewers.

Unlike the original, this story barely even mentioned AI, so it’s questionable whether it belongs on this list, but it’d be interesting to think about how we could create a robot with G.O.R.T.’s architecture.

I rented the movie on Blu-ray, so I watched some of the interesting special features, which included one on Fox’s efforts at environmentally friendly movie production and one on the design of G.O.R.T., which could’ve turned out much different in ways that would’ve been fascinating in another movie, but I think they made the right choice for this one.

Posted in Conceptual modeling, Learning, Movies, Sleep, Weeknotes | 1 Comment

Weeknote for 2/2/2020

Posted on February 3, 2020 by Andy

Conceptual modeling

🙂

I got through 2 1/2 chapters of Meaning and Argument, and inspired by my upcoming project on learning, I’ve decided to format my notes in a way that’s optimized for memorization rather than trying to make them RDF friendly.

Software development

😎

Moving on from Behavior-Driven Development, I switched to the topic of empirical software engineering and listened to Making Software, edited by Andy Oram and Greg Wilson. I picked up on this subject and this book from a talk by Hillel Wayne, one of my favorite programming bloggers. The book covers a lot of interesting and important software development topics, including how you can do research on your own code and coding practices, and while some of the essays were more listenable than others, depending on how conversational or data-heavy they were, overall I loved it.

Life maintenance

Diet

🙂

After another two pounds off my scale reading, I think I can safely say the TLC diet is working for me, at least for weight loss. I’ll find out at our company’s wellness screening in March whether it’s reducing my cholesterol. It helped last time I tried it—not as much as I needed, but this time I’m following it more strictly, except for my lack of exercise, which I’m thinking of adding once I feel confident enough in my time management.

Sleep

😐

I didn’t do as well last week, but I’m learning what I need to do to adjust, such as not starting down “quick” rabbit holes of research when I’m about to go to bed. Fortunately my sleeping habits are still more orderly than they were.

Task tracking

🙂

Making Software told me there’s a name for the way my time management shaped itself up while I tracked my time—the Hawthorne effect—and I tried tracking my tasks at work to see if it would help me stick to my Pomodoro routine. It worked, and it came at the right time, because my ebook schedule is pretty tight right now, so I can’t afford to waste much time, especially when I’m trying to leave work somewhat on time, get stuff done in the evenings, and get to bed on time.

TV

😎

Tim and I watched the first episode of Star Trek: Picard, and they certainly know how to push the nostalgia buttons. The show’s AI theme is right up my alley too, and it’s interesting to compare this show’s take to Discovery‘s. I’m looking forward to the rest of the series.

Posted in Conceptual modeling, Diet, Productivity, Sleep, Task tracking, TV, Weeknotes | 4 Comments

Weeknote for 1/26/2020

Posted on January 27, 2020 by Andy

Life maintenance

Diet

🙂

My weight dropped a couple of pounds last week, so apparently the diet is still working, and I wonder if the week before my body was just holding onto the extra water I’d started drinking to handle the extra fiber. My current task is looking up what I can eat at my usual restaurants, which is turning out to be not much. I also want to start cooking again so I’m not limited by my frozen dinner options, but I don’t want to spend much time on it, so I’m researching cookbooks of quick and easy recipes.

Sleep

🙂

I managed to get to bed before 11 every day except Saturday when I had a few too many things to do. Two results I’ve noticed from my new schedule are that (1) I’m not taking naps after work and (2) on napless days I’m actually doing my night routine instead of flopping into bed out of sudden exhaustion. These somehow feel like small changes, but they’re actually a big deal, since those were nagging problems that dragged down my perception of my life. Not all my sleep problems are solved yet, but I’m counting this as great progress, and so far this bedtime doesn’t feel like a hard schedule to keep.

Task tracking

🙂

Continuing along my self-quantification theme, I returned to another app I used a few years ago, ATracker, which lets you track your time on categories of activity that you define. My initial purpose was to get an idea of where my time disappears to, but it’s getting me to use my time somewhat better while I track it, since (1) I have to think about my activities to track them, which gets me to make more purposeful decisions about them; (2) I’m motivated to organize my time so I don’t have to open the app so much and my activity history doesn’t look like total chaos; and (3) I feel like the app is judging me if I waste too much time, even though it provides no opinionated feedback whatsoever, unlike MyNetDiary and Fitbit.

Software development

🙂

Taking a tip from Living Documentation and Microservices Patterns, I listened to a trio of books on a practice that’s variously called Behavior-Driven Development (BDD), Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD), and Specification by Example (SBE): Bridging the Communication Gap, Specification by Example—both by Gojko Adzic—and Writing Great Specifications by Kamil Nicieja. The idea is that business stakeholders, developers, and testers should work together throughout a project to define and refine its requirements in documents that are clear enough that they both communicate to all the people involved and can be used to automatically test the software as it’s being created. The Adzic books were good for the process of adopting the practice and collaborating on the specifications, and Nicieja was good for the mechanics of designing and using the specifications.

Thanks to a talk I watched by Gojko Adzic, after the BDD books I listened to a short book by him called Impact Mapping, which is about another task that accompanies defining requirements—choosing and monitoring the requirements your project needs, since it’s easy to spend time and resources on tasks that fail to help the customers or the business.

Conceptual modeling

😐

Despite the task tracking, life and poor time management crowded out my project activity last week, so I didn’t get much further in my RDF reading. This week starts Thinkulum project month February, when I’ve been planning to start learning first-order logic with Lepore’s Meaning and Argument, and to avoid uncontrolled delays I’m going to stick to that plan while interspersing some trailing work on RDF/OWL and some meta work. One of those meta tasks will probably be an impact map for my RDF learning, since I’ve realized I have too vague an idea of the kinds of notes I should be taking and what I want to gain from them.

Movies

🙂

Sunday Tim and I watched 1917, which my boss recommended. Even though I don’t normally go for historical movies, this one was very well done, I really enjoyed it, and I hope it wins things. Among its many appeals, a lot of it had an eerie, surreal tinge that connected with me.

Posted in Conceptual modeling, Diet, Movies, Sleep, Software development, Task tracking, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 1/19/2020

Posted on January 25, 2020 by Andy

Conceptual modeling

😐

I made another adjustment to my agenda on the modeling language translations project and started with learning RDF instead of OWL, since OWL is built on top of RDF. I got less far than I wanted, but this week I’ll finish the document I’m reading (W3C’s RDF primer) and move on to the OWL primer, since next week I’ve scheduled myself to start on first-order logic with the Lapore book, and getting through that will take longer, so I don’t want to delay it.

As I go, I’m experimenting with creating a note-taking format I’m provisionally calling Structured Notes Format (SNF). It’s basically YAML with other formats embedded as needed, and at this point it looks like this, which I think is pretty readable (note that the text doesn’t matter in this example, only the hyphens, colons, line breaks, and indentation):

- point 1:
  - subpoint 1.1
  - subpoint 1.2
- point 2:
  - subpoint 2.1:
    - |
      Some lines of
      Python code
  - subpoint 2.2

Life maintenance

Diet

😕

I stuck with my diet, but last week my scale told me I’d lost nothing (literally, exactly the same reading as last week to the tenth of a pound), which is what happened a few years ago. If it happens again this week, I’ll do some research on the problem and maybe look for a new scale, since this one is a little old, but the reading doesn’t quite seem like a malfunction.

Sleep

😐

Last week I got started on my project to get enough sleep, with a schedule of 10pm to 6am. My impression is that my life has gotten organized enough over the past year or two that I have a chance of sticking to this schedule, at least significantly longer than in the past. I started Thursday night and did fine the rest of that week. If my resolve starts slipping a lot, I’ll move to more intense motivation techniques, including an anti-charity if it gets bad enough. Sleep is such a strong and sweeping influence on my life that I’m serious about finally regulating it.

Software development

😰

I finished listening to Stephen Withall’s Software Requirement Patterns, and I found it good but a little overwhelming, giving us a long, categorized list of typical requirements we might need in our software (along with how to organize and word them in our requirement documents), and the increasing burden I felt as I listened made me realize that a requirement amounts to a problem to solve, so Withall’s book was just giving me a huge pile of potential problems. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s uncomfortable, and it reinforces my sense that I need to go into any software project soberly, and it also makes me want to collect known solutions to these common problems.

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Weeknote for 1/12/2020

Posted on January 16, 2020 by Andy

Conceptual modeling

😐

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

🤔

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

🤔

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

😐

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

🤔

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).

Posted in Conceptual modeling, Diet, Movies, Software development, Spirituality, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 1/5/2020

Posted on January 9, 2020 by Andy

Conceptual modeling

🤔

I did my project proposal and started on the first phase I’d planned–adding the translation spreadsheet entries for Attempto Controlled English, which is a restricted form of English that a computer can interpret and translate into logical structures. I thought it would be fairly straightforward, but there turned out to be several issues that made me question my plan, which I’ll write about next time.

😎

In the process of understanding the complications in my process, I came to a new appreciation for writing as a problem solving tool–specifically journaling. If you open a file or a page (or a voice recorder, if talking is more your thing) and treat it as a conversation partner as you work, not only can it help you break your work into more manageable pieces and think through it more carefully, but it can make your work feel less lonely too. I actually felt like I had a companion in my project who was interested in my work and could help me figure things out. I know this won’t work the same way for everyone, or maybe not right away, but it’s a practice worth trying, and I’ll be using it a lot more.

Life maintenance

😐

I got a Fitbit for Christmas, which I’d put on my wish list so I’d have more objective information about my sleep habits, and maybe I’d get around to some exercise too. It was immediately motivating on exercise, because I saw that my heart rate was consistently 10-20 beats faster than I thought it should be. I also want to stop my weight from creeping upward and try again to improve my cholesterol, so last week I returned to the MyNetDiary app I was using a while back, and I’m wading back into the TLC diet, just the basics for now until I come up with a more detailed plan. I paid for MyNetDiary premium to integrate it with my Fitbit, and apparently I’m more susceptible to gamification than I thought, because the combination of these apps has captured my attention much better than any of my earlier fitness attempts, so 2020 may be the year of the quantified Andy.

Productivity

🙂

My Goodreads currently-reading list is getting kind of long, so I’m focusing my listening to get some books off the list and make it manageable again, and last week I finished Pomodoro Technique Illustrated, a conversational guide to using this well-known productivity method. I’m using the PomoDone app, and I’ve still only carried out the most minimal steps and not very consistently, but overall I’d say it’s pushed me to be more focused and productive that I would be on my own, and I’m going to try to practice it more fully.

Software development

😎

Documenting your software for other developers can be a big problem, and it’s one I care about a lot. Last week I finished Cyrille Martraire’s Living Documentation, an excellent collection of techniques for capturing and presenting all kinds of knowledge buried in your organization’s minds and in its code, using both human processes and automated ones. I’m looking forward to experimenting with them and especially integrating what I pick up from my modeling research.

Audio

😰

I was in the mood for October-in-January last week, so I made a playlist of dark winter ambient music and, while that was playing, played another playlist of snowstorm videos. With the ominous playlist in the background, the bridge video in the blizzard list made me feel like I was watching a creepypasta and I would witness something strange and bad if I waited long enough, which of course I didn’t because the video was meant to be relaxing. Actually some of the music was also rather soothing.

Posted in Conceptual modeling, Diet, Exercise, Life maintenance, Music, Productivity, Software development, Soundscapes, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 12/29/2019

Posted on January 5, 2020 by Andy

Christmas

🙂

Some highlights and random observations from the rest of our vacation at our parents’ house.

Sunday

  • I wasn’t alert for all of church in the morning, but in one of my more awake periods, we watched a monologue about Joseph’s disrupted life when Mary became pregnant, and it struck me as a fitting modern description of that ancient story. Actually that could’ve been during Tuesday’s candlelight service, which tells you my mental state and/or the frailty of my memory and record keeping.
  • That evening in anticipation of our family trip to the movies later in the week, at Michael’s suggestion we watched the enlightening and inspiring Mister Rogers documentary, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? I’ll say more about this in the Movies section below.

Monday

  • In the evening we watched Christmas at Belmont on PBS, featuring CeCe Winans and Michael W. Smith. I added some songs from it to my Spotify playlist (see the Music section below) and commented with my family about how impressive expert musicians are as precision performers, since I am sloppy at performance and more of a maker.
  • I stayed up late wrapping presents so that would be out of the way while I was finishing up the labels. It would’ve taken much less time, but I decided I needed to try some envelope and letter folding for some of the gifts.

Tuesday (Christmas Eve)

  • In the afternoon our dad set up the Christmas tree, and the siblings decorated it, as per tradition. The decorating took less time than I expected, about 20 minutes judging by the playlist we listened to.
  • In the evening we went to our church’s candlelight service and then stood in line to take a family picture in front of the sanctuary’s Christmas trees.
  • After our dad’s yummy chili for dinner, we watched Klaus, the new animated origin story for Santa, which was very good.
  • Once my family fiiiinally got itself to bed at midnight (yes, I’m blaming them), I stayed up very late again finishing my Christmas labels. More on those in their section below!

Wednesday (Christmas!)

Christmas morning we carried out our traditional schedule–stockings, breakfast, tree presents, then lunch. My mom had replaced the old stocking she’d made in my childhood with a new one she made, so now my old one is here, and maybe I’ll use it as a Christmas decoration in the future. (Correction: The old one was made by a landlord of my mother’s.) Breakfast this year was Sister Schubert’s cinnamon rolls, which are small, which encouraged me to eat too many of them.

  • Lunch was a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, as we often do for Christmas, with the addition of roasted broccoli, since I’d requested more actual vegetables, which Thanksgiving tends to lack.
  • I was very tired after lunch and took a nap during the annual sibling walk around the neighborhood.
  • In the evening we scrolled through Netflix in despair of finding any good movie we felt like watching, but on the verge of giving up we settled on The Little Prince, and it was an excellent choice.
  • We finished the quilt puzzle. It was a fun one, with a lot of interesting shapes, colors, and textures.

 

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Some nice Christmas stuff from my family. https://www.thinkulum.net/blog/2020/01/04/weeknote-for-12-29-2019/

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Thursday

  • I continued my tech ebook buying binge with Righting Software, Software Requirement Patterns, and EMF: Eclipse Modeling Framework, all of which I’d been antsy to get my hands on. Under the mistaken impression that the site might have an after-Christmas sale, I’d waited till after Christmas, but I was going to buy them regardless. I’ve started all three, and my Goodreads currently-reading shelf is getting crowded.
  • We had our traditional House Cafe brunch, where I got my traditional French toast, which I order practically any time I have breakfast food at a restaurant.
  • My siblings were nice and went on makeup walk with me (photographic evidence), since I’d missed it the day before.
  • We tried to go see the Mister Rogers movie, but the theater had assigned seating and didn’t have five seats together, so we decided to order tickets online for the next day.
  • Dinner was Michael’s delicious turkey soup made of leftovers.
  • After dinner our dad took Abbie and me on our traditional Half Price Books run, where I picked up The Steampunk User’s Manual (follow-up to The Steampunk Bible), Doctor Grordbort’s Contrapulatronic Dingus Directory (from a series I learned about from The Steampunk Bible), Speedsolving the Cube (to help me get a handle on the 3×3 cube I bought a year ago), and a childhood favorite I never expected to find on an HPB shelf, The Man Who Lost His Head.

Friday

  • Laundry day.
  • We made it to the movie, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, with Mister Rogers played by Tom Hanks, who was a good fit even though I never really forgot I was watching Tom Hanks. I was slightly worried it’d just be a rehash of the documentary, but fortunately it wasn’t, and it was just as thought provoking.
  • We did my traditional Schlotzsky’s run for dinner, though I’d forgotten about the tradition till my mom brought it up. I was relieved to be reminded that even though it’s a place only I really care about, since it was one of my favorite restaurants and I don’t have one anymore, the rest of the family seems to enjoy it.
  • After dinner it was time to sit around with PBS on, and I discovered the show Craft in America. The first episode that night happened to be on quilting, which is our mother’s main hobby. I also made it through a whole episode of Antiques Road Show, which I’d only ever seen a couple of minutes at a time.

Saturday

  • I had a surprisingly quick flight back, and I was glad to have found affordable flights at comfortable afternoon times, since I am not a morning person.
  • Jeremy picked me up from the airport, and while we waited for dinner time, he helped me start assembling my dining set, which we finished after dinner. Just like with the sofa, having it makes me feel more like a normal adult and makes my home feel more complete, and I’m already finding more uses for it than I’d originally planned, so I think it was a good purchase.

 

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Bookstore cafe? Or my living room with a new dining set? https://www.thinkulum.net/blog/2020/01/04/weeknote-for-12-29-2019/

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Christmas labels

🙂

Going along with my conceptual modeling theme, my Christmas labels this year were sketchnotes of popular Christmas hymns: “Angels We Have Heard on High,” “Joy to the World,” “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” “Silent Night,” and “We Three Kings of Orient Are.” Click the right arrow in the post below to see more images.

  • I’m not used to this kind of creative modeling, so I was worried I wouldn’t do it right, which led to procrastination during the beginning weeks of the project.
  • It probably helped that I’d been sketchnoting sermons for practice during the previous couple of months.
  • I made up the imagery as I went along, such as for the angels, but I had to research some things.
    • I didn’t know how to draw animals, so I looked up photos of sheep and camels.
    • I learned to draw star people from Visual Meetings, but I had to look up how to draw people running, which I found in an animation book I have.
    • I paid attention to manger images I saw around and learned that everyone makes them with the legs crossing.
    • I paid attention to what Mary looked like kneeling. Silhouettes were helpful.
    • I looked up what images people typically use for “truth” and “grace.”
  • I was again proud of myself for throwing out elements of the project I didn’t have time for. For example, I’d started drawing cartoon portraits to identify the person getting the gift, but that was getting complicated, so I wrote the person’s name in a little banner like the song titles in the sketchnotes.

Movies

🙂

Some things I noticed in the Mister Rogers’ films we watched last week.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

  • I appreciated seeing him talk seriously about his philosophy of child psychology.
  • I appreciated hearing a little about his wife and children and seeing he wasn’t an ethereal person with no real earthly connections. (This happened for me with Dallas Willard too, realizing he was born and grew up somewhere. XD )
  • His own childhood influenced his work. He spent a lot of time alone having to entertain himself during his frequent illnesses, and he was bullied for being chubby.
  • I hadn’t picked up on the main purpose of his program before–to help children deal with feelings. I assumed it was broader than that, but I think it was good for the program to have focus.
  • Coping mechanisms were important for him personally, and his puppets were one of them, especially channeling himself through Daniel and then later King Friday. A bit weird, but whatever works.
  • From the standpoint of someone like myself who’s trying to figure out how to live, Mr. Rogers was a good example of someone living out a deeply and consistently worked out philosophy.
  • He considered remembering their own childhood to be a key practice for adults, which was also a theme in The Little Prince.
  • I’d seen the clip of Rogers arguing for public TV funding before the Senate, and from the chairman’s reaction, I’d always thought he was just a pushover, but no, before Mr. Rogers’ testimony he was opposed to the idea.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

  • The movie explored his relationship and relevance to adults.
  • To a certain extent his determination to live out his philosophy had him living in his own world, even when he interacted with other people. The movie was good at portraying a normal adult’s reactions to him as he resolutely dug into the parts of life that mattered.
  • My impression was the people around him were very loyal, even though he sometimes frustrated them with his eccentric ways.
  • I loved that the filmmakers extended the neighborhood model from the TV show’s intro to serve as transitions in the movie.
  • They also did well at slipping in Rogers tidbits you might want to know, such as how he coped with life, his advice to parents, and whether he’d ever been a military sniper (which would be closer to truth if we were talking about Bob Ross).

There’s more to say about these films, but this post is long enough already!

Audio

🙂

Soundscapes

Continuing my theme of seasonal ambiences, I’ve been accumulating quite a list for winter and Christmas, so if you’re still in the Christmas spirit, here’s the ongoing list I’ve come up with so far, partially sorted by subject matter (city walks, Santa’s workshop, etc.). During some of my Christmas project sessions I listened to the crafting and gift wrapping videos so I could pretend I was working with other project doers.

Music

Here’s a bunch of the music I listened to around Christmas:

  • Christmas 2019 (Spotify) – Based on playlist searches for some of the songs from Advent Orchestra–“Who Would’ve Dreamed” and “Emmanuel (Hallowed Manger Ground)”–plus a couple of songs from Christmas at Belmont.
  • Christmas Lo-Fi (YouTube) – To go with last year’s expansion of my musical tastes into chillhop, I saw one of these in my YouTube recommendations and decided to make a whole playlist. It makes good background music for this video of walking around a wintry Japanese city.
  • Soul of Wind Christmas Guitar 2019 (Spotify) – Based on this video, which I ran across while wrapping presents on Monday and made my companion for the night.

Conceptual modeling

😎

The Thinkulum project month of January starts this week (on Dec 29), and after weighing some options, I decided this project will be to sort out some of the pipeline from writing about a model in plain English to working with it in software. The main deliverables will be (1) a cheatsheet of translations between informal English and various modeling languages and (2) a user guide for basic operations in the software I’m focusing on. This week is for planning the project and starting on it.

Posted in Christmas labels, Conceptual modeling, Holidays, Movies, Music, Soundscapes, Weeknotes | 6 Comments