Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Month: February 2018

  • Day 59 the one where my new Casper pillow arrived

    2018: Day 59 the one where my new Casper pillow arrived
    Word count 137,371 + 2,027 or 139,398 of 1,000,000

    Dear Reader,

    It was about a year ago that we got a new Casper mattress. They sent me a reward code and now I have a brand new Casper king sized pillow. Oddly enough that is something that I have been wanting. I did not need a new pillow, but I wanted one. They were just priced out of my spending target window for a pillow. In this case with a reward code it seemed now was the time. It looks like a pretty decent pillow and I’m waiting to see how it works out. That test is going to have to wait until this blog post is complete. It is late in the day. My writing efforts did not start out the way they were planned. That now seemingly elusive morning writing session is just not happening. Things just keep getting in the way. I know that the power of my stop doing list has to empower me to capture the things that are import to me and discard the rest. Sure that is easy enough to write and easy enough to consider. It is harder to make happen in practice than you might expert. Tiny tasks bring a certain tyranny to your day. You can feel busy and feel like you are accomplishing something.

    It is like the folks that confuse meetings with work. Both action and inaction are valid courses to traverse along the journey. Meetings are not a journey. Nobody ever woke up and wanted to have some meetings along the way to that perfect possible future. That makes sense. It might take you just a minute to get to that point, but it will make sense at some point. Writing is not really something that I consider to be work. It is a part of the journey. A journey that is set to span every day of this year. It is a true inquiry into where I am right now and where I am going. The process of writing 3,000 words per day is about so much more than the simple act of writing. Having a big year and writing 1,000,000 words is about bringing everything together to reach a point of pure exhaustion. A point of exhaustion emotionally, creatively, and probably physically.

    That is the journey that I am on at the moment. It is day 59 of that 365 day journey. From start to finish the journey is just getting started. Our path toward a perfect possible future is also just getting started. We look back on civil society with a degree of nostalgia. Things change at a rapid pace. All of the ways that people interact and the things that hold us together seem to be changing rapidly as well. Some of that has to do with social media and the loose affiliations and connections that are sustained within those digital environments. I like to think that more than participation in the economic system binds us together. Society has a certain social fabric that binds us together in ways that we are better off together than apart. Some of those arguments are getting harder and harder to make. Sometimes the arguments about people building digital echo chambers of like minded networks can make me wonder. All of that wondering has never really lead me down a path to finding or figuring out a pure solution.

    Maybe I just need to join a bowling league and some fraternal organizations to capture a little bit of the that past nostalgia in the present. I’m pretty certain that will not be all that satisfying. Our methods and choices for participation have changed. We have so many choices for how we want to spend our time that even cataloging all of them would be a choice. That does not necessarily help us and in some ways it pulls us apart, but brings us together into very engaged micro-networks of folks forming elements of what would have been larger communities of place, circumstance, and interest. I’m old enough to remember how all of the strange AOL chat rooms connected people who had common interests that would not have ever known each other. Some of those stories are touching and I’m sure positive. A lot of them are either passingly forgettable or veered in another more negative way. I’m pretty sure that the arrival of my new Casper pillow can only lead to good outcomes. At least I have that going for me this evening.

    Topic 1: Writing research papers

    Today was an important day. Maybe it was a true turning point in my research paper writing career. I’m going to abandon all of my current research papers. They are all getting written off as false starts. I’m going back to my old writing methods. This time around I’m probably not going to literally set up three manilla folders to fold the paper outlines. In case you were wondering, I almost typed vanilla folders and then laughed for a second and changed out the word to manilla. The idea is pretty simple. Take the three best ideas for a research paper I can think of and sketch them out before starting to work on a digital version of them. That used to work for me very well. I have all sorts of idea books full of all sorts of sketches. Some of them including finished products and some of them including epic false starts that never really went anywhere. That is where this needs to go tomorrow. I need to get back in the habit of throwing caution to the wind and just sketching out anything that catches my attention. One of those topics will spark something in terms of my motivation and it will drive me with a near single minded purpose to produce research papers.

    2018 has to be the year of publishing and in some ways that has to be related to this journey toward writing 1,000,000 words in the same year. Some of those words need to be targeted toward writing research papers. I may need to just sketch out papers in blog posts and drop all guards or reservations (self-censorship) to just post things that are in progress. That is certainly one way to go about moving forward and writing at an epic pace. Maybe putting together some high quality research papers is the right direction for me at this moment in time. My interests have really moved from researching electronic government and other public policy questions related to automated data collection to artificial intelligence. This year throughout these 59 weblog posts I have not jumped into the deep end of the world of artificial intelligence. You might think that is something that I should have figured out before day 59, but alas that just did not happen. On the brighter side of things it did happen.

    The name of the game is publishing and winning the game usually is evaluated in terms of writing and publishing 3 papers a year. Last year I fell short and my curriculum vitae has a gap. The only way to fix it is to demonstrate a pattern of academic contribution. In other words, the best method to fix the gap is to return to publishing papers every year and to sustain that effort. Making a sustained contribution to the academy seems like a good goal. It seems like a goal that is acceptable and has a purpose. That purpose is to help advance things toward that perfect possible future. The goal itself cannot be the self-sustaining cycle of publishing to add to the pile. Just expanding the pile without advancing our understanding is actually counterproductive it makes the totality of the academy harder to decipher and interpret. A lot of publications that make it through peer review are not really all that substantive. Just like the tyranny of tiny tasks can make people feel busy without really accomplishing anything some publications are just words that do not make a substantial contribution.

    Writing and publishing in a blog style format is about the process of writing. I do not set out each day to make a contribution to the academy by posting words online. Maybe that is a mistake on my part and every day I should sit down and only writing things that make a contribution to our overall level of knowledge. That is probably not a sustainable model for me as a writer. I tend to write out loud and a blog style format is pretty much perfect for that type of musing. That does not mean that blogging is the only style of writing that I will engage in each day. Part of my day can be spent writing a little bit of a research paper. That will be one way to go about changing things up.

    Topic 2: All of this writing is about the journey

    Maybe we move further and further away from discipline. Maybe we are moving more and more toward instinct. That could very well be the case. All of this writing is about the journey. That is why we are here. That is what is happening. This journey is for better or worse about the journey. Taking each step and moving forward. I’m back to listening to an audiobook on Google Play Books and writing. Things are quiet tonight. Maybe listening to audiobooks is not the best strategy for writing long form prose. My word output seems to be better during the course of listening to music at night. You may recall from earlier this year that I do not like silence of working in silence. For the most part I keep multiple things going at a time. That is how I elect to go about things. The other day I tried to work in absolute silence. It just did not work well. Maybe I just prefer to keep moving. Last night I fell asleep in the middle of a chapter and I should have rolled back a few minutes in the audiobook. I have read this book a number of times and did not have to rewind it.

    Maybe I should go back to listening to the rest of that top 100 alternative rock songs playlist. That could be a good thing to do tonight. I’m not sure that is what is going to happen. Tonight may just be a night of typing slowing and listening to an audiobook. Getting to 3,000 words should be enough to make sleeping with my head on this new Casper pillow a little bit more satisfying. Tomorrow I’ll provide a full report based on a full night of sleep. Oh —- this book pulled me into that last chapter. I just lost a few minutes of writing time. The voice actors did a pretty good job on that last little bit. I stopped writing for just a bit and focused in on what I was hearing. At the moment, I’m not interested in giving up my audiobook. Even trying to take a photograph of my Casper pillow box was a challenge. The thumbnail turned out ok. It is attached to this blog post.

    Topic 3: Rounding out the night

    My replacement of breakfast and lunch with Soylent is still going strong. It has been a lot easier of a diet than I thought that it would be. Soylent is vegan based on the ingredients. That pretty much means that my diet is 2/3 vegan and 1/3 vegetarian at the moment. Tomorrow my diet is going to include some popcorn. That should be interesting. I am a fan of popcorn and movies. Suspending all disbelieving and watching a movie is an interesting thing to do. That is pretty much where my interests for tomorrow are going. I have not figured out what other efforts are going to occur tomorrow. This post right now has hit 2,000 words and that is a good start. It is not really a full blog post. I’m not sure that making it to 3,000 words is going to happen tonight.

    Dr. Nels Lindahl
    Broomfield, Colorado
    Written on my Storm Stryker PC and or my ASUS C101P using Google Docs

  • Day 58 the one where I wondered about wonder

    2018: Day 58 the one where I wondered about wonder
    Word count 136,538 + 1,183 or 137,371 of 1,000,000

    Dear Reader,

    Today you are going to get to see that thumbnail of my Microsoft Universal Bluetooth Keyboard. I know you have been wondering about that thing for the last 24 hours. A new class of compain laptops is coming out that pretty much use your phone to drive them. This class of technology is interesting. Imagine a battery, keyboard, and screen combo that need to connect to your phone to do anything. It is an interesting concept. Oddly enough I have gotten very used to typing on this keyboard attached my ASUS Chromebook Flip C101P device. The keyboard is not epic or anything, but I have gotten used to it and that is all that really counts. Writing and being comfortable during the writing process is the name of the game at this point. That is how things are supposed to go each day for about 3,000 words. You can imagine that looking at this class of smartphone powered laptops ate up some of my time today.

    Time is words. Writing words takes time. These are things that happen. They make sence I assure you. Tonight I’m back to listening to a playlist called “100 Greatest ‘90s Alternative Songs.” Maybe I need to find a new playlist or maybe that one will do for tonight. Today was almost a Warren Zevon type of day, but I was able to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat and muddle through to this moment here and now. This moment of peaceful reflection as things are winding down and I’m getting ready for bed. This writing session is going to have to grind out a number of words. I’m targeting writing 3,000 words tonight. It is time to get back on track and write a normal blog post tonight. That is going to require a little bit of focus and a little bit of luck. In terms of you luck you might be wondering how that applies. It really just applied to the amount of potential disruption that would stop me from finishing out my writing assignment for the night.

    We had one little burp in internet service tonight. Pretty much everything in the else lost connection at the same time. I have no idea how or why that happened, but it totally disrupted everything that was running. Canceling cable was pretty easy to do thanks to the advent of streaming video and the choices it presents. Any internet outage pretty much renders that plan useless and forces me to revert to watching whatever is on over the air broadcast television. The title of the blog post for today is related to wondering about wonder. That is an epic use of the imagination. Imagine taking a bucket full of wonder and excitement and just doubling it by wondering about the bucket of wonder. You can imagine that this analogy could go on for hundreds of words. I’m not going to let that happen. That seems tedious. I’m pretty much just going to abandon that one and move on to the next paragraph.

    All of that and this blog post is only at 500 words for the night. Getting to the 3,000 word benchmark might not be happening. That seems unfortunate. I just need to pick a topic and get to writing or at least focus in on a really solid narrative thread to drive an hour or so of stream of consciousness writing. Musings along may not get this blog post to the finish line. It is going to take a little bit of effort and some focus on getting back into the habit of writing long form prose. My distraction level has been pretty high as of late. Most anything can pull my attention away from the 2 to 3 things that I’m working on at any given time. It used to be that digging down deep and working with a single minded purpose was one of the easier things to do. Things change and as they change we introduce more and complexity into our lives. That is the basis of how things drop into my focus and receive consideration.

    One of the things that really breaks my writing rhythm is constantly spell checking after every sentence of paragraph. I need to focus on just executing one spell check at the very end of the writing process. That is easier said than done. I apparently really like to hit the spell check button in Google Docs. My efforts to write on a Chromebook have worked out well enough this year. They could have been better I guess. Maybe one of the new Google Pixelbook, but that is probably not the case. This Chromebook I am using right now can be purchased for $249.99 at most major retailers. It is not an expensive device, but it works out well enough and it helps me work on my grant writing plan. At my current pace, I’m not going to get to 1,000,000 words in the same year. That means that my big year will not in fact be big and my efforts will have failed. That is sad thought to consider. Maybe it would be best to just focus in on bringing my average words per day back up to the minimum viable writing product.

    Writing 1,000,000 words in the same year is really just about keeping a writing average of 2,739.7260274 words or roughly 2,740 words per day. That is so much easier to write than to accomplish day in and day out. So far I have not missed a single day and this is day 58 of my big year of writing. Write now I am working without a safety net and writing real time. The clock is ticking on the blog post that is already setup and ready to go for tonight. I’m pretty much going to write until I fall asleep and this blog post will publish on its own and be out in the wild before the end of the night. I am doing a little bit better at not hitting the spell check button as much. That is a good first step down the path to having a little bit better rhythm to my writing. Getting into a good rhythm is a very important part of the process. So many things can disrupt that rhythm. So many things.

    Topic 1: More wonder

    My travel interests should be more pronounced. They are not. Maybe visiting a beach in a warmer part of the world sounds nice. That is really about as adventurous as my travel based wonder lust happens to be. Colorado is pretty awesome and it has pretty much everything you could want except beaches and awesome ocean views. Colorado has the Great Sand Dunes and that does include an awful lot of sand. It looks like I’m about to spend some time looking at Marriott Vacation clubs again. I’ll be back here writing in a few minutes. Distractions abound. That happened.

    Dr. Nels Lindahl
    Broomfield, Colorado
    Written on my Storm Stryker PC and or my ASUS C101P using Google Docs

  • Day 57 the one with a new wireless router

    2018: Day 57 the one with a new wireless router
    Word count 135,258 + 1,280 or 136,538 of 1,000,000

    Dear Reader,

    Today was the day that I had to update my wireless router. It was really a pretty easy thing to do today. I just had to drive to the cable company store and exchange my old modem for a newer model one. They gave me the XB6 Wireless Gateway TG3482G voice and data modem. Getting it plugged in was easy enough. The power cable was dangled behind my desk and plugged into my UPS to protect it from surges and outages. Strangely enough the device only has 2 ethernet ports on it. I plugged in two different category 7 cables. One 3 foot Cat7 patch cable to my ASUS RT-AC87U Wireless-AC2400 Dual Band Gigabit Router. The other port is plugged directly into my Storm Stryker customer computer bild via a 6 foot Cat7 cable. Things are all setup and it worked out well enough. It really only has the one blinking light on the top. It took about 10 minutes for the modem to get setup and start providing internet. It does not beep or anything, but the little light flashed and started over. I was kind of expecting to see it turn green. My only real sign that it was up and running was when my ASUS AC2400 went fully active and started connecting devices to the internet.

    Today was one of those days where I thought it might be a good idea to mess with my Fitbit Aria scale. Well you might be surprised to find out that for the first time this year my Fitbit Aria scale connected to one of my wireless networks. It was really weird. This time around it could only find one of my home networks, but it connected to it. That is a big step forward on the tracking my weight loss front. Replacing two meals a day with Soylent has really changed my diet and contributed to a bit of a weight loss. The good news is that my Fitbit Aria scale will be able to track my weight loss journey this time around. That is assuming the device does not somehow manage to forget the network. Seriously, Fitbit engineers did not make the original Fitbit Aria very easy to setup or modify. If I thought it was difficult and annoying to get setup, then imagine what other people who are not as persistent think about using the technology.

    Tonight is a night that I’m watching some University of Kansas Basketball on ESPN via YouTube TV. Tonight I’m just watching the game on my phone. We have been using the Chromecast Ultra to watch the games on the old Sony Bravia television. Tonight I’m mostly listening to the game on my Bose Qc35 headphones and watching a little bit while typing this blog post. This may not be a very long post tonight. I’m struggling to keep up with my daily word count. Today was a very very busy day. Mix in the wireless router replacement and you can see how I just started right during the first half of the Jayhawks game today. On the brighter side of things the game has been really pretty exciting to watch. This is my type of game. The Jayhawks are playing pretty well tonight in the first half.

    Topic 1: Flashing back to this morning…

    I totally forgot that this morning I had started writing a blog post…

    Ok. I have 15 minutes here to write this morning, I just hooked up my Microsoft Universal Keyboard to my Pixel 2 XL phone. It has been some time since this device was charged. Right now it is charging in the car from a standard USB car charger. About half my devices are running USB Type-C and the rest are using the regular old USB connection. That makes charging interesting. It means that every time I travel or even in my car two sets of plugs are required. That is not the worst thing ever, but it is something that has to be managed. Right now I’m sitting in front of the school waiting for the doors to open and hammering on the keyboard. I’m hopeful that right now I can contribute 500 words to my daily writing goal.

    I realized right after writing that paragraph that it would have been easier to just bring my Chromebook with me vs. trying to use that wild Microsoft Universal Keyboard. This ASUS Chromebook flip C101P is built to travel around and instead of doing that I elected to carry around an older keyboard. Now for a long time I thought that it might be a good idea to condense down to only using my smartphone to write. Following that set of thoughts lead me to buy a ton of different wireless keyboards. I think part of it was messing around with my Nexus 9 tablet and trying to figure out a solid way to use it like a laptop. I do have to say that the Microsoft Universal Wireless Keyboard was one of the better ones. It is rugged and it still works. I just do not use it very often.

    I took a couple of pictures of my old Pixel XL linked up with the keyboard this morning. That was almost my thumbnail today. It was going to be the thumbnail for this blog post. Something happened today that dethroned that thumbnail. It was a wild day. The kind of day that involved getting a new wireless router. A photo of that new router sitting on my desk had to be the thumbnail today. The new router is about 1/3 the size of the older one. It also does not appear to be as well ventilated, but I’m sure it is an epic and awesome device. I ran a quick speedtest and pulled 290 Mbps down and 30 Mbps up. That is a little bit faster than the last modem. I’ll take it. It works.

    Topic 2: Getting ready for the 2nd half of basketball

    This blog post has already exceeded the 1,000 word threshold that this month seems to be geared toward. Maybe just maybe I’ll be able to sit down and keep writing for the next hour or so. At the moment, Captain Pickles is asleep and almost snoring. The Jayhawks on senior night are playing pretty well and ESPN is not really adding value to the game. The announcers have lost their way. They no longer try to provide true play by play mixed with insightful commentary. I would volunteer to show them how it is done, but I just don’t have enough time to help ESPN figure out how to orchestrate live game coverage.

    Ohhhh —- I almost forgot to mention that during my trip to the cable company story I got heckled. All of the news swirling around college basketball these days and the NCAA in general has been at the forefront of college basketball fans consideration. The salesperson/technician asked me about Kansas being a semi-pro team and engaged in a little bit of heckling. My blog posts are pretty much stream of consciousness and are published as written. I really do not go back and edit things after the fact. This year that is really true. I just don’t have enough time. That being said my sincere hope is that Coach Bill Self is not tied to any tomfoolery. The Jayhawks teams have been very full of players that are not one and done competitors. I guess we will see how things end up, but I’m hopeful they turn out well.

    Dr. Nels Lindahl
    Broomfield, Colorado
    Written on my Storm Stryker PC and or my ASUS C101P using Google Docs

  • Day 56 the one with where I lost a ton of mining time

    2018: Day 56 the one with where I lost a ton of mining time
    Word count 134,256 + 1,002 or 135,258 of 1,000,000

    Dear Reader,

    Yesterday I went to sleep thinking my Storm Stryker computer build running the NiceHash Miner v2.0.1.11 beta was selling hashing power to mine cryptocurrency. In the morning yesterday when I sat down to watch some Star Trek Voyager on Netflix my virus scanning software had quarantined the excavator.exe file. I know you are wondering if all these years later if Voyager is still as disappointing as it was during the broadcast run. At this point watching it is sort of like getting a decent rental car. It is not the car you would have bought on your own, but it works well enough. Netflix works better than the NiceHash excavator.exe file. That thing is constantly flagging the virus scanner. Other than code that I have written nothing really sets off the Webroot virus scanning on this computer.

    It looks like my cryptocurrency mining payments are starting to take longer and longer to arrive via the NiceHash mining software system. Some folks have been warning that cryptocurrency is going to get harder and harder to mine. My mining payments from NiceHash have been pretty regular on a 3 day clip from 1/13 to 2/15. After 2/15 things just slowed down a bit on the selling hashing power front. My initial thoughts were to try to use the MSI Afterburner software to raise the power limit from the current 80% and 85% voltage limits. Those were put in place to lower the overall heat level in my office. Some folks work with core clock and memory clock speed boosts. Those overclocking measures help the card perform at a higher rate than stock settings. I have not really tried to boost the clock speeds on my cards.

    NiceHash wallet payments in reverse order:

    14. 2018-02-23 Mining payment → 0.00106113 BTC
    13. 2018-02-19 Mining payment → 0.00119364 BTC
    12. 2018-02-15 Mining payment → 0.00102799 BTC
    11. 2018-02-12 Mining payment → 0.00102953 BTC
    10. 2018-02-09 Mining payment → 0.00102322 BTC
    9. 2018-02-06 Mining payment → 0.00101337 BTC
    8. 2018-02-03 Mining payment → 0.00135065 BTC
    7. 2018-01-30 Mining payment → 0.00102840 BTC
    6. 2018-01-27 Mining payment → 0.00120973 BTC
    5. 2018-01-24 Mining payment → 0.00125795 BTC
    4. 2018-01-21 Mining payment → 0.00133244 BTC
    3. 2018-01-18 Mining payment → 0.00119401 BTC
    2. 2018-01-15 Mining payment → 0.00105970 BTC
    1. 2018-01-13 Mining payment → 0.00118327 BTC

    All that mining works out to about 0.0159 BTC or roughly $151.52 USD. All of that effort and time to generate 1.59% of a bitcoin. It makes more sense if you know that a single bitcoin is work about $9,512.80. Sure it was a lot more exciting when a single bitcoin was work almost $20k. Well it was about double the level of my current excitement. This weekend has been about recovering and working through the pure wildness that is managing a toddler. We did go to Cabela’s and they sold me some red licorice today. I’m pretty sure that it is not vegan. Oddly enough a couple quick Google searches did not tell me the ingredients. I’m going to have to walk down the stairs and look. That is going to have to wait until later.

    Topic 1: I have been looking at computer builds

    Right now the motherboard that has my full attention and interest is is the ASUS TUF X299 MARK 1. Dropping in an i9 core and some DDR4 RAM would be an expensive build. Earlier today I was looking at that build combination with an NVIDIA Titan Xp graphics card. That probably won’t work out now that the Titan Xp GPU is sold out on the NVIDIA website. It would have been a powerful and epic computer setup. That part combination would make for a build that could support 4K and VR with ease.

    It seems like the only people really avidly building computers are the cryptocurrency miners. A really cutting edge build would cost several thousand dollars. It might be easier for somebody to just buy a retail computer build vs. trying at assemble all the right parts. I have owned two Hewlett Packard builds over the years. One of them was destroyed in a flooded room in college and the other came with a monitor I had purchased at Costco. That build worked out just fine and was the seed of what ultimately became my Storm Stryker computer build. I’m really more of a add a part here and there computer builder. The problem with upgrading a motherboard is that the new CPU and RAM are always going to be pricey. Getting an upgrade that is on the cutting edge of technology tends to be very expensive. Technology that sits behind the bleeding edge of the technology curve is generally cheaper, but a lot less fun and exciting.

    Getting an Intel i7 chip will work just fine. Upgrading to the new i9 chipset is more exciting and more expensive. For the most part either of those chipsets would be a fine addition to my next computer build. I do not think anything in my computer usage pattern has been limited by CPU power. That used to a lot more of a concern than it is today. At this point, the motherboard and the GPU are going to be the driving factors of what the computer build can do. For the most part the build quality of the ASUS TUF motherboards seems to be pretty decent. I have been reading all sorts of reviews about the X299 Mark 1. The Mark 2 does not seem as exciting a configuration.

    Topic 2: The Olympics are ending

    We have not had cable for some time now. I have been checking my overall internet usage and things seem to be ok. We really do not watch a ton of television these days. Our TiVo is pretty full of Olympic video recordings. Giving up cable was pretty easy to do. This batch of writing is pretty much real time again. It took some time to figure out what was going on. Maybe getting tired was enough to slow down the pace of my writing. Things slowed down here in this month. It seems like I am just going to write about 1,000 words per day.

    Dr. Nels Lindahl
    Broomfield, Colorado
    Written on my Storm Stryker PC and or my ASUS C101P using Google Docs

  • Day 55 the one with a memorable Jayhawks victory

    2018: Day 55 the one with a memorable Jayhawks victory
    Word count 135,263 + 1,065 or 136,328 of 1,000,000

    Dear Reader,

    All this chatter and gossip about the state of NCAA college basketball is troubling to stay the least. At some point in the future fans of college basketball will look back at this dark moment. It will probably get a lot worse before it gets better. All of that churn is ongoing in a swirl that makes things very hard to evaluate. Even with all that going on the University of Kansas Jayhawks were able to claim a 14th consecutive big 12 regular season title. That is a pretty remarkable record. For the most part I would say that Coach Bill Self has recruited players that are not really one and done superstars. The basketball program has had a lot of seniors that have played a number of years at the university. It is hard to reconcile. I’m hopeful that at the end of this year we will know where things stand. All of that news made this victory exciting, but I have some reservations about it.

    My new case of Soylent meal replacement drinks arrived today. It arrived in a case of Cafe Coffiest 14 oz Bottles. I’m not sure how long it will take me to consume 12 bottle of Cafe Coffiest, but it should be interesting. My weight has dropped from 226 pounds to 218 so far. I’m going to keep replacing my breakfast and lunches until my weight drops back under 200 pounds. That might seem like a ridiculous goal, but I really do think it is possible. Exercising more by using my walking desk every day will help. Reducing my caloric intake each day is probably going to be the primary driver. My energy level appears to be up and I have not had any issues tolerating the meal replacement powder. That goal has been in progress this week and it should be possible. You might have noticed that the thumbnail today is of that case of Cafe Coffiest bottles. I make it better with a filter and a slightly off angle.

    Today I used my one month subscription to YouTube TV to watch some live ESPN via Chromecast. Specifically, I watched the University of Kansas basketball team play a regular season Big 12 conference game against the University of Tech Tech Red Raiders. It was a pretty big game. Both schools wanted to win the game to make a push toward a regular season conference championship. You already know from the first paragraph that the Jayhawks were victorious. It was a pretty good game to watch. This eason has been really interesting. In terms of coaching this is one of Coach Bill Self’s best efforts. The team on the court has faced a really strong league this year in Big 12 conference play. It pretty much takes a solid team effort to win games and that makes things fun to watch. We will see what happens in the postseason, but it will be very interesting.

    I was going to spend the next 2,500 words writing about college basketball. However, on second thought that did not seem like very best option. Today included some basement cleaning and some Star Trek Voyager streaming episodes from season four. Apparently, finding the keyboard style TiVo remote in the basement may be impossible. Today I did manage to find three over the air antenna devices in the basement. Oddly enough you might remember that I went out to Best Buy to acquire a new OTA device. Now we have 4 over the air antennas in the house. Three in the basement and one plugged into the TiVo Roamio device in the living room. So far I have been happy enough with the combination of the TiVo box and the Xbox One S. We can watch television, physical media, and stream things.

    Topic 1: Google Play Books audiobooks

    Maybe it was a highly indulgent choice, but I now own the third book in the Dune series on audiobook. It is a little over 16 hours of content. Before getting hooked on the Dune series the only audiobook I had downloaded was the Steve Jobs biography written by Walter Isaacson back in 2011. Audible had given me that book for free and it was a pretty decent audiobook. You might have figured out that it took more than 7 years for me to want to download another audiobook. We used to buy some of the Clive Cussler Dirk Pitt novels on CD for road trips, but that is about it. I do remember that we had the Journey to the Center of the Earth audiobook at one point. The writing by Jules Verne was a very interesting book for being first published in 1864.

    Right now I’m listening to the start of the third Dune book in audiobook format. The first book in the series is really the only one that I go back to from time to time. The rest of the series is something that had entertained me at some point, but mostly has been forgotten over the years. Listening to audiobooks is interesting and a little bit different from what I normally do. Maybe since I’m spending the last few hours of my night writing audiobooks have become an indulgence. All of this writing has reduced the amount of time I have to spend on reading things. The journal articles keep coming and other people keep writing things to read. In fairness the new content is not really the part of the process that would stop me from being able to consume all of it. Nobody really can read everything that is unrealistic. Even building an an artificial intelligence based model to consume all written content would be impossible based on current technology. You could probably figure out how to pull it all into a database, but indexing and making it useful would be a pretty daunting task.

    Topic 2: Dealing with cable management

    A number of boxes in the basement contain various cables. I have pretty much kept all the cables in a bunch of boxes. Today it seemed like a good idea to take zip ties and start cleaning up the cables. Some of them are pretty old. I’m not entirely sure what some of the cables belonged to at this point.

    Dr. Nels Lindahl
    Broomfield, Colorado
    Written on my Storm Stryker PC and or my ASUS C101P using Google Docs

  • Day 54 the one where I was ready for the weekend

    2018: Day 54 the one where I was ready for the weekend
    Word count 134,256 + 1,007 or 135,263 of 1,000,000

    Dear Reader,

    Friday is here. I’m glad to have made it to the weekend. This week was a whirlwind of constant time commitments. That happens. It was a bit much, but hey that is what spices things up. This was the week that I started to consume Soylent meal replacement powder drinks. That has worked out really well so far. My weight is down like 6 pounds and my energy level is way up. Tomorrow a new batch of coffee enhanced Soylent will arrive. That should be very interesting. It is more expensive per meal, but it has caffeine. Earlier this week I almost started dumping two shots of espresso into my Soylent cocoa shake, but that seemed weird. It seemed like a better option to consume the two beverages separately. I’m still working on drinking that big 48 ounce Nalgene water bottle each day. Overall the whole Soylent experiment has just been about reducing my overall caloric intake and saving some time.

    My system appears to tolerate Soylent pretty well. The power I have is based on recipe v1.9 and the new coffee flavored version is recipe v2.0. I’m curious what the differences will be. It should be interesting to figure that one out. This week has been a blur of Soylent and Warren Zevon records. For those of you who know me pretty well you have already guessed that the more Warren Zevon in a week the higher the stress level. The only thing deeper down the rabbit hole for me is listening to Pink Floyd tracks. That does not happen all that often. I did try to figure out how to get online access to the SiriusXM radio. My car subscription does not seem to get me internet access, but sometimes it lets me listen to it for free. The Android app for SiriusXM let me listen for a day then wanted me to login. I’m still trying to figure out what music streaming service to go with this year. I have been making an effort to buy the vinyl record via a retail store for any artist that I really enjoy. That seems like the right way to go about it for me based on my interest in encouraging the people who make music I enjoy to keep making music.

    Every night I listen to an hour of music before going to bed. It is an important part of my routine. That is something that will probably not change any time soon. Sometimes I miss my Pandora streaming station. This might be the year that I go back something like that service. I’m trying to avoid using Amazon services. That is really hard when it comes to music. All the autorip albums that I have purchased over the years have a digital copy stored with my Amazon Music account. That makes separating pretty challenging. Going completely vinyl would not really be a solution at this time. My record player is in my office and I’m not setting up a record player in my bedroom. I could download all the content and setup a media server or just store it all on my phone. Some options exist. I’ll probably try to pick one soon enough and go with it for the rest of the year.

    My favorite part about listening to a station like Octane on SiriusXM is that it introduces me to new music. That works out pretty in terms of directing me toward full albums that I might want to listen to from start to finish. Listening to the Lithium station is really about the past. It is about being connected to the music I really enjoyed throughout the last couple decades. Octane is full of newly released music. That opens the door to all sorts of interesting new bands. At the moment, I can go out and listen to their album as part of my subscription and decide if it is something I want to add to my vinyl record collection. That is one of those things that just keeps on going and I keep building it up. It could be worse I guess. All those compact disc (CD) clubs I subscribed to sent me stuff from all sorts of different bands. All of those discs are pretty much gone. I really do not remember where they all went. To the best of my knowledge, I have one binder of music that was in my car. Those discs are pretty badly scratched up at this point. Disc skipping is super annoying and just sort of ruined the experience.

    Today I’m pretty tired and this blog post will probably only hit the 1,000 word mark. That means that this week was really rather lackluster in terms of my written performance. I guess that was bound to happen at some point. To hit 1,000,000 words this year. I’m going to have to avoid having weeks like this one. That is easier to write about than to achieve. Sometimes things just stack up and you end up doing things outside of writing. The simple act of hammering on the keyboard takes time and energy. Running out of time or not having enough energy can lead to shorter blog posts or maybe even worse it can lead to poorly written stilted and disjointed prose that is uninspired. That is prepaps worse than falling short in terms of word count. I have tried to avoid just hammering out horrible content. That would have been one way to go.

    This weekend should be good. It should be a great time to write. The Jayhawks play tomorrow that should be entertaining. I’m hopeful that it will be a good game and fun to watch. Instead of nachos I’ll be having some Soylent either before or after the game. Replacing two meals per day has been my goal.

    Dr. Nels Lindahl
    Broomfield, Colorado
    Written on my Storm Stryker PC and or my ASUS C101P using Google Docs

  • Day 53 the one with some snow and some Soylent

    2018: Day 53 the one with some snow and some Soylent
    Word count 133,254 + 1,002 or 134,256 of 1,000,000

    Dear Reader,

    Well things are going along this week. My words per day pace is still lagging behind. I’m now replacing both breakfast and lunch with Soylent powdered meal replacement cocoa flavored shakes. That endeavor has been going swimmingly. My new BlenderBottle ProStak System bottle has been working well. My current plan is to keep replacing every meal except dinner with Soylent. We will see how long that lasts, but it seems to be a good plan at the moment. It is a solid working plan. A plan that helps save me a few minutes per meal. Like a lot of the folks that first start drinking Soylent products I have felt more alert, had a higher level of energy, and maybe a higher degree of focus. I’m curious to see how long that feeling lasts. I know that the nutriationaly the mix is different than what i normally consume day to day.

    It has snowed just a little bit today. Enough to remind me that it is winter, but not enough to really change anything. That is how my day has gone. Enough has happened to remind me that it was a day, but nothing has really changed. That is for better or worse how a lot of days end up going. My plan is to figure things out tonight. It is going to be a very long night and probably an even longer day tomorrow. That is just how it is going to end up going. Nothing is going to change that at this point. Maybe the long night will give me enough time to really hammer out a solid 3,000 word post or maybe a couple of them. Something has to change at this point. My level of writing productivity is not up to par and it is bringing sadness to my otherwise extremely positive world.

    My outlook on things has always been very positive. I really do believe that staying positive and trying to see the potential in things is a better way to go about each day than the alternative. A negative cycle of expectations and experiences just seems to be less fun. It seems like something that should be avoided and maybe if you have the power to focus one way or the other it is something that should be shunned. That might seem harsh. Maybe it is a harsh thing to consider. Shunning negativity is really not that bad of a philosophy to adopt. You might figure out that the power of a stop doing list is really something you want to have in your tool kit. That is a power that just might help you focus in on stopping any predilection or impulse to engage in wholesale negativity. That is something that is 100% on my stop doing list.

    Sometimes it is just better to focus on having a positive outlook and bend the universe toward that positive plan. Yeah —- I know that getting overly focused on predicting a perfect possible future could be problematic. A lot of variables exist. Figuring out how to strive forward into a perfect possible future may seem impossible. The question would be how to enjoy each moment in a positive way. Making sure each moment remains positive is one of the best and easiest ways to clear a path toward that perfect possible future. At some point you just end up making being positive a habit. That is a winning habit that brings joy to things. That has to be a good thing to focus your efforts and attention on.

    Today will be another day of falling short in terms of word count. It looks like things are shaping up to end the day here with another 1,000 word blog post. Tomorrow however could be the day that things get back on track. I had thought that things were back on track a few days ago, but that turned out not to be the case. Things just got wild. That happens from time to time. This week was a blur. It happened. I’m pretty sure about that, but at the same time some of the moments that passed should have been seized to greater advantage.

    The thumbnail for today’s blog post is of the power cable that made me wonder. I had stared at all the modular power cables that came with my new power supply. It was a process to sort through everything looking to see if a 4 pin cable connector existed for the motherboard CPU. You can tell from the thumbnail that the cable actually splits from 8 pins to a pair of 4 pin connectors. That is one of those awesome things that technology allows. It is also one of those things that when you figure it out you smile and think that is slick. You also look back on the moments of frustration up until that realization as unnecessary. These new Corsair modular cables are actually pretty slick. You can see from the phone that they are all individually woven vs. the ribbon cables of the past. They look pretty good in the case. Getting a good power supply these days is hard enough. It appears that a real shortage exists out in the marketplace of high capacity computer power supplies.

    It is now time to catch a short nap before jumping into the rest of the night. You can probably expect this post to publish at 22:22 tonight. By that time I’ll be back up and writing. This will just be a little power nap to get me going again for a night of fun and adventure. Ok —- it will just be a night of sitting in my office chair, but within the bounds of imagination it could be a real adventure i guess. That is how I’m going to elect to look at it.

    Dr. Nels Lindahl
    Broomfield, Colorado
    Written on my Storm Stryker PC and or my ASUS C101P using Google Docs

  • Day 52 the one where I started eating Soylent

    2018: Day 52 the one where I started eating Soylent
    Word count 132,196 + 1,058 or 133,254 of 1,000,000

    Dear Reader,

    Sometimes writing can be a struggle. These last two weeks have been a struggle. Sitting down to write 3,000 words requires a certain amount of time. That has just not worked out. I need to get better about managing my time. One of the ways I have been trying steal back a few moments is changing up my diet. It was pretty easy to order a couple pounds of a meal replacement powder. This week a tub with 2.3 pounds of Soylent Meal Replacement Powder in the Cacao flavor arrived at the front door. So far three meals have been replaced with a 200 calorie scoop of Soylent powder. The cacao flavor was a good call. It is not the greatest thing I have ever had for breakfast, but it is acceptable. I got this wild sharker contraption that has an angry metal blender ball inside it. Shaking up the Soylent mix is key to the whole process.

    My next Soylent adventure will be replacing my breakfast routine with the Cafe Coffiest Soylent Meal Replacement Drink. I can get a case of 12 bottles that each contain 400 calories packed into 14 ounces of beverage. The bottles are a little bit different of a commitment. The powder allows me to drink 200 calories at a time vs. going up to 400. I prefer to have a small, but powerful breakfast. The Soylent mix version 1.9 was something that I could consume and tolerate without any problems. At the moment, I think it would be possible to replace both breakfast and lunch with Soylent. On the brighter side it is vegan so that is exciting. Not thinking about what to eat or having to prepare food should save me about twenty minutes a day. That time is going to be put straight back into my writing. I say that and it didn’t happen today. That twenty minutes I saved was sucked back into other things.

    Avoiding the tyranny of tiny tasks is one thing. I’m an avid believer in the power of the stop doing list and even that could not save me today. The pile of things was just a little bit bigger than my pile of answers. That is even being powered by the nutritional balance of Soylent powder. The day was enhanced with some tunes from Warren Zevon. I even managed to try to get a few other people to listen to some Warren Zevon albums. At least that good work was done today. I mean that has to count for something in the grand scheme of things. Spreading the word of the greatness of Warren Zevon has to count as an accomplishment. Strangely enough it doesn’t really add any word count to my day. The only thing that counts as words is words. That might seem simple enough to write and simple enough to read, but no substitute exists for good clean writing.

    Tonight I’m writing real time and posting real time. You are pretty much reading a stream of consciousness write after the writing session where it occurred. For that you are welcome and I hope that you get to enjoy it. My writing is a reflection of my thoughts at the moment. The words pretty much just rain down as the thoughts happen. I have trained myself to think and writing at the same time in one fluid process of thought and typing. Sometimes my mind wonders in the middle of writing a sentence or two, but I make every effort to bring my efforts back to writing with a single minded purpose completely focused on the the challenge at hand. That challenge is simple. Writing 3,000 words or accept the failure of falling short. I’m going to write tonight until the clock strikes 22:22 and then this is posting no matter how many words have been written. That is the way of things this evening.

    Here shortly this blog post is going to reach the 1,000 word threshold. That is really the bare minimum of what I’m willing to produce. Anything less than that is just a reflection of complete and total failure. I have to say after three meal replacements with Soylent out of the last 4 meals I feel pretty good and my energy level is decent. I’m tired, but that is more or less a reflection of how much has has to be done in the week. Next week is going to be even worse. It is going to be one of those weeks that tests my willingness to write and produce. It will be one of those strive forward or slip backward moments. I’m not going to call it a dare to be great situation, but the struggle to write 3,000 words per day will be real. I’m going to need to wake up early and write 1,000 words before the day really starts. That nightly session of 2,000 words is possible and should be sustainable.

    Topic 1: My computer struggles

    Back in 2016 my last computer build went well enough. I took a trip to Micro Center. That drive takes about an hour. It was pretty easy to pick out a motherboard, RAM, CPU, and my first Corsair CPU water cooler. I got them home and put all the parts together. The water cooler was the part that took the longest. It was not difficult to work with it was just difficult to screw in the longer connection points at the top of the case. It was really just physically hard to get things connected in the case. It was really an easy build. I used the xdock to swap in and out operating systems. It worked great. To be fair it is still working just fine.

    My latest computer build is just not going as well. This failed motherboard just bummed me out. It was really deflating and somewhat annoying. I know that the motherboard should have been stored better. It should have been treated a lot better. That is on my and I know that my things were not treated with the respect they deserved. That is a lesson learned. I should not have assumed that I was done with that old motherboard and moved on from it.

    Dr. Nels Lindahl
    Broomfield, Colorado
    Written on my Storm Stryker PC and or my ASUS C101P using Google Docs

  • Day 51 the one where my computer did not work

    2018: Day 51 the one where my computer did not work
    Word count 131,182 + 1,014 or 132,196 of 1,000,000

    Dear Reader,

    This post started real time about thirty minutes ago. It was written and posted. No buffer exists anymore. Now is a time in the journey where things are written and then posted. That is not how this is supposed to be. I had a 24 hour buffer built up. The plan was to write 3,000 words per day and have enough time to review them before publication. Keep in mind that today was crushing in terms of things to get done. Writing just did not happen. Last night and this morning just did not yield any writing. Probably the thing that really impacted my writing was the problems with my new computer build. The Corsair 740 case looks great. The new Corsair 850 watt power supply looks great. It turned out that after everything was connected no video happened. Yeah —- you read that correctly the entire computer build did not turn out well. Things did not work. Everything was connected and ready to go, but no video happened.

    My troubleshooting of this problem was very frustrating and ultimately defeating. First things first, I checked the power cable and then looked at the motherboard in frustration. At first, the problem appeared to be the missing CPU 4 pin power cable. That was easy enough to figure out. The Corsair power supply CPU cable splits form 8 to two 4 pin connectors. I had to watch a YouTube video to remember that nifty trick. My next effort involved the CMOS battery and some basic troubleshooting:

    1. I powered off the computer and held the power button for 60 seconds. This step included unplugging the computer and just holding down the power button on the case for 60 seconds. After that step was complete the computer was powered back on and I checked for video.
    2. The power cable was replaced. My brand new Corsair power supply came with a power cable, but it was easy enough to check to see if the power cable was bad.
    3. The CMOS battery was replaced. This one was pretty easy and was made possible by the fact that for some reason I had one extra battery.
    4. The CMOS battery was removed for 5 minutes. This step was pretty easy to accomplish. I unplugged the computer and then removed the battery and waited for 5 minutes before plugging it back in with the battery to see if things were working again.
    5. A second graphics card was tested. It seemed like a good idea to remove the one graphics card and plug in my backup card.
    6. A second monitor was tested. Maybe the computer was having trouble with my primary monitor. It seemed like a good idea to test out my backup computer monitor.
    7. Both HDMI and displayport cables were tested. I tested a couple different cables that were working with other computers. None of that happened.
    8. I checked the CMOS jumper to make sure nothing had gone wrong.
    9. RAM was removed and replaced. I thought this might cause the motherboard to engage in some beeping or maybe do something different.
    10. I let the box run for about 30 minutes. I thought maybe it just needs a minute to run. This step did not help. No video ever showed up on the monitor.

    None of that helped. No video ever occured. Strangely no beeping ever happened from the motherboard. The whole process was very frustrating. That pretty means that my new computer case and power supply are going to have to hang out until I make a decision about getting a new motherboard. You can imagine that all of that testing took a fair amount of time and that is what cut into my writing efforts. For better or worse my desire not to fail at fixing the computer helped contribute to my failure to write 3,000 words today. This post may not even climb up to 1,000 words before it automatically posts at 22:22 PM.

    This is the first time with a computer build that I could not make it work. Without any visual evidence of the boot sequence it is hard to troubleshoot. The steps outlined above are you basic information technology 101 troubleshooting for a potential motherboard failure. That is a rough thing to have happen. Upgrading to a new motherboard comes with a certain set of costs. I’m going to need to buy a new motherboard, CPU, RAM, and probably a CPU water cooling block. All of those components could rack up a sizable bill in terms of computer parts. I’ll have to decide if that is where I want to spend my funds.

    This post is pretty much being written real time. I’m hoping to string together 1,000 words to help keep my word count average from having to deal with a zero for the day. February was going to be my month to catch up. That appears to not be the base. It looks like February is going to just be a hard month for writing. It could be worse. I’m 51 days into this journey and no day has been missed so far. That is positive at least. Way more positive than any of my thoughts about my computer setup. That motherboard had worked, but does not work anymore. This entire post is dedicated to the micro-ATX HP motherboard that has no real model number or brand on it. It is about as generic as you can get. My next motherboard will probably be made by ASUS. It will probably be something from the X299 series of motherboards. They look very promising. The one that really has jumped out at me happens to be the ASUS Tuf X299 Mark 1 motherboard. It is an epic design that seems to be very well built. Whatever happened to my last motherboard probably happened in the garage. It say on a shelf for a couple of years. Maybe something got bent or a transistor fell off. At this point is hard to say.

    Dr. Nels Lindahl
    Broomfield, Colorado
    Written on my Storm Stryker PC and or my ASUS C101P using Google Docs

  • Day 50 the one where we talk about directions and the future

    2018: Day 50 the one where we talk about directions and the future
    Word count 130,173 + 1,009 or 131,182 of 1,000,000

    Dear Reader,

    I’m conflicted about graphics cards. NVIDIA started releasing the pascal architecture cards two years ago. The GTX 1080 and the GTX 1070 seemed a little overly expensive for my needs at the time. I waited for the GTX 1060 to go on sale and bought one directly from NVIDIA. Fast forward two years and I’m not sure where the production of NVIDIA graphics cards is going. It appears that the Pascal architecture is going to transition into production of either Volta or Ampere. All this indecision from NVIDIA or maybe just extreme secrecy makes it hard to elect to buy the NVIDIA TITAN Xp or the NVIDIA TITAN V graphics cards. At the moment my new Corsair Carbide Series Air 740 – High Airflow ATX Cube Case is ready. I’m ready to start working toward a computer system upgrade. Everything is setup for a dual graphics card rig. That case will be ready.

    I spent a bunch of time looking at the ASUS TUF X299 MARK 1 LGA 2066 ATX Intel Motherboard. That is probably my favorite motherboard at the moment. You can imagine that throughout the next year I will be building and pricing all sorts of computer combinations. That is pretty much how things are going to end up going. Now is a weird time for building your own computer. A lot of it probably has to do with the pricing pressures that cryptocurrency miners have put on the entire ecosystem. My 2016 build was based on having a VR ready 4K system. That was where my technology interests were going. I wanted to be able to watch 4K content on my monitor and to experience the immersive quality of it. This time of round my interest is a little bit different. I want to upgrade my secondary computer build to support computationally intensive artificial intelligence work.

    Right now the challenges that face me are related to building out some deep learning and neural network models on my home computer. People are making truly interesting training data sets available and the models to work with them. I have to accept that challenge and build out and model some new things. Right now the bleeding edge of technology is hunting down specific use cases for artificial intelligence based methods. It would be hubris at this point to attempt to figure out generalized artificial intelligence. Picking up a lot of divergent models and working toward generalized artificial intelligence seems reasonable, but it has to be a goal that is worked toward not presumed to be tackled in one sweeping plan. You may have guessed that means that I’m going to be digging deep and working on coding again.

    My primary skills at as a professional code developer are specific and targeted at being able to hunt down the needle in the haystack. I can pick up code and find the defect. That is a useful skill, but it is different than what I need to do this year. My focus for this year has to be to continue to understand and master Tensorflow. Getting the most out of that framework is a good place to start. None of that work has to slow down my writing efforts. It just might help push them forward. Keeping a high quality catalog of my efforts would help me retrace my steps and evaluate the journey. Like all great inquiries into artificial intelligence research I need to pick a use case and begin the process of bringing together the right tools to meet the needs of that use case. Maybe I’ll dig into image or video classification or work on some type of natural language processing problem.

    Being left to my own devices would naturally propel me to a study of polymorphic fractal builds and system security. We already use a variety of decay algorithm in security. Over a decade ago I spent a lot of time breaking down the barriers of the captain fractal algorithm. That was an interesting journey. At the time that type of encryption was not necessary or useful. People have been relatively happy with the way things are made secret and I did not have the energy to revisit that work. That is probably for the best. My interests in using and managing Tensorflow related projects are probably a healthy use of my mental cycles. That is what this journey is all about in terms of an inquiry into quality and how you express the value of quality across time. My pursuit of a perfect possible future will require the commitment of a lot of mental cycles.

    For better or worse that is really a difficult item to breakdown in a meaningful way. The things we spend our time trying to understand are the things that consume us. We have to make a conscious choice to strive forward. That means taking on the greatest challenges of our time and trying to find answers to the hardest questions and problems. Sure that is one way of looking at the future and a variety of ways exist. My interest in the trajectory that has taken us toward the intersection of technology and modernity is one way to look at the future and how we got to this moment right here and right now. That might be a useful way to try to breakdown the things happening in this moment. It could be a distraction from the real problems facing the world around us. Alternatively, it could be a real line of inquiry that opens a narrative thread into a challenge worth discussion. A challenge truly worth consideration.

    Topic 1: Computer repair

    My new power supply arrived today. Things seemed to be easy to assemble. I plugged in the video, a keyboard, and a mouse. All of the fans turned on and things were going to get going. No video happened.

    Dr. Nels Lindahl
    Broomfield, Colorado
    Written on my Storm Stryker PC and or my ASUS C101P using Google Docs