Every once in a while, I write a blog post where I want to put a few footnotes. More frequently, I reference sources. My writing is far from academic, but I figure the least I can contribute is pointing readers (usually just my future self) in the right direction. When I consider the best ways to accomplish these goals, I am reminded of all the other rigor and consistency related issues I have yet to adequately address. The Buddha was right: life is suffering.

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I am so far enjoying “The Black Swan: The impact of the highly improbable” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Random House, 2007). In searching briefly for a summary both to inform the rest of my read and to send to Yizhen, I found a review and critique by David Aldous from January 2009. I have no strong opinion on Aldous’s main disagreement about the cumulative impact of non black swan events, but I appreciated more perspective. I should check out the other critiques mentioned and Taleb’s “shorter and more cohesive account”, “The fourth quadrant: a map of the limits of statistics“.

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I am nonreligious, yet religion fascinates me. In particular, evolving knowledge of Jesus has separated his life and teachings from my notion of the Church.

As a young Wisconsinite, I learned the Church, God and Jesus are a conglomeration, like AOL-Time Warner. Or was it the Holy Spirit and Yahweh and the Lord Pope? The details eluded me, but there were definitely three entities, all the same. Or maybe I am thinking of the trifecta of less important Eastern competitors, Buddhism and Islam and Judaism. Religion was nebulous. All I knew for sure was in America we are united, under one monopoly of God.

Day of Silence at Hartford Union High School in April 2006

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Growing up I was not much of a reader, but apparently that has changed. I started using Goodreads earlier this year to track my reading, mostly to encourage me to write some notes upon finishing, and partly to remember what I even read. It has been helping! After some investigation …

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I sat down this week to start writing a small Python application to aggregate my data and generate a status page like the AWS Service Health Dashboard but with my goal completion instead. This is largely supposed to motivate me to find ways to spend more time doing deep work, but more automatically planned than my past efforts. Well, as I feared, it has taken a few days to lay the groundwork. The last piece involved more trial and error than I would have liked due to lacking documentation, but perhaps someone can make use of this configuration.

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After a few months mostly typing in QWERTY due to a compromise to get some programming done faster, I am recommitted to forcing myself to use Dvorak. I picked it back up quickly. In fact, right off the bat I was possibly faster than when I left off. Strange. This entry will continue documenting my progress.

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