It’s Sunday July 13th, and I need to make my check in late again. Things have been fairly busy, so I had to skip my Friday due date. Life has got to come first, after all. One casualty, of course, was 7-11 Slurpy Day. I guess that will have to wait for next year.
Alright, let’s do the journal, the Log part of this thing, and get to the Fit Check. The Fit is Good. No big gains or losses by the numbers since last week, but things are moving along and in the right direction. This last week, I didn’t get in as much strength training as intended or even one HIIT session. I’ll have to correct that next week. Slacking on those doesn’t seem to have had any measurable setbacks, but I also haven’t been getting the associated gains from them. That’s expected, but I find that by documenting these things, they become more real in my mind, and then I’m more likely to actually do something about them. On top of the other reasons why I am not going to beat myself up over that, the slacking was also a response to upping exercise in a different area, the running area.
I’ve been taking my daily walks pretty consistently, which I’m fairly certain has been the main driver of my improving health and mood. Well I suppose diet is probably the real winner there, but meh. Anyway, I had complained in a previous post that my preferred path was blocked off, and how that had put a damper on my plans to get back into running. I then found a bit of a workaround, but also adjusted my expectations down a smidge. But I did coax myself to do a run here and there, usually more than once a week. However, in the last week or so, the construction on my favorite path finished, and it opened back up! I’m very excited about it! And I have been adding a lot more running to those walks.
I wear a fitness watch that has a GPS tracking function, and that clocks my path at just under 4 miles – a little less than 2 miles out, then I turn around for another 2ish miles back. When I’m on my return trip, right around where I think is 1ish miles out, I rev that walk up to a run. I suppose it’s more of a labored shuffle, but for now that’s passing for running. I don’t know that I can actually make it the whole mile back, but I don’t think so. Instead I opt for a semi-structured interval run, which is building both the fitness and confidence to get to my goal. I regularly challenge myself by upping that pace and/or the length of the stretches between walks, and I try to work on the important aspects of running that I remember being told to watch out for in my youth. Stuff like how I land my feet, trying to widen my stride, opening up my shoulders and lungs, you know, all the run stuff. And I’m pretty happy with both my progress and the incremental results. I would like to get a look at where the research is on running these days, and see if I should adjust what I’m up to, but this has been working for me for many years, so I’m just going to keep it up for now.
Alright, let’s jump over to my academic situation. I finished another couple of books, chief amongst them was another book on learning – “A Mind for Numbers”, by Barbara Oakley. I think that’s the third in this unofficial series. I haven’t finished processing what I’ve read, so I’ll talk about it and the others I’ve recently finished another day, but I can at least say that I liked that book. Have I done a book talk post yet? I don’t think so… gotta make note of that.
I’m also just about to finish my third read of Sun Tzu’s “Art of War”, which I’m way more positive on now than I was in my previous reads. I still have a negative opinion of the bulk of dorks who quote the book, but many things that I enjoy have been over quoted and fawned over by absolute shafts, so I should try not to hold that against it.
In the Math Zone, I’ve made a lot of progress in my Algebra review/revision, and I’m feeling great about what I’ve reviewed so far. I feel a lot more confident in the idea of jumping back into Calculus, but I think this Algebra experience is trying to remind me of the lesson to not rush things, that I shouldn’t expect to just “get” something right away. I think this has been a wrong headed attitude I’ve held for too many years and on too many subjects throughout my life, one that I really have no excuse for keeping. Everything I’ve ever gotten really good at has been hard won.
When I first joined the military, I was terrible at running. I wanted so badly to just wake up better at it, and I didn’t. I got a little better during Basic, but I definitely didn’t get good. It wasn’t until after I’d finished all of the training and got to a base with a long, empty road that I could just hammer the work over and over on that I really improved. In high school, I had wanted so badly to be have some semblance of musical talent, or at least just be able to play a few recognizable songs here and there, and I just wasn’t. I’m still not very good, but after over 20 years of self teaching, I’ve become significantly better. My strongest progress unmistakably maps to periods when I kept consistent, focused practice. And when I was in my corporate job, I got extremely good at a few important office skills (like Excel and SQL queries), and that shit did not come overnight. I had to do a lot of research, trial and error, listening to colleagues, you name it, but I eventually got there. It’s a bit maddening that I still sometimes get frustrated when I don’t immediately understand some new concept, even though I know logically that isn’t how things work.
Anyway, the plan was to dip back into Algebra and then move into Trig & Precalc. The Algebra revision portion was expected to be pretty short, like a week or two, and it has been much longer than that. I am finally close to finishing this phase, and I think I should wrap things by the end of this week. I’ll reevaluate the plan when I do. Right now, it seems like I’m going to stick with it. The only thing that has me second guessing isn’t the notion to increase speed or ratchet things up more, but rather that I might take another step-back. I have really found my time going back through Algebra to be well spent. I feel so much more comfortable with the material, and when I do sometimes gaze back into the Trig stuff, I find myself a lot more rusty on the underlying principles from Geometry. I seem to recall being pretty good at Geometry. In fact, I think it was one of the subjects that gave me the undue overconfidence that I once held in my general Math skills. But it’s not a skill set that I exercise with any regularity, so it takes me some doing to recall even the more basic concepts. I’m pretty sure those basic concepts are going to be key to building up the next set of skills. So I think I’m on the lookout for a good, and hopefully quick refresher. However, if I can’t find a refresher that is both quick and sufficiently thorough, then I’ll take another remedial break. I really can’t keep trying to build on bad foundations.
Next up is coding. I’ve been doing that free CS50x from Harvard, and I’m really liking it. But after getting a few weeks into the lectures, I decided that I really wanted to do the actual coursework, and since they offer to let freeloaders like me actually submit our work to be graded, that seems like too good of an opportunity to leave on the table. So I have been submitting my work, but that’s been very slow going. I felt pretty bad about it, actually, which now that I’m thinking about it ties back to my frustration with not just getting shit right away. I was especially frustrated on the very first problem set, which has students making a simple game in MIT’s Scratch coding platform. The program is extremely easy, made for children, and I think that kind of put me on my heels. In retrospect, I actually think that’s the point. It was humbling, but as I pushed past that, I was starting to get the feeling that the exercise was trying to teach something truly fundamental. I think I might be oversimplifying it now, and hope I’ll expand on the idea as I go, but I get the feeling that the course desperately wants its students to understand the importance of pseudo-coding. That the overall work of coding is about problem solving, and that writing the code itself isn’t where you solve those problems but rather how you apply your solutions once you’ve worked them out. I kinda get the feeling this is also my problem with my fiction writing, that I’ve been approaching it all wrong, that it isn’t just having a great idea, it isn’t about just knowing how things should be, but it’s about having stages or modes, being able not just to switch between them, but to also catch yourself when you’re in one mode and need to be in another. That you need to do prework, then do the work, then review your work, and not just expect but actually plan to have rework. That some of the best work comes out of your revisions and recapitulations. I also need to reign in my lifelong problem of scope-creep, but I knew that years ago, and that ain’t gunna change overnight, either.
So I spent a lot of time in a notebook mapping out how each part of this children’s programming code would work in pencil. I also scaled back my grand plans of having complex scoring, multiple levels, powerups, and all the fixin’s one might expect in a top down shooter. I put together a functional if a little light and boring game, with room to grow if I should later return to it. I feel good about it, though I do wish I’d spent more time with some of the extra, included tools. Like I think I should have made my own sprite or two, that I could have benefited from that experience. It’s fine for now, though, and I’m overall happy with what I’ve done. I’ll look forward to the grade, even if it’s bad. At least then I’ll know where I need to polish up.
The other subjects I’ve been pursuing have been mostly on the back burner. I completely shelved my English Comp after passing the practice test, but I need to plan a serious revision of that. I have decided I am going to try to test out of that with the CLEP voucher I received. I’m a little trepidatious about the whole process, given that I’m new to it. But I’ve been new to stuff before, which I’ll try to keep in mind while I give a closer look into scheduling that over this next week.
I’m also very seriously looking at Economics again, and I think when I’m at a comfortable enough space with my Math and Programming, I’ll make space for more of that. I’ve gone over Microeconomics more than once, but I want to give a deeper look at the materials. Most of what I have looked at hasn’t had much actual coursework, it’s almost all been questions on concepts and extremely simple math. More than one of the instructors has said that basically is the first year for both Micro and Macro, which I guess makes sense, but I’m just not going to feel comfortable with any of it until I can get a few good practice tests under me. So I’ll need to make time for that, and I want to make it soon. I’m coming up on the end of the summer, and I’d really wanted to have been further along by now. I wanted to be starting at the community college in the Fall semester, but time is an ever present constraint that I need to respect, and I’m wondering if I might be able to spend this time best by reevaluating that part of the plan as well. That maybe I would benefit by pushing enrollment out into the Spring and knocking out as many early courses as I can beforehand. You know what, I really need to give this last bit a longer think. Let’s plan to write about this a bit more in the next few weeks, and let’s wrap things up for today.