{"id":494,"date":"2016-03-21T00:15:46","date_gmt":"2016-03-21T05:15:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/?p=494"},"modified":"2016-03-21T01:26:37","modified_gmt":"2016-03-21T06:26:37","slug":"update-for-3202016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/2016\/03\/21\/update-for-3202016\/","title":{"rendered":"Update for 3\/20\/2016"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is a more typical update where I tell you how little I got done on my projects and how many extraneous things I did. (The post date says 3\/21 because I published this just after midnight.)<\/p>\n<h2>Site updates<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Blog<\/strong> &#8211; I blogged several times last week to kick off this series of updates. That took up a decent amount of the week. If you missed them, here&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/2016\/03\/13\/update-for-3132016-part-1\/\">part 1<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/2016\/03\/14\/update-for-3132016-part-2\/\">part 2<\/a>, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/2016\/03\/16\/update-for-3132016-part-3\/\">part 3<\/a>. I got another post pretty much written, but it will come with an associated wiki article that&#8217;s not ready yet, so I&#8217;m going to finish that and post it all this week.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Wiki comments<\/strong> &#8211; I&#8217;m adding the ability to comment on some of the wiki articles. In principle this was my main project for the week. In practice I only made a decent start. But I think I can get it done by the end of next week. This week there will be interruptions.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Project updates<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Math<\/strong> &#8211; I got a few more sections read of the intro to the P-5 part of the EngageNY curriculum. I&#8217;m about halfway through it now. Then I&#8217;ll start on preschool! Maybe I should sit in on a preschool class to throw myself more fully into the experience. (Just kidding.)<\/li>\n<li><strong>Video games<\/strong> &#8211; I installed Dxtory, a video game recording program, on my Surface, where I play most of my virtual board games, so I can record them and study my losses. Then I recorded two games of <i>Splendor<\/i> and proceeded to win them both. Last week I also got back into <i>Minecraft<\/i>, picking up on my Skyblock world where I left off all those months ago. I still knew exactly what I was working on and how to do everything I needed. <i>Minecraft<\/i> is like riding a bike, it seems. I completed my main task, which was building an enclosed village. Next I&#8217;ll need villagers for it, so I&#8217;ll need to cure some zombie villagers.<\/li>\n<li><strong>TV<\/strong> &#8211; I&#8217;m taking a break from <i>Sarah Jane<\/i> to watch season 2 of <i>Daredevil<\/i>, which came out on Netflix on Friday. I&#8217;ve watched one episode so far, and it was good, as I&#8217;d expect.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Books<\/strong> &#8211; There was a sale at Half Price Books last week through today, and I dropped in on Saturday because I was in the area. I&#8217;m in a phase where I basically have all the books I&#8217;m looking for, so I wasn&#8217;t expecting to find anything interesting, but I ended up buying three. First, I&#8217;m on the lookout for books on games that don&#8217;t need much equipment, so one book I picked up was <i>Gladstone&#8217;s Games to Go<\/i>. Somehow I managed to cram it into my board game box. Another was Kahney&#8217;s biography on Jony Ive. Ive is inspiring to me as a designer and innovator. I read <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2015\/02\/23\/shape-things-come\">this profile<\/a> of him about a year ago and have wanted to read this book since then. I don&#8217;t know if I&#8217;ll try to read it all at once, but I thought it&#8217;d be nice to have around to browse through whenever I wanted some motivation. Then there was <i>How Buildings Work<\/i> by Edward Allen, a book I hadn&#8217;t heard of but which fills a gap in my architecture collection. It talks about the basic functions a building has to perform and how our mechanisms for fulfilling them work, such as heating, lighting, and plumbing. I went back tonight to buy a book on EMDR techniques, but it seems someone else got to it first. So I looked around some more and found <i>The Writer&#8217;s Adventure<\/i>, a book of creative writing prompts. I&#8217;m looking for writing prompts, but I decided against buying it because I didn&#8217;t want to fill my shelves with somewhat obscure titles when there were probably more popular options I could borrow from a library or read online. The Writer&#8217;s Digest site has a lot of prompts, for example.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Productivity<\/strong> &#8211; I&#8217;m thinking of trying to create more of a routine for my evenings. I usually fail at this, but maybe I haven&#8217;t tried hard enough. I&#8217;ll see what I can come up with this week. I especially want to block out a large chunk of time each day for project work.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Life updates<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Clothes<\/strong> &#8211; Over the past few months I&#8217;ve been gradually replacing half my wardrobe. Buying clothes is stressful for me, but it&#8217;s also been kind of fun. Except for the pants. I have the hardest time finding dress pants I want to wear. I want a couple of black pairs (the easy part), a couple of blue that don&#8217;t look like black, a medium gray that also doesn&#8217;t look like black, and a brown that looks more like chocolate than sand. That last one is apparently too much to ask. The one I ordered looked black&#8211;dark chocolate, you could say. I returned it yesterday. Then today I tried on my new black pants and spent an infuriating few minutes wrestling with the button at the waist. It actually hurt my finger. A few minutes unfastening one&#8217;s pants doesn&#8217;t work for someone who sometimes has bathroom emergencies. Hence the rage. How dare Croft &amp; Barrow trap me in my own pants! And I&#8217;m not going to wait for the buttons to get broken in or whatever. These pants are all going back to the store. I need to find pants with a hook closure like the ones I&#8217;ve been wearing. I would reorder my usual brand, John Blair, but it seems like they make every size but mine now.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Easter<\/strong> &#8211; My brother is visiting for Easter again. It&#8217;s an annual tradition I look forward to. We&#8217;ll go to our usual Taiz\u00e9 service, an art exhibit we&#8217;ve been looking forward to, and our usual Easter morning service. He&#8217;ll probably go to half a dozen other services that I&#8217;ll skip. So this week I&#8217;ll spend some time cleaning up the apartment before he gets here. I&#8217;ll try not to let it eat up all my time.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Worship performing<\/strong> &#8211; On Saturday I got a surprise request to substitute for a sick pianist at our church&#8217;s other site. I said yes, since I had no conflicting obligations. So that was my morning today. I&#8217;d forgotten that they have the pianist do complicated things on the electric keyboard now, and there were some intros I wasn&#8217;t used to. So it wasn&#8217;t as easy as I was expecting, but I managed. And I got most of this post written in the hour or so between the rehearsal and the service.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Diet<\/strong> &#8211; The first two or three weeks of my low-carb diet were really just a lower-carb diet because I wasn&#8217;t that interested in following Atkins exactly. But I&#8217;ve decided I want to try a more authentic Atkins experience, so I&#8217;m being stricter about it now and cheating much less. I&#8217;m in the very restricted phase 1 for another week or two, 20g of net carbs per day. My boss likes Atkins, so we have a lot of conversations about it. It&#8217;s amazing how much there is to say about a diet. I might ramble in a separate post sometime. If I have time this week, I want to use the phase 1 ingredient lists to come up with a standard salad or casserole I can make easily. I also need to start taking walks again. I&#8217;m sure that&#8217;ll go into my plan for my evening routine.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is a more typical update where I tell you how little I got done on my projects and how many extraneous things I did. (The post date says 3\/21 because I published this just after midnight.) Site updates Blog &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/2016\/03\/21\/update-for-3202016\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,89,113,46,35,91,58,100,87,50,105,12,115,109,83,114,98],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-books","category-clothes","category-cooking","category-exercise","category-holidays","category-life_updates","category-math-relearning","category-nutrition","category-productivity","category-project-updates","category-site_updates","category-tv","category-video-games","category-wiki","category-worship-performing","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=494"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":500,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494\/revisions\/500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}