{"id":731,"date":"2017-03-05T23:44:38","date_gmt":"2017-03-06T05:44:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/?p=731"},"modified":"2017-03-05T23:44:38","modified_gmt":"2017-03-06T05:44:38","slug":"update-for-352017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/2017\/03\/05\/update-for-352017\/","title":{"rendered":"Update for 3\/5\/2017"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>Project updates<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Code console<\/strong> &#8211; I looked into documentation practices a little more, but right now this project is on hold for a bit while I catch up on the next one.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Public coding guide<\/strong> &#8211; Writing helps me clarify my thoughts, keeps them moving, and lets me share them with others, so I&#8217;m documenting my process of revising my programming practices in a guide that I&#8217;ll post on the wiki sometime this week, a guide for moving from programming for oneself to programming for other users. So far I&#8217;ve written most of the introduction, and even though the code console isn&#8217;t in a usable state, I&#8217;ll want to post what I have on GitHub soon so I can link to it from the guide, since it&#8217;ll be one of the main ways I document my new practices. Once the guide has reached the stage of development I&#8217;m at in the code console, I&#8217;ll go back to working on the console, which is why I&#8217;m starting the guide now when that gap is small.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Knowledge representation<\/strong> &#8211; I&#8217;m almost done with the book&#8217;s lengthy part one, but I&#8217;m going to put this on hold too until I&#8217;m where I want to be with the coding guide.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Computer hardware<\/strong> &#8211; I got around to installing the new RAM into my desktop (8 G for a total of 14), which was easier than I expected, and it does feel zippier now, so it was a good idea. I also tried out my video adapter connecting my Surface to my desktop monitor so I can have two screens, and that worked well too, so now I have one less excuse not to stream.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Nostalgia box<\/strong> &#8211; I bought a long reach stapler, so now I can easily and somewhat cheaply make my own custom notebooks to use for experimenting, practicing, and making small projects for the box. I&#8217;m still on February&#8217;s project, which is an experiment with a very nonlinear presentation of a random concept map in a 16-page booklet&#8211;illustrated, if I have time, and I hope I do, because page after page of words in circles really isn&#8217;t that interesting to look at.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Media<\/strong>\n<ul>\n<li><em><strong>Books<\/strong><\/em>\n<ul>\n<li><em>Algorithms to Live By<\/em> &#8211; This book is about what I call transferable concepts, ideas from one field you can apply to others, in this case from computer science to everyday life&#8211;some of the ideas specific, like keeping a cache of recently used items so they&#8217;re easy to find, and some more general, like the need for good-enough solutions when perfect ones would take too long to find. It doesn&#8217;t really contain math, and I think most people could make use of its advice, but it&#8217;s probably easier to understand for programmers and mathematicians, since even as a programmer I&#8217;ll have to reread some of the explanations. I&#8217;ve wanted to write about transferable skills in programming, maybe not a book, but now that Christian and Griffiths have written this one, and much better than I could at this point, I have a lot of jumping off points for further contemplation and research.<\/li>\n<li><em>The Divine Conspiracy<\/em> &#8211; For some Lenten reading I&#8217;m starting with this book, which is an explication of the Sermon on the Mount with the aim of showing that the gospel involves actually following Jesus&#8217; instructions and adopting the view of God and the world Jesus held that makes his instructions make sense. For me Dallas Willard is a mixture of important ideas I want to hold onto and annoying or odd supporting arguments I&#8217;d like to replace, and hearing the latter in this book is reminding me of how much I value detailed and nuanced philosophical discussion. Willard was a philosopher, but that wasn&#8217;t the purpose of this book, and I kind of wish it was.<\/li>\n<li><em>Watership Down<\/em> &#8211; I&#8217;d heard of this book in passing, but I always thought of it as a sappy sibling to books like <em>The Wind in the Willows<\/em> (which I also haven&#8217;t read because the just about only talking animal stories I don&#8217;t avoid take place in Narnia) until I heard my boss talking about it last week with my coworker, who got him into it, and he was marveling that anyone could think of it as a children&#8217;s book and was making serious remarks about rabbit names and warrens and dictators, so I was intrigued, and I started it immediately after <em>Algorithms<\/em>. I haven&#8217;t gotten to anything really dark yet, but so far it&#8217;s just a normal story, and I don&#8217;t feel talked down to or sickened by sentimentality, and I also agree with my coworker that the audiobook reader is excellent.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><strong>TV<\/strong> &#8211; Friday night I watched some of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=G1xa6vzInC8\">a video<\/a> on YouTube from an old instructional TV program we watched in elementary school called <em>The Book Bird<\/em>, where a story was read to the audience while John Robbins drew a picture to illustrate it, which defined a large part of the way I&#8217;ve thought about artistic creation, as a magical unfolding, which is only reinforced whenever I watch skilled artists work. As I glanced through the related videos, I thought of one of my unsolved childhood mysteries, the identity of another show we used to watch about spacefaring puppets (but not &#8220;Pigs in Space&#8221;), and there in the list I saw title that sounded vaguely space related next to a show title I faintly remembered, &#8220;Vegetable Soup &#8211; Outerscope,&#8221; so I clicked, and there it was&#8211;a rickety wooden cone wandering through space, manned by puppets that were much creepier than I remember. And thanks to the intrepid cultural preservationists of YouTube, I can watch <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/playlist?list=PLIWtI4qJfAlIeYU7InBsBFQ2BTY7o4XR-\">many episodes<\/a>, along with the show&#8217;s other segments that I barely remember, if we watched them at all.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Life updates<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Worship team<\/strong> &#8211; We&#8217;re out a pianist, so until our worship minister can work something out, I&#8217;m playing for an additional team, though during Lent it&#8217;ll probably be only that team, since we&#8217;ll be playing for both services and he kindly doesn&#8217;t want to overload me. I don&#8217;t really mind the extra weeks, since I&#8217;m hardly doing anything else at church these days and I feel pretty comfortable performing now, and even playing for both services isn&#8217;t too bad because the morning schedule has some natural breaks that give me a chance to work on things like this blog.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Birthday<\/strong> &#8211; It&#8217;s Tuesday, which brings me to a most inappropriate 39, since I still feel about 20, which I&#8217;m sure explains some things. I don&#8217;t have any plans yet except opening March&#8217;s nostalgia box folder, even if I&#8217;m not done with February&#8217;s, because I put some nice things in there with my birthday in mind.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Project updates Code console &#8211; I looked into documentation practices a little more, but right now this project is on hold for a bit while I catch up on the next one. Public coding guide &#8211; Writing helps me clarify &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/2017\/03\/05\/update-for-352017\/\">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":[39,89,160,4,156,159,58,151,105,162,115,114],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birthdays","category-books","category-coding-project-generator","category-general","category-hardware","category-knowledge-representation","category-life_updates","category-nostalgia-box","category-project-updates","category-public-coding-guide","category-tv","category-worship-performing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731","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=731"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":733,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731\/revisions\/733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}