\ud83e\udd14<\/p>\n
Sunday was our Advent Orchestra performance at church. Considering I only had a week to prepare, it went pretty well. Until the sermon apparently ran short in the second service and I arrived back at the sanctuary late for the last song. Kinda ruined my day. But after a day or three I got over it.<\/p>\n
I have a plan for keeping my French horn oiled so the valves don’t freeze again (do it on laundry day). And I’m hoping I can even keep up with some practicing so my lips will be in better shape next December. There’s a lot of public domain French horn music<\/a> on the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP).<\/p>\n \ud83e\udd14<\/p>\n I continued to be overly optimistic on my annual secret Christmas project last week. I wanted to finish it by Saturday, but it’ll still need a few more days. I’m still hoping to finish it before I leave for Texas on Thursday. But if not, I’ll just follow my usual plan of finishing it at my parents’ house. Late Christmas Eve, most likely.<\/p>\n (Okay, I was actually thinking of putting the last steps off on purpose just so I could do that, maybe on an earlier day. There’s something fun about staying up to get the Christmas labels done. … I never said I was normal.)<\/p>\n To accompany my work, I’ve been listening to playlists like this one of Victorian Christmas music<\/a>, usually overlaid with soundscapes on YouTube like this one of a cottage in winter<\/a>. It’s contributed to the project’s surreal atmosphere that makes me look forward to doing the work.<\/p>\n The last step of my project will be a retrospective where I analyze what went well and what could be improved. I’ve already learned quite a bit throughout the project, so I’m looking forward to putting all the lessons together.<\/p>\n \ud83e\udd14<\/p>\n My project to listen through a bunch of software development books is winding down. Last week I finished The Art of Unix Programming<\/em>, which was very good, and sped through Beyond Requirements<\/em> by Kent McDonald, which was good but really fit more into my conceptual modeling and business projects, so I’ll feel more like paying attention to it when I get back to those projects.<\/p>\n I also sped through Learning Agile<\/em> by Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene, which I’d read most of before but only in piecemeal fashion, so I wanted to get through it properly. It was also good, especially the way it integrated the four major agile approaches (Scrum, XP, Lean, and Kanban).<\/p>\n One thing I liked less was that its approach of teaching through narratives and repetitive discussions made the material feel a little too spread out. I wished they’d put a summary of the principles and practices in an appendix or something. But it’s fine, since that’s what note-taking is for.<\/p>\n \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n I’m taking a little break from programming books till after Christmas. In the meantime I’ll listen to a few steampunk stories. I’ve been wanting to explore that genre for a while. First is a short novel from 1868 called The Steam Man of the Prairies<\/em><\/a> by Edward Ellis, which is in a genre called Edisonades that was a precursor of steampunk. After that I’ll listen to Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines<\/em>, which has a movie that just came out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Music \ud83e\udd14 Sunday was our Advent Orchestra performance at church. Considering I only had a week to prepare, it went pretty well. Until the sermon apparently ran short in the second service and I arrived back at the sanctuary late … Continue reading Christmas<\/h2>\n
Programming<\/h2>\n
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