{"id":945,"date":"2018-03-28T19:45:04","date_gmt":"2018-03-29T00:45:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/?p=945"},"modified":"2018-03-28T19:45:04","modified_gmt":"2018-03-29T00:45:04","slug":"update-for-3-25-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/2018\/03\/28\/update-for-3-25-2018\/","title":{"rendered":"Update for 3\/25\/2018"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last week didn&#8217;t\u00a0<em>feel<\/em> packed, but you&#8217;d think so from the length of this post.<\/p>\n<h2>Birthday<\/h2>\n<p>\ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p>Sunday my friends Jeremy and Heather hosted a birthday party for me. They even made tacos. Tim and Linda joined us. We played some games I brought&#8211;<em>Splendor<\/em>, <em>Magic Maze<\/em>, and <em>Isle of Skye<\/em>. My only complaint is they didn&#8217;t eat enough of the dessert I brought. I was munching on it the rest of the week. Such a burden.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Leftovers from my birthday party. <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/kx08Dn4rtD\">pic.twitter.com\/kx08Dn4rtD<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/thinkulum\/status\/976268856774873088?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">March 21, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<h2>Elections<\/h2>\n<p>\ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p>I vote in primaries these days, but I&#8217;m not great at keeping up with the races, so I&#8217;m left scrambling at the last minute. I&#8217;ve found there are two ways to vote: (1) being tormented with indecision in the voting booth and (2) zipping through the list you wrote down beforehand. The second way feels much better. So Monday night I was up late researching candidates and propositions for the next day&#8217;s vote.<\/p>\n<p>I was pleased that the main candidate I cared about won. The rest of this race should be interesting to watch.<\/p>\n<h2>Beliefs report<\/h2>\n<p>\ud83d\ude10<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/w\/index.php?title=My_Current_Beliefs&amp;oldid=328#Summary\">summary<\/a> I posted the week before last reminded me I have a lot of work to do before I feel my beliefs are settled. It feels like too much to even begin working through right now. But I&#8217;m trying to keep working on the project through Lent, so this week I&#8217;ll post a list of potential sources to consult when I finally do dig in.<\/p>\n<h2>Thinking<\/h2>\n<p>\ud83d\ude0e<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/w\/index.php?title=Analysis&amp;oldid=324\">analysis essay<\/a> still takes up a lot of my thinking time. I&#8217;ve been capturing a lot of passing thoughts in my notes. The next update will be a list of potential sources for this project.<\/p>\n<h2>Grad school<\/h2>\n<p>\ud83d\ude10<\/p>\n<p>As I think about things I want to do, I find myself mentally regressing through chains of prerequisite projects till I end up at what I&#8217;m charitably calling gateways, projects that will make others possible or easier. When I&#8217;m in a grumpier mood, I call them bottlenecks, because I tend to procrastinate on them while being impatient for the projects they&#8217;ll enable. Last week I looked through my big list of current project ideas and tagged the gateways.<\/p>\n<p>One of my gateways is researching grad schools. Once I find some likely candidates, I&#8217;ll be in a better position to plan some of the basic computer science learning I need to do, topics like computer architecture and operating systems. I&#8217;ll also be able to answer people when they ask me where I want to go for grad school.<\/p>\n<p>So last week I picked up my research where I left off way back when. Unfortunately the couple of times I tried, my brain was running on fumes, so I didn&#8217;t get very far. But at least the wheels have started turning again.<\/p>\n<h2>Project generator<\/h2>\n<p>\ud83d\ude10<\/p>\n<p>Another bottl&#8211;uh, gateway&#8211;is my <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/thinkulum\/generator-python-cmd\/tree\/00dd08e2dfd30bd85b34740eb36419d40d9f2d5b\">coding project generator<\/a>. So I briefly looked through my next steps and noted the issues that were holding me back on them. Converting your problems to tasks in a list can make them remarkably easier to deal with. I&#8217;m expecting to work more on this project in the coming weeks.<\/p>\n<h2>Movies<\/h2>\n<p>Somehow I got through three movies last week.<\/p>\n<h3>The Cloverfield Paradox<\/h3>\n<p>\ud83d\ude0e<\/p>\n<p><em>The Cloverfield Paradox<\/em> was a typical soft sf film where the explanations of what was going on didn&#8217;t really make sense, but other than that I liked it. My favorite part was recognizing that the weird things that happen on the station could&#8217;ve sprung from the imagination of my 9-year-old self. It&#8217;s nice finding creators who speak my language.<\/p>\n<h3>Good Will Hunting<\/h3>\n<p>\ud83e\udd14<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve resubscribed to the Netflix DVD service, and last week I was reminded you have to stay on top of managing your queue, because they won&#8217;t waste any time sending you whatever&#8217;s next. So last week to keep the queue flowing I watched the one they sent me, <em>Good Will Hunting<\/em>. I&#8217;d added it because of some articles I&#8217;d read about South Boston, which is where the characters are from. One of my online friends lives near there.<\/p>\n<p>But also the movie was in the back of my mind because my Christian education professors back in undergraduate days would use it to illustrate something or other. I&#8217;d seen the &#8220;not your fault&#8221; scene at least once in class. So I was watching like a hawk to see how Robin Williams the therapist would make a connection with Matt Damon the troubled genius and get through to him. And I watched too closely, because I ended up contemplating life. But let&#8217;s be honest, I would do that anyway. I took away two questions: What counts as authentic experience? And how might I be avoiding it to protect myself from its risks?<\/p>\n<h3>The Scorch Trials<\/h3>\n<p>\ud83d\ude44<\/p>\n<p>Jeremy and I are fans of the <em>Maze Runner<\/em> book series. We&#8217;d watched the first movie adaptation, and Jeremy wanted to watch <em>The Death Cure<\/em>, but we hadn&#8217;t seen <em>The Scorch Trials<\/em> yet. So we watched that one on Friday with plans to see <em>The Death Cure<\/em> the next day at a discount theater. We were very thrown off by the movie. In fact, it changed the premise of the books enough that the first movie didn&#8217;t really make sense. With that and the characters&#8217; overreactions and a very clich\u00e9 plot, we dropped the idea of seeing the third one.<\/p>\n<h2>TV<\/h2>\n<p>\ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p>In between movies, I returned to <em>Star Trek: Discovery<\/em> and got through episodes 5 and 6. The show definitely improved after the first episode or two.<\/p>\n<h2>Death<\/h2>\n<p>\ud83e\udd14<\/p>\n<p>A couple of weeks ago my employer&#8217;s co-founder died. She was about a week away from being 101. The other co-founder, her husband, died a few years before I started working there. Our chapel last week was going to be a birthday celebration, so they celebrated her life instead. The next morning was her funeral, which we were able to watch in the chapel via a livestream.<\/p>\n<p>As usual, I appreciated people&#8217;s eulogies. They reminded me that generosity and hospitality were two of her hallmarks, which challenges me because those are areas I always feel could be improved in my life.<\/p>\n<h2>Life maintenance<\/h2>\n<p>\ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p>Getting my apartment ready for my siblings&#8217; visit over Easter is progressing fairly steadily. I&#8217;m feeling pretty good about it, considering I usually put off that kind of housekeeping, to the point that I do practically none of it before my guests arrive.<\/p>\n<p>\ud83d\ude0e<\/p>\n<p>The week before last, I put half of my new file cabinet together. I finished it late last week and set up my new and improved music filing system in the bottom drawer. What a relief. And getting that done cleared up a lot of space in that area of the apartment.<\/p>\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-permalink=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/p\/Bg4tHxxALhd\/\" data-instgrm-version=\"8\">\n<div style=\"padding: 8px;\">\n<div style=\"background: #F8F8F8; line-height: 0; margin-top: 40px; padding: 50.0% 0; text-align: center; width: 100%;\">\n<div style=\"background: url(data:image\/png; base64,ivborw0kggoaaaansuheugaaacwaaaascamaaaapwqozaaaabgdbtueaalgpc\/xhbqaaaafzukdcak7ohokaaaamuexurczmzpf399fx1+bm5mzy9amaaadisurbvdjlvzxbesmgces5\/p8\/t9furvcrmu73jwlzosgsiizurcjo\/ad+eqjjb4hv8bft+idpqocx1wjosbfhh2xssxeiyn3uli\/6mnree07uiwjev8ueowds88ly97kqytlijkktuybbruayvh5wohixmpi5we58ek028czwyuqdlkpg1bkb4nnm+veanfhqn1k4+gpt6ugqcvu2h2ovuif\/gwufyy8owepdyzsa3avcqpvovvzzz2vtnn2wu8qzvjddeto90gsy9mvlqtgysy231mxry6i2ggqjrty0l8fxcxfcbbhwrsyyaaaaaelftksuqmcc); display: block; height: 44px; margin: 0 auto -44px; position: relative; top: -22px; width: 44px;\"><\/div>\n<\/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\/Bg4tHxxALhd\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Recipe for music filing happiness: &#8211; Large, heavy binders: no! &#8211; Free-standing manila folders that fall over and slide everywhere: no! &#8211; Hanging file folders: yes! &#8211; Working file cabinet: yes!<\/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 post shared by <a style=\"color: #c9c8cd; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 17px;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/thinkulum\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> Andy Culbertson<\/a> (@thinkulum) on <time style=\"font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17px;\" datetime=\"2018-03-28T23:52:36+00:00\">Mar 28, 2018 at 4:52pm PDT<\/time><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><script async defer src=\"\/\/www.instagram.com\/embed.js\"><\/script><\/p>\n<h2>Music<\/h2>\n<p>\ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p>Finishing my new file cabinet and getting ready for the next day&#8217;s worship performance put me in an easy position to try out some recording from my MIDI keyboard. This is something I had in mind for my Surface several years ago when I bought it, but of course I hadn&#8217;t gotten around to it. So I plugged in the keyboard, fired up <a href=\"https:\/\/lmms.io\/\">LMMS<\/a>, and set about investigating how to get it to record. But it was late Saturday night, and I didn&#8217;t get very far. I&#8217;ll have more to report next week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week didn&#8217;t\u00a0feel packed, but you&#8217;d think so from the length of this post. Birthday \ud83d\ude42 Sunday my friends Jeremy and Heather hosted a birthday party for me. They even made tacos. Tim and Linda joined us. We played some &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/2018\/03\/28\/update-for-3-25-2018\/\">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":[180,163,39,160,92,183,82,11,122,125,115,167],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-analysis","category-beliefs-report","category-birthdays","category-coding-project-generator","category-death","category-elections","category-grad-school","category-life_maintenance","category-movies","category-music","category-tv","category-weeknotes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945","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=945"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":950,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945\/revisions\/950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}