Helped my wife as she delivered our child (well, a maternity nurse also participated).

(relevant link)

I've been running a hobby project that's prestigious within my subsubculture, and it became clear that one of the four other people I'd recruited was a bad fit for the job. I convinced him to leave without wounding anyone's feelings, and we're all still on great terms. I'm assigning myself points for (text-based) social skills and for picking awesome friends.

I started writing fiction (well, fanfic) again, including a horror sequence that quite upset my beta reader. I used to assume, when I was younger, that I could only write non-fiction, because I wasn't the kind of person who could flesh out a character or engage a reader about people instead of just ideas.

After using the same terrible, creaky, heavy bicycle for two years because it was free, I finally bought a decent bike. The search process was much less painful than I'd been expecting, and I can go up hills now without having to get off and walk.

I've also started a habit of going for a walk every morning, no exceptions, which seems to be improving my happiness already.

Two entries for me. 1) Got a new job that's actually in my field. (Finally, after five years of looking) 2) Found a girl who's as big of a nerd as I am, and started dating her. Things are going really well so far, easily better than any past relationship.

Many individual changes, several of them big and important in their own right (see my Meta thread comment ), but the big one is just keeping track of things I want to do, portioning out ambitious goals to hit for particular days, managing to hit all or most of these, reviewing why I couldn't hit them all when I didn't and doing a weekly review of which of the bigger goals I should attempt to tackle over the week ahead.

For example, I've hit the income threshold where it's cheaper for me to have private health insurance than not, so that was put on my list of things to do after finishing moving to Sydney, pulled off once I was set up, turned into goals over a few days of finding out more information in general, researching specific plans, picking one, and signing up for it. Each of these was just one bullet point of several on my list to accomplish for that day.

I've gone from being somewhat bored at home, casting around for videogames that inspired me to actually play them, about 3 months ago, to being occupied up until I go to bed every night of the week working on longer term projects for myself.

I donated to the Against Malaria Foundation, which is GiveWell's top charity.

Here is a link for those who wish to do likewise:

http://www.againstmalaria.com/

I built an aquarium that is, by observation, a sufficiently stable ecosystem that it can go without maintenance for a month with no apparent degradation.

Also I convinced a fire eel to curl up in my hand while waiting for earthworms.

I turned in my PhD dissertation. Here's the title and first paragraph of the abstract:

PRODUCTIVE VISION: METHODS FOR AUTOMATED IMAGE COMPREHENSION

Image comprehension is the ability to summarize, translate, and answer basic questions about images. Using original techniques for scene object parsing, material labeling, and activity recognition, a system can gather information about the objects and actions in a scene. When this information is integrated into a deep knowledge base capable of inference, the system becomes capable of performing tasks that, when performed by students, are considered by educators to demonstrate comprehension.

(Basically it is computer vision combined with Cyc.)

Got my dissertation proposal approved.

First paragraph: This dissertation continues the tradition of identifying the unintended consequences of the US health insurance system. Its main contribution is to estimate the size of the distortions caused by the employer-based system and regulations intended to fix it, while using methods that are more novel and appropriate than those of previous work.

I finished the Super Spartan Virginia race. Veterans of other similar contests said this was the most insanely grueling course they'd ever seen. There was very little running involved, because the only flat areas were near the obstacle challenges. Everything else was either long hikes up ~30 degree slopes or scaling mud-slicked rocks/woods, alternating with trying not die by impalement descending similar terrain or 45-degree slopes. Sometimes carrying logs around with you, etc. All of my limbs are currently covered in lacerations and contusions. (I'... (read more)

Someone was having trouble finding good resources for learning Nemeth (the braille format specialized for mathematics); ancient books, programs only available on 3.5floppies, screen reader unfriendly unicode tables, etc. So I wrote a quick guide in roughly half an hour that, according to the person needing such a guide, is actually pretty useful. If I want to go into bragging mode, I seem to have single-handedly half-assed Nemeth into the twenty-first century. (This reenforces my idea that a blindness organization that's actually based out of the 21st cent... (read more)