Update for 4/15/2018

Posted on April 16, 2018 by Andy

Another overly long update for you.

Church

😎

Sunday I went back to the Lutheran church. Last time I got there late, didn’t get an order of service, and spent the whole time lost and confused. But otherwise the atmosphere was right, so I wanted to try again. This time I got there way early, got an order, and even had time to figure out which variation they seemed to be following in the Divine Service book (#1 was closest).

I felt much more present this time, and I think this will be my default old-style liturgical church. (My contemporary liturgical church is the one my brother and I attend on Easter.) I do have one more church to visit though. I tacked it on because I decided to give the Methodists a chance. Also it turns out I know their music minister.

Life management

🙂

Monday I completed the next step in the setup of my grocery shopping system: noting which items I could get cheaply at Aldi. I also needed to buy that week’s groceries, so with all that going on between two stores, my shopping trip took about three hours.

The next step will be to sort the items in my lists according to the stores’ layouts. That way I can zip through and pick things up without hunting for them. Then my shopping will take minutes instead of hours.

There are a couple of recurring items I have to get from other stores I rarely visit. I decided that instead of making special trips, I’d order those in bulk from Amazon. So now I have several months of coffee and breath mints sitting in the cabinet over my desk at work.

Between the shopping system and my newly clean apartment, my life is feeling a lot more organized. I still have a lot of stuff to sort through in my closet, but I think the next housekeeping task will be to finish switching my computer backup system from Jungle Disk to the much cheaper CloudBerry.

Futurism

😎

Tuesday my futurism group met and talked about robots. I had a lot to say this time. Our intro question was what we’d want a robot for. My answer was that there’s not much I’d want current robots for, but once they got more sophisticated and if there weren’t annoying business practices attached, I’d absolutely want a self-driving car, and I’d want another robot to do my housekeeping.

But more than that, if robots had respectable AI capabilities, I’d want one as a friend. Basically I want Data from Star Trek to be real. It’s actually one of my main personal motivations for wanting to work in AI.

But as I told the group, it seems unfair to the AI to restrict it to being my friend. It could do much bigger things, so I’d probably want to free it to do them. As long as it was friendly.

Thinking

😐

I’ve decided to rename my analysis project. It will henceforth be called modeling. Analysis only covers a part of the process I’m describing, and I think modeling does a better job of capturing it.

It seems like most of the rest of the week I spent dealing with my anxiety about that project. I was beginning to feel it was too big. A lot of my projects are kind of big, but somehow this one was different. The feeling stuck around for a few days, coming and going until I’d taken care of the most immediate sources of anxiety.

One source was that a few more potential resources had come to my attention, and making decisions about buying books sometimes makes me tense. It was worse this time because finding these books increased my sense that, the way I conceive of it, modeling is a truly vast topic. But I noticed I felt better after I ordered the books from this batch that I felt would be the most useful.

The other source of anxiety was the large hodgepodge of notes I’d written. I knew they’d be easier to think about if I grouped them into topics, and I had some in mind that would be helpful. I felt better after I’d moved most of them into place.

The next step is to ponder these key topics some more and come up with a new version of my procedure. I’m hoping to have an update to post to the wiki in a week or two.

Project generator

😐

I need to do some programming for my modeling project, which reminds me that I have a bottleneck when it comes to programming: my coding project generator. So I’m back to working on that.

Fiction

🙂

I finished On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness, the first book in Andrew Peterson’s Wingfeather Saga for children. I rate it 5/5. I plan to listen to the rest of the series. I mean it does follow a lot of the tropes of the other epic fantasies I’ve read, so it wasn’t startlingly unique. But when I think about reading Christian fiction by authors I don’t know, I get ready to cringe, and in Peterson’s case there was no need for cringing.

I did find it provocative though, which is a much better effect. For one thing, I don’t know what the author’s influences are, but the whole story I felt like Charlotte Mason was peeking out of the bushes. I get the impression Peterson’s the kind of parent who homeschools his kids on the Trivium. I’m ambivalent on the idea of classical education, and I found myself inwardly debating the story and the people it reminded me of who teach their kids Latin. Although I will admit some of these sound like pretty good reasons.

Beliefs report

🙂

Now I’m listening to Becoming Dallas Willard, the recent bio by Gary Moon. I’d barely started by the end of the week, but already the foreword and opening pages had highlighted the reason I was looking forward to it. It’s one thing for someone like Willard to write about how personal transformation is supposed to work. It’s another to see, in some detail, how it happened in the life of an actual person.

Posted in Beliefs report, Books, Church, Coding project generator, Futurism, Life management, Thinking, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Update for 4/8/2018

Posted on April 11, 2018 by Andy

Easter

🙂

Sunday morning my brother and I went to our usual Easter church. Jeremy’s family joined us. The service was good, but it didn’t feel quite as celebratory as usual. I think that was mainly a combination of us sitting in the back, out of the middle of things, and the service being more streamlined.

After church we had a lunch of delicious Indian food at the home of some friends from church. Then I took Michael to the airport and watched some Foyle’s War with Tim. A nice Easter.

Life management

🙂

As part of my effort to organize my life, I made a grocery shopping system. Step 1: I made a list of all the things I buy on a regular basis. Step 2: I divided them into separate lists based on how often I buy them. Step 3: I put the lists into my to-do app (Nirvana) as recurring tasks. Step 4: I made plans to find out which things I could pick up cheaply at Aldi. That would happen during my first scheduled shopping trip this week.

I’ve been wanting a system like that for years, so it’s a relief to finally set it up. I picked up the idea from my mom. I’m hoping now I’ll be able to think much less about grocery shopping.

Fiction

🙂

I finished Powersat. 4/5. It wasn’t the most profound story, but it was entertaining and did the job of getting the series off the ground.

A couple of weeks ago, thanks to an ebook I made at work, I found the singer/author Andrew Peterson and his Wingfeather Saga series. His Rabbit Room site intrigued me, so I thought his novels might be worth reading, and I checked out the first book in the series, On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness. I was pleased to find it’s really good! The British narrator makes it even better.

Beliefs report

😐

I updated my spirituality report with a bibliography of potential sources. Now I’m taking a break from officially working on both that and the beliefs report. Unofficially, I suspect I’ll still be thinking and reading about them.

🙂

For example, after the Wingfeather book I’m going to listen to a biography that just came out, Becoming Dallas Willard. He’s kind of one of my spiritual heroes, so I’m looking forward to it.

🤔

To balance things out, I’m also reading Trusting Doubt, a critique of evangelicalism by  Valerie Tarico, who’s a fellow Wheaton College alum. I found her when an article she wrote showed up in my feeds. It was about the Ancestral Story that forms the core of the conservative viewpoint. I found it very insightful.

Death

😔

Wednesday morning the company held a memorial service for an employee who’d died unexpectedly the day after Easter. His sister also works there. I thought it was very kind of them to host it. I didn’t know him, but during the service I felt a certain kinship with him because he was an introvert who cared a lot about his work. He was also a geek who liked board games and Star Wars. Maybe we would’ve gotten along.

Posted in Beliefs report, Books, Death, Holidays, Life management, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Update for 4/1/2018

Posted on April 4, 2018 by Andy

Music

🙄

To continue from last time, I was able to record from my MIDI keyboard to LMMS. But LMMS doesn’t have a way to export MIDI files. Something about the trickiness of the bass loops. But there is an external tool for converting LMMS files to MIDI, and since I didn’t find another free MIDI sequencer I liked better than LMMS, I’ll just record that way for now.

Ways I want to use MIDI recordings:

  • To easily study what I’m playing wrong when I practice a piano piece. I can do this with a regular audio recording, but a MIDI sequence might make it slightly easier to see what I played.
  • To easily make use of passages I come up with while improvising. Without a recording I have to try to remember what I came up with. With an audio recording I have to transcribe it.
  • To record performances so I can preserve their nuances while letting me manipulate the results, such as to fix mistakes, substitute instruments, or add effects.

Life maintenance

🙂

The first half of last week was getting ready for my siblings to visit. I didn’t get much actual cleaning done, but I boxed up the clutter, took stuff to Goodwill, and vacuumed. I was proud of myself. I’m going to try to develop new habits for keeping things organized.

Socializing

🙂

Wednesday night I took a break from housekeeping to drop in on an open house for my friend from work who’s leaving the state to work at an amazing new job and join an interesting church plant. Fortunately they’ll only be a couple of hours away. I intended to stay for an hour at most. I left about three hours later.

One highlight was learning about the hand game Chopsticks from their third-grade son. It seems more sophisticated than the games we played at that age. Looking that up led me to this interesting study of Australian children’s playlore. I’ve wondered about how children’s traditions got passed along. I didn’t know people actually studied it.

Easter

🙂

Thursday my brother and sister arrived. My sister was passing through on her way to visit a friend. My brother was staying for the weekend. Visiting Chicago requires deep dish pizza, so that was dinner.

Felt Easter bunnies my sister made for my brother and me.

A post shared by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum) on

Friday after breakfast we looked through a local history museum, where my brother picked up some postcards. Then we took a walk through a park featured on one of the postcards and then sat at a picnic table and wrote the postcard together. Afterward Abbie went on her way, and Michael and I attended church service #1, a Taizé-themed Good Friday service. After dinner at Nando’s I dropped Michael off at a second Good Friday service and waited for him at home while working on a project.

Saturday afternoon we met with Tim and Jeremy at Barnes and Noble for a while and then joined the rest of Jeremy’s family for dinner at a Mongolian barbecue. Finally, a repeat of the night before–I dropped Michael off at church and headed home for another project.

Thinking

😐

What were these projects? Bibliographies. Who wouldn’t skip church for that? I added a bibliography of potential sources for the analysis project.

Beliefs report

😐

I also added a potential sources section for this one. This week I’ll create one for the current spirituality essay, and then I’ll probably put this project on hold again. I’ll come back to it after I’ve gotten more done on analysis and rationality.

Posted in Beliefs report, Holidays, Housekeeping, Music, People, Thinking, Weeknotes | 1 Comment

Update for 3/25/2018

Posted on March 28, 2018 by Andy

Last week didn’t feel packed, but you’d think so from the length of this post.

Birthday

🙂

Sunday my friends Jeremy and Heather hosted a birthday party for me. They even made tacos. Tim and Linda joined us. We played some games I brought–Splendor, Magic Maze, and Isle of Skye. My only complaint is they didn’t eat enough of the dessert I brought. I was munching on it the rest of the week. Such a burden.

Elections

🙂

I vote in primaries these days, but I’m not great at keeping up with the races, so I’m left scrambling at the last minute. I’ve found there are two ways to vote: (1) being tormented with indecision in the voting booth and (2) zipping through the list you wrote down beforehand. The second way feels much better. So Monday night I was up late researching candidates and propositions for the next day’s vote.

I was pleased that the main candidate I cared about won. The rest of this race should be interesting to watch.

Beliefs report

😐

The summary I posted the week before last reminded me I have a lot of work to do before I feel my beliefs are settled. It feels like too much to even begin working through right now. But I’m trying to keep working on the project through Lent, so this week I’ll post a list of potential sources to consult when I finally do dig in.

Thinking

😎

The analysis essay still takes up a lot of my thinking time. I’ve been capturing a lot of passing thoughts in my notes. The next update will be a list of potential sources for this project.

Grad school

😐

As I think about things I want to do, I find myself mentally regressing through chains of prerequisite projects till I end up at what I’m charitably calling gateways, projects that will make others possible or easier. When I’m in a grumpier mood, I call them bottlenecks, because I tend to procrastinate on them while being impatient for the projects they’ll enable. Last week I looked through my big list of current project ideas and tagged the gateways.

One of my gateways is researching grad schools. Once I find some likely candidates, I’ll be in a better position to plan some of the basic computer science learning I need to do, topics like computer architecture and operating systems. I’ll also be able to answer people when they ask me where I want to go for grad school.

So last week I picked up my research where I left off way back when. Unfortunately the couple of times I tried, my brain was running on fumes, so I didn’t get very far. But at least the wheels have started turning again.

Project generator

😐

Another bottl–uh, gateway–is my coding project generator. So I briefly looked through my next steps and noted the issues that were holding me back on them. Converting your problems to tasks in a list can make them remarkably easier to deal with. I’m expecting to work more on this project in the coming weeks.

Movies

Somehow I got through three movies last week.

The Cloverfield Paradox

😎

The Cloverfield Paradox was a typical soft sf film where the explanations of what was going on didn’t really make sense, but other than that I liked it. My favorite part was recognizing that the weird things that happen on the station could’ve sprung from the imagination of my 9-year-old self. It’s nice finding creators who speak my language.

Good Will Hunting

🤔

I’ve resubscribed to the Netflix DVD service, and last week I was reminded you have to stay on top of managing your queue, because they won’t waste any time sending you whatever’s next. So last week to keep the queue flowing I watched the one they sent me, Good Will Hunting. I’d added it because of some articles I’d read about South Boston, which is where the characters are from. One of my online friends lives near there.

But also the movie was in the back of my mind because my Christian education professors back in undergraduate days would use it to illustrate something or other. I’d seen the “not your fault” scene at least once in class. So I was watching like a hawk to see how Robin Williams the therapist would make a connection with Matt Damon the troubled genius and get through to him. And I watched too closely, because I ended up contemplating life. But let’s be honest, I would do that anyway. I took away two questions: What counts as authentic experience? And how might I be avoiding it to protect myself from its risks?

The Scorch Trials

🙄

Jeremy and I are fans of the Maze Runner book series. We’d watched the first movie adaptation, and Jeremy wanted to watch The Death Cure, but we hadn’t seen The Scorch Trials yet. So we watched that one on Friday with plans to see The Death Cure the next day at a discount theater. We were very thrown off by the movie. In fact, it changed the premise of the books enough that the first movie didn’t really make sense. With that and the characters’ overreactions and a very cliché plot, we dropped the idea of seeing the third one.

TV

🙂

In between movies, I returned to Star Trek: Discovery and got through episodes 5 and 6. The show definitely improved after the first episode or two.

Death

🤔

A couple of weeks ago my employer’s co-founder died. She was about a week away from being 101. The other co-founder, her husband, died a few years before I started working there. Our chapel last week was going to be a birthday celebration, so they celebrated her life instead. The next morning was her funeral, which we were able to watch in the chapel via a livestream.

As usual, I appreciated people’s eulogies. They reminded me that generosity and hospitality were two of her hallmarks, which challenges me because those are areas I always feel could be improved in my life.

Life maintenance

🙂

Getting my apartment ready for my siblings’ visit over Easter is progressing fairly steadily. I’m feeling pretty good about it, considering I usually put off that kind of housekeeping, to the point that I do practically none of it before my guests arrive.

😎

The week before last, I put half of my new file cabinet together. I finished it late last week and set up my new and improved music filing system in the bottom drawer. What a relief. And getting that done cleared up a lot of space in that area of the apartment.

Music

🙂

Finishing my new file cabinet and getting ready for the next day’s worship performance put me in an easy position to try out some recording from my MIDI keyboard. This is something I had in mind for my Surface several years ago when I bought it, but of course I hadn’t gotten around to it. So I plugged in the keyboard, fired up LMMS, and set about investigating how to get it to record. But it was late Saturday night, and I didn’t get very far. I’ll have more to report next week.

Posted in Analysis, Beliefs report, Birthdays, Coding project generator, Death, Elections, Grad school, Life maintenance, Movies, Music, TV, Weeknotes | 1 Comment

Update for 3/18/2018

Posted on March 18, 2018 by Andy

Board games

😎

Sunday to reward myself for surviving 40 years, I bought a couple of board games I’d had my eye on, a cooperative one called Magic Maze and a solitaire card game called Finished! My coworker wanted to try Magic Maze, so on Friday I brought it to work and played it with the lunch game group. Most of them weren’t there last time we played it, so I introduced them to it, and it went over well.

Futurism

🤔

At the futurism group last week the topic was genetic engineering and CRISPR. One of the people there was actually a biology professor who practiced biohacking, so we got an insider’s perspective, which was very interesting. Our intro question was what we’d want to alter about ourselves via genetic engineering. I picked the ability to function on very little sleep. But I’m a cautious person, so I wouldn’t alter anything until the treatment was well tested.

TV

🤔

I finished season 2 of Stranger Things. I’ve heard people say it wasn’t as exciting as the first season, and I’m not sure I agree. It got pretty intense several times. I wonder if they say that because the show’s concept isn’t new anymore. Being introduced to a premise has a special magic that sequels have to work harder to replicate. I don’t think that means they have to be a letdown. Sometimes the sequel is better. But maybe not in this case.

Movies

🙂

Speaking of sequels, I watched 10 Cloverfield Lane so I could catch up with everyone and watch The Cloverfield Paradox. 10 Cloverfield Lane was good, 5/5. The ending felt satisfying and left me wanting more. Other than its being in the Cloverfield series, I wanted to watch it to be challenged by what looked from the trailer like an imprisonment theme. Along those lines the movie was less intense than I expected, but I think that deepened the theme. I appreciated this article‘s interpretation.

Life maintenance

🙂

I finished my taxes. Usually I do them at the last minute, so I’m proud.

😐

Remember that file cabinet I impulse bought months ago? I finally started putting it together Saturday night. I’m halfway done. Other than my project to fix up my apartment in general, what motivated me was again my unwieldy filing system for worship music. Every time I get ready to perform, I inwardly groan a little louder at having to wrestle with my files. For a new system I need a working cabinet. Once I have that, I’m going to try hanging folders.

Beliefs report

😐

I’d been somewhat procrastinating on my beliefs report, so I decided to take my boss’s advice to write a summary with a limited word count first. I succeeded and added it the beginning of the essay. Having the summary gives me a better idea of the work I need to do. It’ll take a long time to resolve all my issues, but at least I can plan. I’ll try to work on this project through the rest of Lent before putting it on hold again.

Posted in Beliefs report, Board games, Futurism, Housekeeping, Movies, Taxes, TV, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Update for 3/11/2018

Posted on March 14, 2018 by Andy

Church

😎

Sunday I visited liturgical church #5, an Episcopal one. In contrast with the previous week’s, this was the friendliest church yet. They greeted me as I came in and as I left the service, and they even convinced me to stay for coffee time afterward, where I talked for quite a while with several people. A couple of them even knew my old employers.

They held the service in what looked like a Sunday school room that doubled as a library. Later I learned this was because their sanctuary needed reconstruction. I was struck by how the trappings of liturgy could elevate such an ordinary environment. The sermon was a very helpful one about the meaning of liturgical gestures. The songs were interesting too, especially “Inspired by Love and Anger,” a social justice hymn by John Bell.

Birthday

👴

I am old now. My 40th birthday was Wednesday. For being such a momentous one, it was the most casual birthday I’ve had in quite a while, basically just a normal day. The closest thing to a black balloon I got was a Bitmoji of a coffin from my brother, to which I replied I’d already moved into my coffin to save time later. My sister’s message was a video of her booping my picture. Also a very nice card in which she assured me 40 is the new 30, so I shouldn’t let it hold me back.

Since Wednesday I’ve been slightly more aware of my status as an old person when I’m around young people, but other than that, mentally I still feel like I’m about 20. And my body disagrees less than I expected. Maybe I’d notice my age more if I’d ever been remotely athletic.

“Life begins at forty.” I never understood that saying until I found an addition: “Up until then, you are just doing research.” That’s how I’ve been feeling the past couple of years, that the developments over the course of my life have been coming together and soon I’ll be poised to do something with them.

Having said that, one of my friends told me years ago that when she was young, she thought middle-aged people had it all together, but when she got there, she realized it wasn’t true. They were trying to figure things out like everyone else. And now that I’m there, I definitely agree. So young people, that’s what you have to look forward to, muddling through a life of confusion! But at least it’s not boring.

One nice birthday present I got was an email from my old college friend Cam, wishing me a happy birthday and giving me his phone number so we could catch up. It’d been a few years since we’d talked. So I replied with my number, and we had a good conversation Friday night. The funny thing about Cam is that we were both Christian education majors who ended up programming for a living. For a while we were even both working with the same technology, SharePoint. It’s kinda nice to catch up after a few years and immediately be able to talk shop.

As kind of a late celebration, I’m getting together with friends at Jeremy and Heather’s place on Sunday for board games.

Thinking

😐

I posted an update to my analysis essay. This one is an account of my current hazy, messy process of analysis. There are also links to example analyses and a roadmap of planned updates to the essay.

Beliefs report

😐

I’m sort of at a stopping point in my analysis essay, so I guess I’ll get back to this one. I’m going to try a different approach, at least in my notes for the essay–writing them in dialog form to fit the back-and-forth nature of my thoughts on religion.

Fiction

🙂

I finished Pilot X, written by a tech journalist I follow, Tom Merritt. I appreciated his attention to the logic of time travel. It’s hard to get right, but I think he did pretty well. My only real complaint about the book is that it’s too short. It skips over long time periods and could easily have been a series. But I guess there’s something to be said for pocket-size epics.

I got through Haruki Murakami’s Wind/Pinball. It felt surprisingly Western, like it could’ve been written by an American, except that it was sprinkled with odd statements that reminded me the characters were from another culture with different assumptions and idioms. I also wasn’t sure how much of the novel reflected actual Japanese life in the ’70s and how much was magic realism. The detached, apathetic tone of the stories reminded me of Less Than Zero, though Murakami’s characters were trying to find themselves a little more actively than Ellis’.

Now I’m on the next book in that series, A Wild Sheep Chase. I’m reading the print book because I couldn’t find a convenient audio version and I didn’t feel like buying it on Audible.

For audio I’ve started a new listening project, Ben Bova’s Grand Tour series about colonizing the solar system (see my tracking spreadsheet based on the lists here). I was going to try to piece together a series like that out of multiple authors’ books, but then I found out Bova’s. Convenient! I like Powersat so far, a political thriller about a revolutionary solar energy project.

Life maintenance

🙄

Well, I was all ready to do my taxes (at the last minute Saturday night), but I couldn’t log in to the site that had my W-2. I’ll try again this week.

Posted in Analysis, Beliefs report, Birthdays, Books, Church, Taxes, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Update for 3/4/2018

Posted on March 5, 2018 by Andy

Birthday

👴

On Wednesday I will officially be old. I might try to get some people together for board games.

Church

🤔

Sunday I visited liturgical church #4, this one Anglican. Unlike every other time I visit a church, at this one I actually wanted to talk to people, because they occupy the building of my old church that closed. Plus I’d met the organist and wanted to say hello. However, this one wasn’t very welcoming–not even the priest greeted me, since he was already in conversation with probably some church members–and I didn’t get a good chance to greet the organist. Still, I liked the service, so I’m planning to give it another chance, probably in a few weeks. The need to be more proactive at this one made me generally more open to socializing at the churches I’m visiting, even a little eager.

Life maintenance

😄

Saturday I was getting ready to renew my driver’s license at the DMV, and I happened to notice it’s not expiring till next year. The renewal notice the state had sent me was for another ID I’d gotten six years ago and practically never used. So I’m off the hook. And I got my glasses a year early. Oh well!

😐

I’ve barely started on my taxes, but I did collect some necessary information for them, which took some time. I’ll work on them more this week.

🙄

Last time I tried taking my cans to the recycling place, the drop-off bins were gone. Last week I did some research and found out the whole center had closed. More research told me the closest non-closed drop-off place is half an hour away. I gave up. No more Mr. Good Citizen! I’ll just throw my cans and bottles out. But my apartment building has a paper recycling bin, so at least I can still do that.

Thinking

😐

On my analysis essay, I stumbled on an idea for an update I can finish soon, so I’ll try to post that this week.

Coding project generator

😐

These days my project ideas usually end up involving programming, and my study of analysis is no exception. Thinking about my plans for that project has made my coding project generator feel like a bottleneck again, so last week I got back to working on it. It’s proceeding slowly, but at least it’s proceeding.

Fiction

🤔

I finished Skeleton Crew. I generally liked the rest of the stories, except for “Survivor Type.” I couldn’t wait for that one to end. I couldn’t stand the character. I was also in a bad mood that day. I really liked “Gramma,” though maybe not the ending. “The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet” was interesting.

😎

While I was waiting to start Skeleton Crew, I started on another of my shorter ones from Audible, Pilot X by Tom Merritt. After Skeleton Crew I continued it. I think of Tom Merritt as a tech journalist, so I didn’t know how his fiction would be. It turns out I really like it! Pilot X is written very accessibly and has an interesting premise and setting. The reader is really good too, Kevin T. Collins.

🤔

After Pilot X, I have a pair of Haruki Murakami novels lined up–Wind and Pinball. Reading the thoughtful posts of Makoto Murata on some mailing lists I follow has put me in the mood to look into Japanese literature.

Work

🤔

Last week another of my favorite coworkers left the company. She retired. We never actually worked together, and we didn’t speak often. But she’s the kind of person who has a distinct presence. Whenever she was around, I could tell things were getting done and people were feeling appreciated.

Posted in Analysis, Birthdays, Board games, Books, Coding project generator, Life maintenance, Weeknotes, Work | 1 Comment

Update for 2/25/2018

Posted on February 26, 2018 by Andy

Life management

😐

I had a surprise freelance job last week, so no taxes. But this week!

Movies

😎

Tuesday I saw Black Panther with my geek meetup. I rate it 6/5. I’d been looking forward to it as a potentially good example of Afrofuturism, and I was not disappointed. In fact, I found myself thinking about it for days after, which to me is the sign of a good movie. Because of its themes I feel even less qualified to evaluate and comment on it than other movies, but it feels like a complex one that rewards rewatching, so I’ll probably do that. One thing I will say about it is that I’ve never felt so much sympathy for a villain. I was also happy to see Letitia Wright from Black Mirror.

Fiction

🤔

I finished “The Mist” from Stephen King’s Skeleton Crew collection and decided to listen to the rest. It’s a nice collection for getting a sense of the variety in his stories. It’s not all monsters. It’s not even all horror. My favorites so far are “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut,” “The Jaunt,” and “Word Processor of the Gods.” “The Raft” is probably what I would’ve expected from Stephen King before I read anything by him.

Thinking

😎

Friday I picked up Rethinking the Fifth Discipline by Robert Louis Flood. Even though it’s a critique of another book (The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge), I’m probably going to use it as my introduction to the details of systems thinking. It’s relatively recent, summarizes some major systems theorists, and advances the field with insights from complexity theory. Kind of an obscure book, but it was somehow at a local used bookstore.

Socializing

🙂

Picking up my systems thinking book on Friday took me past Jeremy’s workplace, so we came with me to the bookstore. We discovered there was an Applebee’s nearby, and since the one near us closed years ago, after the bookstore we had dinner there. It wasn’t the best maintained building, but the waitress was friendly and the food was delicious.

Death

🤔

Saturday I went to my friend Rex’s memorial service. Yet again I was surprised by how much I learned from the eulogies. I knew he’d been in the army but not that he’d jumped out of airplanes, and I didn’t know he went on mission trips to Uganda. And I didn’t know just how much he was loved. His church was interesting, a Messianic Anglican church with a charismatic flavor. There was a sprinkling of Hebrew, and I learned of the Tree of Life Bible translation.

Posted in Books, Death, Life management, Movies, People, Systems theory, Weeknotes | 1 Comment

Update for 2/18/2018

Posted on February 19, 2018 by Andy

Thinking

🙂

My analysis essay is trundling along. I’m hoping to post the rest of it in the next couple of weeks.

Life management

😤

I’m going to do my taxes this week. Don’t let me put it off!

Beliefs report

🤔

I’m planning on returning to my beliefs report as a Lenten project. But I want to finish the current phase of my analysis project first. And then I’ll probably keep working on the beliefs report till I’m at a good stopping point. So really its timing won’t strictly coincide with Lent but will overlap it instead.

Futurism

🤔

Last week’s futurism meetup was about futurism itself. The organizer also invited us to suggest topics for future meetings, and it just so happened that I have one. But I wanted to have videos to recommend before I gave him the topic, so since then I’ve been researching them.

TV

🤔

I caught up on Black Mirror (I rate it 5/5), and now I’m on The End of the F***ing World (that’s literally the title, including the asterisks), which has one of the actors from Black Mirror, Alex Lawther. He seems to play vulnerable characters with secrets, which is intriguing. Otherwise the show wouldn’t interest me. So far I like it better than I expected.

Death

😕

Sunday I played the piano at the funeral of a church friend, Marilyn. The organizers had asked me to play a couple of weeks before. It’s good that they did, because I was in Texas when she died, and I hadn’t heard the news, though it was clear she’d been declining. I knew her from a couple of ministries we’d been involved with together. As usual, it was good to hear people’s recollections, especially since I didn’t know her that well.

This Saturday I’m attending the funeral of another ministry friend, Rex. He’d had a few bouts with brain cancer, and this last time it was very aggressive.

I wouldn’t have heard about Rex either except that I happened to check Facebook at the right time. That was also true of Ray’s cancer about a year ago. I need a better way to keep up with that site. I rarely visit it because it distracts me so easily.

Correspondence

🤔

I’ve been getting nice letters and notes the past few months. My sister sent me a very nice thank you/appreciation card after Christmas. My brother has sent me a few letters and postcards. His latest letter was a very long answer to a question I’d asked him over email. So now I need to write some replies. I also told another old friend I’d write her a letter, if I can get her address.

Posted in Analysis, Beliefs report, Correspondence, Death, Futurism, Life management, TV, Weeknotes | 4 Comments

Update for 2/11/2018

Posted on February 12, 2018 by Andy

Church

🤔

After being sidetracked from my liturgy hunting project for a few weeks by music duties at church, last Sunday I visited Lutheran church #1. It definitely had the feel I was going for, but I spent the whole service in confusion. I got there late, only by 15 minutes, but they were already at the sermon, as if they’d started half an hour earlier than the time they listed everywhere. And then I couldn’t see where they kept the printed liturgies, if there were any left, so I couldn’t even sing along most of the time. It was also closed communion, but at that point I was relieved not to feel the need to participate. Interestingly when the priest greeted me as I left, we recognized each other. We concluded it was from college. I want to go back for a proper experience of their service, but that’ll be after I’ve visited the other places.

Thinking

😎

I posted another section of my analysis essay. That’s it for the preliminaries, and now I’m digging into the heart of my method. It might take a while to sort things out enough to post more. But this is the fun part. The hard kind of fun.

I can already tell the trajectory of my analysis project is taking me straight into the realm of systems theory. So prepare yourselves to have systems thinking foisted upon you at every opportunity! Once I learn enough. You can begin by perusing these inspiring tweets. The world’s had a long break from being bludgeoned by me with a blunt framework. It’s been long enough. It certainly bludgeons me enough with complaints about the pit it’s falling into. Systems thinking can possibly offer some handholds.

Fiction

😎

I finished Red Mars. It was very good, and I’ll listen to the rest of the trilogy at some point. I was reminded that my other favorite character besides John was Nadia, a very sensible, determined, and competent person. She inspired people to follow when she was in her element. Overall the story demonstrated to me that fleeing to Mars won’t solve humanity’s problems. The last few hours of the book were rather stressful.

While I was waiting for my next audiobook to be available, I listened to short stories by some Internet acquaintances. One was a set on Audible by Jeffrey Koval. They’re all paranormal fiction with some interesting twists. The other was a story by James Troughton, “The Mothgate,” on the Escape Artists podcast for young adult sff, Cast of Wonders. It also has an interesting twist.

The audiobook I was waiting for was Skeleton Crew by Stephen King, a collection that has the next story in my Dark Tower listening project, “The Mist.” It arrived at the library late in the week, so I trekked there on Saturday to retrieve it. I’ll probably listen to the whole collection. After that is the first actual Dark Tower book, The Gunslinger.

While format shifting Skeleton Crew to listen from my phone, I started on another short one I picked up from Audible, The Oedipus Plays. It’s a full-cast production of a very listenable translation, and it’s so good I haven’t even finished and I’m ready to give it 5 stars. I wish this cast would do an audio Bible. You can listen to a sample on the product page. It makes me want to listen to more classics.

Video games

🙂

I’ve been missing Minecraft, so I’ve returned to my single-player world where I’m building homes in a bunch of different biomes. I’d built paths through the Nether to all the locations, but actually building the homes was stalling me. When you don’t know what you’re doing, designing nice homes is too much work. So now I’m stealing other people’s designs. Last week I built this one at my main base in a plains village. Next will be an adobe house in the neighboring mesa biome.

Social life

🙂

My longtime friend Alpana is back home from her latest Navy assignment, and we caught up over the phone. She pointed me to a potentially interesting collaborative sf franchise, Imperial Odyssey. Collaborative writing projects intrigue me, and now I’m thinking a list of them might make its way to the wiki.

Side note, Minecraft is a great way to pass the time when you’re on the phone. 😉

Photography

🙂

On my way back from the library on Saturday, I passed one of the lakes where I take pictures, and even though I’m usually not interested in trying to photograph winter, I liked the sky that day and decided to try it. The trip reminded me that walking through deep snow is a workout. Afterward I had to lie back in my car for a while to recover. I think the pictures turned out pretty well.

One of my usual photo spots, now with added winter. #snowscape

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A bristly hill. #snowscape

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Posted in Analysis, Books, Church, People, Photography, Systems theory, Video games, Weeknotes | Leave a comment