Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Month: October 2017

  • These words get going again

    Rambling. Even before the start these words were going to be rambling. These words being written today got going just in time to write. Today started off slowly. It was one of those days that just does not click. Maybe it was recovering from a slight back strain or just a poor night of sleep. Whatever the cause might have been things did not get going the way they should have to start the week off. That happens from time to time, but it cannot become the routine or things just end up being unpleasant.

    Still rambling on. I’m listening to Monday night football on my Chromebook. The Denver Broncos are playing the Kansas City Chiefs at Arrowhead. Opening the game in one Chrome tab and writing in another seemed to make sense. It seems like I can do more and more with my Chromebook. That has been working out in my favor. The whole writing thing for better or worse is about spending time engaging in the practice of writing.

    My goal for tonight was to sit down and just write for 30 minutes straight without stopping, pausing, or reconsidering the nature of my efforts. I picked up a Boss Metal Zone M-2 guitar effects pedal from an eBay auction. At some point, I may have owned one of these pedals before. For some reason that is something that I cannot exactly remember. A long time ago, my original guitar setup was flooded out in a Kansas basement. All of the gear got wet and simply did not make it based on a combination of mold and water damage.

    It seemed like a good idea after moving a couple of years back to get a small Marshall amplification stack for my office. A small head unit connects to two smaller speaker cabinets. In terms of a guitar amplification setup it delivers a nice warm clean tone that is ready for guitar pedals. Next week at some point it will be delivering the sounds of a guitar and a Boss Metal Zone M-2 guitar pedal.

  • Thinking about my next Chromebook

    My current ASUS chromebook flip works just fine. It was ordered back on January 16, 2016. That seems like a long time ago. It might not really be that long depending on your perspective. Technology always seems to change so rapidly. For what it is worth the new ASUS Chromebook Flip C101PA looks like a strong contender to be my next Chromebook. Within the new design the Chromebook received USB Type C. That is good news for mobile charging enthusiasts. That one selling point is probably good enough to make me want to upgrade.

    Buying this Chromebook was about renewing my commitment to writing. Traveling was at the time a huge part of my life. On airplanes this Chromebook worked out well enough. It had enough battery life and pretty much supported my writing needs. I’m still not totally happy with either Google docs or the version of Microsoft Word Online that Chromebook users get. In terms of a pure writing experience, I just need something with a reasonably good spell checker and the ability to save to the cloud. For some reason, those two fundamental criteria should be enough to move forward and engage in the act of writing. They are not in the end the things that seem to help drive my writing efforts forward.

    Most of the writing that I have done throughout the last 20 years has been stream of consciousness related. I sit down and wrestle with the blank page or more realistically the blank screen. It ends up being a way to think about complex topics and to just engage in the act of writing. Most of the time I crank up some music and just spend some time with my thoughts. That is a process that has worked well enough and has helped me move things forward. Getting into the habit of spending 30 minutes a day writing is a great way to organize your thoughts. Sometimes I end up writing useful and pithy prose and other times things just end up a garbled mess. 20 years ago I would just hit publish and move on from my writing efforts at the end of each writing session.

    Over the last couple of years, I have stopped just publishing unedited prose. That policy may or may not be the best method to move forward with things. It does mean that I have a ton of word processing files that contain oddly unedited false starts. People who want to know more about writing an article or writing a book should just sit down and sketch out a short article. They should take the time to write out a draft. That is really what separates thinking about the process of writing and just writing.

    Art is art. That pretty much spells out the answer to the previous question. Striking a cord and producing outstanding and meaningful prose starts with the act of writing. Naturally, some of your efforts will be better than others. Separating out my lesser work form my best efforts is easy enough, but that does not take away from the noblest intentions of my original efforts. That noble effort is to just engage in the practice of writing.

  • Working on one thing into the next

    Opportunities abound. We elect to turn most of them down on a daily basis. My theory on working on one thing into the next is rather simple. I focus on being positive and moving forward. Within that general focus I recognize that we have the opportunity to pick up different things and work on them. That chance to decide what to do next is very important. It might be watching Jim Carrey in the 2008 film Yes Man or it could be reading about the life and times of famed mathematician Paul Erdos. Either way the protagonist moved from one thing to the next. One of them with more of a purpose. Motivation remains a hard topic to address. For most people it changes from day to day and potentially from moment to moment. I tend to think about wanting to make a lasting contribution to the academy as something that has motivated me to push things forward. That is probably why i have spent so much time learning and writing over the last two decades.

  • These are the days that inspire words

    More thoughts are happening than words these days. I ended up reading this post by Seth Godin. Somehow reading that blog post is probably Om’s fault. It was enough to spark my interest in typing up a few words tonight. That is really all it takes to start the writing process. A small amount of fuel is enough to stoke the writing fire for hours or in this case a few minutes. The screen brightness on this Chromebook has been turned down. Star Trek discovery has been watched and all excuses are pretty much off the table at this point.

    So much is happening in the world these days that we really have no excuse not to write. Each day the intersection of technology and modernity becomes clearer. That along should be enough to get things going. Civil society has broken down in ways that were both expected and at the same time apparently unavoidable. Warnings were placed. People engaged in grand thought experiments about the very fabric of our democracy. Warnings and thoughts mixed together and produced a myriad of results. All of that built the foundations of where we are right now at this point in time. A point in time that pretty much compels us to write. We are compelled to put words to the page.