2018: Day 39 the one where I realized my fan is not balanced
Word count 106,813 + 2,335 or 109,148 of 1,000,000

Dear Reader,

My TiVo has been setup with a OnePass to record new episodes of the X-Files. That is exciting mostly because we actually have new episodes of the X-Files. With broadcast television I’m going to have to hope that they arrive over the air and are recording without any interruption or single degrediation. That was always one of the great mysteries of my last setup. Was that recording actually recorded. This time around the antenna worked great plugged directly into the television. We will see if the same level of consistency happens with the TiVo. It should no material difference exists between the way the antenna connects via coaxial cable to the back of the television or the TiVo. The pass through is different. At this very moment the TERK antenna is grabbing over the air broadcasts, the TiVo is outputting that signal via HDMI cable to the XBox One S, adn the XBox One S is passing that signal to the Sony Bravia television via an HDMI cable. Both HDMI connections are obviously digital and should not see any signal degradation. That is all very exciting and new at the moment.

Right now I’m trying to use TiVo Online to setup all of my television show recording options. It took me a minute to figure out how to use the OnePass manager. We don’t really watch shows at specific times anymore. The whole point of the TiVo is that it will record and hold content for us when we want it. A real exception to that theory is live sports. Tomorrow we will start to get broadcasts of the Olympics. That is exciting. I’m pretty sure that the whole family will sit down to watch some of the winter Olympics this year. John Paul really likes ice hockey. We went to one Colorado Avalanche game and that was enough to apparently earn a fan for life. I’m pretty sure that the kids will like the figure skating and the downhill skiing. It will be interesting to see exactly what catches our attention.

All the Olympic fun stars tomorrow. My opening vignette just stalled out. I lost focus for a couple of minutes. Captain Pickles is attacking the dog bed. That is some pure puppy behavior happening on the far side of the room. Maybe now is the time to turn off my music and return to listening to my Dune (1965) audiobook via Google Play Books. It appears that the book is 19% complete and only has 16 hours and 58 minutes remaining. That probably means that I’ll be listening this audiobook for the week or two before bed. The Play Books app has a wonderful shut off feature that lets me listen to 30 minutes or an hour more. That has worked out well as an application feature. It has worked out poorly as a writing tool. The last couple of nights I have just shut down the ASUS Chromebook Flip C101P and gone to bed. My writing effort at night has to yield 2,000 to 2,500 words or it is not a successful writing session.

Yesterday I was digging into the differences between my blogging efforts from 2003 and 2004 vs. the content that is being produced this year during my long journey to writing 1,000,000 words in the same year. Writing a million words is not something that is new to me. Writing them in the same year is both new and a little bit of a reach. This year will be my most prolific writing year by far. I was talking to Andy today about one of my more recent efforts. During 2009 I had thought it was a good idea to spin up a podcast called the Newscast. In hindsight if I had uploaded it to YouTube vs. Blog Talk Radio it could have reached a much wider audience. That show featured interviews, news, and even callers. It was a fun broadcasting activity. That show did not last. I lost interest in broadcasting or something else happened that took up my time. For some reason that specific detail alludes me. Some of the transcripts got posted on this blog.

The major difference between the Nelscast and the YouTube live streams is the difference in content. All of my YouTube live streams are focused on bringing artificial intelligence news and content to the forefront of the public mind for consideration and debate. The Nelscast was a pure commentary show devoted to my interests at the time. It was sort of a live version of this blog in many ways. Maybe that would be a fun thing to do on YouTube for a few days, but it would end up falling into a weird category of social commentary mixed with autobiographical content. That pretty much describes most vlogs and the art of vlogging. Oh well —- maybe that is a topic for another day. They type of video content I’m interested in at the moment is devoted to helping people dig in and understand artificial intelligence, deep learning, machine learning, and neural networks. I feel like those topics deserve a lot more consideration than they get on the news these days.

Topic 1: Copy editing my post titles

I just realized that the title of Day 37 was pretty much nonsense. It was not a grammatically correct title. Today I just went back and updated the title to something a little bit better, “Day 37 the one where I rethink mining 1% of a bitcoin.” That is a stark reminder that I need to at least proofread the titles along this journey. Copy editing has never really been my strongest skill. I write a lot and for the most part I can get away with avoiding the act of copy editing or even proofreading really. As long as I’m engaged and writing with full focus the prose I generate tends to be at least reasonably readable. One touch writing is a skill I guess. Maybe that skill is better than being most excellent at copy editing.

Topic 2: I realized my fan is not balanced

Our ceiling fan was installed last year. It was a decent purchase. We spent a lot of time hunting for the exact perfect ceiling fan. After searching a ton of shops and looking at a ton of fans we finally picked one. That was just the first part of the process. Buying a fan in a box and putting the box in the back of the car was easy. Hiring an electrician to install the fan required a real hunt. Online services and other methods exist for finding help from an electrician. It took a little bit, but I found a company with good reviews to do the installation. The fan is in place and it works great. We run into one problem with it however. Our ceiling is at a slight pitch and the fan from time to time will get slightly unbalanced. Figuring out how to balance the fan is something that needs to happen.

Topic 3: Hitting that wall

My thoughts are focused, but my will to write is non-existent at the moment. Today might just be a day where this post does not make it to 3,000 words. My desk is mostly clean. I have one pile of mail to clean up and that is pretty much it. My war on clutter has been fruitful. I even cleaned up the pile of laundry up in my room. None of that cleaning helped me find my long lost pair of glasses. They may be gone forever. I’m going to have to face the possibility that they were left somewhere and will never be in my posession ever again. Acknowledging that loss is hard enough, but having to mix it with falling short on my writing goal today is devastating.

We are basically at 1,500 words for the day and that means the halfway point might just be the end. That would mean that I would need to make it up over the course of a bunch of different days. I thought maybe a few days would really jump out and shatter the daily writing goal, but so far this year that has not happened. Sometimes runners hit the wall and just power through that wall and keep on going. I’m not sure if my writing rises to that same type of breakthrough, but maybe just maybe I can dig deep and keep going. Digging deep is going to take a little bit more effort today. I’m not sure why exactly that is the case.

Topic 4: Using Google Hangouts as a home phone

Since we gave up cable on Saturday I have been looking for new ways to make phones calls. One of the ways that has actually stood out and has been a good positive experience is Google Hangouts. I just grabbed the old USB headset and microphone combination that was laying around and plugged it into my computer. It was picked up as part of Google Hangouts and I was able to make make a call straight away. It was really easy to use. The one thing that really caught my attention was when I got a call on my Google Pixel 2 XL phone and I was on a Google Hangouts call. Both services worked at the same time. That seemed really promising.

Topic 5: My writing plan for tomorrow

Today was a day where it looks like I am going to end up being 66% productive. That means that this blog post is looking to be about 2,000 words long. That means 1,000 words will have to be picked up tomorrow. I better pick a really good topic for tomorrow if it is going to inspire an epic and awesome 4,000 word essay. It would have to be a topic that really captures my attention and inspires passion in my writing. That might just help. I went and grabbed the future topics list that I was keeping and it looks ok.

Upcoming 2018 Writing Topics:

— Write an open letter for students on the first day of college
— Some thoughts on my sports trading card collection
— A post about my top ten favorite science fiction television shows
— Recap of all the video camera equipment I have owned
— All the promise and failures of my first Sony camcorder
— That one with a roadtrip to Florida
— Applied AI: A use case based exploration
— My ode to minor league hockey
— Progress within general AI vs. specialized use cases
— My review of the ASUS C101P Chromebook
— On leadership and the modern workplace
— The best way to archive digital content

Maybe tomorrow will be a good day to try to attack that list from topic one down. It might be a good idea to just start writing and keep going topic by topic until the goal is achieved. Maybe tomorrow I will follow my own advice and sit down and sketch out a solid outline of the blog post I am about to write. That used to be the way that I wrote papers and essays. It is even the way that I used to write book chapters. I would grab my trusty notebook at the time and start to sketch out the chapter. You can imagine that the process of writing a book is very similar to that chapter writing approach.

My first question was always about what argument is being made. I work from a reverse pyramid approach. Instead of building up all the foundation and then making the argument. I approach it from the other direction. I make the argument clearly and with purpose before really digging into the reasons why in the subsequent chapters. That is a different type of approach, but it has worked for me over the years. I then took all those supporting arguments and organized them into chapters in a logical order and moved forward with writing the book. My notebooks have a ton of false starts in them resetting on pages never to be chased down again. I have sketched out a lot of books and I think that is a really healthy thing to do. Being able to separate out something worth devoting months to writing and something that sounds good, but maybe is not worth the time commitment.

Maybe at some point it would be worth it grab my old notebooks and just work my way from the distant past all the way to current day. Now that would be a very interesting thing to do with my previous works. Maybe one of those notebooks or even one of my idea books has a gem that was beyond my skill at the time, but now is within the realm of possibility now. Right now from my desk I can see a stack of 12 notebooks and 2 large format books that contain my notes. One of them even goes all the way back to when I came up with the captain fractal algorithm. Now that is a blast from the past. Some of my blog posts that go back to 2004 or maybe a little earlier were really focused on working with captain fractal. Even just thinking about those efforts takes me back to an earlier time when I really tried to solve hard problems. I mean I tried to dig in and really solve the impossible problems of our times. I guess that’s just how things stacked up at the time. Now that topic could easily take up 4,000 words tomorrow, but that story may not be the best story to blog about.

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

P.S. Well today fell short of the goal, but things worked out better than they could have worked out. I had that little stretch of productivity when things looked darkest, but that set of reflective thoughts only brought things forward a little bit toward the goal line.

2018: Day 38 the one without a ton of market coverage
Word count 103,811 + 3,002 or 106,813 of 1,000,000

Dear Reader,

Both the dow jones industrial average and bitcoin seemed to do better today. You can be thankful that I’m not going to spend the next 3,000 words writing about how inflationary pressures, bond market stress, and overvalued commercial real estate could be enough to trigger several thousand points in market correction. Economic considerations aside. This is not a market driven functional journal. My words are always a reflection of the things that draw in my attention and at the moment that is not a detailed macro economic analysis of inflationary effects on the market. Maybe if it was related to the cryptocurrency market I would cover it in detail.

Today should have been a big adventure. It was going to be one of those days where things work out well enough. Tonight the TCU Horn Frogs are going to play the University of Kansas Jayhawks on ESPN2. You may have already considered that my plan to give up cable television might be interfering with my ability to watch that game. Nobody is giving me the option to pay to watch the game ondemand live via an À la carte streaming service. That option does not exist. At least I’m pretty sure that option does not exist. On option did jump out at me and that happens to be a very interesting one. YouTube TV was offering a 7 day free trial that includes ESPN2. You can imagine that it only took a couple of clicks to make that happen.

Right now ESPN2 is streaming to my Sony Bravia television via a Chromecast Ultra device. It had some trouble streaming to my generation 1 Chromecast. Oddly enough that television has two Chromecast devices attached. That original generation 1 Chromecast and the 4K capable Chromecast Ultra device. Yeah I know my television is not capable of displaying 4K content, but I had plugged it into my 4K computer monitor. At the time I had thought it was a good idea to try to do some multiple content source picture in picture type display work. I gave up on that after about one day. It just did not work the way it was pictured in my mind. It didn’t really work out well at all. That meant one thing had to happen. Instead of wasting the new device and just putting it on the shelf it became my backup Sony Bravia Chromecast. When for some reason one of them is having trouble I flip over to the other one. That happens from time to time. I have no idea why or how it does, but Chromecasts devices tend to give me trouble right when i need them to work.

Topic 1: Kansas vs. TCU

We are sitting down to watch the University of Kansas Jayhawks play some basketball against the TCU Horn Frogs. I’m hoping this game will be better than the last game. Coach Bill Self has had a lot of work to do this year. This year is a year that is really going to come down to coaching and the quality of point guard play in the tournaments. The game seems to be streaming well enough. YouTube TV really does deliver ESPN2 via Chromecast to my Sony Bravia. The wireless internet connection the Chromecast Ultra does hold up well enough. I have never tried to stream 4K content on it using wireless, but it works just fine with regular old high definition content. We will see if I end up keeping the YouTube TV service after the 7 day free trial. It does look like the Jayhawks have 6 more games on the ESPN family of networks this year. That probably means paying for either YouTube TV or maybe Hulu Live TV for about 30 days. It looks like I need access to the ESPN family of networks until March 3, 2018. We used to be able to go out to a restaurant and watch the game, but with two kids trying to hang out at a restaurant for 2 hours seems like an impossible dream. They have a hard time sitting still for 45 minutes during a regular dinner vs. a 2 hour basketball game.

You might be wondering if it is really necessary to watch every University of Kansas basketball game. If you have not figured out by now, then you may have missed something. Our entire schedule is planned around being able to watch these basketball games. That has been the case for years. It is probably not something that is likely to change. It is really the only strong use case we have for cable television. Live sports are really the last thing you cannot stream online with ease. It does appear that even the new offering of ESPN Plus that will be coming out soon won’t give me access to the primetime games on the base ESPN family of networks. I guess that must be the one thing traditional broadcast media is not willing to give up. I gave up on cable television and it reduced my overall bill by almost $150 per month. YouTube TV and some of these other streaming services are not all that expensive, but they still do not let me just pay for the one channel or game that I want to watch.

I’m sitting here writing and watching the Coinbase dashboard. It has been a wild month for bitcoin and the Coinbase dashboard shows the values 24/7. Bitcoin trades like a currency and it trades all day every day. That means the value when you went to sleep and when you wake up are not going to be the same. Something has to give. Something will probably change. Stocks are based on the market they trade in. Other than gaining or losing momentum outside of trading hours the stock price when it opened will be generally what it opens at on the market. Sometimes the momentum on a stock will change overnight and it will radically jump up or down at the opening bell, but that shift will happen at the bell. That makes cryptocurrency a very interesting case study. It has a real follow the fun cycle where people are buying and selling it at all times.

Kaylee is almost asleep. Some yawns and a little bit of babbling are the key indicators that sleep is quickly approaching. Based on what I can hear from the game downstairs it does not appear that things are going all that well 10 minutes into the first half. I am about to venture downstairs and watch the game. I need to drink a bunch of water tonight. My water consumption for the day is behind schedule. My Fitbit data is also suggesting that today did not involve enough steps. Sitting down and watching this game is not really going to help either. I should Chromecast the game on in front of my treadmill and walk a couple miles during the game. My walking desk has not really made an appearance during my journey to write 1,000,000 words this year. Maybe it should be more prominently featured.

TCU players are having a lights out 3 point shooting night. The clock is ticking down to halftime and things are not looking all that promising. Oh they were going for the 2 for 1 at the end of the half and that first possession did not go all that well. That first half of the game gave me heartburn, but the Jayhawks are only down by 2 points. Coach Bill Self has a little bit of work to do at halftime to get the team ready to win the second half.

Topic 2: Graphics cards

I really thought the market for graphics cards would be getting weaker today. A few quick eBay searches for NVIDIA GTX 1080 do not appear to be showing softness in the market. I will admit to spending a couple minutes thinking about the newly released NVIDIA Titan V graphics card that is on sale now for the exalted price of $2,999.00 on the NVIDIA website. Don’t worry they limit people to only buying 2 at a time. It looks like an amazing piece of technology. At some point that Volta technology will get applied to the whole line of graphics cards. It is more likely that a soft mining market would make some GTX 1080 cards available to me compared to getting one of those amazing Titan V cards. It would be fun to try to train some deep learning models on that new Titan V card.

My last trip to Best Buy on Saturday did include a trip to the area of the store where they sell NVIDIA graphics cards. It was completely empty. That is the really how things seem to be everywhere. Graphics cards are in short supply these days. My NiceHash Miner software is mining at about $3 per day. That is between two GTX 1060 graphics cards that are running at about 80% power. My cards will be mining for at least 64 more days. At some point my new power supply is going to show up and I’m going to try out some mining on that system. It may be a Ubuntu Studio based system. I have never tried to mine using Ubuntu and it seems like that would be a fun thing to get setup and try out. All of that fun will happen after my power supply arrives. It is on backorder. I pretty much check every day to see if it is switches from backorder to preparing shipment.

This second half has been full of opportunities so far. That dunk from Udoka with about 16 minutes left was intense. Ok that one that followed on the next position was also pretty intense. My writing efforts tonight seem to be going well enough. Yesterday I just fell asleep and did not close out my writing assignment for the day. This is Day 38 and we are just moving along toward 1,000,000 words. The Jayhawks will have had an off season and will return before this writing journey is over. Even the thought of writing 3,000 words per day for the next 300 or so days is daunting. It is a very intense proposition. This year’s Jayhawk team seems to really love shooting beyond the arch. That just appears to be the way basketball is trending.

Tonight I’m sitting and writing in the family room. That probably means that it is highly unlikely that I will fall asleep during the basketball game. I guess that means that my writing productivity needs to increase a little bit here so I can close out before going back upstairs.

Topic 3: Audiobook fun

The game is almost over. Tonight I’m going to listen to just a few minutes of my Google Play Books audiobook. This version of Dune (1965) is read really well. The folks doing the voicing are really locked in and doing a good job. Given that this is well over 20 hours of reading that is pretty decent. The last book I listened to on audiobook was an authorized Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson. That book came out in 2011 and I got the audiobook from Audible. It may still be in my library. Maybe tomorrow I will check to see if that application is installed on my Android phone. It is entirely possible that the application may still have my Steve Jobs biography available for download. That was a pretty decent book. I might listen to the first half of it again. That part was written very well.

Topic 4: Reading old blog posts

Early this morning I got pulled into the world of 2003. Maybe going back and reading some of words from the close of out of 2003 was unwise. That has never really stopped me from extreme self reflection. In this case it is just hard to imagine that those words were written about 15 years ago. It seems like so much time has passed. Reading those words is almost like reading about somebody else. It is a familiar story and one that I know, but the words feel different with so much time removed. Strangely enough the entire internet world from back in 2003 is backed up on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. That thing can eat up hours of my day. It is such a blast from the past to read things from that ecosystem. It is a snapshot of a world that was just coming together and in some ways about to break apart.

I’m going to do some retrospective posts on the blogs that used to capture my attention. It is hard to believe that all of that blogging was captured and stored for future generations. I’m not entirely sure what use it has, but it is interesting to see how much things have changed. Obviously, I’m still writing and still blogging, but it is different now. The level of engagement is much lower. I know some folks still have lively and engaged audiences.

Topic 5: The new TiVo arrived today

My usual FedEx driver dropped off a small box with a refurbished TiVo in it. According to the email and parts list it was the, “Bundle, TiVo Roamio OTA with AIP service TiVo-Renewed Roamio OTA 1T w/accessories.” That is exciting right. They were sold out of the non-factory renewed version. It looks great like a brand new device. If nobody had said it was factory refurbished, then I would have never known the difference. The box was covered in a thin plastic film. I got the box out and plugged it into the HDMI that is daisy chained to my Xbox One S. My Xbox One S has one of those fans that just keeps getting louder. I am literally considering pulling a noise canceling foam block on the cabinet ceiling over the unit. It would have a 2 inch gap and not be touching it, but the noise cancelling might stop the horrible pop/catching noise that the fan makes. Microsoft quality control personal owe me a series apology for bringing this noisy beast into my life.

The remote is kind of clunky and larger than it should be. I want to order another remote that either has voice recognition or the fold out keyboard. Those readers that have been here for a long time know that I have a remote with a keyboard and it is somewhere in one of my coard boxes. It is probably in the basement and it has not been unpacked since the last time we moved. Given the price of the remotes it would probably be a good idea to try to find the missing one before giving in and buying a new one. Setup took about 30 minute and I remember just how slow the TiVo boxes are. I’m comparing them to my laptop or desktop computer. If my Storm Stryker box with an i7 processor even slows down a touch I get annoyed. You can imagine how surfing on the TiVo one letter at a time for usernames and passwords made me feel. I’ll try to provide a full review of the TiVo tomorrow.

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

P.S. My writing progress has been getting slower and slower each day. Getting to 3,000 words seems to be getting harder and harder to achieve. I’m sure that is a function of having written about just about everything that caught my attention. You really have to have strong opinions about things to spend hours a day writing about them. I’m a passionate person and writing about technology has always inspired me, but sometimes the topic is just lacking the fuel and the spark. Today the dogs wanted to lay in the other room. They normally just stay in my office all day. I’m not sure exactly why they wanted to nap in the family room, but I’m sure it has something to do with sunbathing.

I spun up an album from Warren Zevon today. That album was pressed back in 1980. The album “Bad luck streak in dancing school” was in a tattered and used sleeve/cover. It shows some wear and tear. The vinyl record inside is actually in remarkably good shape. That is the real difference between all of my CDs and my vinyl record collection. None of my CDs are in that good of a condition. They have lived in binders and other containers. None of them stayed in the jewel cases they came in. My CD management was a nightmare. I should have done a better job of just taking care of them. Now I know better and my vinyl records arrive and are put in polypropylene sleeves and put on my bookshelf. They are stored in an autobiographical order based on when they were purchased. That is easy enough to do with a smaller record collection. I think my record collection has probably grown to about 30 vinyl records.

Closing out the day today has been interesting. I have been writing and writing this year. It is all about the process of sitting down and pounding keys to produce prose. Today getting to that 3,000 word threshold took a little bit more energy. Maybe I should have just written about economics and the markets. That would have created a lot more controversy out their in the world. My theory of economics is probably not ready for prime time. The last time I tried to model a real time view of the economy using sampling and data feeds was not all that successful. I know how to model and measure sentiment, but translating those indicators into a real time view of the economy was illusive at the time. Maybe my skills are better now and i should give it another shot. We will see how that goes. I always love a good Perl scripting challenge. Those are my favorite server side problems to solve.

This last sentence is going to push us over the 3,000 word barrier for the day. Well —- this last one will.

2018: Day 37 the one where I rethink mining 1% of a bitcoin
Word count 100,802 + 3,009 or 103,811 of 1,000,000

Dear Reader,

All day the value of bitcoin has been falling. The CoinBase dashboard shows the value of the coin has fallen 59.3% in the last month. The current price is at under 7 thousand dollars and appears to be falling. You may have pieced together that the value has dropped by 10 thousand dollars in the last month. That is an amazing decline and it has crushed the value of cryptocurrencies throughout the world. I kept an eye on bitcoin and the dow jones industrial average today. A huge amount of value vanished into the ether. A lot of the folks that have been mining or selling hashing power have seen the profitability of their efforts drop prodigiously.

Using the NiceHash Miner v2.0.1.10 beta software my system with 2 NVIDIA GTX 1060 graphics cards has now mined 1% of a bitcoin. That 1% of a bitcoin has dropped 59.3% in the last month, but hey it still feels like an achievement. My Coinbase wallet has 0.0096 BTC and my NiceHash wallet is about to pay out tonight. That payout will raise my total mining efforts this year to 0.01 BTC or 1% of a bitcoin. Strangely enough that does not mean that I will receive anything special. It just means that this year if the NiceHash miner keeps running all year I’ll probably have mined about 12% of a bitcoin. That would have been more impressive before the great cryptocurrency value plunge of 2018. At the moment, the NiceHash Miner estimates that i will earn about $3.00 per day.

One of the things I have enjoyed is watching YouTube videos of cryptocurrency mining rigs being built or being run. Rightnow my mind is racing through the possibilities of how each of those rigs was financed and what has happened to the profitability those folks were expecting. Things have changed rapidly in the last month. My mining effort is going to continue for another 65 days. That will conclude my 100 days of being a cryptocurrency miner. It has been a really interesting ride so far. I’m learning a ton about some new things and applied research is always more fun than reading about things after the fact. Watching the dow jones industrial average drop by 1,174.21 points was disheartening. Between the stock exchange and the cryptocurrency markets things have been falling.

This crash is probably going to have some global ramifications beyond hobbyist miners. In my case both cards can be used for TensorFlow projects. My interests in machine learning, deep learning, and neural networks outpace my need to sell the cards to get some money back. It is very possible that a lot of NVIDIA 1080 graphics cards will be hitting the secondary market if bitcoin prices continue to plunge. That could be a good thing for all the gamers that really want one of those graphics cards. Now the cards will have been run at excessive heats and have probably been overclocked beyond reason, but the prices will be low and that could be a good reason for me to pick up a few of them. My two computer case setup could probably allow me to run somewhere between 4 and 6 graphics cards. My Cooler Master Storm Stryker case can support three graphics cards. My new Corsair 740 case could easily support 3 more graphics cards. My initial plan was to have 2 graphics cards in each case. That was really before this crash happened and the possibility of a swarm of cheap NVIDIA GTX 1080 cards could be hitting the secondary market.

That is a very real possibility. We will probably know within the next 30 days if that starts to happen. Be careful buying up cards that have been run at full power and very high temperatures. I’m sure some of them will be just fine, but a bunch of them are going to be poor investments. Based on my artificial intelligence based hobbies having 4 graphics cards should be enough computing power to do anything that really needs to be done at the moment. For the most part I want to have one Windows 10 machine and one Ubuntu machine. That really allows me to do whatever I’m in the mood to do at the time. That is how my coding practices are best empowered. The whole reason I got the Storm Stryker case was the X-drive swap at the top of the case front. It allowed me to swap in various solid state drives based on whatever operating system I wanted to use at the time. That was before I moved my Windows 10 installation to an m.2 drive. It looks like a wrapped up stick of gum that is attached to the motherboard. It works great so far. Now i just swap in a drive for whatever Ubuntu flavor meets my needs.

Topic 1: Dune audiobook listening

It turns out that I have been really enjoying listening to Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) in audiobook format. A special thank you goes out to Google for starting up Play Books and giving me one free audiobook. Each night I’m listening to about an hour of audiobook before bed. I really do read so much faster than the rate at which they took. This is probably the most time I have devoted to really thinking about and internalizing the words. I am writing during the listening part, but multitasking is something that I do pretty much all day every day. It has gotten so bad that when i stop to just focus in on one thing at a time my mind wonders. That is the worst thing to have happen. A wandering mind can venture anywhere. Creativity becomes unlocked at the exact moments that you should be focusing. I’m not sure if I will buy the second Dune book after this one is done. We will see what happens, but audiobooks are really expensive.

Sometimes I wonder what it would take for my writing skills to advance to the next level. My ability to write and form up sentences and useful prose has improved, but it is not work class at this point. That is really the goal for any writer. To take the formation of prose to a level where it transcends the process and becomes a work of art. Yeah you might not be buying that last sentence, but it was written honestly and it comes from a good place. Art is art. Some of my favorite art has been delivered in the form of really well written books and articles. I really do consider writing an artform. You can dispute that one if you want, but I’m going to stand behind it. You can tell that is the case based on it being written and published in blog form.

Topic 2: My TiVo Roamio shipped

An email arrived today letting me know that my TiVo-Renewed Roamio OTA 1 terabyte with accessories entertainment center has shipped. Later this week it will arrive and take my television viewing to the next level. By that I mean it will re-introduce our household to the power of a digital video recorder (DVR) device. Sometimes pausing or skipping commercials can be highly satisfying. You can imagine based on the amount of prose that I am turning out on a daily basis my time is not spend writing and I can only catch a limited amount of television per day. That is ok. I don’t really need to watch hours of television each day. Keeping up with my nearly endless stream of 3,000 words per day is probably taxing as well. For those of you who are still keeping pace on day 37 thank you for being here and enjoying the banter. I’ll try to write some transcendent chautauquas at some point, but for now you will have to setting for above average blogging.

I’m very curious how much the TiVo interface has changed since the last time stopped paying for cable television. Like anything that I get involved in I took my Tivo very seriously. I even joined the Tivo Advisors Panel years ago. We will see if they invite me to join again. They sent me these very involved surveys and I filled them out. We got beta features and that is about all that happened. It was exciting at the time. At least that is how I remember it. Sure it was not opening day at Wrigley to see the Cubs exciting, but it was interesting and amusing.

Topic 3: Be a lifelong learner

Striving to get better daily in a positive way can be fulfilling. Part of striving to improve and grow is being a lifelong learner. One of the things I learned in over a decade of college is that knowing everything is impossible, but trying to learn every day is attainable. Being a lifelong learner is about the pursuit. It is about the daily struggle to intake new and interesting information and make sense of the world. That last part is the hardest part. Learning may be a little bit easier than trying to make sense of the world around us. Things change nearly every day and the foundations of what we learn remain. Our experiences and the foundational knowledge we share are always going to be a part of us. The things we share and the things we have in common make it easier to relate to the word around us and to begin to understand the how and why of things. For me striving to be a lifelong learner is important. Being inquisitive and trying to understand things helps me stay positive and enjoy the journey.

That topic should have yielded a lot more prose. I feel like things got very word economic in that last paragraph. You probably enjoyed the concentrated learning power in the paragraph, but those ideas should have been unpacked over the course of over 1,000 words vs. that one little paragraph treatment they ended up getting. I just set the sleep timer on my Google Play Book application to one hour. It is hard to tell exactly what chapter is playing, but it is all from the novel Dune. Reading is an important part of our shared experience. We learn about the world and expand our thoughts on things by reading.

Topic 4: Rounding out the night

Day 37 is coming along nicely. This blog post is moving right along. Sure a timer is going for one hour and then things will be done for the night. That sleep timer is a solid application feature. It also means that writing for an hour should close out the night. Apparently, I fell asleep. I’m not exactly sure how much of the Dune audiobook I listened to. I may have to rewind part of an hour to figure out where the night actually ended. It is clear exactly where the writing effort left off. You can tell that happened a couple of sentences ago. That means this morning it is time to crank out 1,000 words to catch up and keep things running on time and with quality.

This morning I lost a little bit of time to watching a couple guitar videos on YouTube. That happens from time to time. Those folks over at YouTube have made some algorithms that are really good at pulling me down the digital rabbit hole for a couple of videos. I know that being consistent is the key to growing a YouTube channel. That means producing consistently good content and making sure it is delivered consistently at or around the same time. That is something that I was really good at it for some time. Then it seems that that something happened. I know it was in some ways related to my writing challenge. Writing 3,000 words per day is something that really started to slow down my video production. Dedicating 2 or more hours a day to writing is going to crowd out a lot of other concerns and side projects. That is probably the best way to describe my YouTube channel at the moment. It is a side project.

You may have noticed that YouTube elected to remove monitication from my channel again. That was enough to really slow me down and make it so that I didn’t really want to post and make content for YouTube. I do not use YouTube to make money. Some folks are able to do that and I think that is fantastic. My interests in YouTube are mostly just to help me dig into and understand artificial intelligence. For me the best way to really dig in and learn about it on a daily basis was to share my findings each day. That worked out great. I learned a lot and thousands of people were either amused or entertained with my videos. Very few of the comments that I got were mean or trolling.

Topic 5: Thinking about guitars

2018 may be the year that I add a new guitar to my collection. I have been looking at the new range of Chapman guitars. I think the Chapman Guitars Ghost Fret Pro just might be my next guitar. They look pretty good. It seems like the market has been flooded with new and interesting guitars. Some of them even have 8 strings or maybe even more strings. I have a hard enough time playing a standard 6 string guitar that the idea of moving to 7 or 8 strings does not seem likely. My collection does include one acoustic bass guitar. At some point, I should probably change the strings out on the guitar. They might be 10 years old.

My Fender guitar got some updates. I changed out the pickguard from a white one to a blue marbled pickguard. The back plate was swapped out for a black spring guard plate. All of the hardware and most of the screws were switched out for a black plastic vs. the white plastic parts that came with the guitar. The biggest change was the introduction of a brass nut at the top of the fretboard. It sounds pretty good. I have been happy with my upgraded Fender guitar. Right now it is my daily player. At some point probably today I’m going to put my Les Paul guitar back in the case and store it in the basement.

Topic 6: Thinking about all the things that need thinking

You may have noticed the thumbnail today is of Captain Pickles the dog staring out the door. It took me a few tries to capture that little Elvis style snarl that Captain Pickles does. It is sort of like a frown I guess. It mostly happens when the dog is looking out the window. Strangely enough it does not seem to happen when the dog barks. This new puppy is learning to be at home in the house and it seems to be happy enough.

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

P.S. My writing patterns have been changing a little bit. Writing and then writing some more has made me think a little bit differently. My output has increased substantially. All of this writing and not really editing has been a different sort of routine. Right now I just write and have to remember all of the things that have come before these words. That block of 100,000 words that were written this year should not be on a repete cycle. I want to avoid writing about the same things every day by creating a never ending circular cycle of what will end up being nonsense to a reader. The goal here is to write and push forward in a professional way that does not involve a lot of editing or revisiting efforts.

One touch writing is a different type of writing altogether. What is even more interesting is trying to engage in one touch writing while producing stream of consciousness style prose. All of your thoughts have to be organized and you have to approach writing in a different way. Instead of just pushing out prose and writing for the sake of writing. You have to look at each sentence and focus in on bringing things together in the form of a paragraph. After all of these years of writing and blogging my basic thinking process has changed a little bit. The outcome of my stream of consciousness is really these paragraph blocks that sometimes relate to each other and sometimes they don’t. That is probably an interesting observation in and of itself.

This postscript might have been a little bit meta and circled around the idea of writing and writing itself. That happens. It is one of those things that will keep happening. Writing for a couple of hours per day is going to focus my interest on writing and in some ways cause me to want to write about writing. That is something that I need to resist and to try to avoid in some ways. Everyday should not be devoted to writing about the writing that is occuring. That is just a rinse and repeat washing cycle that won’t really go anywhere. The name of the game is to push things forward.

My mine is perfectly clear at the moment. We could take this writing session in any direction. It could be that the two shots of espresso from my Nespresso Expert machine are kicking in and I’m wide awake. We have been adjusting to not having cable television. Today I noticed that I cannot watch CNN online anymore from my computer. That is a change to my routine. Today seemed like a good day to just get some market updates and see what is happening out in the economy. Finding an alternative should be easy enough. The internet is full of online dashboards. I could probably just open up one of my trading platforms and watch the indicators tick on throughout the day.

This last sentence will push the blog post up over 3,000 words for the day. I think that is all that is going to happen today.

2018: Day 36 the one with the big football game and a hot sauce ranking
Word count 97,468 + 3,334 or 100,802 of 1,000,000

Dear Reader,

Today is going to be a day full of watching football. Today is also the day that my overall word count will hit 100,000 words for the year. Both things happening during the same day is pretty entertaining. At 4:30 PM the Philadelphia Eagles and the New England Patriots are going to play a game to determine the champion of the National Football League. That game concludes the season for the National Football League. Even without the support of the power assist cable the TERK indoor plate antenna was able to pick up our local over the air broadcast of Channel 9 our local NBC KUSA channel. That was pretty exciting. We cancelled cable in Colorado Springs and did not have the same signal strength from over the air broadcasts. Earlier today the antenna was just plugged into the back of our Sony Bravia television and it picked up the channel just fine. It all seemed to be working. That was good news in terms of being able to watch television. I’m pretty sure that after watching this channel for a couple hours today the picture from the over the air broadcast is clearer and more crisp than what we were getting from cable. It is possible that the cable company was down-scaling our local broadcasts to 720p or some variant of that.

Lunch is now over and things in the house are slowing down for naps. Strangely enough NBC started wall to wall football coverage today very early. They were all in on football today. I guess that makes sense. People like to watch the coverage and get amped up for the game. Instead of a get psyched mix tape we have pregame coverage. I guess these days it should be called a get psyched playlist as folks don’t really have tapes or even discs anymore. I have a CD player in a box, but I’m not sure I could play a tape if we wanted to play it. The only device in the house with a tape deck is my Commodore 64. Obviously, we are not going to plug that thing into the wall. That has to be a fire risk of some kind. In this household we have had the NBC channel on since around 10:00 AM and it has been all football coverage. I would have to say that we have not had any flickering or disruption of the over the air signal. At some point this week our new TiVo Roamio OTA 1TB entertainment center will arrive. I think TiVo lists it as a digital video recorder (DVR), but to me it is an entertainment center. The only part of the TiVo box that seems to be lacking is the 4K support on the Roamio, but I’m sure they will

Wow —- Sean Evans just showed up on the NBC broadcast with Von Miller during a recap of the latest Hot Ones Youtube episode from this week. I guess Sean is now mainstream. If your YouTube show gets broadcast on NBC that means you are being accepted by the mainstream media. This is probably good for Sean. I imagine the same folks who eat hot wings and like interviews are the ones watching pregame NBC coverage. My garage fridge has about 20 different hot sauces in a plastic ice tub. It was really the best container for holding hot sauces. It has decent wall height and was wide enough for the bottle to sit side by side in two columns. I use them on vegetarian and vegan wings every week. You can catch a video of me eating the Last Dab Hot sauce on YouTube. It is pretty easy to find. The show Hot Ones really has been pretty good. It is probably one of the best examples of how YouTubt allowed creators to bring forward content that people enjoy that would otherwise be left out of traditional broadcast media.

Topic 1: My favorite hot sauces

This is a ranking of my favorite hot sauces at this moment right now. I went through and force ranked all of the hot sauces that I have had within the last 30 days. Watching the YouTube show Hot Ones with Sean Evans has been enjoyable. It is an interview show, but it really does bring out the best in the guests. I have probably watched every episode of the show on YouTube. As a result of that my diet has started to include a few more hot sauces. It is probably now full of an order of magnitude more hot sauce than ever before. It was amazing that after being exposed to hot sauces I wanted to buy them and try them. Some of them are really good. Some of them were just hot and I have limited interest in every consuming them again. I have made several purchases from the Heatonist website. If you have never visited the Heatonist website, then check it out and buy some hot sauces if you like that sort of thing. You may only want to do that if you like spicy to extremely spicy foods. My last common on that topic is that the folks over at Queen’s Majesty Hot Sauce make some really nice blends. You could start with them. They are my favorite. They really are worthy of the top 2 sauces on my list.

1. Queen’s Majesty Hot Sauce Scotch Bonnet & Ginger Hot – This is hands down my favorite hot sauce right now. My favorite midweek indulgence is dipping tater tots or tater coins into this scotch bonnet & ginger sauce.
2. Queen’s Majesty Hot Sauce Red Habanero & Black Coffee – This sauce is a close second in my book to the scotch bonnet & ginger. It is not as robust in flavor. It has one key note and it is a good one, but it does not have the waves of flavor the first sauce gets.
3. Hot Ones Fiery Chipotle – This sauce is pretty decent and works out great on my vegan and vegetarian wings. I’m pretty sure that they will come out with a 2.0 version of this sauce and it will be epic.
4. Dick’s Hot Sauce – Hot Pepper Sauce with a Tropical Twist – This sauce has a ton of flavor and is also good with tater tots.
5. Bravado Ghost Pepper & Blueberry Hot Sauce – This sauce can get a little thin, but it has some decent flavor. I have put it on leftover pancakes a couple of times.
6. Hot Ones – The Last Dab – Flavor is not the question with this one. It has some good flavor, but it is awfully hot for a daily go to sauce.
7. High River Rogue – Maybe it is just my preferences for hot sauce, but this one just tasted sweet and I did not enjoy it.
8. Secret Aardvark Drunken Jerk Sauce – For some reason this saue just does not work for me. I wanted it to be awesome, but I just do not enjoy it.
9. Blair’s mega death sauce with liquid rage – You may be aware that this one is hot and has a strange taste. I would call it fermented raise and hot.
10. Da’ Bomb Beyond Insanity Hot Sauce – Eating this sauce is not on the list of things I plan on doing again.
11. Torchbearer Zombie Apocalypse – It is easy to say without question that this is my least favorite hot sauce of all time. It is hot and I really do not like the flavor.

Topic 2: Star Trek Discovery

We switched over to watch an episode of Star Trek Discovery today. This series is darker than any other Star Trek I have watched. We are getting pretty deep into the series and it full of twists after episode 9. I get how it ended up being a streaming only type of series for CBS the writers took it in a lot darker direction than the previous versions of Star Trek.

Topic 3: Big banks are banning cryptocurrency credit card transactions

I’m reading this article from Bloomberg. It appears that a growing number of lenders (credit card providers) are stopping transactions related to the purchase of cryptocurrency. This could and probably is having a huge chilling effect on the market for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Most casual buyers of coins or a fraction of a coin probably used a credit card. My efforts are a little bit different. I’m selling my hashing power using the NiceHash mining software. That means that I receive small payments in BTC (bitcoin). I have limited interest in using my credit card to buy cryptocurrency. Just because I would rather engage in some mining and earn coins vs. buying them that does not mean people are going to stop. Now the more banks move to stop people from moving in and out of cryptocurrency positions that is going to have a chilling effect on the market. All of my TurtleCoins are safe. I’m not exactly sure you can buy a TurtleCoin with credit card. I think you have to trade some other type of cryptocurrency for the TurtleCoin within the market. I have been watching the Coinbase dashboard all weekend. The market has been wild. I’m guessing the reduced influx of small purchases is depressing the market value in an artificial way.

Topic 4: The game is about to start

We rocked 5 hours of pregame coverage for the big game today. That coverage was interrupted by a trip to Target and Costco. Oh —- and we watched that episode of Star Trek Discovery I guess, but for the most part the entire day has been dedicated to getting ready for the big game. At around noon today I even ordered a pizza for deliver after the game starts. Today is probably a pretty big pizza delivery day. I’m about to do some dangerous Google searches on that topic. Apparently, New Year’s Eve is the busiest day of the year for pizza delivery. I guess that makes sense. I can see that being a day of pizza.

The teams are getting ready to walk out. We are seeing a montage of pre-recorded player introductions. The game is about to get going here. I made it all the way until 4:15 PM without hitting 2,000 words for the day. I really thought my writing efforts today so far would have yielding more words. I think a lot of content has been included, but that has not translated to a high word count. Maybe my prose today should have been more verbose and devoted to really digging into details. Now would be the time to turn that around and begin to write at a higher level throughout the rest of the day.

Topic 5: My live game blog

Soon enough the pizza will arrive today. I decided to get an extra large pizza with half double cheese and half regular cheese. I’m just curious to compare the two sides and see which one works out better. Both of my kids stood for the national anthem. Apparently, all that pledge of allegiance training kicked in. The first commercial was for a movie that I am probably not going to see. The TD Ameritrade commercial featuring Lionel Richie with references to the song “all night long” was pretty funny. It was a little bit of inside baseball, but it was funny enough. I’m hoping the commercial game is on point tonight.

This coin toss is going well enough. New England won the coin toss and deferred. In previous years I heard a lot more about people in Las Vegas setting up proposition bets for the game. Maybe that was just not a big topic this year. It is also possible that they hype for that happened and I just missed it. This first series is going well enough. A pass got completed. That is about the extent of my play by play announcing skills. You can expect a few general game observations and that is about it.
3-0: Uh-oh the Eagles really needed a touchdown on that drive. Coming away with 3 instead of 7 is not the most effective way to start the game. We will see if those 4 points ends up mattering at the end of the game.

3-3: The game is tied after two drives. Watching the New England Patriots play offense is something that I have done a lot in the last decade. Tom Brady was a little off on that third down red zone throw.

9-3: It was an epic touchdown throw from Foles, but that missed extra point is probably going to be a factor. The Eagles have now left 5 points on the table. That Ram trucks advertisement with Vikings was lacking. Maybe it is the brilliant high definition of the over the air broadcast, but the game looks pretty sharp. I would say the overall picture quality is good and it seems sharp on the old Sony Bravia. That attempt to hurdle a defensive player by number 14 was interesting. That missed field goal by Stephen Gostkowski really hit the exact middle of the upright post. Hmmm —- they are making another MIssion Impossible movie. The best promotions during the game so far seem to be for the winter olympics. All these advertisements are probably going to drive up viewership for the winter olympics. We are probably going to be watching the olympics every night that they are on via over the air broadcasts.

15-3: Apparently, the Eagles offense came ready to play tonight. Points are getting left on the table. At this point by my count the Eagles have left 7 points on the table after that failed 2 point conversion.

15-6: Well that kick from Stephen Gostkowski was true. It feels like the 2nd quarter is not going by as fast as the 1st quarter. We ate a bunch of pizza during the game. Sadly, nobody has even cracked open the seven layer dip. That first turn over of the night was wild enough. It was batted right into the defenders hands. I really just wanted to see a competitive game. That is really the best outcome.

15-12: I’m sure this is a game that Stephen Gostkowski is going to want to forget. That missed extra point was not even close. Ok that advertisement for travel to Australia teasing a crocodile dundee remake and featuring a cameo from Paul Hogan really made me laugh. At first, I was getting nervous that it was a real movie trailer, but fortunately it was not a real movie. New England is trying to save some clock with a timeout here.

22-12: That one might have been the last page of the playbook. The Patriots defense was not ready for that move by Foles. Bradley Cooper was loving it. This last series for the Patriots is not looking crisp. On that last sprint to the sidelines Tom Brady was not going to make it.

Halftime: That performance during halftime was just not in sync.

22-19: Well it appears that Rob Gronkowski made the most out of halftime. The game is very competitive. The ratings numbers are going to be good tonight.

29-19: They need to update the rules. Even the announcers were wondering if that was a touchdown or not. If those highly trained professionals have no idea, then the rule is unclear and needs to be updated.

29-26: Well Brady is over 400 yards for the game. This game is close. It is competitive. We may see a barn burner of a 4th quarter tonight.

32-6: That field goal was a little bit of a let down for the Eagles. They need to be scoring 7 points at a time. This game is over 1,000 yards in total offense.

32-33: It took a long time for Rob Gronkowski to get going, but it happened. The Patriots now have a lead in the 4th quarter. It is bedtime for the kids. One kid is asleep and the other is almost done for the night. I have to say that the over the air broadcast has worked out really well. Not having pause capabilities is just like I remember it. You really cannot do anything about it and time marches on. At the moment, i’m watching the game on the NBC Sports website and waiting for Kaylee to finish falling asleep.

38-33: Well it is all going to come down to a Tom Brady drive. I guess that is not going to be the case. We just hit the 2 minute warning.

41-33: That last field goal might have been enough. The Philadelphia Eagles just won a championship.

It might have been a mistake to try to blog every score tonight. I really did not think that we would see so much scoring during the game. Apparently defense was not a winner tonight. It was however a very competitive game and it was enjoyable to watch. The NFL is probably pretty happy with the outcome. Ratings are probably going to be pretty high. I’ll check them out tomorrow and see where this game stacks up in the all time rating. Tonight will probably be one of those games that gets talked about for awhile. I feel like the video looked really good and crisp.

Topic 6: Rounding out the night

The weekend is quickly drawing to an end. It would have been much better to have completed my Corsair 740 build this weekend. Not having a power supply was a huge oversight on my part. It would have been a lot more fun to start working on mining cryptocurrency. I really thought a spare power supply had been sittin in the basement, but that was not the case. At some point in the next couple of weeks a power supply should show up after it comes back in stock. Even the Best Buy where I bought my TERK over the air antenna did not have any graphics cards or power supplies in stock. A big section of a shelf at Best Buy should have included NVIDIA graphics cards. It was empty. At some point, Best Buy should probably give up on the graphics cards and reclaim that shelf space.

Maybe next week will be a fun week. That is possible, but who knows. Right now all I can think about is getting some Sweet Potato Masala this week. It would be a fun lunch of fresh sweet potatoes cooked in our house favorite Masala sauce. That is something that could happen, but who knows exactly. This next week is going to be an adventure. You can probably tell that this blog post has had a lot of time devoted to it, but the total word count does not really show that. My efforts to just sit down and hammer out a ton of words back to back just did not happen. In some ways it is probably the fault of the football game and all of the pre-game festivities associated with the game. It only happens on time per year and it does pull in a lot of focus from the entire nation.

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

P.S. Some quick data analysis on my blog posts from this year pretty much indicates that I should spend my time writing about TurtleCoin. It appears that my one solid post about TurtleCoin has driven the bulk of my recent traffic. I had thought that over the course of the year my effort to write 1,000,000 words in the same year would pick up trafic. It always seems that if you produce daily content then the number of followers on YouTube or the number of visitors on a website will go up. It is also entirely possible that a website with zero traffic will just continue on with zero traffic. That first ramp up will bring in some folks and how and why that happens is context specific. I guess some of my coverage should be geared toward writing about and digging into alternative cryptocurrency. That appears to be what the people would like to read about.

2018: Day 35 the one where I built a new Corsair 740 based computer
Word count 94,140 + 3,328 or 97,468 of 1,000,000

Dear Reader,

That title is misleading. Building a brand new computer would require buying all new parts. The parts being assembled today are not all new. Sure the Corsair Carbide Series Air 740 – High Airflow ATX Cube Case is 100% brand new fresh out of the box. Somebody from Fedex just delivered it to the house yesterday. All the other parts in the case are from a computer I acquired some time ago. It had some type of HP micro-ATX motherboard. At the moment I think it might be an MS-7613 or maybe some variant of that motherboard design. Going out an building an all computer would be cost prohibitive at the moment the price of the parts is greater than their value assembled.

Earlier this morning I grabbed the Corsair Air 740 case and a towel. It was pretty easy to set the towel on the dining room table and place the case on top of the towel. That is how the entire build process started today. Unscrewing two thumb screws was all it took to remove the power supply side panel. The motherboard side of the case has a door handle with an easy open latch that really was pretty easy to open. Getting the motherboard setup was pretty easy the case had slots for a micro-ATX motherboard. I was able to put 5 screws into the case to attach the motherboard. 3 up top and 2 on the middle row. That was enough to get the motherboard firmly attached. I keep all of my motherboard parts in the hand tray under the front of the Storm Stryker case. Cooler Master had some really good design choices on that case. The Corsair 740 does not have as many features. It is however my new case and it does have a lot more slots for fans on the motherboard side of things.

Getting the graphics card installed was pretty easy. I detached two thumb screws and took out 2 slot cover brackets out of the case. The graphics card installed pretty well and was secured with 2 thumb screws. I dropped in one SSD drive using the screwless drive bay. Adding the SATA cable was easy enough. The only real problem came during the process of trying to plug in the front panel switches to the motherboard. They are just not labeled on that old HP motherboard. I found some diagrams and plugged the cables in to the best of my abilities. They are either upside down or exactly in the correct alignment. It could go either way i guess. We will find out at some point. The entire system has no power supply and is not going to be booting up any time soon. My future power supply is on backorder.

The other problem that was diagnosed during assembly is the number of fans in the case. The tiny micro-ATX motherboard can support two extra fans. That means that I need to devise a method to connect 5 other fans that are or will be hanging out within the case. They won’t really be hanging they are screwed to the walls of the case and cannot really move. Fan vibration against the case would create noise pollution within my office and that is not acceptable. I have never really run into this problem before and I’m going to have to do some research on exactly how to connect in these extra fans. Oddly enough it does seem like Google gets lots of search variants related to, “how to connect extra case fans.” I picked a link from the venerable and mostly trustworthy Tom’s Hardware. Based on the guide that I read it appears that I will need to buy a cable that connects to my power supply unit or motherboard that splits off into several fan connectors. It does look like Newegg has some options for this type of cabling.

I’m going to have to learn about the different options and order one of them post haste. They are not very expensive so ordering one will not break the bank, but it is very interesting. My current motherboard in my Storm Stryker has about 5 fans plugged into it and that is something that I took for granted. I know some folks might cringe at the idea of the case having 5 fans plugged into it. One of them is a Noctua NF-A20 PWM premium-quality quiet 200mm fan that is pulling hot air off the graphics cards the other two are Corsair Air Series AF120 LED Quiet Edition High Airflow fans that are pulling air into the case from the bottom and front respectively. Those three fans were added to deal with the heat from two constantly running graphics cards.

Topic 1: The OSU vs. KU basketball game

The Oklahoma State University basketball team is playing pretty well today. At halftime the University of Kansas Jayhawks are struggling. The team has been down pretty much the entire half. Things are not looking very well. Ouch —- that game did not end up going very well. Coach Bill Self is going to have to make some adjustments or the Kansas streak of winning the Big 12 basketball championship is going to be over. I do not have anything else to say about this topic. It just makes me sad. This paragraph will be short.

Topic 2: No more cable television

I made the trip to the cable store. It is about 25 minutes from the house. Getting in the car with the X1 box was pretty easy. We had the cable box plugged into the Xbox One S via HDMI. Our entertainment hub has been the Xbox One S. For some reason the fan on our new Xbox One S is horrible. It makes an awful clicking noise. It really is just terrible. Quality control for Xbox production should be ashamed they let these sneak out into the wild. It is really bad the clicking is loud enough that I can hear it from about 50 feet away. Ok back the problem that was addressed today the cable box. Crawling behind the entertainment center to unplug the X1 power supply was easy enough. I grabbed our push to talk voice remote for the X1 and all of that ended up in the car.

After getting to the store the technical/salesperson who greeted us was able to take our cable bill and reduce it by 2/3 in one decisive action. We went to internet only services. It was frightening and exciting. It was exhilarating and unnerving. We can now only watch streaming services or the over the air antenna. An option exists to move to a 1 gigabyte down internet service, but it would require a technician to come out and verify our lines check out and are up to standards. You can imagine that getting rid of cable was really as easy as dropping off the box and moving on. We were not under any contract or anything like that. At some point next week a brand new TiVo box will show up.

Tonight we have the Xbox and a sweet TERK Indoor plate antenna that found 41 channels when plugged directly into our Sony Bravia television. We plugged in the antenna to the television and it took me a minute to figure out how enable the auto scanning feature. It warned that the scanning might take a total of 30 minutes. Fortunately that was not the case it took about 5 minutes. It found a lot more channels than I expected it to find. It does appear that broadcast television is still alive and well. 41 channels worth of it

Topic 3: NiceHash sent me a payment

Mining cryptocurrency has not been as fun this week. Bitcoin values cratered. They bounced back a little bit. Things are wild in the world of mining. My NiceHash Miner software is still running. It actually just paid out my 8th wallet payment. That was pretty exciting. I was able to make a transfer from the NiceHash wallet over to my Coinbase wallet. My BTC fortune has not reached 0.0096 of a bitcoin. You read that correctly I have almost mined 1% of a bitcoin using the NiceHash mining software. That was a lot more awesome when a bitcoin was approaching $20,000 in value. Based on data from the Coinbase dashboard it looks like in the last month bitcoin has dropped 40.42% in value. A higher value without that reduction would have made my fraction of a bitcoin a little bit more shiny. Alas that is not the case.

NiceHash wallet payments in reverse order:

8. 2018-02-03 05:50:10 Mining payment → 0.00135065 BTC
7. 2018-01-30 04:28:59 Mining payment → 0.00102840 BTC
6. 2018-01-27 04:51:21 Mining payment → 0.00120973 BTC
5. 2018-01-24 04:25:25 Mining payment → 0.00125795 BTC
4. 2018-01-21 05:32:06 Mining payment → 0.00133244 BTC
3. 2018-01-18 04:27:55 Mining payment → 0.00119401 BTC
2. 2018-01-15 04:30:34 Mining payment → 0.00105970 BTC
1. 2018-01-13 04:51:00 Mining payment → 0.00118327 BTC

My 100 day journey into the world of cryptocurrency mining is well under way. I have mined a variety of things with NiceHash and I have a couple thousand TurtleCoins. At some point in the next two weeks my new backup computer will be up and running. That assumes a power supply finally shows up after being on backorder. That backup mining machine will build up some reserves of fringe or alternative cryptocurrencies. That has a better shot at profitability than just watching the NiceHash miner grind away selling hashing power. Don’t get me wrong. I have enjoyed using NiceHash, but selling hashing power does not have the same potential upside that mining alternative coins has.

Topic 4: Google gave me a free audiobook

Apparently for owning a Google Home Mini device I received a store credit for one free audiobook. The email said, “Audiobooks are here, and your first one is on us.” That was pretty epic. I scrolled through the listing and really pondered what audiobook would bring me the most joy. You may be surprised to find out that book is Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965). When I bought my Google Pixel 2 XL smartphone it came with a free Google Home Mini which in turn apparently came with a free audiobook. I’m going to have to plug my Google Home Mini back in to listen to the audiobook. It is one of those devices that I received and setup, but have never really used. I actually unplugged it the other day when my office cleaning binge started.

Topic 5: Getting ready to watch the Super Bowl

We have been without cable television for most of the day. Things seem to be going fine. Sure i will probably miss the Curse of Oak Island and Top Chef. Beyond those two shows I not really have any vested interest in television. We have a subscription to watch the new Star Trek Discovery. I would have just bought on Blu-ray if they had started selling it instead of stringing it out via some CBS streaming scheme. We also have a subscription to something called Stargate Command that proporates to have new episodes of Stargate at some point. You may be starting to see a pattern around our buying habits. They are pretty much driven by science fiction tent pole franchises. Overall that does not really concern me at all. My Blu-ray collection might take up space, but it does not really hurt anything.

It has been about 8 hours since we gave up cable and I can report that nobody seems sad or worried about the decision. Tomorrow however is the day that Super Bowl LII (52) will be occurring on the NBC. That should be easy enough to pick up using our new TERK over the air antenna that is directly plugged into the old Sony Bravia television. It also appears that a ton of streaming options exist for the game. The NFL must be trying to combat piracy by just making it very easy to watch the game online. I’m curious to see if the game tomorrow will have a high viewership number. Apparently, Super Bowl XLIX (49) between the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks was viewed by over 114 million people. The game tomorrow will probably not pull in that large of a an audience, but it could pull in a very large amount of people. Based on the economic drama that has occurred throughout the last week and the horrible flu season I think people may just stay in and watch the game driving that number way up. If they manage to calculate all the streaming figures correctly, then it could make a for a record setting number.

We will be watching the game. Being fans of the Kansas City Chiefs the outcome of the game is interesting, but I have no real emotional attachment to it. My rooting interest would be for a good competitive game that is fun to watch. That is probably the best way to sum up my interest in the game. I am wondering if we will see any interesting advertisements. Don’t forget that Apple launched the Macintosh with an iconic Super Bowl commercial. Some very iconic commercials have occurred during the Super Bowl. More people are going to be tuned in and engaged during the Super Bowl broadcast than at any other time throughout the year. If you want to capture the attention of the people, then the Super Bowl is your best bet.

Topic 6: Rounding out the night

Really digging into meaningful topics still appears to be a little bit illusive during this writing journey. That is wholesale my fault. The buck pretty much stops right here. I should be picking better topics and spending more time writing about them. Yesterday I had decided to sit down and sketch out my blog post before starting the writing process. That did not happen. This morning I got up and started closing out the blog post from yesterday. It was not until later in the day that this blog post started to come together. It was not sketched out. I started writing without a plan. The only real thought that was on my mind was related to how hard it was going to be to return the cable box. At the time I thought it would be emotionally draining and somewhat harrowing of a journey to get the box returned to the cable company. That was not the case the process of returning the X1 box was pretty much seamless.

The one thing that I should have done was factory reset it before returning it. Somebody could plug that device in and watch all my Curse of Oak Island episodes stored in the DVR. I guess that device also knows my Netflix password. Maybe they are storing that in a secure way. Either way that concern is just an afterthought. The device is gone. It was scanned in and officially returned. The one thing I have noticed about using the TERK over the air antenna hooked into the television directly is that the guide function is highly limited. Getting the TiVo box will help fix that problem and make it easier to find the right content at the right time without a whole lot of effort.

My goal for the day is to continue writing and try to break the 100,000 word mark for the year. That will probably depend on the level of passion that the topics I pick inspire. It is entirely possible that in about an hour I will want to lay down and just go to sleep. That is what happened last night. That type of effort just keeps me behind my writing goal. Playing catch up is always hard enough to begin with. It would be easier to just stay on schedule and keep on moving forward based on the daily writing plan. That plan calls for a minimum of 3,000 words to be written and ultimately posted within a blog post. Sure that sounds like a routine thing to read as a statement. It is a much harder thing to accomplish.

I started wondering if it would be possible to play my new Dune audiobook from my Pixel 2 XL phone. It turned out that the answer to that question was yes. However, it did require installing a new Google Play application from the store called Play Books. Right now I’m at 0% with 20 hours and 54 minutes remaining on my new audiobook. This is really more of a table reading than anything else. Each part seems to be read by a different person. It is entertaining, but it will take a long time to listen to all 21 hours of this audiobook. I read at a much faster pace than these folks talk. That is good I guess. It will allow me to keep writing and listen to the audiobook at the same time. It really does seem that they are just reading the book word for word. That is good. Some audiobooks are highly abridged. This one appears to be unabridged.

Today was a rather productive day. Even my never ending battle with my laundry pile found a small degree of success. Most of my clothes are now folded and stored in my dresser. Cleaning up my messes and clutter is one of my goals for the year. It is a goal that can be accomplished. It is something that can be done.

Topic 7: Closing out the next day

Things ended up at a count of about 2,882 words yesterday. I’ll take it and we will close out the writing process this morning in a storm of prose. Today is Super Bowl sunday and plenty of time will be available for writing on the couch during the game. I do need to go over and make sure that we are getting a good strong over the air single for NBC on the old Sony Bravia television. That is one major consideration for the day. We kicked off the day by turning on PBS kids. That was a different twist to things. Normally it would have been some type of streaming or maybe the Disney Junior channel.

I do watch a lot of YouTube compared to anything else. A lot of the YouTube creators that I follow produce clips that are about 10 minutes long. I watch a few of them each day. They are mostly on in the background. Right now however, I’m listening to This Week In Computer Hardware episode 451 recorded February 1, 2018. Leo provides tons of content on TWiT television. Leo says on the about page that TWiT is a netcast network. I would just describe it as collection of podcasts with video. All the shows are pretty much stationary and have really good audio. The video is mostly just people sitting around in a studio or their homes talking. Either way it has been something that I have enjoyed for years.

Strangely enough Patrick Norton is talking about GPU prices and miners today. It was really interesting to watch this show talk about the wild tactics sellers and miners are the value of potential income. It was really interesting. My guess was that they were being rather reserved on the topic and did not share their full unfiltered thoughts. I did really enjoy Allyn and Patrick Norton talking about ways to free the GPUs from miners. That made me laugh/giggle.

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

P.S. Today is going to have a rather short postscript. On the brighter side of things the word count for this post is well over 3,000 words before this last little bit of reflection. Today the post for day 35 is coming to a close. You can expect a lot of Super Bowl related content to happen later today. That is sort of what happens this time of year. This will be Captain Pickles first super bowl in the house. In preparation for the game we washed both dogs with some type of coconut and honey smelling shampoo. Peppercorn the dog gets washed very sparingly. That dog is not a fan of baths. Captain Pickles does not appear to care in the least.

2018: Day 34 the one where my Corsair 740 Air case showed up
Word count 90,823 + 3,317 or 94,140 of 1,000,000

Dear Reader,

Our regular FedEx driver dropped off my new Corsair Carbide Series Air 740 high airflow ATX cube case today. I’m afraid the driver knows me. That is either a good thing or a bad thing. My answer probably depends on the day. The box was much smaller than I expected. Inside the box were two styrofoam block ends and a matte black bag surrounding the case. I’m calling this new case “The Borg Cube” and it is pretty awesome. I’m going to put this old motherboard in it later today with an older graphics card. One day that motherboard will be replaced with a newer model. All off my efforts to install a motherboard and get the case setup will not get the new computer system up and running tonight. A very important piece of the puzzle is missing. This computer build has no power supply. No amount of wishes and goodwill will get it running without a power supply.

The case came pretty much fully assembled. It is sitting under my desk next to my other computer. I believe you can see what it looks like in the thumbnail. Tomorrow morning I’m going to open up the side of the case door. It is a clear plastic see through design. It has a hinge toward the back that really make it feel like a sturdy type of door. The other side of the case has a traditional sliding door with some grooves. The power supply sits on the hidden side along with some space for hard drives and cable management. After opening up the door I’m going to work on attaching an old micro ATX motherboard I found in the garage. That motherboard does not even appear to have a brand sticker on it. Oddly enough it has one graphics card slot and 3 PCI express slots. It is a short motherboard and will probably look funny in the case.

Tomorrow I should be able to install the motherboard and an older graphics card. I have a hard drive ready to install in the case. I’m going to install Ubuntu Studio on the hard drive. That is pretty much it. The motherboard already has 8 gigabytes of RAM, a CPU of some type, and a now very clean CPU fan. I used a good portion of a can of compressed air cleaning the CPU fan. It was seriously covered in a very deep grey color of dust. The computer will be mining alternative or fringe cryptocurrencies. You may have already guessed that means it will be doing nothing, but mining TurtleCoin at the moment. My other thought is that it might end up mining one whole Litecoin. In any event it will be mining whatever cryptocurrency that might make enough profit to pay for new parts. This computer build is pretty much a compilation of parts that have been assimilated from a bunch of other builds.

Getting the computer setup will just be the first step. I have an a couple old monitors, mice, and keyboards that could get it up and running. I’m probably going to use the Google remote desktop feature to keep the miner up and running on a regular basis. Depending on how hot my office gets that computer could very well end up in the basement. The basement sounds like a great place for a computer to hang out and mine cryptocurrency. Given my general feals of electrical fires I’ll probably leave the computer up in my office where it has my full attention. I’ll probably provide some updates on how well it mines and what it does. That will all have to happy after my backordered power supply arrives. Apparently the backorder is going to last a week or two and it could be closer to the middle of the month before my computer is up and running. With any luck the cryptocurrency market will have rebounded by then and mining TurtleCoin will be epic.

Not only was this week not a good week for the stock market, but also it was a rough week for cryptocurrency. It was the worst week in two years for the stock market overall. That has to have sent some shock waves throughout the investing community. Markets go up and down. Anybody that thinks the market is only going to go up has not studied history. You could say the general trend is up, but that does not mean the curve is linear. I just got done reading an article from the New York Times titled, “Stocks Fall to End a Bad Week, and a Boom Begins to Look Shaky.” That article shared some economic considerations about inflationary concerns. It was a decent article. I shared it via a Twitter today. You can catch the link on Twitter or just search for it. You may have noticed that my posts do not contain a ton of hyperlinks. My thoughts on writing include providing enough detail that references can be found independently. That means ensuring that dates, authors, and relevant title information is shared inline. If somebody really wanted to look it up, then they could find it today or years from now.

I’m sure at some point the new Gutenberg WordPress plugin will drive me toward better design, style, and hyperlinks. That new reality has not arrived yet. You will just have to wait for WordPress 5.0 to come out. It does appear that new version will force an entirely new creative design interface on the community. That pretty much means that I will need to adapt or find a new blogging tool. I used to really liked using, editing, and coding for Movable Type 2.63 (2003). For some reason that I switched to WordPress a few years ago and have been on it every since. A fair number of platforms exist. WordPress has worked out well enough for me, but this Gutenberg plugin is perplexing. My main mode of blog communication is the written word. My prose for better or worse gets written and posted with little editing or afterthought. That pretty much means that I write from start to finish and post after cutting and pasting my content into WordPress. That is how I go about it.

I settled in here after 7:30 PM to write this post in one swift writing session. Things are going well enough so far and that is ok. Peppercorn the dog is snoring. You may have guessed that our opening vignette is coming to a close. It did last over 1,000 words which is a good sign. I’m going to try to stay focused and lock on each topic that gets brought forward today. Writing high quality in depth prose is the name of the game today. It should be the name of the game very day.

Topic 1: Oh that cable television subscription

Tomorrow I’m taking the plunge. We are going to go out and return our X1 cable box and move to a pure internet only plan. Our household only has one television in the main area and it should be possible to just watch over the air content or stream content. That is pretty much the way we are going. A new TiVo box is on the way next week. We will see how that ends up going. We cut the cord on cable one other time and used TiVo. That older TiVo box is probably in the basement somewhere hanging out. It required a monthly subscription and was kind of slow. It had a great interface and search worked out very well. This new box should be faster and does not require any monthly subscription.

That was one of the key selling points that pushed me over the edge to going internet only mixed with the ability to record OTA HD content. Buying an antenna remains on my to do list. The Best Buy near my house appears to have more than 10 different antennas in stock. It could be a good option to just go look at them and figure out what antenna will work best for me. I made the mistake of asking the internet to tell me what the best indoor OTA HD antenna was. All of that searching just kept pulling me into advertisements.

All of my monthly savings from not paying the cable company for television could be spent on expanding my ever growing Blu-ray collection. That at least can be a 4K ready content option. A lot of movies these days include a 4K and HD Blu-ray disc in the box. That works for me now and in the future. A future where I upgrade my television to have a 4K experience. However, I am seriously convinced that our refurbished Sony Bravia television will last for years to come. We are probably going to keep this television until the hardware fails. That really could be years from now. The device has never been plugged in without a dedicated battery backup with voltage regulation.

Topic 2: Finding my glasses

My plan to search all over for my glasses has not worked out as expected. Maybe tomorrow I’ll have enough time to put all my laundry away and get my dresser back under control. Oddly enough I did find my long lost Pokemon Go Plus device. It was in a my favorite sport coat. The tweed one with elbow patches. Tomorrow just might be the day that I finally find my glasses. It may also be the day that I accept that they have been lost to the ages. Glasses and phones are things I do not generally lose. That is really for the best. Both of those items are fairly expensive items to lose.

Well that topic did not really pick up steam. My efforts today were going to really focus in on topics, but the juice may not have been worth the squeeze on this topic. Maybe my glasses are just not that interesting of a topic. Maybe it would have been better to debate the value of blue light filters on glasses and how that impact my computer usage. That could be a good topic to start digging into. I will admit that the blue light filter did not really seem like a good thing to do when I was buying the glasses, but it did work. That was a somewhat surprising finding from the purchase of my latest glasses.

Topic 3: Rounding out the night

It does appear that the overall traffic to my blog is increasing. I had wondered if publishing 3,000 new words each day would increase my overall traffic. Some of that is keyword driven and some of it might be people who are along for the journey. It is going to be a long journey. I’m thinking of putting in a countdown. Ok —- I built out the widget to show the countdown, but seeing it with over 300 days listed was enough to make me turn away from that plan quickly. That widget had to get deleted. It pretty much seemed daunting and a little unsettling. This is one of those goals that is better to take on one day at a time. Yeah I’m going to avoid thinking about that part of the journey and just focus on staying positive and writing one page, one paragraph, or one sentence at a time.

Rounding out the night did not finish out this blog post for the night. It seems to be happening every night. Instead of finishing out my writing secession I am pushing off the last 1,000 words to the following morning. I’m going to need to finish this blog post and then jump right a really good vignette to catch back up. My writing buffer is gone. At the rate we are going the actual blog post for each day is going to get closer and closer to real time. The idea was to try to maintain a 24 hour buffer between scheduling and publication. That was to allow some type of editing. Sure that was misguided. I have not been circling back to edit the posts in a meaningful way.

Topic 4: I’m ready for the weekend

Today the weekend has officially started. I’m still on the hunt for the best donuts in Denver. We found a place down the street that makes pretty good ones. They are never as fluffy and fresh as the donuts I remember getting as a youth. Today might just be a day that I venture out to get a couple donuts after finishing up this blog post. We do not have any real plans this weekend or anything that has to happen based on the schedule. Believe it or not that is actually great news. Sometimes a sleep weekend full of just getting things done is a great way to spend the time. My laundry pile along upstairs needs some serious attention. It is all clean laundry it is just piled. The problem started when I did not take the time to fold the first batch. You can imagine that after that the problem snowballed or in this case laundry piled up more and more. Joni actually things I have more clothes piled on the dresser at the moment than actually in the dresser. That is a sad state of affairs.

At some point today, probably after getting donuts I’m going to assemble the parts in my new computer case. Strangely enough I thought the Corsair Air 740 case was going to be bigger. It is pretty wide and had a cube like like. It simply is not thall. The storm stryker case is a full ATX case and it is much taller. You can tell from the photo that it is a little bit less wide, but a lot taller. The storm stryker case from Cooler Master is much heavier than the Corsair 740. That power supply is still on backorder.

Topic 5: Now really does not appear to be a good time to build a computer

The title of this topic really does say it all. I’m going to grind out a few words on this topic, but I think the title really does clarify things. Now is really not a very good time to build a custom computer. First, the shortage of high end graphics cards is very real. NVIDIA is going to at some point release the next generation of processing power after pascal. I will probably end up buying another reference graphics card directly from NVIDIA at that point. It looks like all the hobbyist cryptocurrency miners have just purchased up every graphics card they think they can mine with. I mean it makes sense. If you can drop an extra graphics card in your case, then set two cards mining and make $5 per day that is something people are going to do. I have been mining cryptocurrency for an entire month. Now the value of my fraction of a bitcoin has plunged 45% in the last month, but that is a story for a different blog post. Second, it seems like the new RAM is pretty highly priced. Some folks have indicated this relates to graphics cards and the high end RAM they require as well. I will have to research that one a little bit more. Third, all the higher end power supplies are sold out as well. Even driving down to Micro Center I could only get a 650 watt power supply. My future case build is going to need a power supply that is over 850 watts.

Over the course of the next year. I’m sure my new computer code named “The Borg Cube” will be getting new additions. In my mind each one of them will be an act of the Borg assimilating some technological distinctiveness into the cube. Yeah —- that last sentence might have been a little over the topic, but if you cannot write some Borg jokes before 6:00 AM then what is the point… I’m still thinking about watching Star Trek Voyager all the way through again. Canceling cable will probably open the door to an adventure like watching 172 episodes of Star Trek Voyager from start to finish. That seems like a decent enough proposition. This new computer case has a few different pieces that are interesting. I’m trying to figure all of the different part configurations that are possible. The part I need to figure out is the long-term storage configuration. It looks like the case has some slots for a few hard drives. To mine cryptocurrency having a storage array is not a requirement, but the price of drives has come down so much that setting a little bit of RAID storage seems like an exciting proposition.

You don’t have to worry about me getting sucked into the world of hard drive mining. That is probably not going to happen. It seemed like the setup was a lot more complex than getting a standard miner up and running. I’m also pretty skeptical of hard drive mining in general. The bandwidth costs scare me. Some of these folks on YouTube have huge mining storage setups with a ton of hard drive space. I mean it seems interesting. At some point along the way I do want to figure out how and why people are getting paid for hard drive space. My desire to learn and understand is probably causing trouble at this point, but hey learning about different things is a good strategy.

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

P.S. Most of this post was written on my Storm Stryker in my office chair listening to some songs from the Amazon Music Unlimited streaming music. I listened to a ton of Nirvana this week. I even ventured out into some of the live radio broadcast recordings. Maybe it is pure nostalgia, but there were pretty decent. My record collection spans a musical period of over 50 years. That speaks to my eclectic taste in music.

We made it to the donut shop. They had not even pulled all the donuts out of the boxes yet. The trays had not been fully setup. You can imagine from just that description that the donuts are not baked or fried at that location where we pick them up. Don’t judge that fact or question the freshness of the donuts. They are still pretty darn good. I had a wonderful twist donut this morning and a tall flat white espresso based drink from Starbucks. The flat white is not my go to coffee beverage of choice, but sometimes it is nice. Today for example is a relaxing day. I had a wonderful donut and a flat white to start off the day. A day that may or may not involve returning the cable box and canceling out our cable television. This could end up being a very big day.

I’m closing out the blog post today with a few thoughts on the approaching 100,000 words for the year. You can imagine that I thought it would take a lot less time to hit 100,000 words at this point it is going to happen on Day 35. By extrapolating the 35 day speed to 100,000 words over an entire year that does give me hope. 350 total days of writing at my current pace would produce 1,000,000 words within the year and I would have a slight buffer of 15 days. Maybe those 15 days could be spend resting and recovering from a big year full of marathon writing sessions. I just cut and pasted this blog post into WordPress and we are only at 3,261 words. That means we ended up falling just a little bit short of the expanded writing goal for February. You can imagine these last two sentences were designed to just tip the scale and cross the writing threshold for the day.

2018: Day 33 the one with the missing computer power supply problem
Word count 87,502 + 3,321 or 90,823 of 1,000,000

Dear Reader,

It is 7:12 PM and things are just starting to calm down for the day. Things ramped up today and did not slow down. That happens from time to time. You may have noticed that my YouTube live stream had a triumphant return today after a brief hiatus. My first attempt at hosting a live stream today did not go as planned. It actually went terribly. The stream started and no audio was present. Both my primary microphone and my backup microphone were not streaming any audio. That as you can imagine would make for a pretty boring live stream broadcast. Today my Open Broadcaster Software had to upgrade and somewhere along that path the microphone settings needed to be refreshed. That was an easy enough to fix and implement. Within a minute or two I was backup and streaming. I had to go into my videos on YouTube and delete that false start before it got posted. That was easy enough to manage.

Today I had an idea for a television show called Crypto. It would follow a startup cryptocurrency founder and a core group of friends. It could be like a better version of the television show Chuck filled with interesting asides. The team could get pulled into feuds with state actors, rival coins, and highly strange investors. I’m thinking the show could really be about the community of folks it takes to get a cryptocurrency setup and keep it running. Maybe at some point I’ll adapt my idea into a series of short stories and publish those here this year during the long race to 1,000,000 words. That seems like an interesting way to spend part of my writing time. I started to sketch out a whole season of episodes with a few character arcs. It could be great mix of cryptocurrency fanfiction and epic techno thriller. All of the state sponsored efforts and schemes are ripe for serialized satirical hyperbole.

Today included some wild cleaning efforts. One of my favorite collections of my collegiate publications was moved from one wall to another. An original photograph from my cousin was moved from the back wall to the front wall. One University of Kansas magnetic dartboard moved across the room to hang above the door. All of that happened pretty quickly. Cleaning up the rest of the bookshelves took a little longer than expected. They were full of all sorts of nonsense. I’m guessing they had about three solid years worth of nonsense spread out all over them. Things get put on bookshelves and they just stay in there. I guess that is sort of the point and also part of the problem. Only one shelf remains to be cleaned in my office. That should be the hardest one to clean, but hey it is possible.

You may have noticed the thumbnail for today’s post is of Captain Pickles the dog looking out the window. All of those cords hanging down in the photo are not managed properly. They are now. My desk is clean and things are working out well. I had tried to do a photo mashup the clean and the unmanaged table. Captain Pickles the dog did not cooperate for the 2nd photograph. That happens sometimes. You can enjoy the majestic look of Captain Pickles being super focused on the world outside the window. Learning about the world around around us is always fun. It is amazing just how focused the dog can get on searching and looking for anything that might happen outside the window. Not that much happens outside the window. A lot more searching happens during the process than actually finding something. I spend a lot of time thinking about the process of searching for things. Part of striving forward and staying positive is about looking toward the edge of what is possible. That edge is really powerful. We strive to get to that edge and to keep pushing it forward. Every day the idea is that the edge of what is possible gets a little farther from where we started. That is the basis of the journey and the foundation of how we sustain our momentum to keep fighting the good fight to improve and enhance the world around us. Sure some folks might believe the here and now is a true utopia. I’m not inline with that thought.

Topic 1: My Corsair Air 750 case arrives tomorrow

You might have guessed from the title of this blog post the problem that exists. It seemed like a great idea. I was going to boot up my old graphics card connected to my n-1 motherboard. It has some RAM and a decent processor. It could power up an operating system and allow me to set up one more cryptocurrency mining computer in my office. It was going to be devoted to mining TurtleCoin. I was going to call it the Borg computer. It would run from parts assimilated from other computers. Resistance as it turned out was not all that futile. Without a modern power supply the entire build was a risk. By risk in this case I mean that it was not going to work at all. That as you can imagine was enough to make me frantically search the basement for the missing power supply. The power supply in my Lian Li cube is capable of powering an original AMD Athlon 64 bit CPU and a bunch of peripherals that are connected with IDE cables. It simply does not have enough wattage to power a modern graphics card and motherboard. It is also really old and kind of loud.

Tomorrow the new case will arrive and I will work on getting some things connected. It will be a fun little adventure, but it was not be a satisfying one. Hitting the power button will not make anything happen. A computer needs a power supply. That is just one of those basis computer 101 facts that anybody that got one of those A+ (Plus) certifications from CompTIA IT Certifications. That power supply needs to be connected for the magic to happen. I’m thinking about making the trip down south Saturday to visit the Denver Tech Center Micro Center. Ordering a power supply at this point does not feel like the right thing to do. This feels like a problem that only a trip to Micro Center will fix. Being able to go visit Micro Center in Kansas City and just walk around was something that I took for granted. No stores near me really sell computer parts. We have some big box retail stores, but none of them sells a combination of awesome parts like a Micro Center. Even at this time of night the drive would be 35 minutes. Strangely to me that feels like driving to a different city.

I may get online and make sure they have the power supply in stock before making the drive. I could probably pay for it before hand and still just walk around the store for fun. This is something that a service like TaskRabbit might do for me. That would not be as satisfying as actually roaming around a real technology store for an hour or so. The risk with a trip like that is that I end up coming home with more tech than just a power supply. Ok —- apparently I thought TaskRabbit did a lot more than what the website indicates. Go figure. That was a misunderstanding on my part.

Topic 2: Watching the Bitcoin values

Throughout the day I have been keeping an eye on the dashboard over at Coinbase. It shows the real time values of 4 key cryptocurrencies. Today was not a banner day for those folks that have invested in Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, and Litecoin coins. Last year Bitcoin had almost hit $19,206. Right now it is sitting at $8,771.14. I’m wondering if we are going to see a plunge to under 5K tomorrow followed by some type of rebound. It seems like all the exchanges use BTC as a benchmark or standard for conversion. My humble mining account holds 0.0072 BTC. It is worth less USD this week than last week, but I’m still going to wait out the 100 days to see where things end up. Tomorrow will be a very interesting day for people who buy and sell cryptocurrency.

A massive hype bubble for bitcoin existed. Pretty much every time somebody did a Google search for the coin it was predictive of price increases. The more people that wanted to know about bitcoin the higher the prices went. Right now things are just falling. People online do seem to be showing some signs of panic.

Topic 3: Giving up cable television

We had cut the cord before and stopped paying the monthly subscription rates for cable television. I’m not entertaining the idea of giving up the cable modem, but cable television is probably not necessary. We really only have one television in the house. The kids really only watch Netflix. I’m going to start looking at what it would cost to just buy internet services. It may take a bit to research all the internet providers in my area to see which one provides the best uptime and service. It looks like DSL or cable modem are my two choices for internet provides. The DSL was ok back in Colorado Springs, but the upload speed is a deal breaker. I really just want to move up to a gigabit internet service. I already looked at replacing my cable box with a TiVo OTA box. It seems like a responsible thing to do, but I need to dig in a little more and look at all the options and figure out the right path forward.

I did some research and it does appear that we can reduce our monthly costs by about half. We just might be giving up cable television this year. I’m seriously considering buying the TiVo Roamio OTA 1TB DVR and switching to internet only service. Right now this seems like a brilliant idea, but it takes time to figure out all the logistics. Our only real concern related to live sports programming is having access to University of Kansas basketball games. They are mostly on the ESPN family of networks these days. Being able to watch those games is key to being able to make the switch and reduce my monthly entertainment costs. We have to buy a new TiVo box and or figure out how to use the Xbox One S as a DVR. Either way we have to buy an OTA HD antenna. So many are on the market these days. It is sort of hard to figure out from the ratings and reviews which of the OTA HD antennas is really the best. That is key for me during this transition. We need a really good antenna. My search for the next few weeks is going to be about trying to find the world’s best OTA antenna. If you have a suggestion to help me get on the right track, then please drop a brand and model or a link in the comments.

Maybe it will be a good thing to not have access to cable news on a daily basis. I really do like to check on CNN from time to time throughout the day. I guess giving up cable has been done before and things worked out ok. We will see how it goes. I’m pretty sure that is the path we are going to go down at some point this month.

Topic 4: Rounding out the night

Cleaning up my office and removing clutter has been a big part of my efforts this year. One of the problems I have been dealing with relates to accepting clutter. It is easier to just leave the clutter and move on. It is much harder to address it and fix things real time. This post today will push my word count over 90,000 words written on this blog this year. I have pretty much removed any mental clutter and put all my thoughts down on paper. That is a really powerful thing to complete. It is a monumental task to knock out. Being ready to write free of negative baggage is important. My goal is always to stay positive. Staying positive and trying to move forward is the key to figuring things out. You may have guessed that I truly believe in staying positive and keeping a high degree of motivation going.

My glasses are still missing. Today i’m going to clean up my laundry pile on my dresser and check each one of my suit coat pockets to see if my glasses are just in hiding. It is also possible that maybe they fell between the seats in my car. Those are the three places I’m going to search for them today. It is possible that they got left someplace. That means I have two remaining pairs of glasses hanging out with me. I don’t really like my n-1 pair they are not that comfortable. My n-2 pair is great, but they have a few scratches and are a slightly older prescription. They still work, but they are not perfect and they do not have the blue light filter. I think at some point this year I am going to get a new pair anyway. It might be a good idea to go ahead and move up my eye doctor visit for the year.

Topic 5: Fitbit Ionic initial thoughts

My new Fitbit Ionic is way more comfortable than my Fitbit Blaze. I’m not exactly sure how and why that is the case, but I hardly notice the Ionic. It feels pretty comfortable from the start. The battery life does appear to be about 4 days based on my usage patterns. I did end up changing up the clock face to the Tabs design. It says that clock face was created by somebody called DevRag. They called it a stats intensive clock face and that is pretty ture. Overall it is my favorite Fitbit Ionic clock face at the moment. I did take a few moments and looked at the sport band for the Ionic. The one I ended up buying is what they call slate blue and burnt orange. The face edges are burnt orange vs. silver. It just caught my eye and I liked the style better than the black or silver watch frames.

Topic 6: My fountain pen collection

My fountain pen collection has not been growing lately. I’m really happy with my Parker IM Premium Matte Black Fountain Pen with a Medium nib. I use only a Parker blue ink that comes in a little ink well bottle. I have been refilling the pen with a Parker fountain pen converter that uses a standard twist fill method. It works great and it is my daily workhorse writing instrument. Switching over to fountain pens has been a new adventure for me and it is something that I have really enjoyed. I had no idea what a nib was and how it worked. Ballpoint pens were how I engaged in writing. They were my writing instrument of choice. That was the case until very recently. It has probably been within the last year that I started using this one fountain pen and refilling it from an inkwell.

I gave up on using regular paper notebooks and started using large plain hard cover Moleskine Art Plus Sketchbooks. The fountain pen works great with that thick paper. Writing by hand is something that is great for taking notes and for brainstorming. You can imagine that the fountains pens and the whole day dreaming and brainstorming practice work out great. It took me a little bit to get used to writing with a fountain pen, but now it is my favorite way to interact with paper.

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

P.S. We are digging into the second day of february right now. I’m writing every day and producing words at a record pace. I really need to start digging into topics in more detail and spend more time really debating the topic on the merits digging a layer deeper into the form, function, structure, and assumptions related to that topic. Right now I’m burning through topics at a pretty fast rate. Some of these one paragraph topics are just not getting enough discussion. I’m opening the topic and giving it some coverage, but things are not getting taken to the next level. Writing at this pace is going to involve changing up a little bit of my writing effort. I really wanted to put together a ton of words today and push my writing efforts over 100,000 words for the day. Last night I sat down to write and just could not produce at that level. It probably has to do with not picking topics to write about that inspire passion on my part.

Writing about things that you are passionate about is just easier. The prose is less terse and more epic. You can imagine as we move forward toward writing another 900,000 words this year. Picking the right topics will be very important. That is going to pretty much ensure the success and prevent the failure of this writing journey. You can imagine that producing 1,000,000 rambling stream of consciousness based words would be hard to follow. Right now my efforts have to get a little bit more targeted. I might need to sit down with my trust fountain pen and sketch out about 5 topics for the day and then execute that plan every day on time and with quality. We have made it do day 33 of this journey and I’m learning that making outlines and getting a plan together is actually a really important part of the writing process. Maybe just winging it is not enough to get things done anymore.

Maybe this week could have been more fun. I just could not really get into a solid groove for writing sustained bursts of words. I’m wondering if maybe trying to write more in the morning and waking up at 5:00 AM next week might be a good test case. Maybe an extra 30 minutes of early morning writing will be enough to push things forward. The only problem with that strategy is that the more typing that happens that early in the morning the greater the chance that the dogs will wake up the kids and that will just kickstart the entire day. The dogs are always a consideration in the process. They are at their absolute loudest first thing in the morning. I’m exactly sure why that is the case, but it does appear to be true.

The total word count for this blog post is quickly approaching 3,317. That is a big target to hit. I have removed the upcoming topics section and that just makes the target even more interesting. What I still think is really interesting is that the word count between Google Docs and WordPress is different. They must be using very different algorithms to determine what exactly is a word. For me the definition is simple. Every non punctuation related utterance separated by some sort of spacing is a word. I did some quick searches on it and the answer does not appear to be easily found. Maybe that is something where I will dig into the code and figure it out. I did figure out how to add a countdown to my 100 days of cryptocurrency mining extravaganza. That is pretty exciting I guess. Countdowns are always fun to have on the website.

This last sentence is going to put us over the word count edge for the day. With that in mind stay positive and keep striving forward.

2018: Day 32 the one where a new month started and my office got clean
Word count 84,161 + 3,341 or 87,502 of 1,000,000

Dear Reader,

I’m writing about 6 single spaced pages in Google Docs per day this year. That is exciting. Welcome to the first pages of February. I’m glad that you are here to enjoy the journey. My glasses are still missing, but hey I’m sure they will show up at some point.

I am getting emails and application alerts from Netflix today. For some reason the algorithms over at Netflix seem to think that I should be watching Cars 3 tonight. Yeah that last sentence presumes that the algorithms over at Netflix are capable of some degree of thinking or at least independent processing with some element of decision making built into the process. Sure that is probably a little premature in the life cycle of the algorithms that Netflix has built. General AI is probably a few years away and most of the specific use case AI efforts are very focused. This is an example of an area where I could see a combination of things being built out in concert. It is also possible that the algorithms are built to be adaptive and capable of organic expansion based on mutation. I’m sure they are in the aggregate built to make suggestions and improve success rates over time. Even a series of A vs. B tests working at a high enough volume testing a variety of theories could get us to a useful setup. Yeah I just lost about 20 minutes thinking about how I would work out movie picking algorithms. Sometimes I wonder what building out algorithms and doing data work would be like on a daily basis.

Today is another day where things started off slowly. I’m contemplating writing a short story tonight. Today might just be a night of venturing off into the world of being a fiction writer. Yeah —- I should have gotten up at 5:30 AM and written a sweet vignette. Instead I just wasted an hour or so and had some espresso. That new Nespresso Expert machine really does make some pretty decent coffee. I’m not 100% sold on the price of the pods. My first experience recycling pods worked out well enough. All that nonsense was enough to just help get me going. Getting into the groove of writing took a little bit of time tonight. Things are just getting going and it is 7:30 PM. that might just be a little late in the game to get going.

Ok things are just going to divert to fiction writing time. I’ll try to signpost it all. My first attempt at a short story did not go all that well. It was not natural and organic writing. It felt forced and uncertain. A good short story should take you along the way. You should not be trying to drag it to the finish line. That is a key indicator that you are working on a false start. That happens sometimes. Back when I used to write in notebooks it was not a very big deal to just tear up a page and move on. Things are easier to cross out and give up on when you are writing by hand on paper. Computers are supposed to make things easier and in a lot of ways they do achieve that goal. In some very important ways they change the dynamic between the writer and the page. They breakdown that hidden wall between the production of prose and the publication of prose.

Maybe tonight could be devoted to working on some foundational ideas about the nature of quality along the journey. The inquiry does appear to be the journey and the journey does appear to be inherently linked to the inquiry. This could be the night that things gear up for a chautauqua geared around the metaphysics of things related to this journey. We could dig into quality and value. That might be the right way to go. It might be easier than trying to force the production of a short story that does not really want to spring into existence. Every option for writing tonight is about talking this stream of consciousness in a different direction. It is about focus my attention on something meaningful and really digging into that topic. At some point this year I am going to write a series of missives that will make up the foundation of a spycraft thriller. That is probably going to happen sooner or latter. I would say that it is almost inevitable. Those short stories have to be inspired. They have to really pull a reader into a world that feels completely real and plausible. Those are the types of books I write.

It has been some time since i sat down and just devoted time to writing a book from start to finish. These blog posts if you have not figured out are written from start to finish. No real editing. No effort to censor or delete the previous sentence. If things feel like a false start, then I just call it out and try to do better. I broke that rule here during day 32 here and circled back up to the vignette section. I think it was worth it. A little bit of a short story is trailing this paragraph. I had to jump back in front of that block of prose and write a little bit of an introduction to help explain how all of this happened. That does not justify the poor quality of the following prose, but at least it acknowledges that the level of quality was not there for prime time.

False start 1: A poorly executed attempt to write a short story titled, “Weekend Recruitment a short story from the Robert Heart Series.”

Desert roads always give you time to think. Those long hall drives are the ones that spark the imagination. Walter has been making trips from California back to Colorado and all over the southwest for decades. They always give Walter the time to remember that we all want to belong to something big. Believing is a healthy part of what drives us forward. That is pretty much the premise of every approach for any recruitment that has happened in the last two decades. Things are getting more complex every day. Folks talked about the widing net of social control and that was no joke. At some point you will get to know Robert Heart and you will learn what being a real patriot is all about. That is a story for another time. This story of recruitment is about something different. It is about what Walter K. Wilburton does best. Bringing people into the fold takes a certain level of skill. It really does. Every recruitment has to work. That is the name of the game when you reach the level that Walter is at.

<<< This is the end of false start 1. >>>

I just was not feeling it and the prose suffered. That short story went sideways and pretty much crashed into the mountain of its own failure. Sometimes I guess it is just not the right time to sit down and try to write a short story. Maybe the process of producing 3,000 words per day has stolen some of my whimsy and imagination. Maybe constant production has sapped my creativity. It is also possible that I’m just a little bit tired and a good short story will show up at the exact time and place it is meant to show up and not a moment sooner or later. It could just be as a professional writer I’m not able to muster enough creativity to produce a short story on command. Reacting to the world around me and chasing down the things that catch my interest is a lot easier to write about on a daily basis than allowing a world to spring forth from a fountain of creativity.

Topic 2: Searching for a new router

Back in 2014 I purchased an ASUS RT-AC87U Wireless-AC2400 dual band gigabit router. It has worked well enough over the last few years, but it has started to go wonky. By wonky I mean it has to be reset and then it starts providing internet to the house again. You can imagine that is discouraging and at first made me thinking the security had been compromised. I do not believe that is the case. I think maybe it just got hot from sitting on top of my cable modem and stopped working 100%. It could have also gotten hot from a combination of the sun and the cable modem or something I guess. It is also possible that maybe the router just has not stood up to the test of time and it is starting to fail. I started looking at some new options to replace that router and they are very expensive. Routers seem to have gotten more expensive than I expected. Two of the models that I looked at today that seem to be really good devices were also about $400 and that alone was enough to make me want to factory reset my current router and hope for the best.

Topic 3: Updating my Fitbit Aria scale

Talk about devices that are challenging to update. I’m pretty good with technology and I gave up trying to get the Fitbit Aria scale to accept a new network. It could see them and I know the password was right, but it failed to connect to three of my home networks. In a last ditch effort to make it work I renamed one of my networks and reset the password to the combination I knew the scale had used before. Even that attempt failed miserably. I started search the Fitbit help forums for answers. I would like to track my weight on a daily basis, but my technology is not making that easy. The Fitbit support forums on the subject are just full of reports from sad and frustrated customers who cannot get the scale to connect. I may just give up on the device after one more attempt.

Topic 4: 1,500 words in and no title

Most of the time before reaching the halfway point these blog posts have a title. Today I’m considering calling this the blog post without a title. That is probably a bad idea. At one point, I gave up on giving my posts clever titles and just named them using a standard Year Month Day (YYYYMMDD) naming convention. That would make things easier, but it makes it really hard to sort things out in the end. Sometimes a title helps make things more focused and allows the reader to have some idea about what is about to happen. Not all of my titles are that useful really, but at least they provide some idea about the content of the posts. Throughout this journey I have been trying to make sure that each post is at least a window into something. A new chapter. A new story. At the very least, I have tried to make sure that each day is different to some degree. That is the spice of life that brings joy to the world around us. Striving forward in a variety of ways to experience different things.

Topic 5: Rounding out this blog post

You may have already guessed that last night I was just not feeling it. Today however things have returned to normal operations and I’m back at it at full enthusiasm for life, the universe, and well everything. It could be the wonderful lungo style espresso beverage from my Nespresso Expert or it could just be a nice of good sleep. Either way things are moving forward and progressing along today. Yesterday, I thought it would be a good idea to listen to my Nirvana Unplugged vinyl record today. That recording is one of my favorite albums to hear from start to finish. I started looking for a copy on DVD from eBay. Maybe buying up concert films of bands that I enjoy could be fun. It only looks like a few Nirvana DVDs are out and about on the open secondary market. It really does seem like I have doubled down on buying up physical media. From my vinyl record collection to all my DVD and Blu-ray purchases. My stockpile of physical media just keeps growing.

That is probably just foreshadowing of the size of my future collections. Just thinking about my sports trading card collection alone the amount of space it takes up just grows from year to year. The last time I sold a ton of my sports trading cards was before I got married. That was a long time ago in what seems like a very far away land. Well I guess it was not all that far away it was up in Boulder, Colorado. That is about 15 minutes up the road from where I am at now. We lived right next to the post office and selling trading cards was pretty easy at the time. Cards sold on eBay and I packaged them up and walked next door to mail them that same day. It usually was a process that happened in batches. Most of my eBay listings were all done pretty close together. That meant the auctions ended at about the same time. A lot of people paid right after the auction ended. Some folks did did not pay very quickly.

It is snowing right now in Denver. It is a thing very light snow that is sticking to the road and is just sort of applying a dusting to things. I’m curious to see how much snow we end up getting. This week I did manage to venture out and buy some kind of pet safe not salt product that can breakdown ice on the driveway. That is an important part of keeping the household up and running. Google local weather seems to indicate that snow might just be happening until about noon and then things will clear up. I’m ready. I have some Nirvana booted up and I am ready for the day. Maybe two more shots of espresso would help, but at the moment I’m ready for the day.

Topic 6: An update on cleaning my office.

Yesterday one of the three bookshelves in my office got picked up. Some stuff did shift from that one bookshelf to another one. That means that the last two shelves will be harder to clean than the first two shelves. The whole process of getting things picked up and removing the clutter has been a challenge. I need to finish cleaning up the 2nd shelf today or you just might see that mess during my triumphant return to YouTube today. My plan is to turn off the NiceHash miner software during the live stream and just jump back into mining cryptocurrency after the broadcast ends. Building a second computer will allow me to remote into one box and show some live mining during my YouTube broadcasts. It will also let me dig in and show you some more complex Tensorflow and other deep learning screens.

The second bookshelf is really not all that dirty and it is really just a matter of cleaning up some clutter and organizing the books a little bit better. This blog post finally got a title, “Day 32 the one where a new month started and my office got clean.”

Topic 7: Cable management

You may have been wondering how long it would take me to clean up and manage the cables under my desk. Yesterday I crawled under my Studio RTA executive glass desk and zip tied all the cables together up and away from sight. That is working out pretty well given that Captain Pickles the dog is now sitting under my desk. Now that things are cleaned up our 8 month old puppy just wants to sit and look out the window all day. That is fine. Nothing really happens in our neighborhood. Sometimes the squirrel the dogs are at war with runs by the window and a bark-storm occurs. My new cable management has helped remove clutter and get things in order within my office. At the same time, that change has opened the door to some extra puppy driven wildness.

Topic 8: Today’s thumbnail

Yesterday I called an audible and replaced a photo of my Google Nexus 9 tablet with a photograph of my new Fitbit Iconic fitness watch. That was a good change and I stand by that decision to bring in a more relevant thumbnail for the blog post. Today however I have elected to use that photograph. I tried to grab a photograph of the snow outside and so far it is not very compelling. That fact has been taken into consideration and today will be the day that you get to enjoy this Nexus 9 photograph. It is now an end of life technology that may not get to be the center of attention again.

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

P.S. You may have noticed that the end of the blog post has changed a little bit. I have removed the upcoming topics list from the daily post. It was just adding an offset to the daily word count and it was not something that was being used a ton. That pretty much meant that it had to go. I’ll try to keep the list in a running topic list in a separate document. It may be something that I keep in a notebook. Writing the topics down by hand just might help them become more meaningful for me. Something needed to change. Those topics were supposed to inspire me and help me push forward entire blog posts. That just was not happening. My writing routine was not sparked by a featured topic or even a theme. Each new day just began the process of muddling through from start to finish. At the moment, I’m leaning toward a framework where any topic that bubbles up gets tackled real time instead of getting added to a list for future consideration.

On the brighter side of things the copy and paste function is still working and working well. That has saved me countless minutes each day. For some reason I am still writing in Google Docs and pasting into my blog post. The squirrel just ran by my office window and Captain Pickles missed it. It is snowing and very cold outside. I guess it is just one of those days. Here in just a few moments I’m going to go make two shots of espresso and start the day. This morning writing session was required to fill in some word count from yesterday. I have to stop going to bed without finishing my writing for the day. I’m basically tracking at about 1,000 words behind schedule each day. That means I’m going to sleep knowing that I’m going to have to get up and write frantically in the morning to catch up before the day starts. Without question that is not the best strategy to take to move things forward on a daily basis. My morning writing session should offset the daily word count and help kickstart things to make my nightly writing session more manageable.

This last paragraph here today is being written to stretch out my word count to more than 3,317 words for the day. Getting to that word count will help me catch back up to my daily writing target. Welcome to February the month tagged with an extra goal to make up for certain writing goal deficines in January. It could be worse I guess. The journey toward writing 1,000,000 words in the same year will truly test my resolve, dedication, and persistence. Today we are rounding out to just a little bit above that word count and we removed the upcoming topics section. That means that today happened. Was completed within target and is now complete.