Musings about robots, hacking, technology, futurism, philosophy, movies and more!
Halfway through 2024 all ready. It’s going too fast! This is only my second post this year. This is not to say I haven’t done anything this year I just haven’t shared it. Both work and my personal life have had a number of exciting events and I think my priorities are just focused inwardly.
A number of years ago I made a goal and started reading “50 books per year” with the vague intent to “Read ‘More’”. This approach wasn’t entirely haphazard and I deliberately decided to read books on a 5 book rotation; a fiction book, a non-fiction book, a work related book, a recommended book, and a “grab bag” book. The work related book could have been fiction or non-fiction as long as the topic was something involving work (historical fiction regarding the military like “Once and Eagle” by Anton Myrer or “Gates of Fire” by Steven Pressfield being two examples.) The recommended book was always one that, once I had asked someone expressly for a recommendation, I was not allowed to not read, with the intent that I broaden my reading landscape, even if I hated the book. 1 Finally, the grab bag book could be any of the above and was set a “pressure release valve” so I didn’t feel I was trapping myself in this cycle.
only once did I hate a book so much I didn’t finish. I didn’t even go back to the person for a recommendation since I felt so bad about it. ↩
Merry Christmas everyone! (and a happy new year!)
I clearly haven’t written in a while. I missed July entirely and don’t have much to say new now. I’ve found the idea of “Attention” and “Monthly Topics” isn’t working out so well. I keep layering on new things to focus on and I’ve come right back to where I was before I started this; Trying to do too many things never with enough time. While it did help me focus in on a number of activities I’ve been generally meant to pursue, most of which I perhaps wouldn’t have made the time for otherwise, the intentional singlemindedness kind of took the joy out of doing a lot of these activities. I clearly need to find a balance between my interests, motivation and structure. With that said, I’m on the verge of trying something new that might accomplish just that, but the new thing itself will be a bit of a discovery process. More on that later I guess?
This month’s post serves two purposes, first, to update the next topic of the month (as usual), but also to write a blog on a recent project that I did because of some stuff my company is working on. This project involving AIS ship transmission subsequently led one of my bosses to ask I write up a little more thoroughly because it highlights some themes that are relevant to what we are doing, namely, that the tech we are developing isn’t extraordinary, it’s just deliberate.
Ok, first an update on how February went, and then to the next topic of the month: Bottom line? Programming went so-so… I learned very little Go although I did make some progress with Javascript. I also spent some time learning Docker and wrote some scripts in BASH to automate some docker tasks related to my companies software. I don’t know how much those could be considered deliberate programming but I am pleased to announce that I am included as a contributor on a release of our primary software, so I guess that means I’m officially a professional programmer now. :) If I’m really giving myself credit, I guess I could also say that I learned a ton about how professional software products are bundled, built, released, managed and shipped, so again, while not deliberate programming, I did a lot to learn about how the whole process of programming works.
Annd MORE than 4 months this time. 6 actually. Good thing I never committed to writing consistently. In my last post “Whirlwind” I described how life was keeping me busy. Turns out this is probably won’t change anytime soon.
Wow….four months later… lets see all that has happened since then:
I just completed the tomezoe step of brewing a batch of saké. It was the longest and final cooking step in a process that isn’t particularly hard, but takes a small amount of attention at precise, but irregular intervals. There are still more steps to finalize the saké into something that is drinkable, (including racking, clarifying, bottling and aging) but after this step today it will begin its final fermentation and turn fully into alcohol, which felt meaningful in some way.
TL;DR- Learn a bit of the history of an idea to gain substantially deeper understating of the ideal itself, and apply it better to other domains.
This is a continuation of my previous blog post that ran long so I elected to finish it later. If you don’t feel like going back and reading that one first, I am examining how Isaac Asimiov’s “I, Robot” written in the 1940’s has some amazingly accurate predictions about the state of robots today, at least from an engineering standpoint. I’ll dive right back in with my comments on the next chapter.
I recently finished the audio book of Isaac Asimov’s “I, Robot”, a collection of short stories written between 1940 and 1950 that were the beginning of his robot series and arguably the most famous work of early science fiction concerning robots. I had read the book before when I picked up a paperback copy in a USO in Kuwait on my way to Afghanistan and found it interesting, if not a little silly, since Asimov’s ideas about robotics 70 years ago were nothing like how we think about robotics today…..or so I thought.
Maybe this will stick a bit better than a journal. Tune in next week to find out!