As of a week ago, I have developed two daily habits to reclaim my life from a distracting digital world:

• meditation in the morning, before breakfast
• shutting down my computer at home in the evening two hours before going to bed

Meditation

The meditation habit is one I have wanted to develop for years now, but had not. Before around 2007, I was meditating every day for a year or two, but then I fell off the practice, and eventually stopped for long periods of time, and then just a year ago, thanks to a weekly meditation practice set up at Carnegie Mellon University, I began attending that (and Abby started meditating for the first time then).

I always felt guilty during the entire past year when noting that I wasn’t regularly meditating at home. I knew that “I’m too tired” or “I don’t have time” are never valid excuses to avoid doing something one feels one “should” do. Those excuses almost always mean that something has gone wrong with priorities.

The fact is, I was caught up with a huge number of projects, and became more and more unbalanced, especially when I lost the CMU practice for two months since it was no longer happening (thanks to the CMU academic calendar).

Last week, Abby and I decided that we would meditate in the morning before breakfast, and keep it at ten minutes. Who doesn’t have ten minutes in a day, especially for something that, for me, gives me benefits that last the entire day? So we’ve established this new routine.

More on the morning routine

In conjunction with the new meditation routine, I also decided that I would not check email or the Web generally until after meditation, and unless there was an emergency, I would not deal with email until after breakfast.

Also, I have decided to significantly reduce reading the Web (through my blog subscriptions or Twitter feed) in the morning, so that I keep my morning focused. Now I’ll check the Web mostly at lunch time.

Evening information diet

Furthermore, I have cut out a good bit of computer time from my evening also, in order to promote better sleep as well as doing other things, such as reading paper (gasp!) books.

This has been a difficult cut, but I have managed so far, and yes, there have been repercussions. I have been doing less blog writing (because that happens on the computer), less Web reading, less tweeting. I have a large backlog of interesting Web articles that I’ve simply bookmarked without reading, and I have to confess that I’m not happy about this situation.

Conclusion

I have yet to figure out the best balance to achieve in this digital age given my thirst for fresh ideas and information that are so easy to come by online, but I know for sure that I do not want to sacrifice essential calmness, exercise, sleep, and social time for the sake of addictive information overload that in the long run is not as beneficial as one might hope. What do I really need to know about? And how much of it can I apply? And even given that I have received much of value online, what is the opportunity cost of not using the time spent online on pursuits off-line? These are very hard questions for me to answer, so I’m taking my information diet one step at a time.

I have not written about my flute activities since a month ago, but that’s not for lack of action: in fact, I’ve been spending a lot of time on the flute, at the expense of other personal projects, including writing.

Two months ago, I mentioned that I was considering joining the Carnegie Mellon All-University Orchestra, which I claimed was “not very good” and that “I don’t have to be super good to be a part of it.” I take back those comments.

I joined the CMU AUO two Sundays ago, attending the first rehearsal then, and it was one of the most frightening experiences in my entire life. I almost left before even entering the rehearsal room. But I went in, stayed for the two and a half hours, and last Sunday, I went to the second rehearsal.

Let me put it this way: at the first rehearsal, there were about ten flutes and one piccolo in the flute section. At the second rehearsal, we are down to four flutes and one piccolo. I hope that we don’t lose any more flutes at the next rehearsal. OK, maybe some students happened to be busy and will be returning. Or maybe some of them had the same reaction that I had: absolute terror.

Let me explain.

Recently, my neighbor gave me a Liebster Blog Award. This is actually my second one, but I had not yet claimed the first one, under the rules of acceptance of the award. I’ve had difficulty finding the origin of this award and the official documentation of the award, but from what I can tell, the rules are that I must give the award to five other bloggers who have fewer than 200 followers:

• Thank the giver and link back to the blogger who gave it to you.
• Reveal your top five picks and let them know by leaving a comment on their blog.
• Copy and paste the award on your blog.
• Have faith that your followers will spread the love too!

So here goes, starting with identifying the two people who gave me the award:

Yesterday, Abby and I finished the third and final session of “A Garden Primer”, a basic course on organic gardening offered by Grow Pittsburgh. We took this course because we would like to start our own little urban garden.

As an utter beginner with no experience, I thought the course was a very useful and friendly introduction to organic gardening.

In the past couple of months, I’ve made some large changes in my diet. Fundamentally, I’ve moved in a paleo direction. The largest change was breakfast, where I completely gave up my old breakfast and replaced it. After some experimentation, I’ve finally arrived at a breakfast template that seems optimal for me (as gauged by my morning energy level and other criteria I discuss below).

As an example, here is what I ate this morning:

The ingredients, and what has changed, and why:

On Saturday, Abby and I went for the first time to the latest meeting of a local French traditional social dance workshop and dance here in Pittsburgh.

It was a lot of fun!

Today, I was very sad to see a news article Children’s science questions “stump many parents”. I was not sad for any of the following reasons:

• Oh no, kids these days are receiving a poor science education!
• Oh no, the parents received a poor science education when they were young!

I was sad because of many of the parents’ reactions to their children’s questions:

…16% told their children to ask their partner and a fifth made up a response or pretended that no one knew the answer.

What are some better alternative responses?

Some months ago, when the legendary computer scientist John McCarthy died, I wrote a blog post in which I briefly reminisced about the way I hated computer programming before I came to love it. Today I am filling in some more details about how school (elementary school through college) made me fear, misunderstand, and hate computer science and programming. I am inspired to do this because

• Just a few weeks ago, I came across an old article from 1992 by someone who had a similar experience, and I wanted to complete my story. Although my story also goes back more than two decades, I feel that the same fundamental stumbling blocks exist to the universal computational competence that I now advocate.
• The topic of learning “coding” has exploded into the popular media, with hundreds of thousands of people having signed up for Code Year and even New York Mayor Bloomberg stating that he has signed up for the free Codecademy online tutorial courses.

My goals in telling my story:

• I want to raise awareness among those who might this year be jumping into “coding” that they might encounter the same kinds of stumbling blocks that discouraged me at first, so that they don’t prematurely jump to such conclusions as “programming is boring and confusing” or “programming requires special talent I don’t have”.
• I want for educators to take note of the barriers facing students who may not be “naturals” to understanding computation or writing computer programs in the context of currently common programming environments.

In a forthcoming article, I will engage in a severe critique of the Codeacademy lessons I have so far examined and gone through, while helping my wife learn programming from scratch.

Yesterday I wrote about my experience with completing, in fall 2011, the free online Stanford course Introduction to Databases. Today I am writing about my experience with completing Machine Learning.

This course was different in many important ways from the databases course.

In October 2011, Stanford University broke new ground by offering three free online computer science courses:

• Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
• Introduction to Databases
• Machine Learning

Curious, I signed up for all three of the courses, since I had never taken a course in any of these three subjects.

Because I was not enjoying the AI course and did not expect to find it so useful, I dropped it after completing all the assignments in the first week or two.

Here I report on the databases course. I will follow up with a report on the machine learning course.