anchor

Ain't much of a view but at least its an interesting pattern

All the Bright Places

First book of the year, woot!

Tho I don't have much to say about this. The progression felt similar to "Your Name" (which is definitely not Shinkai's best work): with a gradual build up and then a intense resolution. I respect the ending a lot, it was emotional, dramatic, yet real.

At the very least, this novel would have influenced me to read The Waves.

fajita

I'm happy with my new apartment...except with the shower hot water. Or rather the lack of hot water. Lukewarm is the most appropriate descriptor, but if I'm being precise, the water temperature is warmer than my finger temperature but cooler than my head temperature...when turned to the max hot position.

It really is unacceptable.
But.

There's two reasons why I wouldn't want this fixed:

• Saves energy to shower with cooler water (although this argument is null if I'm losing hot water somewhere along the distribution, which atm I have no way of knowing if this is true)
• Less damaging to my skin & hair

I've been on the fence the past couple of days on whether to further pursue this issue. Already been through one maintenance request, which helped a tiny tad bit: the water is warmer for ~10s after you adjust the temperature setting, then resuming to lukewarm. This suggests that its more likely to be a distribution problem rather than a heating problem, which would tip the argument towards following up. Guess I'll do that.  

+1

Not quite home-y feeling yet

scotch

I'm usually more excited than stressed for a move, but man this time its the total opposite. Not even thinking about Gus' fried chicken is much help. Also doesn't help that I've made a bunch of logistical mistakes that made life a lot harder (and myself poorer). Annnnnd there's an impending snow storm on the day of my flight "orz

See you later Toronto

smear

It has not been a good morning. I would've saved myself a lot of trouble if I just contacted my bank to change my address first.
Sigh.

I do feel revived after reading this manga. Too cute, so much feels uwwuuu. It's like a non-otaku version of this.
...

But here's part 2 of what I've recently made during winter break:

Coconut / chocolate / orange sour cream loaf via  Alexandre Cooks

Shaoxin goji chicken via Christine's recipes

I also made another (canto??) variation of braised beef with potatoes, but alas forgot to take a photo.

A System ver0

I originally had the intent to create this system in a super design-y way, and write the post like an ESP report. But alas that intention fizzled out. Instead I based version zero on what I knew already worked. Is it a lazy approach? yes. Is it likely to work? I believe so.

I also intended to have the system on a single platform for maximum integration and elegance. But after looking into a couple of platforms / trying to tinker things, it became obvious that it would be too much of a compromise. Since the purpose of each reflection interval (instantaneous, daily, weekly, monthly, and annually) are different, they would be better served by different medium.

Currently, I've chosen:


Trello desktop app for instantaneous reflection (captain's log)

I was really stuck on picking a medium for the captains log because I wanted it to sync between desktop and mobile, while also autofilling the current date/time. I could've followed Malcom (and others) and used workflowy, except I didn't want to spend money on another software that enables a keyboard shortcut to insert the current date/time. After some time of frustration, I realized I'm not micromanaging my day to need to see the timestamp of my logged thoughts, so I threw out the time/date requirement. Picking Trello was purely based on (relative) familiarity with the platform (I'm far from a power-user). The desktop app is quite nice as there is a keyboard shortcut to bring up card-creation, which is seamless enough for me to log thoughts as they come. My captain's log is a list within my "mission control" board. 

Trello for daily morning planning

The second list is "daily priorities". I'll add ~3 items every morning to give some focus to my day.
Typeform for daily reflectional night: 

I chose typeform since its pretty aesthetically pleasing. My questionnaire is H&C themed to be extra motivating :D There's a set of questions, mostly qualitative, about how my day went. The questions I gathered from the daily journals that people recommended in the GCI workshop, along with some YNCN practices. One pitfall, or at least I consider it a pitfall, that I wanted to avoid was excessive quantitative data collection. The advantage of quantitative data is that its easy to automate its processing and analysis, but at the trade-off of a rather restive field of view (arguable I suppose, I could always pick better metrics to track). But more importantly to me, automation is the literal opposite of being mindful, and thus defeats the point of reflecting.

Google Docs for weekly reflections

I'd like for this to be on Typeform as well, but their free plan is limited to 10 questions and the paid plan of $30USD/month is not worth its prettiness. The doc opens with the questions of "what was my most profound experience of this week", again to focus more on the experiential rather than quantitative data. I had a really hard time coming up with good effective questions, and ended up with 3 sections of "how I spent the week", "did I plan this week well", and "looking forward to next week". Who knows if I've actually picked good questions, will reassess after Q1.

Blog post for monthly reflections

Hurray public accountability! Blog posts are also convenient to retrieve for the annual review. Monthly reflections have 2 foci: stoplight progress tracking of goals, and prompting questions about how I spent the month. Also quite unsure about the effectiveness of these questions, but we'll see. My desired outcomes for this is to reassess the relevancy of a) this system, b) my goals, be critical of my progress and then realign my actions as necessary. 

??? for annual reflections

To be honest I haven't thought much about this. There'll be reviewing my performance on this year's goals. Setting & planning for new goals are also definitely a part of it. I also want it to be more of a discussion with other people. I also like to pick a theme for the year. Evidently, this paragraph is much more of free-flowing thoughts. 

To get side tracked even more, I have no clue how good my critical thinking skills are. The instances where I put in explicit effort to be critical in my thinking are my theses, but both of them didn't get much feedback on how critical I was. I got good marks...so that's reassuring but is that really a good measure?

Anyways going to cook dinner instead.