Salon post: April 12

[jenett]

Welcome to this week's salon post! (After a couple of weeks hiatus. My life, it sometimes gets busy.)

Welcome to this week's salon post.

Topic of the week
I'm betting you've learned or discovered something recently - feel free to share the useful, interesting, or just plain fun things.

(My example in a comment.)

What I've been up to
Last week was a symposium for work (interesting, but sort of exhausting couple of days) and this week has been the week of a bunch of routine medical visits. (Allergist on Wednesday, nutritionist on Thursday, primary care for my seasonal visit + annual physical today. I like all three of them, but it's a lot of appointments.)


Useful notes
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Comments

Thing I learned

[jenett]

So, I mentioned this in a locked entry, but it's a great example.

Wednesday, at my 6 month visit with my allergist, I mentioned that I'd moved, I'm now down a flight of stairs from street level, and about one time in three I am really having trouble breathing for a minute or two when I get to the top.

She was very clear that that's actually a lousy measure for health - stairs are just Really Hard for the human body, lots of humans (including those who do not have my cranky lungs) have trouble with them.

Well, okay, there's twenty something years of beating myself up about stairs I didn't really need to do, then.

Re: Thing I learned

[fandomonymous]

I'm reminded of my first visit with my current therapist, going on about past history, and how high school was emotionally difficult. My eczema was flaring at the time, and she asked about how long that had been part of my life - since at least middle school, and not very well controlled in my high school years.

She was the first person to make explicit the connection for me, how stress in my body/skin/immune response must have made concentrating at something as intense as my high school experience difficult and painful.

It's so obvious, right - help the body, help the mind - but I had always separated them out for some reason.

She's not the best therapist - particularly not on poly things - but that was one thing that gave me SO MUCH VALUE that I still feel I have a lot to get from her, years later.

Re: Thing I learned

[brithistorian]

That's interesting about stairs - I'll have to start being less hard on myself for being somewhat out of breath after walking up 3 flights of stairs to my classroom.

Re: Thing I learned

[havocthecat]

I learned this from your doctor too. They ask this as a basic measure of cardiac health before surgery - so why do they do it if it's such a difficult thing? It always makes me feel so bad.

Re: Thing I learned

[jenett]

I mean, I agree that it's possibly a useful data point? But one among many.

[jazzyjj]

I hear everyone on the stairs thing. Like I mentioned in another entry comment, I need to get out more and I'm not the only one saying that. I live on the top floor of my apartment complex, with no elevator. It's always great exercise carrying my laundry or groceries up and down the stairs. During the wintertime, everyone only wants me to use the front staircase since it's the one that is inside. They don't want me falling on ice or anything and getting hurt. I agree with them. Fortunately, our landlords have been great about shoveling stuff off.





As far as learning new things, I've pretty much tried to do that on my iPhone and have in large part been successful. There are some travel apps for those of us who are visually impaired, 2 of which I have and they seem to work well. But I'll fully admit I'm not the greatest independent traveler out there, and it's not my fault at all. I'll save it for another time though. Due to a very busy social life in and around my apartment complex I have basically let the independent travel skills I have, go by the wayside. But I actually did make a discovery related to outdoor travel last week. We had a vacuum shop occupying a space right next to our front building entrance ever since I moved in in the summer of 2004. Unfortunately, they ended up having to relocate to a suburb about an hour away due to being evicted. How does this relate to me? Well, one of the travel apps I use still contains the name of said vacuum shop in its database, and not the name of the current business that occupies the space. So I contacted the app developers, and shortly thereafter received a very nice response from the team lead. In it she gave me instructions for updating their database, and further stated that they'd be happy to do it for me if necessary. I think I'll take her up on her offer, because the process for doing so is a bit confusing to me. So I'm going to somehow make time to go back to the place where I was trained on my iPhone. Their head of technology is retiring, but they really seem to know their stuff. In addition, they have a certified orientation&mobility instructor on staff and she already entered me into her database so I'm going to try and work with her a bit. She says she can come to my place of residence if need be, which would be ideal.

[estelendur]

I just started working in a large research university library this week! Things I have learned include:
- it’s possible to work in a field that I find intrinsically interesting! Omg. I can read the websites I’m working to support for fun! Astounding.
- given sufficient novelty, I may be able to avoid my previous distraction habits.
- I really needed to work in a quieter space than the open plan offices of my previous jobs.
- yes, being in the actual physical library building makes me happy all by itself

[eseme]

Today I used my car manual and figured out how to delete my old cell phone from my car's bluetooth, and add the new cell phone. I can now make calls through the car speakers, which is far safer while driving.

[chickiedeare]

I did a waltz with someone last weekend and some things clicked! It was informal and not the kind of instruction that I think of as ~learning~ but my muscles and rhythm learned some things.

[keshwyn]

I FINALLY figured out how to mock a shell command in Python. I've only been trying to figure this out since 2012...

Net result was that I wrote unit tests - and they worked AND helped me debug a problem!

[silveradept]

It was probably helpful now for my psyche than for anything new learned, but I did the librarian "magic" trick of being able to make a book appear based on a few maybe-remembered details and then got the person the book they had wanted (the first of the series, since the one they were describing was the second.)

And so I was reminded of the thing I had read...somewhere about them that when describing a book, there's a good chance the details are right and it's a question of whether there are enough details to make a search engine turn up a useful result.

I also learned that every member of Congress, past and present, has an official biography and they're all in a searchable database.

[brithistorian]

Good job on finding the book!

And the searchable database of congressional biographies sounds like a horribly useful thing. (I almost said it seems like they should have taught us about it when I was going to school for history, but then I remembered the state of computer technology at that time.)

[silveradept]

Yeah. They're pretty bare-bones, but they exist so you can put in a name, a party affiliation, a year, or other criteria and search official biographies.

[brithistorian]

Thanks! I just spent 20 minutes searching for biographies there - even with the bare bone nature of them, they help you get a feel for the person.

[silveradept]

You do. I think at least some of the content might be provided by the person, so that it can be incorporated, but I haven't gone looking for that information at all.

[eclips1st]

So I teach high level English to French students (while most of them identify as French, they are often just as good as native speakers.)
One of the things I work on with them is False Cognates between French and English. For example, "demand" (eng) and "demander" (fr) have very different meanings even though they look similar. (In French, "demander" is "ask".)

So I was shocked this week when my brain finally realized that I've been getting "empathie" (empathy) and "sympathie" (sympathy) wrong in French FOR SEVEN YEARS because THEIR MEANINGS ARE REVERSED IN ENGLISH*! SEVEN YEARS! I was so mad!! For years people have been correcting me in French and I've been like "uh, but no!" except it'S just because my reference is the English definition!

SEVEN YEARS! AND I DO THIS PROFESSIONALLY!
I'm so mad, lol
Sorry, I'm done "screaming"! XD

*I say English has it "wrong" only because the meaning in French is closer to the latin root of the word. I don't actually think it's wrong. English doesn't (generally) care about such things and it's why I prefer it!

[cadenzamuse]

According to the EVO Planner system (whose methodology I suspect is suspect, just because it's "proprietary"), I am the type of person where I have to share things like this daily to make my life feel like it's working. Whatever else they got wrong, they certainly got that right about me.

I am mostly discovering poetry through various people's National Poetry Month posts. (Today, some Eavan Boland and Nikki Giovanni, both of whom I knew of but did not know these poems.)

I am also hyperfocusing on fashion at the moment, so Outfits I Wouldn't Have Thought Of, through my Stylebook app's "shuffle" feature, are high on the "oh cool!" list.

[brithistorian]

The EVO planner system looks interesting, although a bit expensive compared to other options. I'd love to hear more about your experiences with it.

[cadenzamuse]

I'm sorry for being slow to get back to you--my thesis is due Friday so I'm writing frantically.

All my experiences are with the planner for my "brain type," the "Alchemist."

Pros:
I write everything down first, THEN prioritize it--forcing both of those things helps me get stuff done
All the planners prioritize the following habits for a day, all of which have planning space in the daily spread: gratitude, wellness, fun, a most important task, and a monthly "ritual" (habit you're trying to work on)
Each brain type then has one other thing it prioritizes (for the Explorer it's time in nature, for the Oracle it's "focus time," for the Alchemist it's sharing a discovery, idk about the Architect because it's the opposite of me so the only one I never considered might be my brain type and investigated).
Each brain type is laid out completely differently--it looks like the Explorer plans out things by time of day blocks. The Alchemist has a space to plan how I will share discoveries every day, which absolutely 100% makes my "flow" better
estimating how long things will take has helped me plan better
I find having to reflect on the previous week to gather weekly data to be a helpful practice, and the sparkly data part of that is totally a motivator.

Cons:
expensive af
given there is an integrated app, the data you get from it is uninteresting and not as manipulatable as the data scientist in me wants it to be
when I don't have a million different things to get done, I tend to just not use it because it's expensive and I don't want to waste the space
definitely not the only useful planning system I have ever used?

[brithistorian]

Thanks for answering me on this - especially given that you're at the end of thesis-writing! Best of luck with your defense.

I'm currently using a bullet journal for organization, with various other apps and supplements to handle the things that a bujo doesn't do well, but I'm always looking for new systems (or for parts of systems that I can steal and add to my current system).