Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Month: November 2017

  • 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.