Soren Bjornstad

Soren Bjornstad

Software developer, tech thinker, information systems designer. See more.

Sabbatical Update, Week 6: Miscellaneous Weirdness

3 minute read

This week was an odd mixture of a lot of different things, and next week will likely be the same. Regardless, I am still greatly enjoying this whole sabbatical thing. I don't feel directionless or like I'm wasting my time, I'm learning a lot, and I'm not lonely even though work has normally been a big part of my social interaction. (Maybe partly because I've had lots of extra time to talk to people I recently haven't had a chance to!) So still double thumbs-up at the six-week mark with a minimum of seven more weeks planned.

If you're currently on Control-Alt-Backspace, you can read this post on Soren's Zettelkasten.

Published

Reading

Finished:

Started several more books as well. I'll talk about those next week.

Lifetime reading for September: 1/3 books.

Tasks and projects completed

  • More progress on tzk, but still not ready to publish. I don't mind that – I've still been doing important things I care about, just not what I originally planned on.
  • Verified my backups and finished the GTD collection process as planned. The one uncollected thing in my life still is a bunch of junk behind my file cabinet that needs to be categorized – but it's all stuff I've decided to get rid of already, I just haven't brought it anywhere (some needs to go to a thrift store, some to the hazardous waste disposal, and so on). I'll work on that bit soon.
  • Finished listening to all of Bach's cantatas, which is a big deal because there are almost 200 of them, each 20-30 minutes long. I started this project sometime during the first work-from-home phase of the pandemic and would listen to one or two every morning. When I started working in the office again, I kind of forgot about it, so in the last few weeks I picked it up again.
  • Reorganized my computer files. I'm happy to say that it wasn't much work, because the framework I set up a couple of years ago still mostly makes sense.
  • Lots of reading.

Miscellaneous thoughts and anecdotes

  • Sentence found in a scientific paper on a contributing cause to the obesity epidemic: “However, the Damocles sword that hangs over our weight-expanding youth merits such endeavor.” Scientists aren't always the best writers...though it gave me a laugh, so maybe that's okay.
  • Last night, my apartment's smoke detector went off at 1:00am because some wood smoke had drifted in the window. This is a new type of special sealed, maintenance-free smoke alarm, which sounds like a good idea except that you can't turn the darned thing off when there's a tiny amount of smoke in the building that you can't immediately do anything about. (There is a “deactivate” switch, but if you press it, the detector becomes permanently inoperable.) Also, the “silence” button only works for about 10 seconds at a time. I ended up putting it on the floor in a different room with the windows closed, hoping that would prevent it from catching the smoke again. It worked until 5:00 am, when I had to do the same thing all over again.
  • Facebook has released camera glasses and reportedly plans to add facial recognition to them. Nothing could possibly go wrong here.

Looking ahead

This coming week:

  • Camping Sunday through Wednesday.
  • In whatever time I have left, my priorities will be to work through my Zettelkasten and add anything I need to from my camping trip (I usually end up with a lot of new thoughts when I go camping!) as well as cleaning up/updating some stale content. For instance, I often write a blog post about something I had in here, improve my thoughts in the blog post, and never backport the improvements to the Zettelkasten or even link to the blog post. I'd like to get that under control.

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