{"id":618,"date":"2016-09-05T23:11:36","date_gmt":"2016-09-06T04:11:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/?p=618"},"modified":"2016-09-05T23:11:36","modified_gmt":"2016-09-06T04:11:36","slug":"update-for-942016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/2016\/09\/05\/update-for-942016\/","title":{"rendered":"Update for 9\/4\/2016"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Happy September! Here&#8217;s a <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/AbbieOnPaper\/status\/772882390620508161\">tweet from my sister<\/a> about an article on making a fresh start this time of year.<\/p>\n<h2>Project updates<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Math relearning<\/strong> &#8211; Life never misses an opportunity to disappoint my optimistic scheduling expectations, and so despite my diligent efforts I&#8217;ll need at least another week writing my math program intro, but let&#8217;s be realistic and call it a year. It turns out I have a lot to say about learning by programming, but I like what I&#8217;ve been writing, which might be part of the problem. One project management skill I need to work on is scaling back a project to fit it into a time frame while still producing a satisfying result. In any case, it&#8217;s turning out I care so much about this topic of learning by programming that I don&#8217;t want to move forward with any other intellectual project until I&#8217;ve gotten somewhere with this technique so I can use it in some way on those projects.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Life maintenance<\/strong>\n<ul>\n<li><em><strong>Diet<\/strong><\/em> &#8211; Lately instead of cooking industriously, I&#8217;ve been re-exploring the frozen dinner aisle with my TLC diet in mind, which limits only saturated fat and cholesterol, so it gives me more choices than my doctor&#8217;s old recommendation of a low-fat diet that limited total fat, back before he switched to low-carb. Annoyingly, for some of the products, the nutritional info on the box doesn&#8217;t match the info in my diet tracking app, so I&#8217;m avoiding those brands, which so far are Boston Market and maybe Chili&#8217;s. I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;m doing this diet quite right&#8211;not getting quite enough soluble fiber, fruits and vegetables, fat, protein, or even calories&#8211;but it&#8217;s hard to coordinate all the different factors and find time for food prep, and I&#8217;m procrastinating on figuring out a better meal plan until I can fit in some time programming a tool to help me, though probably by that point the initial experiment will be over and I&#8217;ll have started on another low-carb experiment.<\/li>\n<li><em><strong>Exercise<\/strong><\/em> &#8211; I&#8217;ve decided I have enough else to do that if I don&#8217;t get in my exercise in the morning, I&#8217;ll count it out for the day, and so I&#8217;ve skipped exercise a few days recently because I&#8217;ve slept extra in the mornings, but oh well, I&#8217;m mostly sticking to the schedule, and it shouldn&#8217;t be a problem if I can get my sleep schedule under control, though when has that ever happened? I do kind of like my walks, since they give me half an hour to let my mind wander, which is pretty much my favorite state of being, and it&#8217;s a major reason I walk instead of jog, since anything resembling intense physical activity takes over my attention with all the strain and pain.<\/li>\n<li><em><strong>Daily routine<\/strong><\/em> &#8211; My task tracking app tells me I&#8217;ve gotten almost enough sleep over the past week, just not quite at the right times, and I&#8217;ve spent a decent amount of time on my projects, but I still feel dissatisfied and a little depressed about my time management skills. Do other people have trouble getting around to everything important in a timely fashion, or is it just me? Anyway, as I looked at my messy apartment this weekend, I concluded I need to restart my <a href=\"http:\/\/lifehacker.com\/productivity-101-a-primer-to-the-getting-things-done-1551880955\">GTD<\/a> practices, which have been minimal for a long time, so that&#8217;ll be coming up in the next week or two. It&#8217;s my Steptember fresh start.<\/li>\n<li><em><strong>Clothing<\/strong><\/em> &#8211; My collection of t-shirts is old and wearing out, so I&#8217;m on the lookout for new ones&#8211;a few plain ones and some graphic ones, like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.target.com\/p\/men-s-justice-league-mash-up-t-shirt\/-\/A-16740640\">this Justice League one<\/a> I picked up from Target. One problem to contend with is a trend I&#8217;ve seen in several brands for the bottom of the sleeve to be super short, which pulls the rest of the sleeve awkwardly when I move my arms.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><strong>Books<\/strong> &#8211; I&#8217;m pushing myself through Charles Stross&#8217; <i>Glasshouse<\/i>, which for me had a slow start but picked up in chapter 9, so I can get to Lev Grossman&#8217;s <i>The Magician King<\/i>, which I checked out a few days ago when my turn finally came up in the hold queue. The first book in that series was so good that I&#8217;m expecting to glide through this one in a few days.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Video games<\/strong> &#8211; I&#8217;ve been missing <i>Minecraft<\/i> the past few weeks, so I&#8217;ve been listening to the soundtrack a lot, and this weekend I rebelled and played some when I should&#8217;ve been doing other things like sleeping. For anyone who cares, I&#8217;m on a long trek through the Nether from my temporary starting base to the location I&#8217;ve planned for the central base in my network of biome-related homes, which is the point of this world, and I might post an article or video about it someday so you can see what I&#8217;m talking about. I also sometimes wish I could get into other games, such as <i>RuneScape<\/i>, so I can get more involved with the people I hang out with online, but I don&#8217;t know when that would happen.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Religion<\/strong> &#8211; My holding pattern between faith and doubt and my general spiritual inaction have been wearing on me for a while, and my mind is slowly drifting toward the idea of doing something to move in some direction. For now that would mostly take the form of journaling so I can work out what I think I need and what next steps would be most helpful, and I&#8217;ve decided to put my morning meditation on hold, since it&#8217;s only been helping me in a very limited way, and replace it with some kind of actual devotions.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Dusk<\/strong> &#8211; It&#8217;s not a forest preserve, but I found some pretty clouds during one of my parking lot meals.<br \/>\n<blockquote class=\"instagram-media\" style=\"background: #FFF; border: 0; border-radius: 3px; box-shadow: 0 0 1px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.5),0 1px 10px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.15); margin: 1px; max-width: 658px; padding: 0; width: calc(100% - 2px);\" data-instgrm-captioned=\"\" data-instgrm-version=\"7\">\n<div style=\"padding: 8px;\">\n<div style=\"background: #F8F8F8; line-height: 0; margin-top: 40px; padding: 37.4537037037% 0; text-align: center; width: 100%;\"><\/div>\n<p style=\"margin: 8px 0 0 0; padding: 0 4px;\"><a style=\"color: #000; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 17px; text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/p\/BKACLV8h6td\/\" target=\"_blank\">The clouds kind of match the towers.<\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"color: #c9c8cd; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 0; margin-top: 8px; overflow: hidden; padding: 8px 0 7px; text-align: center; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap;\">A photo posted by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum) on <time style=\"font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17px;\" datetime=\"2016-09-06T04:09:13+00:00\">Sep 5, 2016 at 9:09pm PDT<\/time><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><script src=\"\/\/platform.instagram.com\/en_US\/embeds.js\" async=\"\" defer=\"defer\"><\/script><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Happy September! Here&#8217;s a tweet from my sister about an article on making a fresh start this time of year. Project updates Math relearning &#8211; Life never misses an opportunity to disappoint my optimistic scheduling expectations, and so despite my &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/2016\/09\/05\/update-for-942016\/\">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":[117,135,112,124,35,100,105,22,109],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-routine","category-devotions","category-diet","category-dusk","category-exercise","category-math-relearning","category-project-updates","category-spirituality","category-video-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618","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=618"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":619,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618\/revisions\/619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}