Update for 12/11/2016

Posted on December 12, 2016 by Andy

Project updates

  • Christmas
    • Projects – I’m trying to remember that I have time to work on these over my vacation, so I don’t have to stress myself out trying to finish them before I leave, especially since traveling makes me tense enough. But I did make a key decision on one of these projects that removed a major roadblock, and now the rest of the way looks clear and navigable. On the other project I just have to push myself through it.
    • Travel – The weather is turning this year’s Christmas vacation into an exercise in worry management, and it’s reminding me that one of my main coping mechanisms is contingency planning. My first stop is my friend’s wedding in North Carolina, and I have a pretty tight window for getting there, so if there’s too much snow and my flight gets canceled, either I’ll have a tighter window, or I’ll be late, or I’ll have to miss it and fly straight to Texas. If I do make it to NC, I was thinking of doing some sightseeing after the wedding because it’s near some places I grew up visiting, but the mountain driving and forecast of rain are making me think I’ll spare myself the stress and just hang out at the inn, and anyway I was always there during summer rather than winter, so it wouldn’t be the same. Once I’m in Texas, things should be easier, and my weather app says the temperatures will be much warmer than I was expecting, so that’s a relief.
  • Bookmarks – This one is plodding a bit, and I’m thinking I should leave it till I get to Texas or even till I get back, since it takes more concentration and time than I can really spare right now.
  • Project map – I’d like to say I’m ready to post, but I still have stuff to think through, especially the differences between what I need from this map and what my site visitors need. I might wait till January to finish this one.
  • Coffee – I’ve been on a leisurely stroll through varieties of instant–so far Café Bustelo and Starbucks VIA Columbian, Italian, Mocha, Caramel, and Pumpkin Spice–and next is Mount Hagen, which I found at Whole Foods, where I also found an intriguing Ekobrew reusable Keurig container that lets you use your own coffee, so if that’s compatible with our machine it work, I’ll be trying that too.
  • Books – I finished The Long Earth, which is the good kind of science fiction where they propose a concept and then explore its consequences for society, all while following the characters through some kind of adventure, and it set up the next book in the series really well, so I’ll probably get to that in the nearish future. But next I’m listening to David Foster Wallace’s Girl with Curious Hair, if I don’t get bored and drop it. I’ve been curious about DFW for several years, I’ve been kind of in the mood for literary fiction lately, which is highly unusual, so it seemed like a good time for it.

Life updates

  • Christmas party – Our superdepartment had its Christmas party last Wednesday, complete with our annual Christmas Olympics, a series of silly games (this year from Minute to Win It) that we compete in as four large teams for silly trophies, which was almost traumatizing for me the first time we held it because I hate those kinds of games, but once I knew what to expect after the first year, I could disengage enough from the experience to stay calm, and this year I was so detached I sort of regretted the decision, so maybe I’ll let myself participate more next year, especially since one of this year’s games was the kind of object sorting I would do for fun anyway, so I guess not all the games are evil.
Posted in Books, Coffee, Coping, Holidays, Life updates, Party games, People, Programming, Project updates, Projects, Travel | 1 Comment

Update for 12/4/2016

Posted on December 5, 2016 by Andy

Project updates

  • Bookmarks – I didn’t work much on the desynced bookmarks situation, but I did think through it enough to start dreading it, since writing a script to merge them was going to take a fair amount of work. Fortunately I’ve come up with a quicker solution to try, and I might be able to wrap it up this week.
  • Project map – My map of all my projects feels like my most important project right now, since it will help me coordinate all my projects better in the future, so this is the one I’ve put the most work into lately. It’s taking shape slowly, like a growing plant, but I do want to move on, and I think with another week or so of work I can call it good enough.
  • Christmas – The project map may feel like the most important, but my Christmas gifts won’t buy or make themselves! I made decent progress on my Christmas stuff last week, and I’ll keep working on it this week.

Life updates

  • Funeral – I attended Ray’s funeral on Saturday, which I thought I was running late to, but it turned out they had a viewing first, so I ended up being early to the service itself. It was a church I’ve visited quite a few times, and the funeral was like a regular Sunday morning service, with a full sanctuary and a full liturgy, which I expected. I felt inspired by the eulogies and the homily, partly because the people speaking were thoughtful and reflective and partly because that’s the way Ray was, and they motivated me to return to some of my devotional practices, so since this came up at an Anglican church, I thought I’d try following the church year somewhat, and I’ve bought a couple of books to help me begin working through it: Welcome to the Church Year by Vicki Black and The Divine Hours: Prayers for Autumn and Wintertime by Phyllis Tickle.
Posted in Books, Death, Devotions, Holidays, Life updates, Programming, Project updates, Projects | Leave a comment

Update for 11/27/2016

Posted on November 29, 2016 by Andy

Life updates

  • Thanksgiving – On Wednesday I made a very stressful drive down through hours and hours of rain to my sister’s place, and what a relief to finally get there and see her and my brother. Thursday we went over to her friends’ house for Thanksgiving dinner, where their sister’s family was also visiting, and I learned that the sister’s husband works in AI, a surprising and welcome coincidence. Friday we watched a movie (more on that below) and took a walk through some nearby woods, where my hurting leg reminded me that I’m old and haven’t exercised in a while. Saturday we took our brother to the airport, and Sunday I had a much easier drive back, which included an interesting detour around some traffic through some US Routes that Google Maps told me would save seven minutes.
  • Ray – I visited Ray after my Remicade treatment on Monday at the same hospital, and I met his brother, who gave me an update. It turned out Ray’s condition was very bad in spite of some improvements, and he died Thanksgiving morning. I’m going to his memorial service on Saturday.

Project updates

  • Project map – I’m thinking through my topics of interest and arriving at a helpful broad analysis of my project ideas. I don’t like the ramble that’s in the wiki article right now, so I’ll replace it soon with the much briefer set of lists I’ve come up with so far.
  • Bookmarks – I’m starting to work on a program to merge the Firefox bookmarks from my three computers, and then I’ll export them as a set of web pages for my own reference, and I’ll delete most of them from Firefox and basically start over so I can sync the files normally and work from a more current organizational scheme.
  • Media
    • Books – 14 was good and left me wanting more, which there is, sort of, in the form of a side-quel, The Fold, but I won’t get around to it until I convince myself to subscribe to Audible, because that’s the only convenient place the audiobook is available. The Stand became available, so I started that on the Thanksgiving drive down, but I wasn’t in the mood for horror on the drive back, so I started The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, which pushes several of my interest buttons and which is worth reading without any spoilers.
    • Movies – Over Thanksgiving my siblings and I went to see Loving, which is about the Supreme Court case that established interracial marriage as constitutional. I was struck by how normal and caring and gentle the couple was, and I hoped the real people were like that and I wasn’t just being manipulated into liking them. The movies my family sees together are usually historical or historical fiction, and while I used to think these were the most boring genres, over the past few years I’ve given them a chance and found that an open mind can go a long way to making life more enjoyable.
  • Christmas – I have a few, rather involved things to do to prepare for Christmas, so I’m going try to get a good start on them this week. I don’t know if decorating will be one of them, since I’d have to clean up a lot first.
Posted in Books, Death, Exercise, Holidays, Housekeeping, Life updates, Movies, Programming, Project updates, Projects | 2 Comments

Update for 11/20/2016

Posted on November 21, 2016 by Andy

Project updates

  • Project map – I’ve made progress in sorting out my projects, and I’ll post a streamlined version of my article sometime soon.
  • Bookmarks – The election and creepy fiction articles are coming, but to make those easier, I want to collect the links in my Firefox bookmarks and write a script to transform them into the wiki markup. But I have a little electronic housekeeping to do first, because my bookmark situation is a little chaotic right now because the file is too large to sync easily with my usual method (Xmarks), so now my bookmarks are desynced across computers, and to fix it I’ve been wanting to archive most of my bookmarks and start over. Now that I have significant bookmarking projects to start, I’ve decided to do the archiving first, so that’s in process.
  • Movies – Wednesday my boss invited me to see Arrival with some people from work, so I went with them that night, and I felt that I would’ve made the movie similarly if it were up to me, so I really liked it, and now I’m reading the rest of Chiang’s story and mentally comparing it to the movie, which is turning out to be an interesting method of reading. Sunday Tim and I went to see Fantastic Beasts, which I liked pretty well, especially the mesmerizing cloud effects in certain parts I won’t spoil for you.

Life updates

  • Memorial service – A couple of weeks ago a friend from church asked me if I’d play the piano for her father’s memorial service this past Saturday, and I agreed, though I’m not going to do this on a regular basis, so don’t get any ideas! I was a little anxious because I didn’t get around to practicing as much as I wanted, but it turned out fine, and I even was able to assemble a prelude from a great book of lead sheets I found last week, The Hymn Fake Book, which I could get in Kindle format. As I usually find at memorial services, the stories from the people there made me wish I’d known him–a kind, generous, knowledgeable, and productive man–and they gave me some ideals to strive for.
  • Thanksgiving – I’ll be making a long drive for Thanksgiving to visit my sister, where my brother will also be. Our parents are snubbing us. I’m looking forward to it (the visit, not the snubbing).
Posted in Death, Freelancing, Holidays, Housekeeping, Life updates, Movies, Project updates, Projects | 6 Comments

Update for 11/13/2016

Posted on November 14, 2016 by Andy

For those of you who were disappointed by the shortness of last week’s update, I think you’ll be happier this week.

Project updates

  • Ulcerative colitis – I went for my first Remicade treatment on Monday, and my next one for this initial period is in a week. I haven’t seen any improvement yet, but like with Humira, it can take a while to see results.
  • NaNoWriMo – I’ve decided (1) NaNoWriMo doesn’t fit the project I’m using it for, (2) it’s too late to switch projects and hit the official word count, (3) I don’t want to put off my current project anyway, and (4) I’ve been a little distracted by current events; so I’m ditching NNWM this year. The issues with my current project are that (1) I’m writing a project map that I want to be fairly concise; and (2) since I decided to do NNWM at the last minute, I’m doing my planning while I’m writing; but (1) the emphasis of NNWM is on verbosity, and (2) you’re supposed to plan your novel beforehand. I’m updating the wiki article I’m writing with the parts I added last week, but from now on instead of trying to write constantly, I’ll take more time to think, and I’ll revise to cut out unhelpful content as I go. Dropping NNWM will also give me more mental space to write for my offline project, which I didn’t really want to include in the word count and which has an actual external deadline.
  • Media
    • Books – The two books I’ve been reading (‘Salem’s Lot in audio, Less Than Zero in print) are both due on Monday, so this weekend I scrambled to finish them. ‘Salem’s Lot, along with the TV show Luke Cage, makes me feel like being more involved in my community, something I’ve done much less of in recent, well, years, and it reminds me that the arts aren’t just idle entertainment but can shape your life. Next books: 14 by Peter Cline and The Bug by Ellen Ullman, which was forcibly loaned to me by my coworker months ago, so since I’m into reading print books right now, I guess I should read it before I move on to another library book.
    • Movies – I want to see Doctor Strange and Arrival. I know practically nothing about either, but the little revealed in the trailers seems right up my alley–Arrival in linguisticness and Doctor Strange in weirdness. I was going to say Arrival‘s premise reminds me of “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, one of my favorite SF writers, but then I found out that’s what it’s based on! I guess I should finish reading it.
    • Web video – I’ve been continuing to explore the Internet’s weird media, mostly the ones Night Mind highlights but starting to broaden my net, and the catch is scattered enough that I’m creating a wiki page where I’ll collect links to the ones that interest me, once I figure out what to call this category. These series roughly fall into the horror genre, but not all horror appeals to me, so maybe think of these as some combination of the X-Files and Blair Witch.
  • Politics – Like most of the country I was stunned by last week’s election results, and like half of it I was chagrined, but my initial shock has worn off, and now after some initial posts on Twitter and Facebook to get my basic thoughts out in the open, I’m mostly just collecting viewpoints to try to understand the issues, which I admit is fun for me, though in a serious and somewhat obsessive way, given the intensity of the debates, the complexity of the issues, and the real problems minorities are facing. I’m trying to use this election as a way to get back into the topic of politics, and links on these issues are going into another wiki article, which I wanted to do for Brexit but got distracted from, but I was less involved in Brexit. My overall theme is still the need to listen.

Life updates

  • Work – At the end of last week the warehouse had a big order they needed help with, so some of us from my department went down Friday morning to pack books. This is the kind of help I’m reluctant to give, but it felt natural to join in when someone else said they’d go, and it ended up being a lot of fun.
  • Hospital visitation – Last week I learned that after some surgery, a friend of mine, Ray, is in a coma, or something like it, and when I told Jeremy about it, he volunteered to go with me to visit him in the hospital, since he’s also met him, so we did that on Friday after work and then had dinner. We met Ray’s parents in the room, and at his mother’s suggestion I talked to him a little and held his hand, and she told us that he seemed to respond to music at one point by moving his head back and forth, so I’m deciding not to believe he’s gone yet. This is the kind of community involvement I had in mind, though in Ray’s case I probably would have visited even without the encouragement of Stephen King and Marvel. I wouldn’t have visited without the election, however, because the only way I knew about his condition was a Facebook post I saw while I was scrolling through for political posts.
Posted in Books, Brexit, Current events, Health, Life updates, Movies, Project updates, Weird stuff, Work, Writing | 2 Comments

Update for 11/6/2016

Posted on November 7, 2016 by Andy

Project updates

  • NaNoWriMo – After trying this for a few days, it’s clear that 50,000 words isn’t going to work for me, since it would take two to three hours a day, and I can only work on my projects for about an hour at the best of times, so I’m setting a goal of 15,000 words. I’ve written about 2,200 words, and I’ve posted what I have so far, part of my project map, which I started writing a few months ago.
  • Ulcerative colitis – I’m posting this from the hospital with an IV delivering my first Remicade treatment, which will take a couple of hours. I’ll have another one in two weeks, another six weeks after that, and then every eight weeks. To be honest it feels a little silly to go through so much rigamarole for this condition, but maybe I’ll feel differently if it actually works.
  • Media
    • Books – I’m about halfway through ‘Salem’s Lot, and I like it as much as I did The Shining. When I was growing up, I was afraid and suspicious of all horror writers because I assumed they reveled in evil, but now I see that those who are like Stephen King use their story’s horrific situation as an extreme test, as my boss put it, to reveal aspects of human nature. After this book, the next few in my Dark Tower project are The Stand, “The Mist,” and then the first Dark Tower book, though I’ll probably listen to other things in between. I’m grateful to the producers of the Dark Tower movie for moving its release from February to the summer so I have more time to catch up. 😉
    • TV
      • Marble Hornets – I finished Marble Hornets, and despite some awkward acting at times (along with some that’s great) and some boring scenes of exploring ruined buildings, I loved it and found myself wanting to watch it just for the atmosphere. I love it even more after staying up way too late to binge watch Night Mind’s analysis, which revealed a lot more than I caught when I watched, and I will definitely be studying their storytelling techniques. I was a little chagrined but also intrigued to learn that some of the MH story played out in real life among its creators–a cautionary tale, but it won’t keep me from following their future work.
      • Alan Resnick – My next stops in my journey through Night Mind’s videos were two works by comedian and performance artist Alan Resnick–alantutorial and Unedited Footage of a Bear, both of which are brilliant, but especially alantutorial, which starts out hilarious and becomes more disturbing as the series progresses, though the paranormal elements I vaguely expected never showed up, which reminds me that the real world can be horrific enough.
Posted in Books, Health, Project updates, Projects, TV, Writing | Leave a comment

Update for 10/30/2016

Posted on November 1, 2016 by Andy

Project updates

  • Math relearning – I’ve released the first alpha version, which isn’t very interesting to use, but the documentation might be slightly less uninteresting to read. I’d love to say I’m going to jump into the math programming this week, but because of my other plans that’ll probably be delayed till December unless I can slip it in on the weekends.
  • GTD – My main task on this is mapping my projects, which I’ve barely started but will continue this week, and in fact I’ll be able to combine it with another project I’ll describe later in this entry.
  • Coffee – I’m still aiming to fix my sleeping patterns, but in the meantime I’ll be content to patch their effects, so I’ve decided to develop a coffee habit (okay, not really a habit, if I can help it), and I’ve been exploring the available ways to get coffee easily at work. The coffee from the vending machine in the kitchen is too weak and dirt-like, and the coffee from the Keurig machine on our floor is good but environmentally unfriendly, so to avoid resorting to it often, my next step is to investigate instant. At some point I’ll take Cory Doctorow’s advice and try cold brew, but I’m too lazy to make it on a regular basis. This is all very new to me because as a child I thought of coffee as a drink for grown-ups, and I never got around to growing up enough to start drinking it, and I still wouldn’t have except that a neighbor of my uncle’s offered us some when I visited a few years ago (Folgers French Vanilla Cappuccino, I think), but even after that I only drank it on rare social and distance driving occasions, but at this point in my life I don’t feel my identity is somehow wrapped up in not drinking coffee, hence this experiment.
  • Media
    • Books
      • Less Than Zero – I’m a little over halfway done, and all I really have to say so far I said in this tweet thread.
      • Peak – This is a book about skill development by Anders Ericsson, one of the leading researchers in expert performance, and I found it inspiring and motivating, even though the authors made it clear that expertise is a lot of hard work. That point will help me prioritize the skills I want to develop, since I’m more aware of how unrealistic it would be to try to develop too many of them to a high level. The book also helped me along in resolving a question I’ve had for many years, whether natural talent or hard work is more admirable, by arguing that raw talent only gets you ahead at lower levels of skill, which means that at higher levels the will to practice becomes all important.
      • The Willpower Instinct – Since developing skill takes persistence, I’m delaying ‘Salem’s Lot to listen to this book by Kelly McGonigal, based on the course she teaches at Stanford. The book is as inspiring and motivating as Ericsson’s, but it reminds me of just how eager we all are to delude ourselves in every way possible, though it also points us to the ways out of this dark forest with many practical exercises, and I’m already seeing the effects just from casually following some of McGonigal’s advice.
    • TV – I’m 2/3 through Marble Hornets, and not that I’m qualified as a critic, but that series is surprisingly good for something that’s obviously a very low budget amateur film, with effective suspense and more self-awareness than I expected. It’s written well enough that it’s even gotten me to shift my attitudes toward the characters over time. If I ever get around to it, I’d like to study it as an example of its genre (whatever that is–a found footage creepypasta ARG?).
  • NaNoWriMo – I don’t have a novel to write, but I do have a lot of content to write for my website and maybe an offline project or two, material I’ve put off writing forever, so I’m going to piggyback off of this event to get a bunch of that done, if I can keep up. I’m going to prioritize original content that I can just write–stuff that’s already in my head and doesn’t take much research, including an article mapping my projects–and unless I run out of things to say, I’ll aim for the typical 50,000 words spread over the various articles, though possibly not all of it will end up online, as I mentioned. My NaNoWriMo profile is here, and I was pleased to find that they accommodate people who aren’t writing novels.
  • Photography – Here’s an ominous Halloween crow for you.

Posted in Books, Coffee, Existential crisis, GTD, Math relearning, Photography, Programming, Project updates, Skill development, Sleep, TV, Willpower, Writing | 1 Comment

Update for 10/23/2016

Posted on October 24, 2016 by Andy

Project updates

  • Math relearning – I finished the installation code, but I want to update the readme file before I commit everything. Then I’ll start on the actual math programming.
  • GTD – I’ve decided to revisit an idea I had a while back, making a concept map of my projects and their goals, which will help me think through my priorities. I’ll do some of that this week, using the open source concept mapping software VUE (Visual Understanding Environment).
  • Life maintenance – I haven’t made much progress on either regulating my sleep schedule or getting exercise in quite a while, and saying that every week doesn’t seem to help, so as with diet, I’m going to drop those categories from these updates until something interesting happens, though I’ll continue to experiment with them.
  • Media
    • TV – Doctor Who and Arrow are on hold for Luke Cage, and now Luke Cage is on hold for my Halloween special, a creepy web series called Marble Hornets (along with the response videos from totheark), which came to mind last week when I wandered back into the dark side of YouTube and took another look at a channel called Night Mind that investigates the weird fiction of the web in depth, starting with Marble Hornets.
    • Books
      • My side trip through the Magic Thief series has concluded, and although I didn’t like the first book much when I read it long ago, now that the series is over I already miss it.
      • Next I’ll continue my Halloween theme by trying out my idea for a Stephen King reading project: the Dark Tower series and all the major tie-in stories in publication order, which is probably too ambitious (24 novels and short stories), but I’ll see how it goes, starting with a trip to another distant library to pick up the audiobook for Salem’s Lot.
      • While I’m waiting to start that one, I’ve been listening to a book I bought a few weeks ago on the subject of skill development, which I’ve had in mind to explore for years, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson, one of the main researchers in that field; and as you might expect, my mind is already spinning out project ideas.
      • My superbook investigations while I made my Christmas wishlist led me to some more conventional but still intriguing children’s books by author-illustrators like Colin Thompson and Shaun Tan, so I’m looking more into those.
      • In unguarded moments I find myself looking up books on apologetics, so I guess I’m ramping up to do that project sometime soon.
Posted in Apologetics, Books, Daily routine, Exercise, GTD, Math relearning, Programming, Project updates, Projects, Skill development, Sleep, TV | 2 Comments

Update for 10/16/2016

Posted on October 18, 2016 by Andy

Site updates

  • Wiki comments – I’ve enabled guest commenting, so now if you don’t want to register with Disqus, you can just type in your name and email address to comment like you do on the blog.

Project updates

Posted in Anime, Books, Current events, Daily routine, Diet, Dusk, Exercise, GTD, Housekeeping, Math relearning, Movies, Music, Photography, Programming, Project updates, Site updates, Sleep | 5 Comments

Update for 10/9/2016

Posted on October 10, 2016 by Andy

Project updates

  • Math relearning – I didn’t get a lot done on this last week, but I did learn some more about the code I need to write and make a list of the tasks involved, which I’ll try to get through this week. I’m feeling more motivated on this project both because I’ve been working on it and because I ran across an interesting article on Common Core math, which of course led me to other articles, and I might post the wiki article I started a while back for collecting links on the topic.
  • Life maintenance
    • Ulcerative colitis – I met with my gastroenterologist last week, and I’m going to try switching from Humira to Remicade, so that’ll start in the next few weeks.
    • Diet – I got my cholesterol results back from the lab, and everything was in a normal range except total cholesterol and LDL, which were still greatly improved from my earlier numbers, so I’m going to stick to the TLC diet a while longer. I might need to start tracking my food again, because I’m noticing myself getting more lax.
    • Exercise – I think I’m going to have to just set my alarm earlier so this gets done and then deal with whatever tiredness happens.
    • Daily routine – Do you have any stubborn life patterns that resist all your intentions to change them? Bad time management is one of mine. It’s an issue in need of journaling, if I can get myself to do it. I guess I should set my alarm even earlier.
  • Books – I’m waiting for a movie to be returned at the distant library that has the Magic Thief audiobooks so I can consolidate my trips and pick up both the movie and the next book, so in the meantime I’m listening to some short books I can cram into a week, such as Coraline by Neil Gaiman, which I’d never read (how many books does that guy write per year??), and From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, which I read as a child but don’t think I ever finished, and I didn’t remember the plot except that the main characters are two kids who run away from home to live in an art museum.
  • Creative writing – The little story Coraline writes toward the beginning of the Gaiman book reminded me of a passing thought that I’m now thinking of turning into a project: writing extremely short stories as an exercise, partly just to get myself used to writing whole stories and partly to experiment with writing stories iteratively, expanding my story blips into longer flash fiction in several passes.

Life updates

  • Politics – I haven’t gotten back into the topic of fringe theories, but I did see an interesting and troubling article recently about how they’ve made their way into mainstream politics. To me it highlights the need for listening, since Trump in some ways represents the frustrations of people who’ve felt ignored, and they’re now more able to speak to each other, so they feel validated, but I don’t think there’s still much listening across political lines, maybe because it feels unnecessary, dangerous, or impossible, but then there are cases like Chick fil A. One of my distant dreams is to be involved in some kind of dialogue organization.
Posted in Blood tests, Books, Current events, Daily routine, Diet, Exercise, Fringe theories, Health, Life updates, Math relearning, Programming, Project updates, Sleep, Writing | 4 Comments