Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Month: December 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.