Over the last week, my wife and I chose to turn off the alarm clock and wake up when our bodies naturally woke up in the morning. Partly this was due to a more relaxed schedule for me at work, and also because we had some inconsistent evenings with later bedtimes. This unplanned “experiment” started out innocently at first, when we genuinely forget to turn on the alarm clock on Sunday night, but deliberately choose to keep it off for the rest of the week… because, why not?

Earlier this week I discovered a new album on Apple Music called American Dream, by Norwegian composer Thomas Bergersen. It has turned out to be pretty good “background music” for listening at work, especially during more focused sessions of writing or programming (which I’ve been doing more over the past few days). The music sounds much like a “film soundtrack” but turns out to be a great classical-style symphonic suite.

The last time I preached a sermon for our church, it was on the topic of Satan’s attacks against the believers. The two main areas I covered were:

1. Satan’s role in deceiving those who would otherwise believe the gospel
2. Satan’s accusations against the saints

Interestingly, this week I was listening to the Solid Joys devotional while riding my bike into work, and I got a clearer picture of one of the accusations that Satan uses against believers.

I recently came across an older Wired article from last year by Katie Hafner that describes something I experienced in the last five years. Katie describes her problem as “episodic partial attention”, something that she brought on herself by allowing electronics (primarily her iPhone) to keep her in a state of constant distraction.

Over the last few months, I’ve enjoyed digging into automation technologies and finding new ways to shortcut common tasks, or blaze the trail to solve an unsolved problem I wish I could figure out. One way to do this is with a published application programming interface (API), which is essentially a specific way for programmers and computers to interact with a system or piece of software.