• It’s the most wonderful place in the world, but I’m actually not feeling particularly compelled to visit it again any time soon. Some of this has to do with the fact that I’ve been there eight times; some of this has to do with the fact that I rather enjoyed spending the week between Christmas and New Year’s at home, and am not sure how much I want to do any vacationing for the sake of vacationing. Of course, this is all subject to change at any time, and Liesl and Miranda may have different opinions.
• We’ve had bad hotel luck in the past; based on recommendations from comments on this blog post, we decided to try renting an apartment this time. We went with absoluliving; not as cheap as a cheap hotel, but for the same price as a decent hotel, we could get two bedrooms and a living room, with a clothes washer, a stove (not that we used it), a fridge. Or at least we thought that’s what we were getting; the day before we were supposed to leave, they e-mailed us to tell us, with no explanation whatsoever, that they were changing apartments on us; we ended up in a one-bedroom apartment, which they had the gall to call an upgrade because it was in a trendier neighborhood. To be fair, the apartment wasn’t a complete unknown, since we’d marked it as acceptable from the list of apartments they’d initially proposed to us, but I still didn’t appreciate the bait-and-switch, or whatever it was, at all. (Also, to be fair, I’m happy enough with the area we ended up in, and will consider staying near République in the future, but I didn’t like being in the middle of a very long block on a side street.) The other problem with the apartment was that one window kept squeaking open and closed all night when it got really windy; I’m not really mad at them about this, because I’m not sure how they would have discovered it by inspection, but it does point out a problem with an apartment agency that you don’t have with a hotel, namely that you can’t just complain about a maintenance problem and have them move you, because they might, say, be closed on the weekend. (Fortunately, it happened on a Thursday, and they managed to get somebody in on Friday who eventually stopped the squeaking by duct-taping it shut.) Anyways, one separate bedroom (Miranda was in a sofabed in the living room) is vastly better than everybody sharing a bedroom, so the general idea was a good one.
• Poor Liesl was sick some of the time; fortunately, it wasn’t nearly as bad as when we were in Amsterdam, but she stayed in the apartment for three (two?) of the days because of that. Partly because of that, we didn’t go to as many restaurants as we might, but we still got some good food out of the trip (including one from a restaurant that apparently changed hands about a week after our last trip and was completely, surprisingly different this time); visiting salons de thé in the afternoon may have been my favorite part of the trip. (The pizza at decent Italian restaurants in Paris is quite nice, too.)
• Why had I never heard of Lovis Corinth before? My first reaction is that I’d rather look at his art than, say, that of Van Gogh or Gaugin or Seurat. Looking at labels suggested that part of the reason is that his art is scattered around museums in Germany instead of clustered in museums in Paris; glad I’m aware of him now.
• The baboons at the zoo in the Bois de Vincennes are a hoot.
• Having internet access in your apartment is a good thing. And no, this is not a sign that I need to relax and tear myself away from the internet: this is a sign that I don’t feel compelled to spend every vacationing hour traipsing from site to site and can, instead, spend time in my hotel just enjoying myself without feeling guilty that I should be doing more on vacation.
• Having a washing machine in your apartment is also a good thing. And points out another benefit to the internet: if your washing machine is refusing to wash and just blinking when you hit a number, you can google the model name and get a manual. (Answer: you accidentally hit the child lock button; hold it down for four seconds to unlock, and what you thought was the off button is actually the start button.)
• Miranda’s favorite museum turned out to be the sewer museum.
• Sacré Coeur is distinctive to look at from a distance but boring on the outside. Not so Notre Dame: there’s something to be said for thousands of people working for hundreds of years to produce something glorious.
• I really am not impressed by the current Orangina ad campaign: large-breasted zebras just don’t do it for me. Sex, fine; animals, fine; combining the two, ick.
• We forgot to buy a power converter; fortunately, the basement of BHV had them for sale. (They had one that went both directions, 110-to-220 and 220-110.)
• Traveling with several puzzle books from Nikoli was an excellent idea: not only are the puzzles top-notch, but the narrower-than-US form factor meant that I could slip one into my jeans pocket, which is very useful when walking through museums where I’ve had to check my backpack, finding myself a room or two ahead of Liesl and Miranda because we go through them at a different pace, and needing to amuse myself. I’m getting a bit burned out on Nurikabe (though I still think they’re an excellent puzzle variant), and Number Link isn’t my fave (once the puzzles get out of the easy range, I have a hard time proving my solution is unique, which frustrates me), but I’m still a big fan of Masyu and Slitherlink. I’ll have to try some of their other puzzle types.
• I really can dial down the number of books that I take on a trip these days: I have enough other entertainments that I don’t need to carry nearly as many to avoid running out of them. (And there are always bookstores if I guess wrong.)
• Heavy curtains are great for the first night or two after getting off the plane, but in retrospect I should have stopped closing them completely after that: I never really got my clock adjusted to Paris time. The flip side of which was that lying awake at night gave me lots of practice in going over my Joyo kanji…

I would seem to be ready to give up on much of the random fiction that I acquired during grad school. I’m still hanging on to more of my academic books than I should, though: I didn’t select any math books to discard, or any Sanskrit/Pali/Indian studies books. (I’m certainly not about to give away my 45-volume edition of the Pali canon, what with the stylish elephants on the spine! But other stuff I could probably stand to give away.) Also, I somewhat surprised myself by giving away some books by some authors while keeping other books by those same authors: in the past, I’ve been more of a select-by-author person.

Incidentally, for what it’s worth, this is the sort of blog post that I’m not sure I would have made in my pre-twitter days. But giving away books seemed to meet the twitter-worthy threshold; and when I thought about it a bit more, I decided I had more than 140 characters that I felt like saying on the subject. A good thing, I guess?

The levels are pleasantly challenging while, generally, fair; I had to play many of them over and over again, but I usually felt that dying was my fault rather than the level designers’ fault: if I could just get my movements executed properly, I’d be able to finish the level, and the levels are short enough that you don’t have to retrace your steps much at all.

The graphics style is very bare-bones, which worked just fine: you’re a stick figure (albeit one with amusing death animations: exploding stick-figure limbs setting off a further chain of bomb explosions can be quite charming), there are no textures to speak of, the enemies are the most basic of sprites. All of which just serves to emphasize the pure platformer nature of the game: it’s all about making your jumps, everything else is secondary.

I’m quite happy with it as my first XBLA experience. I didn’t finish the game, and in fact I only made it through about a third of the levels. But that third of the levels was a good 75 levels, and it was a lot cheaper than a retail game; I got my money’s worth, and if they’ll stick in more levels for people who are more obsessed with that sort of gameplay than I am, more power to them! There’s a free version, too (which came out before the XBLA version); I haven’t tried it out myself, but I’m sure the game play is extremely similar, if you’re curious about it.

One concrete effect of this realization is that it gave me a way to flag the current status of all of my projects. I have a list of projects; each project has to have to have at least one item associated to it with the label NEXT, WAITING, or SCHEDULED. I may have multiple such actions, if I’m proceeding along multiple fronts; I may also have items on the project that don’t have any of those labels. (Those items might be ideas for future actions or reference materials.) But I have to have at least one item that’s flagged with one of those labels: if I don’t, that’s either a sign that it’s really a someday/maybe item, not a project, or that I need to sit down and come up with a next action on the project.

This also applies to e-mails. Some e-mails, even e-mails that I have flagged as active instead of archived, aren’t associated to a project; I stick these in a folder called ‘conversations’. But lots of my active e-mails are associated to a project. So I have folders ‘actions’, ‘waiting’, and ’scheduled’, corresponding to the labels above. (As well as another folder, ‘projects’, for reference material that I don’t want to archive just yet.) (Actually, not every e-mail in actions/waiting/scheduled is associated to a project in my formal project list: some of them are single-action projects that I don’t feel compelled to capture elsewhere. Though some may be few-action projects that really should be captured elsewhere? I don’t think it’s hurting me yet, though.)

The problem is that this requires too much work for some common operations. Say that an e-mail comes in that I’m waiting for. Then it’s a response to something that’s currently in my ‘waiting’ folder; to avoid forgetting that I’ve gotten the response, I typically move the response to ‘waiting’ as well, then (once I’ve finished clearing out my inbox), go to ‘waiting’, look for e-mails that have gotten responses, and characterize them accordingly. Another difficult issue is when an e-mail requires some amount of context to respond to entirely: do I just have a single message in my actions folder, or the whole thread?

I’m starting to think that gmail has gotten it right by replacing folders with (per-thread) tags. But I’m not willing to move even my personal e-mail usage to gmail’s web interface, and I certainly can’t move my work e-mail there. Does Thunderbird use tags, and make it easy to restrict your view to only messages with a certain tag? (Looking at the web page, I think so, but I’m not completely sure.)

For the time being, I am one of the eccentrics who reads e-mail using Gnus. I assume I’ll move off of it one of these years, but that time hasn’t yet come, and (despite Gnus’s folder-centric nature) I don’t think this will push me off of Gnus, either. I spent a few hours digging through the source code and asking questions of the newsgroup; Gnus doesn’t have tagging support, but it looks like it should be workable to add an extra header to saved e-mails and tell Gnus to limit its view to headers matching a certain value on that header. (A nice benefit of having a mail reader written in a scripting language.) I haven’t yet found the time to implement this, so there might be something that I’m missing, but I’m optimistic.

Once I’ve done that, I can get rid of the separate action/waiting/scheduled folders: those messages can all be in my projects folder, and I can add keystrokes to narrow my view to messages with a certain tag. Of course, this doesn’t solve the ‘response to waiting’ problem listed above; I may actually have my inbox be the same as my project folder. (I’m not sure what the effects of that will be.)

Even the current system is a big improvement over what my inbox used to look like. My actions folder never gets very big; when I got back from vacation, I had 50 e-mails in there when I was done with my inbox scanning, but that was an exception, and having those e-mails all in one place was very useful. (In particular, it allowed me to get it down to the normal 5-or-so level by the next day.) And the waiting and scheduled folders are useful views for periodic reviews. But it’s clearly an area where improvement is possible.

The basic idea is this: if you want to remember something, you have to practice remembering it periodically. So it’s not enough to cram facts for an exam and then pretend that you know something: a few months later, you won’t consciously remember most of it. (Which is one reason why I question significant parts of our educational structure, but that’s a separate rant.) Instead, you have to periodically refresh your memory of the facts; fortunately, you can refresh less and less frequently over time and still remember those facts. Basically, the optimal time to refresh each fact is right before you’re about to forget it; this guy claims that he has a computer program that will serve up facts to you at the appropriate time for optimal practice.

This would be very useful to me (and, for that matter, to Miranda) right now: while he will happily apply it to anything, it’s clearly extremely applicable to learning foreign-language vocabulary. (And grammar!) And the theory is also obviously quite plausible (and apparently supported by the empirical psychological literature): I’ve spent a lot of time memorizing facts over the years (and in particular over the last year), and I can testify that this phenomenon of memorizing a word, and then not quite having it at the tip of your memory (or barely still having it at the tip of your memory) some time later is quite correct, and I’m quite willing to believe that there’s some optimal decay pattern for the refreshes.

But I also have a system for memorizing vocabulary that works moderately well right now: not perfectly, by a long shot, but I’ve gotten a lot of use out of it. In particular, right now I have 1200 or so vocabulary cards written down; I’m not about to sit down and digitize them all (which isn’t really necessary), but I’m also nervous about switching to another system which may or may not work, and (if I decide to switch back) to then deal with having some of my vocabulary on a computer and some on physical cards.

Also, to make matters worse, the software is basically Windows-only. So using it isn’t a realistic possibility for me. (It does seem like the sort of software that would strike a chord among Mac geeks, but who knows…)

But then I was idly thinking about it some more over the last day or two. Just how hard could it be to whip together a version of the software myself? The basic infrastructure is pretty straightforward: I need a way to save questions and answers, I need it to display questions to me, and I need to tell it whether or not I’ve answered the questions correctly. Then the software could save my history of when I’ve answered each question successfully (or unsuccessfully), and, based on his magic curves, figure out when it should next offer that question up to me. I’d never written a Rails app (a deficiency that I’d like to remedy), but all the data entry/display sounded like it should be very easy to whip up using Rails; I didn’t know what the magic sauce was, but it’s probably some sort of exponential decay curve, so I should be able to just look up his algorithm and implement it, right?

So I spent some more time at his web site, looking up his algorithm. And, at first, I was pretty disappointed. The most obvious place to start was with the paper version, but it had a few glaring deficiencies. The main one is that it had you work on groups of items all at once, treating each group as equally difficult (i.e. with the same decay curve). (Both the grouping and the equal difficulty seemed wrong to me.) Also (and this is, of course, just a minor annoyance, easily tweaked around), having the first review come four days after you’ve written down a group seemed way too long to me.

Reading that, I was pretty let down. After more poking around, though, it turns out that the algorithm has changed a fair amount over the years; I believe this is the most recent version of the algorithm listed on the website, and that page gives links to earlier historical versions. I haven’t tried to fully understand the most recent version (and, as far as I can tell, there’s not enough information there to reconstruct it, some of the constants there apparently need to be determined empirically), but there are enough ideas to try to remedy the above flaws. It seems like the current version doesn’t always use exponential decay, but I believe earlier intermediate versions did (version 4 seems a particularly useful touchstone), so I could easily start with that; there is a per-item difficulty factor, and there’s some idea that you can calculate the difficulty factor by counting the number of times you’ve gotten the item wrong.

Based on that, it sounds plausible that I could hallucinate an algorithm that probably wouldn’t do any worse than my current method for learning vocabulary. (My current method wastes too much time up-front in going over words that I would ideally review in intervals longer than a day, while at the same time not doing enough review of old words.) And I don’t think it would be too much work to whip up a program to implement it, and I’d get some practice with Rails to boot.

So: would doing that be a good idea? I’m still not sure: if I ultimately decide that I don’t like the results (whether because I don’t think it works well or because I don’t want to be tied to a computer when doing vocab review or because of some other reason), then there would be a real cost in switching back. And it may turn out that this is all really a side-issue: maybe it would be more effective than my current system, even significantly so, if I wanted to memorize a dictionary. But I don’t want to memorize a dictionary, I want to be able to, say, read Japanese, and doing so would probably give me frequent enough review of the words I was actually using to make a program like this superfluous.

Not sure where I’ll go with this yet; for now, I’m too busy, so it’s on the someday/maybe stack. But it’s surprisingly close to the top of that stack; we’ll see where I am in a couple of weeks.

• blog: 7 (+5)
• book: 32 (+7)
• commented: 0 (-2)
• flash-game: 10 (+2)
• long: 28 (+14)
• music: 13 (+6)
• podcast: 28 (+8)
• recommendation: 17 (+6)
• short: 0 (0)
• think: 12 (+3)

For a total of 147 items, an increase of 49 over last time. Which is 49 off of my prediction.

Hmm, not sure I’m learning anything any more from these posts. Note that all the categories except for blog, commented, and short are part of my someday/maybe list; the three short-term categories aren’t growing (the 7 items in “blog” just means it’s been a little while since a “random links” post), but the someday/maybe categories are. Which is fine; I still get occasional use out of the collection of saved items, and the fact that those categories are growing just says that I have other priorities in my spare time right now.

I guess the next steps are to find a Linux client (shouldn’t be hard, I guess I can just do it via IM?) and add a few more people to follow. So far I’ve been following a few people I know and a few of the bloggers I read whose tweets are relatively interesting. Which certainly isn’t the case for all bloggers I read; come to think of it, the sort of tweets I prefer from people I know personally are rather different from the sorts I prefer from people I don’t know. I still need more people to follow, because my stream is thinner than I’d like and too heavily dominated by the relatively few frequent posters, but it’s a good start.

This is a list of things that you’re thinking of doing but don’t currently have in progress. As with most GTD concepts, much of its power comes from allowing you to create clear boundaries: the relevant boundary here is that something you’re thinking of doing is either in progress (in which case it’s on your projects list) or is something you’ve consciously decided to defer (in which case it’s on the someday/maybe list). This forces you to think for a few seconds: do I want to work on this now or postpone it? If I want to work on this now, what’s the next action? But once you’ve done that, you can stop worrying about it. (Or at least that’s how the theory goes, and it matches my experience well enough.)

So, basically, the someday/maybe list is a repository for all those pipe dreams and worries that you’ve had that you’re not dealing with right now. Much of its value is simply as a place to write things down: part of the GTD idea is that, when a thought flits through your mind, you probably want to write it down somewhere unless you particularly want that thought to continue flitting through your mind. And many such thoughts translate into either new items for the someday/maybe list or comments on existing items for that list.

Of course, just making a list won’t do you any good if it turns into sweeping unpleasant thoughts under the carpet: that will translate into some combination of not getting things done that should get done and of worrying that you won’t get things done. So you’re supposed to look at your somebody/maybe list once a week, to ask yourself if any items there should be promoted to active projects.

The reason why this struck me so much is that it gave another way to look at my preferred way of dealing with books, namely to have a very short stack (ideally of length at most 1) of books that I’ve bought but haven’t yet read, while keeping a much longer list of books that have caught my eye for some reason. I got this revelation from lean (inventory is waste), and it’s served me very well over the last couple of years, but I had a hard time explaining just why it is that having a big stack of books that I really want to read but haven’t gotten around to reading is bad while having a long list of books that I really want to read but haven’t bought or gotten around to reading is good. (The third option would be to not have a list or a stack; for me, that would translate into an unreliable mental list, which is worse than a physical list.)

If you think about it in GTD terms, though, what’s going on is this: you see a book, and the thought flits through your mind that you should read it. Being a trained devotee, you know that you need to write this down somewhere: so is reading that book a current project, or a someday/maybe item?

If it’s a current project, then the logical next action is to buy it, so by all means do so at once. If you don’t have definite plans to read it soon, though, then it should go on the someday/maybe list, in which case buying it now isn’t appropriate. If you want to get a bit subtler, you can say that you have a current project of “always have a book to read”, in which case buying the book is appropriate if you’re close to finishing your current book and you want to read that book next, but isn’t appropriate otherwise.

Basically, there are (in my experience) a few reasons why I’m tempted to buy the book on the spot. One is because I like to fantasize how exciting it will be to read the book. That’s very pleasant, but buying the book isn’t a good response to fantasies like that: I should only buy the book if I’m actually going to read it, not just because I want to bask in the thought of reading it and can hallucinate that buying the book right now is a constructive step towards that end. Another reason is because I’m afraid that I’ll forget about the book if I don’t buy a copy right new, and I really would like to read it at some point in the future; fair enough, but making an entry on a list (possibly with some notes about what attracted me to the book) is a better response than buying it. A third is because I feel guilty walking into a bookstore, browsing their books, taking notes about what books to buy, and then walking out without giving them money; I still think that’s actually a pretty good reason to buy a book, but what I’ve found is that, if I have a low (frequently zero) unread book inventory, then I can assuage my guilt by buying one book and reading it next (or possibly after I’ve finished my other book in inventory). And if I’m not sure that I want to read the book next, then maybe that’s a sign that I shouldn’t buy it right now: I have lots of experience with the strategy of buying books because I feel that I should read them, and the results aren’t generally particularly positive.

The upshot is that I’ve moved my books-to-read (games-to-play, music-to-listen-to) lists to a ’someday’ subdirectory of my GTD directory, and added a generic someday list there. And the results have been generally pleasant: it’s nice to have a place to write down ideas about things that I’m thinking of doing in the future. Equally importantly, it let me stop worrying about certain things that I knew I should get around to doing but just didn’t have enough spare cycles at the moment to work on; enough items have graduated from the someday list to full-fledged projects that it’s not just a sham.

So I’m open to the idea of using it. Which means that I need two things:

• Friends who use it, so I have somebody to follow.
• Good clients for both Linux and Mac.

Presumably I can figure out the latter easily enough myself (though I’m open to suggestions, especially on the Linux front); can my blog readers provide me with a critical mass of the former?

I might as well stop here; most people will either run screaming from the game or fall in love with it, and the above paragraph should give you enough information to determine which bucket you fall into. If you want puzzles, this is the place to go: there are 130 or so of them, I enjoyed them all, there are ample hints should you need them. On a non-puzzle-related note, the art style is totally charming, in a sort of Triplets of Belleville way.

And there’s already a sequel out in Japan, with a third game in the series promised; yay!