diana_coman: whaack: at some point you’ll have to review those plans too overall, in one of the weekly reviews, it’s not *all* just “how I changed”.
For this week’s review instead of writing how I changed, I have reviewed the outcomes of the plans I had for the week with the goal of figuring out why problems occurred and how to go about changing myself in the future. I review 4 separate points that descend in order of importance. The first 3 review identified problems that have been discussed with diana_coman, and the 4th point is a review of the work I did with trinque’s published sources.
The 1st point to address is my overall lackluster carpe diem. This week and every week since I started my daily schedule I’ve planned out 8-9 hours of the day, but there are 16 available. Some of the spare time is spent productively: reading logs, reading blogs, responding and making comments, making phone calls to follow up on orders, etc. Except there is also non-negligible time spent spinning / participating in avoidance behavior. When I do something mundane like getting up to fill a glass of water, I often get the sense that I am doing this to avoid work rather than to quench my thirst. To fix this general problem I see a few paths I need to take. First, is I need to plan out my day a little bit more. I don’t think it is right to plan for the full 16 hours, but a 12 hour schedule seems doable. I have also been assigned to list what is eating my days. The next way I can improve is I can get a wrist watch with a timer feature and keep a hand written log of my activities + the time it took me to do them.
The 2nd point to address is the writing problem. I planned 12 hours to writing my rereading article, and wound up spending about 13 hours. While I’m happy I did not let the time spent writing overflow into all my other tasks for the week as I did with my article on meeting up with Adam, I was quite unsatisfied with the result. I discussed briefly this morning why I thought the article came out poorly. diana_coman said I am spending too much time worrying what to write about. I agree. To fix this problem going forward diana_coman has assigned me a daily writing exercise.
The 3rd point to address is saltmines being the focus of my week. As discussed with diana_coman, the only task I consistently reserve a large block of time for in my weekly plan is my day job. And this week I dedicated an extra 4-5 hours to saltmines ontop of my usual 20 hours. ((This was not because I had a surge of passion for my saltmines work, but rather for an opposite reason. I let teenager concerns distract me, and I thought it’d be better to knock out some saltmines hours while I’m not focused than to work on something I cared about while my mind was wandering. This was a bad idea, because my mind wandered more since I was doing something I saw as unimportant.)) To address the problem of saltmines being the meat of my week, I am doing two things. First, I am reducing my saltmine hours to 16 from 20. Second, I am going to plan other work for the morning/evenings of saltmine days. ((This is in line with the solution to the problem in point 1))
The 4th point to address is the work I did with setting up trinque’s src. My original plan was to write a rough draft of an article on setting up logbot. However I only found time to get the bot setup on my local machine + hand write a list of notes along the way. There was a little bit of uncertainty as I was deciding what to do while getting acquainted with trinque’s code. Part of me thinks, and still thinks, that I should not have even ran the code until I had read a book on CLOS, read every line of code + looked up all functions I didn’t know, and figured out CL’s restart tool. ((If I commit fully to this idea I would need to also read about keccak and jfw’s source before using his keksum tool.)) However I wanted to have something concrete accomplished, so I only skimmed the parts of the code I needed to know to get the bot running. This is an area where I am not sure exactly where to go next, and could use some help. I have asked trinque for guidance in #trinque.
(( 0. Sunday 12/08
0.1 Rough draft of an article on re-reading is the most powerful tool (4h)
whaack: diana_coman: EOD Report: Nothing to add other than the progress on the re-reading article this morning.
1. Monday 12/09
1.1 Saltmines (8h)
whaack: diana_coman: EOD Report: I logged 11h of saltmines today. As of now I plan to get in a few extra hours of saltmines this week, and then use those hours to work fewer hours next week.
2. Tuesday 12/10
2.1 Saltmines (8h)
whaack: diana_coman: EOD Report : Today was not that successful. I got 9.5 hours of saltmines done, but almost nothing else.
3. Wednesday 12/11
3.1 Saltmines (4h)
3.2 Trip to Santa Cruz to open bank account, get more house supplies, etc. (6h)
whaack: diana_coman: EOD Report: I did 4hr of saltmines and did a trip to town where I got a multimeter, a mosquito net, groceries for the week, and opened a local bank account (I have to return to town on Friday though to pick up the debit card, I will adjust my schedule tomorrow morning.) I did 1hr 45mins of Spanish study tonight as well.
4. Thursday 12/12
4.1 Trilema rereading article rough draft (4h)
4.2 The Odyssey reading block (2h) (1h)
4.3 Read about computer assembly + prepare boot stick (2h)
4.4 Read trinque’s irc-bot source (3h)
whaack: diana_coman: EOD Report: I did ~2hrs of Spanish study, did an unexpected bit of saltmines (~30min), finished a rough draft of the rereading article ~4h, and got trinque’s irc ping-pong bot connected ~4h. There was a chunk of time I burned trying to set up keccak on my local machine so that I could press the vpatches correctly. I got stuck on setting up gprbuild. I think I may try to use jfw’s keksum, but if that doesn’t work I don’
whaack: t know it’s worth figuring out what’s wrong on my osx 10.9 as I should have my new computer anyways soon. Reading through trinque’s code and playing around with it, I see there are a few topics I need to go over: CLOS, threading with CL and slime, and CL’s exception handling tool/restarts.
whaack: I believe I was more focused today. I had some time where I wasn’t working though: an interruption for ~40 mins when a surfpal stopped by, and I played guitar for another ~20 mins at sunset.
5. Friday 12/13
5.1 Trilema rereading article final draft (4h)
5.2 The Odyssey reading block (1h)
5.3 Read about computer assembly + prepare boot stick (2h)
5.4 Trip to town to pick up debit card. (5h)
5.5 Draft article of setting up trinque’s irc-bot (2h)
whaack: diana_coman: EOD Report: I published my re-reading article ~5h, setup jfw’s keksum ~35min, pressed the vpatches on trinque’s page ~1hr (this had a few bumps along the way. for ex: some of the vpatches used keccak for the hashes in the vdiff and others sha512sum. i was using a slightly modified v.pl v99993 which i needed to find out how to further tweak to deal with keksum only having one space between the hash and the filename in t
whaack: he output.) I got trinque’s logbot (different than ircbot) running with a local postgres db ~2h. — All the time estimates are fairly rough. I do not have a draft of an article for setting up logbot as per my original plan, instead I have just a few hand written notes. There was some spinning today, but not an extensive amount. I spent ~1h chopping vegetables into zip lock bags to save time cooking for the next few days. I also had
whaack: a neighbor over for ~45mins in the evening.
))
Re timing, you know you don’t absolutely need any new gadget especially for that, right? For one thing any computer will have a timer/clock/something you can use, for the other there’s even Jacob’s clock software that I hear others are using, for yet another thing ffs, any mobile phone or clock will do!
“Part of me thinks, and still thinks, that I should not have even ran the code until I had read a book on CLOS, read every line of code + looked up all functions I didn’t know, and figured out CL’s restart tool.” – yeah, that part of you is the avoidance-through-perfectionism. Call it by its real name – stupidity – and then kill it and put it to rest: there is *never* such luxury of perfectly knowing upfront everything and following this chimera will be the death of you (mainly through the being-an-engineer path, really); what you need to focus on at all times instead of this ideal is the two-headed practical beast of making the most of what you currently know while also increasing your knowledge in the most useful way as much as you can, that’s all.
As to having something concrete re bots, stand all of them up and have them running, make a mirror of the republican wot for instance and start discussing the code in your articles with a view to signing it too as you grok it (or otherwise patch it if you see ways to make it better, of course). Since iirc ~any bot will log anyway whatever it sees, I would very much want you to use this (or any other bot really) to gather some data from various irc networks too so we can have a look at what real activity is going on and where, so have this in mind too (and ask me in chan if you don’t know what I’m talking about).
Comment by Diana Coman — December 15, 2019 @ 1:48 pm
While I know that I don’t need a specific gadget, I find that the act of getting a dedicated tool for a task that can otherwise be handled by say a mobile phone helps. For example I got metronome for practicing guitar to remove the possibility of being distracted while opening up my metronome app in my phone. Also the dedicated watch / metronome do their job slightly better than the phone alternative. jfw’s clock software looks great, and better than a watch, but it won’t help me when I’m away from my computer.
Ack re making most of what I know + meanwhile increasing knowledge.
The irc logging project sounds interesting, I will follow up in channel.
Comment by Will Haack — December 15, 2019 @ 5:49 pm