Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

Year: 2017

  • I upgraded to the ASUS C101P

    Proprietary format device charges are the worst. My original ASUS Flip C100PA-DB01 Chromebook had a proprietary charger. Locating that charger became problematic today. The charger has gone missing. It cannot be located. That meant it was either time to buy a new charger or to buy the ASUS C101P and upgrade. Finding the right upgrade path was easy enough. The ASUS C101P has USB-C charging capabilities and that is enough to make things easier. I’m going to use this device for about a week and then write a review.

  • Writing for an hour at the end of the day

    Today was one of those slower days. During the course of my 2018 effort to write 1,000,000 words in a single year some days are going to be slower than others. Building a good sized lead will probably be the best strategy to ensure success. Over the last few days my weblog posts have been pretty constant. Throughout the month of December it will be important to take the time to set the stage for engaging in some major daily writing.

    Without question my writing policy for 2018 will have to be based on seizing every opportunity. My core writing time will be the hour before I go to bed. Throughout many years I engaged in writing at the end of the day. Sometimes it was on paper and most of the time it was on whatever computer i was using at the time. Getting back into the habit of writing was harder than i expected this time around. It was much easier to sit and watch television. That makes sense. Writing can be hard. Generating prose has to become almost a reflex to actively thinking.

    People seem to really like this company called B&H Photo. I spent some time looking at the ASUS Flip chromebook on the B&H website. I may set a halfway point goal and buy the ASUS Chromebook Flip C101PA-DB02 after reaching 500,000 words in 2018. That will probably happen at some point during the month of May. I wonder if this keyboard will end up wearing out. ASUS did not list a maximum number of keystrokes the flip was rated for in the manual.

  • The one where we went to Benihana

    We used to go to a restaurant called Hibachi. It was located within the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City. It may have been more formally known as the Hibachi-Japanese Steakhouse. More than a few birthdays during my formative years were spent at a now closed teppanyaki grill. The format is now ubiquitous and carbon copy restaurants exist all over the place. One of them that happens to have a franchise near me is Benihana.

    Tonight as I ordered spicy tofu as an entree it reminded me a lot of all the times we went to visit the Hibachi. Just down the street we had walked to a bookstore. It might have been a Border’s books I don’t exactly recall the name. I do recall eating at the Hibachi. It was a lot more about the experience of driving to the plaza area. Just getting in the car and driving toward downtown was an experience. It would inherently involve battling traffic and driving by very nice houses and even a museum. The entire process of getting to the plaza and parting was memorable.

    Shops and all sorts of other things were around the area. They even had some Kansas City’s famed fountains. That is one of those things where i know they were famous, but I never really appreciated them all that much. I think someplace in my office a polaroid photograph exists from one of the trips. For me all of those photos were taken before the advent of digital cameras. That might be way the entire experience remains so fresh in my memory.

  • The one about the time we went to see a reindeer

    We ended up going to the botanical garden today. They had put up lights and had two actual reindeer. I assume they were real reindeer, but obviously my lack of knowledge on the subject leaves the door open. At the very least, they were clearly labeled reindeer and everybody seems to go with it. Some of the lights on the trees were a little extreme. This one tree literally looked like it was completely covered in LED lights. It was a tall tree. The tree had to be about 100 feet tall. My next thoughts were about how they managed to run power cables throughout the botanical garden, but that kind of questioning is pretty much standard at this point.

    Our new puppy Captain Pickles is adjusting to life at our hours pretty well. Getting to know a new puppy is always interesting. Right now I’m watching the Ohio State vs. Wisconsin football game. This weekend was a pretty big weekend for college football. Major conference championship games were all scheduled for this weekend. That should have pretty much guaranteed a weekend full of really good competitive games. Things do not always work out that way. Certainly they could have worked out well, but this year has been a year of upsets and complications.

    Something has to give in 2018 with respect to the things covered within my writing. Moving toward my goal of sustaining a 3,000 word a day writing habit will pretty much guarantee some additional coverage of politics and public policy. I always figured that my political views are complex and therefore should be avoided in print. That very real self-censorship will have to give way to the need to write 3,000 words a day. Stepping up to end up writing over 1,000,000 words in a year will require just going with it and writing about whatever comes to mind. That probably means a lot more content about guitar pedals, sports trading cards, and random thoughts on encryption.

    Increasing my daily writing output will probably also put a strain on my proofreading skills. Most of the time that I engage in pure stream of consciousness style writing I leave the prose as written. I pretty much just remove all the red squiggles with spell check and move on to whatever is next on my agenda. Intellectually, I consider that practice of not adequately editing my work to be questionable. Given the sheer volume of my writing output I lost interest in editing my non academic writing some time ago. That probably happened over a decade ago. Sometimes I get motivated and edit my weblog posts, but some posts just get posted.

  • Battling a bunch of writing false starts

    Today is a day of false starts. That happens from time to time. Sometimes you end up writing and switching topics before they are complete.

    Here we go again chasing that illusive 3,000 word per day writing habit. Before you know it the year will be over. 2017 was a very striking year. I’m still surprised that we are 17 years passed the millennium. Watching the Stanford vs. USC PAC-12 championship game seemed like a good idea. We will see how it shapes up, but at the moment the game is not that competitive.

    Bravo shared a quick look at the next season of Top Chef. Year after year it seems that Top Chef is a show that I record and watch. Even during the years where I cut the cord and did not have cable I purchased the show online to watch. This season is based out of Colorado and that alone would kick my interest level up a notch. I’m guessing that one of the episodes will be devoted to whiskey.

    Writing while listening to music seems to work out well enough for me. Writing while watching television always seems to produce disjointed prose. Generating a false start mid paragraph is actually easier to do than you would think. A distraction could occur and stop the writing process. Sometimes a new idea will pop up and things will shift to an entirely new topics. That happens more often than you might expect.

    Setting up to write 3,000 words in a sitting could benefit from a small amount of prep work. Sometimes I find it beneficial to make a list of a few topics before jumping in to write. It might be a good idea to outline and plan a structure of what is about to be written, but that does not really happen. Only during the course of creating academic works do I utilize the outline and build framework.

    Really digging into a topic and writing about it requires a certain amount of intensity and attack. Things that inspire passion are probably going to receive more sustained attention. Some topics like what phone or Chromebook should be my next major purchase receive more attention than they deserve. It seems to be about one or two times a day that I spend a few minutes thinking about buying a new Chromebook or laptop. That has probably happened just about every day for almost 20 years.

    Over the last few days I have been really enjoying writing using Google Docs. I am not exactly sure how or why that happened, but it has certainly been the case. At one point, I had decided to write in one document and follow a book format. That idea seems to have faded away. It has been easier to simply open a new document each day and begin to tame the blank page. That pretty much means that my collection of writing is somewhat unstructured. Obviously, the content placed on the weblog has both marks for category and time.

  • The 3,000 word a day writing habit

    Maybe it was the city upon the hill that drew my attention. It was more or less a vision for contemplation that captured my attention. A lot of things will need to catch my attention to help spark a 3,000 word a day writing habit. That pretty much means that I need to sit down in front of the keyboard and dedicate a pure hour to the practice of writing. Just like somebody who practices the piano or guitar to improve their skills. The daily writing habit helps to improve writing skills.

    Most people do not willfully record and publish their piano or guitar practice sessions. Maybe the guitarist Buckethead is the exception. Brian seems to churn out albums at an unprecedented rate for a guitarist. To keep up with that type of prodigious creativity I would have to encourage and embrace my tendency to engage in stream of conscious writing. That is a relatively easy thing to accomplish.

    It works the same every time. You sit down and start to write. Whatever comes to mind is where you start. From that point in time you just focus on embracing the practice of writing and let the words take you forward. My general state of momentum helps me embrace striving forward. Focusing on the past and dwelling on things can be a part of being a reflective practitioner, but it has to be couched within a guiding principle that involves striving forward. Improving, learning, and refining strategy are all good things to do based on past results. Over thinking things and just remaining in the intellectual weeds of the past does not really benefit the future.

    Inherent within the struggle of striving forward is the next step. That step informed by the last but independent. Each step powered by good intentions. We tend to keep striving forward. To write 3,000 words per hours you have to pretty much surrender all reservations and just go with it. Writing for the sake of writing. Each impulse converted into words and plastered on the page. Making that happen involves just going. You pretty much have to let your mind focus on the task of writing and stay in that creative pocket for as long as you can.

    Distractions are pretty much inevitable. Life involves so many factors that push and pull on your time. Dedicating an hour a day to writing for the pure purpose of writing used to be something that was a part of my daily routine. Every night before going to bed a writing session would occur. Some of those sessions were much more productive than hours and that is ok. Sometimes gold pours out and sometimes it does not. Part of the process is striving forward and embracing the good days and trying to get as much out of the great days as a possible.

    Writing with citations and in a proper academic style typically takes longer. Some topics I can write about and cite as i got without picking up books. That harkens back to the time I spent writing and reading about civility and social capital. I remember the thrill of just finding a library shelf and reading every book related to the topic at hand. That type of reading is oddly satisfying. Understanding how different contributors to the academy took on challenging topics and how they dealt with them in print helped me understand topics in a deeper way.

    Some of my more satisfying writing sessions have involved writing either short stories or fiction chapters. It has been a long time since I had the time to sit down and just writing a story. Being in the habit of writing tends to help me produce a wide variety of different things. Focusing in on one topic for 3,000 words would really help ensure a great degree of depth vs. the breath introduced by jumping around from topic to topic. Reading disjointed prose probably won’t be fulfilling. It probably will not be fulfilling for the writer either.

    Taking the time to truly think about something in a deep and meaningful way can be fulfilling. For example, I could write about the rise and inevitable fall of the National Football League. That topic probably has enough ground to cover to fill several volumes of notebooks. A large portion of the population probably has an opinion on the subject. It would probably end up being somewhat controversial in parts based we just don’t agree on anything anymore. Spending the time to write about the nature of truth in general and just how hard it is to gain agreement anymore might be a better use of my time. That type of treatise about the nature of truth would be a great inquiry, but it would probably also be less readable.

  • A hard day to strive forward

    Tired enough. Getting tired happens from time to time. Today was one of those days that just did not ever really get all the way kicked off. It was a day that even espresso could not jump start. Sometimes those days yield interesting results. This is probably not one of those silver lining type of days where you learn something valuable and are better for it. Things happens. You move on. Today was a day that just stacks up with the other days you move on from.

    Sales came and went with Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year. Some Chromebooks did go on sale. None of those sales were enough to tempt me into replacing this ASUS Chromebook Flip model C100PA-DB01. This build is lacking in processing power and RAM. It really was not built to do anything intensive. It works great for writing and general internet browsing. Video sometimes work and sometimes it just lags and freezes. Build quality for this device was pretty good. A few of the screws on the bottom of the aluminum frame are damaged, but otherwise the whole unit is in good shape.

    Some time ago I covered the only webcam on my ASUS Flip with a piece of electrical tape. That seemed like a logical thing to do. I have no real need to use the video camera on my Chromebook. It would be a very awkward camera to use. Both my Google Pixel XL and my Pixel 2 XL have way better cameras. Most smartphones solid in 2017 have a better camera.

    Each day my writing projects have to grow beyond 500 words. That floor has to be the minimum standard for a writing session. Producing some type of video content has become a part of my daily routine. Day one of the vlog experiment started on December 17, 2016. We are quickly closing in on one full year of creating video content. Initially, I had thought about trying to make a video every day for 365 days straight. That did not happen. Seriously, that is actually really challenging to achieve. The folks that are able to generate dynamic and interesting daily content are both very creative and highly motivated.

    Both vlogging and live streaming are interesting. Most of the academic prose I generate is highly technical and only somewhat approachable. That is probably my fault to some degree. I know that writing informative and highly approachable prose is the way to go, but that can be challenging at times to achieve. Go figure. We all have to strive for a certain level of output. My personal challenge for 2018 will probably be to average 3,000 words per day. That would benchmark my 2018 writing output at about a million words. Somewhere in the middle of writing a million words in a year has to be something meaningful. Even it only happened on accident the effort would be worth the result.

    This paragraph will include the 500th word for the day. That pretty much means that between the start of this writing session and this point I would only be at 16% of my 2018 daily writing goal. Well to be completely accurate I would be 16.66% repeating of course. Writing at a cip of 3,000 words per day would require finding things that are worth writing about and aligning those to things that I am actually passionate about.

    Generating 3,000 words of pure stream of consciousness driven prose per day would be an interesting experiment. Prose resulting from such a daily ongoing grind would probably be highly disjointed. It would probably end up going in highly varied and somewhat chaotic directions. Daily writing can take on a kind of retrospective take on things. Stream of consciousness writing can really end up going in seemingly random directions.

  • Poorly executed prose can bewilder

    A little bit of a streak has started. Today marks the third day in a row executing my new writing plan. Writing generally begets writing. That is how it happens. Word after work things start to come together. However, poorly executed prose can bewilder reads. Sometimes the simple act of banging out a few pages will be enough to help push things toward a healthier trajectory. Getting back into the grove took for better or worse a wave of motivation. Getting back into a routine sometimes takes a lot of willpower.

    My willpower is being tested today. My Bose Qc35 headphones only have 20% battery left. Charging will probably have to happen tonight or tomorrow morning. For some reason my Google Pixel 2 XL phone dropped all my bluetooth pairings today. That was frustrating. It did highlight the lack of battery, but otherwise it was completely annoying. My phone sports the Android 8.1 beta edition. Up until tonight I have not seen any of the Pixel 2 XL random rebooting. It seems the update that came out today brought the joy of completely random rebooting. After plugging my phone into the charger it rebooted. That was odd, but not as odd as when pairing my Qc35 the phone rebooted a couple more times.

    Fortunately, things have stabilized for the moment. That is a good thing. Being a part of a software beta program is always going to present challenges. I have always been willing to beta test Windows operating systems and Android phones. Somehow those two things are probably related in some way, but I chalk it up to my need to chase the bleeding edge of technology. Today that edge involves a bunch of frustrating Google Pixel 2 XL random reboots.

  • We attended a Colorado Avalanche game

    We got to attend a Colorado Avalanche hockey game this weekend. Visiting the Pepsi Center in Denver is always an adventure. It is a reasonably fun and all around nice place to attend a sporting event. Throughout the entire event the people around us were very nice to use beyond simple civility.

    It seems like a long time ago that I first visited the Pepsi Center. That was back during the CU Boulder days. We ended up getting tickets outside the event right before the game. It was fun enough that it was memorable.

    Today seemed like a good day to spin up the Google Docs and do some writing. My goal for the moment is to write for the next thirty minutes without stopping. It seems that Google Docs is able to save my writing efforts in near real time. That pretty much means that the hardware could fail at anytime and my words would live on in the Google Docs cloud. Things like that seem pretty straightforward now, but they are rather increible compared to a decade ago.

    Writing today will be occurring to an epic soundtrack. It is far too late for coffee, but it is just the right time of day to listen to the 2017 album New Millennium from the band Dream Theater. The album has the subtitle, “The Classic Broadcast 1999/Live Recording.” It might be my favorite album of 2017. Buying vinyl records continues to be one of my hobbies. I almost wrote habits, but changed out the word to hobbies. Maybe habits is a better description. It was a phrasing that seemed a little off to me at the time. Hobbies are important. A small stack of my paintings exist in the basement. Recently my myriad of hobbies has streamlined into collecting: vinyl records, sports trading cards, and guitar pedals.

    Collecting sports trading cards has been a part of my routines since the early 90’s. Sure that might seem like a long time ago. It really does feel like a long time ago. You could literally say it was not even this millennium and be accurate. Writing about writing might be less than interesting, but writing about hobbies could fall right into that same categories. My interest in sports trading cards probably involves a mix of nostalgia and my interest in statistics. Each card really is a snapshot. Sports trading cards capture a moment.

  • We write the ballads of our time

    Within the realms of my imagination writing remains one of the noblest pursuits. Maybe within the harsh light our reality writing would not be considered noble. That question does not need to be debated at the moment. Like most days recently my interests have been focused on recovering from a cold. One of the insights that occurred during my sleepless nights was a rather simple observation. I realized that it might be time to return to writing in the original style of this functional journal. A style of writing that involves my observations and a little bit of information about my day.

    For better or worse the fine art of noodling on a page needs to be a large part of my day. That will have to involve spending more time writing. More or less it will involve producing prose just like this on a series of different days and posting it online. Thinking about writing opens the door to looking at Chromebooks online. My original ASUS Flip works just fine. I know that it works just fine, but for some reason I keep wanting to replace it with a newer model. That endless search for new technology always seems to be a part of my process. It always seems to happen.

    Writing academic papers and making academic contributions should really take up more of my time. That is something that gets easier and easier to ignore every year. A seemingly relentless need to write strikes me from time to time. During that window I have to produce something useful. That does not always happen. Sometimes distractions slow me down or sometimes my attention gets focused on something that simply does not deliver. My new strategy to avoid false starts and to otherwise lean into them involves dragging my Chromebook around with me to write within a moment of notice.