And Stuff Episode 008: Fast Paste Environment

This time we talk about … stuff?

Listen to And Stuff E08: Fast Paste Environment on Overcast.

andstuffpodcast@gmail.com

@andstuffpodcast on twitter

soyeahandstuff.podbean.com

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Two-Day-Late Sunday Snapshot #5

Thinking about revamping this post series and using the Day One app to make it work better. Been trying to use Field Notes to take notes daily about what should go here but the analog-digital divide there is a little too much. Field Notes works best for me for having one page per activity, rather than one page per day. But Day One is specifically designed for one post per day.

Anyway.

Supplements:

Started taking coluracetam at TID 9mg. The only obvious effect is that my dreams are SO MUCH more memorable and vivid. It doesn’t seem to have any of the excess acetylcholine negative symptoms that I experienced with the other racetams I’ve tried, but I have noticed that I’ve been a little more tired than usual.

My tinnitus has improved significantly, which is probably due to the tianeptine, which I highly recommend everyone ever take.

Started using sulbutiamine more often as an alternate to caffeine, and that works well too, as long as I don’t overdo it.

So right now that’s my stack: tianeptine, coluracetam, NALT, caffeine, theanine, NAC. Occasional sulbutiamine and ALCAR.

Books:

I finished reading Reamde, and posted about it last post. I started Seveneves and it is absolutely amazing. I’m on about page 50 of about 600 or so. It reminds me of Arthur C. Clarke in that it’s got a lot of hard science in it, but the readability is really great. In fact, it’s probably Neal Stephenson’s easiest to read novel so far, despite all of the hard science.

Pens:

Been using Pilot Juice almost exclusively, but that’s because I haven’t been doing much analog note-taking. Juice is by far the easiest to carry around all the time, so that’s that.

Content creation:

Uploaded a video of me making a bookmark for Kelsi. I spent a lot of time on the audio track for it and I’m pretty proud of it. Probably one of the best “in the box” MIDI sequencer-based compositions I’ve done.

Also found a nice ffmpeg incantation for turning an audio file into a video with visualizations, so I’m doing that to all the And Stuff podcast episodes and putting them on youtube. The audio quality is actually better than the actual podcast because youtube gives you infinite space and the free podcast host we’re using only gives you 50MB per month. So on youtube I’m using 384kbps aac for audio, and on podbean I’m using V9 mp3 (which is about 38kbps).

Two of the episodes are up so far:

School:

Class is almost over, I hate it so much. Final is on thursday. I need to cram basically starting now, oops.

Cycling:

Did 9.0 miles, which is an improvement over the last few weeks. I’m loving cycling so, so much.

Anyway. Good week, I think.

Smonday Smnapshot #5

Ugh, I’m late again. I’ve been kind of “detoxing” from supplements, and also from caffeine and alcohol. Unfortunately if I don’t have any caffeine then basically I sleep all day. Tianeptine still seems to be working. I seriously don’t understand why it isn’t a first-line treatment for a whole slew of mental conditions.

Another thing I did in the past few days is completely upgrade my netbook to Debian 8.1 “jessie”. It’s made a lot of workarounds I had to do in 7.8 “wheezy” unnecessary, which makes me so happy. I wanted to install it on my girlfriend’s netbook also but I’m encountering a weird error. Enjoyed getting everything set up today–I might make a post just for myself to remember all the things I do to get a system the way I like it.

One thing that sucked is that when I installed Wheezy I didn’t allocate enough space to the root partition, so I had to do a fresh install for Jessie instead of “upgrading in place”, which is what I was able to do on my main desktop.

Also she got a new phone, so I took her old one. It’s the same model as my old one, but mine … has a broken screen. So that’s nice.

Smunday Snapshot

Podcasts:

Listened to an old episode of App Story and Vic actually talks about Pragmatic, which is kind of hilarious because he later became a cohost on Pragmatic.

Books:

Barely read anything. I want to actually read some of the stuff on Gutenberg that Cameron has been reading, but haven’t gotten around to it.

Pens and notebooks:

Still loving the green-black Diamine ink in my Platinum Preppy 03. Not really much to say on the pen front other than I’ve gotten in the habit of using a dark red Pilot Juice 0.4mm in a “daily carry” kind of sense. Clipping it in my back pocket next to my field notes is less uncomfortable that one might expect.

Movies:

Actually watched the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie the other day. It’s so bad but it brought such great things, so … whatever. I think Joss said that the movie isn’t in the same canon as the show, but the original screenplay for the movie is. Hence mentions in the show of the gym getting burned down but that never happens in the movie, etc.

Content Created:

• Podcasting: Episode 004 of And Stuff, but I already posted about it.

Smunday Specie

Didn’t do any coding yet, but I did migrate all of my bots to dropbox so I can run them from any computer.

Smunday Statuses (omnifocus)

Project statuses:

• Hate this class. Test on Wednesday, gotta start cramming basically now.
• I cycled 7.7 miles last week. Previous weeks were 6.9, 11.17, 12.54.
• Web presence was meh.
• Podcast was uploaded two days late and blogged about four days late, but it got done so it’s not the end of the world.
• Haven’t worked any on guitar amp.
• Finished desk joinery. Need to plane and sand a bit and then glue it to the top next.
• I started being stricter about diet. Eating powderchow every morning and baking chicken every night and having eggs for lunch. Now I just have to cut back on the snacking and the beer and I’ll probably get my body fat percentage where I want it. Apparently in the past month I’ve gained about ten pounds, so yeah.
• I’m up to doing 4 sun salutations every day and 30 pushups and 45 situps every other day. Kind of need to get a pullup bar or something though.
• Applied for a job. No call yet so I might go apply to the other location.

Sunday Snapshot + Sunday Specie + Sunday Statuses

Part of GTD that I don’t really do yet is the review process. Since I haven’t finished reading the book, so IDK exactly what kind of review is supposed to be done weekly, but I’m going to try to remember to do some kind of review anyway, and blog it here to keep myself honest. If you see me miss one of these Sunday posts, you should yell at me on twitter or gchat or aim or sms or

I’m also inspired by Tasha’s Sunday Snapshot post series, so I’m going to add to the weekly review the kinds of things she puts in her Sunday Snapshot posts, IF THAT’S OK WITH HER.

Sunday Snapshot

Podcasts:

In the past week I’ve listened to a LOT of episodes of The Pen Addict Podcast. I think I listened to episodes 40 through 72 all this week. What the hell, self. Anyway, this podcast is amazing but they’re really going to ruin my wallet. I ended up adding three of four things to my last Jetpens order (remind me to blog about what I got) because of it, and then I ended up making a second Jetpens order for fountain pen converters and inks, and then ended up subscribing to Field Notes Colors, all because of how passionate these guys are in this podcast.

I’m also trying to get caught up on Generationals/Technical Difficulties. I finally got to the point where they renamed the show. I’m more behind on The Pen Addict though, so I’ve been listening to it more. Generationals talks about GTD in the most helpful way of any podcast that ever talks about it. I’m pretty sure episode 029 or maybe 033 was one of my favorites, where Gabe talks about his career and how he is happier in a field he is less passionate about, because when he was in a field he was passionate about, he was ALWAYS working with people who didn’t care about what he was working on as much as he did. This concept is starting to make me reconsider a lot of things because I’m starting to feel anxious about being put into a similar position someday.

Speaking of GTD, #pisode 39 of Hello Internet (which is of course my favorite podcast ever) was about it. It was kind of weird to be honest because Brady hated the book. Also, Myke Hurley is interviewing CGP Grey about workflow and productivity and habits and so on in a new podcast called Cortex. I’m finding it highly entertaining … but IDK if it’s for everyone.

I also started listening to the archive of The Memory Palace. I highly recommend it–it reminds me a lot of Lore, so if you like that one, check it out. Or if you like history in general. I heard about it because they interviewed the guy from it on Stuff You Missed in HIstory class.

Books:

I think I only managed to read a few dozen pages in REAMDE by Neal Stephenson. I NEED to finish it NOW because I already got his new book, Seveneves, and I’m not going to let myself start it until I finish this one. REAMDE is actually really good on a page-by-page basis, it just doesn’t grab me when I think about the plot from a mile-high perspective. Also I want to reread The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon because the Pynchon in Public Podcast has been discussing it. But I probably won’t do that until I finish Seveneves.

Unfortunately I’m also having to read Protective Relaying Principles and Applications for class, and that’s exhausting a lot of my reading desire. This book is fairly accurately described as “the power electronics engineering bible” and is exactly as interesting as it sounds.

Pens and notebooks:

I’ve been using a Pilot Hi-Tec-C Blue-Black almost constantly. I also got two Platinum Preppy fountain pens, one in the 02 nib and one in the 03. I love both of them, but the black cartridges they came with aren’t black enough for me, so I bought two Platinum converters (which actually cost more than the pens did), and two bottles of fountain pen ink. I got Parker Blue-Black Quink and Diamine Green-Black. I love both of them but the main problem I’m having is that neither write very well in my field notes.

Speaking of which, I got my first Field Notes subscription in, and they’re completely amazing. The paper is SO much better than Moleskine and the “workshop companion” series is quirky and fun. It’s got dot grid paper which is clearly the best option and the Hi-Tec-C writes on it completely perfectly. The fountain pens don’t write on it well at all, but this is kind of a known problem with Field Notes. You probably don’t want a fountain pen crammed in your pocket with your notebook anyway.

I also rediscovered the Kuretake Fudedogochi Super Fine, which is an amazing brush pen intended for drawing but it’s fine enough to be a great regular writer as well.

I also found my old Doane Paper idea journal that I used to use as a geocaching log. I’ve only used 7 or 8 pages in it so I’m kind of looking forward to using it again for something else at some point.

Movies:

Last Saturday I saw Jurassic World. Great movie once you sit through the exceedingly dull first thirty minutes which consists of nothing but character backstory. I get it, we need a little bit of backstory to relate to the humans before they start showing the dinosaurs and Chris Pratt, but we didn’t need it to take up 25+% of the movie. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if the product placement wasn’t so egregious.

But then once Chris Pratt comes on screen, the whole movie turns around and is a really rewarding watch. That’s really all I have to say about it.

Sunday Specie

I keep meaning to get in the habit of analyzing my daytrading bot’s performance weekly. Here we go:

From June 13th to June 20th, I bought 1586176 dogecoin for a a total of 1.2536260 bitcoin, and sold 1577984 dogecoin for a total of 1.26494513 bitcoin. Doing the math, I gained 8192 dogecoin and 0.01131913 bitcoin, which totals a profit of approximately $4.37. My capital at the beginning of last week was around $41, so that’s kind of amazing. The average buy/sell pair I made had a profit of 1.43%. This is the best week I’ve had in ages. The week before I had an average profit of 0.76% for each buy/sell pair. I’m not sure if I should do any more tweaking at this point. If someone wants to invest in my bot … let me know. The more coin I put through it the lower my fees go, of course. I’m heavily considering depositing actual USD, but I want to make sure I’m profitable multiple weeks in a row first.

I do all this math in libreoffice calc, but I should write a python program that does it more quickly for me.

Sunday Statuses (omnifocus)

UGH, Omnifocus makes it easy to do the past week including today, but not the week starting eight days ago. So this will include stuff from today but not include stuff I haven’t done yet today, I guess.

Project statuses:

• Graduate: I failed to contact several people that it was essential for me to contact. I won’t graduate this semester. I am doing a bad job at this project. I’m not sure what I need to change in the system.
• Take care of yourself: I’ve been doing better at yoga and cycling and callisthenics and so on. I only missed one day of yoga last week and I cycled a total on 10.6 miles. Also only missed one day of reading and I did fine on hygiene although one more bath would be optimal. Really proud that I somehow have gotten myself into the habit of flossing, it’s like I’m a real adult. I do need to practice piano scales more often (I did only once in the past week.) I bought selenium to possibly help with tinnitus, so at least I’m taking some action there.
• Take care of your house: I forgot to take out the trash only once. Changed cat litter twice but that doesn’t seem to be enough … twice is supposed to be enough if my girlfriend is also changing it but I don’t think she is. *shrug* I keep deferring major cleaning tasks, which is bad, but in the past week I actually did a few, namely clean fan blades and deep-clean bathtub and clean refridgerator. I still have room for improvement but I don’t think I need to make any changes in omnifocus.
• Be responsible: I keep being too lazy to cancel some subscriptions I’m paying for. I also keep putting off reconciling my bank account transactions to make sure everything is legit. I guess I’m being relatively responsible.
• Maintain web presence: I’m getting back into the habit of keeping my tumblr queue full, but the main thing I’ve been neglecting is twitter. I don’t actually care about facebook but I do want to be making one post a week just so my wall isn’t filled with stuff other people posted. Web presence is going to have a lot more fuel soon once my podcasting plan actually gets underway.
• Keep in contact with friends: I’ve been doing OK. I need to buy my girlfriend a birthday present. I wrote a letter and mailed Kelsi’s birthday present. (Two months belated, oops.)
• Write thankyou notes for last Christmas: I still haven’t. Oops.
• Finish building Baby Whale: still need to figure out how to work the wood. Haven’t made any progress on this one in a few months. Don’t want to change any of the actions in omnifocus yet but maybe I will next week.

I put these two under “take care of yourself” but they’re really just one-off treats that might boost productivity as a side effect since they promote journaling and writing:

• Bought a subscription to Field Notes Colors. (Future post about this if you remind me.)
• Bought fountain pen converters and ink.

And then here’s the coolest thing–a new project.

• Podcast: Sometime in the past two weeks I recorded a podcast with Cameron, and I finished editing it yesterday. It’ll be up soon, but there are several actions we have to take before it can be listened to. Of course, if you want to be an early listener and tell me if there’s anything we should probably not do, email me or Cameron or comment on our blogs or tweet at me, etc.

Now I’m supposed to decide if any of these projects should be reorganized to give their actions more clarity. I also have a bunch of projects in omnifocus that have zero actions because I never made any. I think I’m going to wait until next week to make any changes because I like doing things wrong.

Well, there we go. hopefully I actually do this next week as well. Remind me to post a Jetpens haul post and a post about field notes I guess.