20220602

Had some personal things come up recently that distracted from my daily routines, but once again I am hoping to be getting back to more regular journaling! My brother is visiting me at the moment so that may distract a bit however. Thinking a lot about how I want to structure my time and habits for this summer. There are a lot of research papers that I want to read so I want to come up with a system that makes it clear which ones I want to read and makes it easy to pick up them up and write out thoughts that I have related to them so that I can not have that happen in a vacuum. I think having them printed physically and placed somewhere is going to be the right call ultimately, but I still don’t really like how that is restricted to being in a certain place. Maybe I have an “on the go” folder that I have easily accessible and make a habit of packing and unpacking it wherever I go so that I have it and it’s never out of sight in my backpack. Something like that might be good as having papers digitally does not have them obviously available to you (although maybe some sort of homescreen widget that displays them could emulate this? Still need to unlock the device to see this, whereas a folder makes it obvious by default that the papers are the sole purpose of that folder being there).

Daily Listening

I listened to this Massive Attack album for the first time in the summer of 2015 (7 years ago!) when I had started venturing into my musical tastes and following various top charts on rateyourmusic. I didn’t really get it back then, but it sounded quite nice to me now. I’m not sure what prompted me to want to listen to it. Well, actually I realized it was because I had seen something about Banksy which reminded me that I had read somewhere one of the Massive Attack members was maybe Banksy or had influenced Banksy. For whatever reason this must have got my mind recalling various impressions of the album from all that time ago and got me wanting to revisit it. I realized immediately I messed up when I first listened to it by using my laptop speakers and not my headphones (I have a memory of playing it on my laptop at my family’s cabin that summer). The way the bass comes in on the first track (you really need headphones to experience this) just lets you know what sort of ride you’re in for, and I’m glad I can appreciate that ride now.

Daily Reading

Finished the first Series Of Unfortunate Events book a while ago and have been reading The Essence of Software by Daniel Jackson. So far it has been a really enlightening read about design and how to think about software from a design standpoint. I think it’s providing some useful frameworks that I can and want to apply to my research software that will help make it more accessible to me (when I need to use parts I haven’t used in months and forget what I was thinking when I made them) and to a potentially wider community when I release it.