Weeknotes 7/17

Continued REM - wake transition research

This is my independent research on using biomarkers to predict arousals from REM before they happen.

My goal this week was to collect data every night, starting Sunday.

Collected data on:

• ✅ Sunday Night
• 🟡 Monday Night (Computer turned off for a software update)
• 🟡 Tuesday Night (Computer turned off because it wasn’t plugged in)
• ✅ Wednesday Night
• 🟡 Thursday Night (Again, left the computer unplugged 😭! But I woke up and plugged my computer back in. But EMG 1 moved and EMG 2 was pulled out!)

So many misfires 😭!

My skin broke out from electrode glue 😭!

I stopped Friday. My skin needed a break. I had painful acne and a dry red spot where the electrodes were. I need to figure out how to not irritate my skin.

I also analyzed some of the data and made some updates to my lab code.

Here I am pretending to fix something for the camera after I already fixed it.

New lab experiment post: Testing psychic abilities in dreams

New blog post with Dr. Karen Konkoly on one of our telepathy/psychic experiments.

Continued lucid dream AI data labeling pipeline

I worked more on the data pipeline for Daniel Morris’s (Northwestern) galantamine study.

My AI pipeline kept freezing when opening Matlab and sleepSMG, so I finally built my own GUI for the sleep-scored files to replace sleepSMG. Hopefully I can move past this pipeline nonsense!

I would have been done organizing the data a long time ago if I’d just done it manually, but I thought it would be more efficient if I automated the data labeling 🙃. Regardless, I wanted to learn about designing AI pipelines.

Worked on my financial ledger

I once used a SaaS that provided a financial ledger for payment orchestration.

The SaaS made critical accounting errors that resulted in huge financial losses.

For example, one day we owed $40k to a few hundred global contractors. However, the ledger made an error that doubled those funds. This allowed the contractors to automatically pay themselves $40k extra of my own money.

Luckily, suspecting the SaaS was incompetent, I had already taken precautions and was able to recover and limit those losses. Had I not, those losses would have been 10x — hundreds of thousands of dollars daily. Imagine trying to recover those funds from thousands of contractors all over the world.

Sometimes software isn’t scary, but when it reflects real money it’s terrifying. This experience made me both intimidated by and interested in building my own ledger. It feels necessary if I ever need a ledger in the future, since there doesn’t seem to be a trustworthy service.

I worked on building my ledger this week.

Met with a medium, professor, engineer

The medium who I wanted to meet with last week ended up being a professor, serial entrepreneur, and engineer. Interesting person. We are going to meet again.

I’m realizing that if I’m not social I get a bit down. I can get carried away being alone, working on projects for long periods of time. Maybe I should set a goal for a certain amount of socializing per week.

Codex isn’t as bad as I thought

I started using Codex when I ran out of Claude tokens, since I’m already paying for ChatGPT. It’s so different from when I last used it. Better than I expected.

Question I’m pondering: Am I too judgmental?

Is judging ourselves and others ever good? Ever bad?

Helped a friend with their startup

I like to donate my time to help people with their startups. It helps me connect with others, give back, and learn about other industries. A friend wanted to know if I’d partner with them. I said to instead reach out to me for free advising. They didn’t use much of my time, which ended up being good because I felt myself wanting to focus on my projects. I think I’d get more from shadowing someone, but I don’t know if that would be mutually beneficial.

Started writing a post to help sell my property

I started writing a blog post about how I picked my lot in Costa Rica. It’s informative but also serves as an SEO/GEO post to sell my property.

Cleaned 30m/week with spouse

For the last few weeks, my spouse and I implemented weekly 30 minute cleaning sessions. We are both messy. We used to do 2 hour sessions once every few weeks. This is better.

Practiced Spanish and Thai

I don’t want to oversell this- I know very little Spanish and no Thai. But this week I tried to replace some of my entertainment time with content around learning Thai and Spanish. Spanish because I travel to so many places that speak Spanish. Thai because Thailand is cheap and beautiful. It might be high ROI to know Thai.

However, I often feel there’s no point in learning languages since we can translate everything. I wish everyone would just pick one language and learn it. I thought I’d at least try to learn to read Thai, since that would help with translating. I’ll probably give up on this soon…

Overall

Doing these weeknotes helps me see that I do a lot in a week, though I didn’t know how much to include or leave out. I felt motivated to do more knowing I would talk about it in my weeknotes.

Rereading this now, I’m wondering if I need to focus more — I’m not sure I got enough done. It seems like I touched a lot of projects, yet didn’t progress far in many.