Mid-May

I didn't do all that much this week because I was consumed reading The Stand for most of it. No joke, I read almost nine hundred pages between Sunday evening and the wee hours of Friday morning. I can clearly see why Stephen King is such a successful (as in, highly selling) author. Simultaneously, I have no strong desire to read any more of his work.

This, quite predictably, has thrown off a lot of my internal schedules and whatnot, so the goal for this week is to get that under control, and quickly at that. There's a number of things I want to do, like finish cleaning the fridge, get a haircut, push out a book review, work on job applications, and so on.

One positive: getting back to the YMCA after all these years. I'm mostly focusing on treadmill-type exercises because my daily distance walked must have crashed after graduation. This is a good opportunity to read in a significantly less sedentary manner, and appears to be a promising place to integrate library books into my reading profile. My mom is trying to get there two or three times a week, and I will endeavor to go along most of the time.

I might start swimming again if I can deduce the combination to my old lock, but until that occurs or I shell out for a new one, I'll go for something less capital-intensive.

Oh, also: the weather finally let up so the local campus observatory was open to the public. It was their ADA night, as well, so there were on top of the parking garage instead of a building roof; consequently, more telescopes. I got to see Mars, Jupiter, and Luna through some pretty big scopes, plus a couple of stars. The International Space Station did a pass near the moon early in the evening. This Friday probably won't be as exciting, provide the clouds decide to cooperate again.

Mother's Day

I spent basically the entire day doing things with people, and I am exhausted.

To be fair, it was a busy week. Still, I'm not a big fan of socializing. I hope I can spend a bit more time to myself this week. I have a blog post I want to finish and another I want to start, plus plenty of material to study and practice on my own. Job applications also fell off in the last couple of days and I'd really rather jump back on that saddle.

A small change: I've decided to no longer exercise on the weekends. My thought process is that first, exercise is often a stumbling block in my morning routine, and I'm wasting perfectly good Saturdays with slow starts. Second, I've been having weird pains in my upper body, so I think that I might need to incorporate a dedicated rest period, and weekends are a natural point to do that. We'll see if things improve.

(I should note that I've started alternating exercise sets and reading in the mornings, which slows down the overall process but makes it easier to complete, so my exercise has been slightly more regular in the last fortnight or so. It's also stacking up pages read, which is good for my self-esteem more generally—the length of my to-read list has been giving me anxiety for months if not longer, and finally drilling into it the way I have since finishing First Man is making me feel a lot better about it.)

So that's the current situation. No major progress to report, but not too much trouble, either. I'll probably stay in tomorrow to avoid overtaxing myself, but then it's back to the library everyday. Those engineering texts aren't going to read themselves.

Routines

My routine is less weekly and more daily, which I think is part of why the weekly reviews are losing interest to me. In the academic environment, weekly cycles mattered a lot, and I sort of rolled that over after coming home. Part of that, though, was that a lot of the house stuff required Dad's presence, which could only be guaranteed on Saturdays and Sunday afternoons.

There's still weekly components, especially on the weekends, but I'm operating a good deal more autonomously at this point, at least with regard to how I structure my overall time. I'm not going to the house to paint or whatever; I'm going to the library to read engineering books in the afternoons. I've noticed some of the same anti-productive dynamics at play there; I want to try shaking things up, but ultimately I am the one directing my action there and I have the capacity to change things should I so desire.

(I think I am going to experiment with that, in fact—not tomorrow, because I have plans that involve other people but an insufficiently specified time. Tuesday I have evening plans, though, so it would honestly be idea to try going to the library in the morning and coming back mid-afternoon to see where I'm at cognitively. I thought that would be a good strategy at one point back when I was working on the house, but in practice I turned out to be pretty tired when I got home and rarely accomplished what I wanted in the evenings. Whether the same applies here is an important question to answer.)

Introspection is still valuable, of course, and Sunday nights are still a good Schelling Point for introspecting. I'm just not sure it's the more insightful point to be doing so.

April Week 4

At this point, I think I have to admit that the quarterly objectives systems was insufficiently valuable, seeing as we're already a month into Q2 and I haven't missed it any.

I have some thoughts about why that was the case, but I haven't taken the time yet to organize them to the point that they're ready for public consumption. That said, I have organized them, and taken away some lessons for future planning projects.

I haven't decided what, if anything, will replace this. Frankly, the weekly reviews seemed almost entirely divorced from my actual goals, so I don't see any particular reason to discontinue my Sunday night posts. They provide a useful catalyst for introspection and near-mode planning. The issue is that they don't do that much to turn far-mode plans into near-mode plans.

I'll think about the implications of this problem further in the coming days. My day-over-day is solidifying into a more regular routine, with fewer surprises and lower variance. Worrying about the weekly plan(s) means a lot less in that context. Systems and habits matter more. I wanted to steal Malcolm Ocean's habit-a-week idea, and tried to implemented it back in 2016, but failed poorly. Maybe it's a good time to implement something in that vein.

We'll see.

Reading Program

I'm doing something unusual today, and taking a book off my Goodread's to-read shelf. Almost invariably, I add books and leave them there till I finally get around to reading them. Removing them is so exceptional I feel the need to write a blog post justifying myself!

The specific story is pretty simple here: when I put John Anderson's Hypersonic and High-Temperature Gas Dynamics on my reading list last summer, I was more interested in bookmarking it for future reading rather than giving it a particular priority in my independent study plan. However, since then, I've started giving much more weight to reading the books that are already on my to-read list (and don't want to overpopulate it with the hundreds of titles which have, at least briefly, caught my attention over the years).

Hypersonic aerodynamics is an advanced topic, and Anderson recommends Fundamentals of Aerodynamics and Modern Compressible Flow as pre-requisite texts. At this point, I'm not going to forget about his hypersonics book, so when and if I get to the point where it's appropriate to study high-speed flow, I'll know where to look. In the meantime, however, I'm better served prioritizing more foundational engineering texts and the other types of books on my list (history of science, philosophy, fiction).

I'll probably use the newly-vacated slot for Spacecraft Mission Design by Charles D. Brown, which strikes me as a more appropriately challenging textbook at this point in my reading program.

April Links

In the first three months of 2019, a Google product died every nine days.

FiveThirtyEight introduces a new accountability project to check the calibration of their predictions. In a shocking turn of evens, 70% predictions happened about seven times out of ten. It's almost like statistics works.

In a huge victory for small business owners and entrepreneurs over legalized cartels, Arizona becomes the first state to recognize out-of-state occupational licenses.

Speaking of cartels, the San Francisco planning commission has more members with second homes than members who rent. Maybe that has something to do with their extreme protectionist, anti-growth policies?

Was the college admissions scandal about rich parents helping their kids, or giving the parents the satisfaction of performing pseudo-meritocracy?

Republican Senators introduce a bill to fast-track regulatory evaluation of new birth control products. Congress doesn't have the power to directly mandate over-the-counter contraception, but telling HHS to give priority to assessing such products is about the next best thing.

Kansas Legislature approves a bill giving counties the option to implement open polling in future elections. Note that this bill does not require counties to provide open polling options, so check with your local election office before the race.

After severely damaging their only aircraft carrier last fall, the Russian Navy is considering scrapping it entirely.

Easter Sunday

It's been almost a month and I still haven't decided whether or not it's worthwhile to continue these, but I haven't taken the line-item off my weekly to-do list, so I'm still doing them. The fact is, though, I don't think the reviews have helped all that much beyond being aware of my own behavior better, and there's a few other things that happened around the same time which may or may not have had a greater impact.

This week was not all that productive; the big thing was finishing Spacecraft Propulsion. It's a lot shorter than a lot of other books, which is a big factor for why I was able to speed through it when I'm still about a quarter of the way from the end of Rocket Propulsion Elements. I'm going to use my library time on something lighter before picking up what will be a similarly gargantuan text on high-temperature gas dynamics, so again, progress may not be all that fast.

This coming week I mostly want to get back into my routines of exercising, meditating, studying, and applying for jobs. This last week I was pretty wildly off and my performance suffered for it. There may be some scheduling aspects which work in my favor the next several days; it remains to be seen.

How fast the start goes depends on just how badly my body reacts to the dose of pollen and hearing damage I sustained going to church today. Seriously, who brings bagpipes to an Easter service?

April Week 2

I've been reflecting on what's been missing from my quarterly goals based on an interesting discussion I had at the local rationalist meetup last weekend, but I haven't quite yet finished articulating it in a form fit for public consumption. Maybe this week? It's hard to say. Spring allergies have been hitting me hard and a foray into cooler weather didn't help any.

Consequently, I didn't feel really as accomplished as I would have liked this week. There we some administrative tasks, household errands which really shouldn't have been as much of an ordeal as they were, and the like. The big excitement was renewing my CPR certification on Monday and going to get a haircut on Tuesday.

In the coming week, I'll hopefully reach a decision on whether or not these weekly reviews and quarterly objectives are actually worthwhile. That's the only thing that seems worth mentioning at this point.

April Week 1

Am I doing quarterly objectives? I still haven't decided. Nevertheless, weekly reviews continue.

My Q1 review was how I started my week. Because it's also April, I published a post for Amazing Breakthrough Day on my real blog the same day. That did surprisingly well (by my standards) and makes me want to keep writing for more hits. I haven't felt that motivation in awhile.

The good news is that I came up with a good idea for a short post on Saturday. That day I went with my old Scout Troop to volunteer at a church soup kitchen—except we make sloppy joes, not soup. According to the recipe notes, this is the 15th consecutive year the Troop has done this. I was pretty tired when I got home but my renewed social calendar meant heading out again.

Despite all that, I managed to finish reading Spacecraft Propulsion by Charles D. Brown, which is one of the technical books on my formal reading list. I'll probably work some of the exercises next week, but I make no commitments. Brown is better about writing textbook problems than many authors, but this book primarily uses English units of all god-forsaken things so it remains to be seen whether my resolve will be sufficient. In either case, the next book on my list (Space Vehicle Design by Griffin and French) doesn't have exercises, so there isn't a clear conflict there.

Tomorrow night, I'll be getting re-certified for CPR, which is neat. In other re-learning news, I've got some programming ideas bouncing around my head, but my MATLAB subscription expired, so I need to choose another language. Right now I'm decided between C and vPython, so I'll hopefully get one or both of those set up this week.

There's also some internal affairs stuff I need to work on, like job applications and the like, but that's not particularly worth enumerating.

Winter 2019 Quarterly Review

In January, I laid out some objectives for the first quarter of 2019. The first quarter is now complete, so let's look at whether I completed those objectives.

My objectives for the first quarter were divided into four (4) focus areas. Of these, I did quite poorly in one, and acceptably but not impressively in the other three.

The first area was applying for jobs and graduate school. I completed my graduate school application, though this took longer than I had really expected. (The trip to Texas in mid-February rather disrupted the process.) Preparing for the GRE was a significant factor there, but that too has been put behind me. Since completing that process, I've resumed near-daily job applications, which I hope to keep up into the second quarter.

The second area was my self-directed study, which I continued but largely failed to accelerate. I worked through a number of technical papers that had be cluttering my desktop, which is a relief. I did not, however, finish reading Rocket Propulsion Elements as I had hoped; about 150 pages still await me. My general reading schedule has picked up again since finishing First Man, and in the last week I found library resources available to me that will considerably improve the situation (see the last weekly review for Q1).

The third area was cleaning and organization, and here I have precious little success to report. I put a little time into this back in January, but since then have done almost nothing to sort and catalog my various physical possessions. This is looking like less of a priority as the odds of attending grad school increase, but I would still rather have everything in its place.

The final area was writing, where again I did alright but unimpressively. I managed to publish at least one proper blog post each month so far (including April already) but went little beyond this. I've also tried to write a little fiction again—I managed to outline a plot that didn't strain my own suspension of disbelief, but only wrote a few pages of the text itself. This is a rather recent development, mind you, so I may very well pick the project back up again in the coming days.

High-level take-aways from this quarter are oddly similar to last quarter: I need to allocate more time to achieving my goals. This is more possible than before, but still somewhat challenging.

I had some success experimenting with time-blocking, but this was largely exhausted on GRE preparations, so I should try that again to associate it with something more emotionally rewarding. Planning my day in advance lets me think about what I actually need to achieve (assuming everything goes well).

A related issue, which I noted last time, is over-extension. My Q1 Objectives had a narrower focus than the original set six months ago, but even so I felt underspecified in what I was actually supposed to be doing. Now, I've dealt with some lesser matters that won't be recurring should I chose to continue this experiment, but the general point stands: chose which goals actually matter and pursue those exclusively.

The final issue I've noticed is that my time horizon is too broad for meaningful planning even over a three month period. I may opt to start pursuing month-by-month objectives, either in stead of or in addition to this quarterly system.