Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Month: March 2018

  • Day 90 the one where the Jayhawks were in San Antonio

    2018: Day 90 the one where the Jayhawks were in San Antonio
    Word count 180,061 + 544 or 180,605 of 1,000,000

    Dear Reader,

    You may have been wondering about the thumbnail for the blog post today. Captain Pickles the dog decided to eat some books today. One of those books happened to be, “Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology,” by Jean-Paul Sartre. That book has been read a number of times. That could explain why it was chosen for destruction by our new puppy. I went only to Barnes and Nobles and ordered a replacement. That replacement will be kept on a higher shelf in my office. The dog appears to only eat books on the first two shelves… something is going to have to be done here to help stop the dog from eating my books. After giving up on Amazon this year and ending all of my financial transactions with them I had to find a new bookstore and it seemed like a good idea to go back to my old bookstore. Barnes and Nobles was the bookstore that I would go to visit and buy books at in Kansas City. That or a Borders bookstore which apparently ceased operations back in 2011.

    Ok —- now that the book destruction has been addressed it is time to note that the University of Kansas Jayhawks played the Villanova Wildcats today in San Antonio, Texas. It is about 20:00 hours and I just started writing. The second half has started and I’m still hopeful at this point. The clock is going to keep ticking, but a comeback would need to start. We are watching the TBS broadcast via our Chromecast Ultra and YouTube TV. Our subscription to YouTube TV is probably going to be cancelled after the end of basketball season. I do have to say that the service is pretty great and it worked out really well during the NCAA tournament.

    One of the thinks that I started working on today was buying two movies in a 4K format. I had thought that our local Costco would have had Thor Ragnarok and The Last Jedi movies in the 4K format. That packaging seems to include the regular Blu-ray disc and the 4K Blu-ray disk. For the most part I am just future proofing my purchases in a physical storage format. My Storm Stryker custom built computer with a 4K monitor supports 4K content. Our old Sony Bravia does not support that type of content. Surprisingly, Costco did not have the which is probably a reflection on the sale of physical media. That store sells a lot of 4K monitors and televisions. Given that they sell 4K disc players and televisions capable of playing 4K content I had made the assumption that the movies would be for sale as well. ‘

    Well this second half is not going very well so far. My reaction at the moment is to want to repeal the 3 point line… at the moment that seems like the best chance to restore order to the universe. It is probably not a winning philosophy or a realistic suggestion, but it feels like the course of action at the moment. My energy level and focus on writing at the moment is questionable. Things were shaping up for a fun weekend and now things are on tilt all over in basketball land.

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

  • Day 89 the one with some Last Dab hot sauce

    2018: Day 89 the one with some Last Dab hot sauce
    Word count 178,943 + 1,118 or 180,061 of 1,000,000

    Dear Reader,

    Oh it was a day of snark. Some oddly mercurial folks with a keen wit were out in force today. Sometimes I guess that happens. For a lot of folks it was either the end of a spring break week or the start of a holiday weekend. Either way I figured it was a Friday and tried to look forward to a few moments of peace. Right now at the moment I’m pretty calmly writing some words and listening to a little bit of Pandora. It is about 20:00 hours and the day is mostly gone. Now would be the time to hammer out some thoughts on the keyboard. I’m hearing pretty mixed reviews on the Ready Player one movie. That makes me somewhat sad I guess. It is a movie that I really want to enjoy. Given that movie theater popcorn makes me happy the movie only has to be pretty decent to be acceptable. We will see a ton of reviews this weekend for the movie now that it is out in the wild.

    For those of you who have my YouTube video alerts turned today was the day for my Last Dab Carolina Reaper edition review. For some reason, the overlords at YouTube elected to take away my ability to schedule videos. Beyond having monetization ripped away from my channel the schedule video feature is the one that I miss the most. Taking that feature away was arbitrary and capricious. It was simply mean and truly uncalled for. I pretty much consider taking that feature away to be patently ridiculous. So the original Heatonist sold hot sauce from the First We Feast was the Hot Ones sauce. It is zesty and pretty darn good. It has a medium level of heat and I really like it with tater tots. Later they made a sauce called the Last Dab. It included a pepper called Pepper X and it is rated spicy with a 10 out of 10 ranking. My review of the Last Dab featuring Pepper X has been viewed a few thousand times.

    Today I went back and revisited the Last Dab hot sauce with Pepper X and paired it with the newly released Last Dab Carolina Reaper edition hot sauce. I can handle the Last Dab with Pepper X it is hot probably due to the primary pepper ingredient having a 3.18 million Scoville unit rating. This might sound strange, but the Last Dab Carolina Reaper edition hot sauce was way more abrasive and heat forward. On a few occasions I have tackled Pepper X and gone back for more. I’m not sure the flavor on the Carolina Reaper edition was enough to bring me back to the table. I’m going to make a video about my top 10 favorite hot sauces. That sounds like a really great plan for a video. I’m sure that will be a project for next week.

    Topic 1: Buying some N scale model trains

    A few quick eBay searches yielded a few options for buying up some N scale model train parts. It looks like a few engines are for sale on eBay. They are pretty much sold as is and mya or may not work when they arrive. That is really the wildest part about buying vintage or used parts on eBay. With a vinyl record I can generally tell from photographs if it is going to play or if it is turn up beyond any degree of playability. Buying an N scale model train engine is a very different proposition. It could look fantastic and not work. I guess that is the risk associated with buying things at a much lower price than trying to buy new ones. Maybe N scale is not as popular as it used to be or model train parts have just gotten more expensive over time. It was one of those things I thought would be for sale in lots on eBay. I’ll keep looking for a really good lot of trains until my collection gets a little bit out of hand.

    Topic 2: Deploying my graphics cards

    I’m seriously considering taking my two GTX 1060 graphics cards and moving them from my Storm Stryker case to my new Corsair Air 740 case. I’m wondering how much of a temperature difference that simple movie would make. The fan situation within the Corsair Air 740 case is way better all around. I added a ton of fans to my Storm Stryker case this year. That was enough to allow some cryptocurrency mining to occuring during the last 100 days. That endeavor has been a wild ride. Overall values of bitcoins have gone up and down a ton. Keep in mind that all of my mining efforts have only yielded about 2% of a bitcoin. My real curiosity is just how well the ASUS X299 TUF Mark 1 motherboard will handle the heat. The package indicates that it should handle it pretty well, but that is a test I want to see and evaluate.

    Another option would be to pick up some used NVIDIA GTX 1060 founders edition graphics cards on eBay. Strangely enough I sort of thought the dip in bitcoin prices would have results in more graphics cards being sold on eBay. The ones with less than 6 gigabytes of RAM are probably going to end up being sold on the secondary market in large numbers. Those blockchains are not getting smaller every day. They are just getting larger and more computationally intensive. That probably will yield a ton of graphics cards flooding the market at some point. However, unless the next generation of NVIDIA graphics cards is an evolutionary leap the cards that end up being sold will be good for gaming, but probably not the best of the best in terms of overall GPU power.

    Topic 3: The TensorFlow Dev Summit

    I had a chance to catch parts of the TensorFlow Dev Summit today. It will probably take me a good chunk of the weekend to watch the whole event. Some of the day one stuff looked pretty interesting. It gave me some ideas to jump in and work with some different methods of data importation. It is nice to watch or see somebody using the product. Sometimes the easiest way to learn about something is to observe it instead of just trying to read about it. Ok —- my Pandora internet radio station just played me an advertisement in Spanish. That was pretty much uncalled for. I understood some of it, but that does not seem like a properly lined up advertisement.

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

  • Day 88 the one with some reflection on picking direction

    2018: Day 88 the one with some reflection on picking directions
    Word count 177,762 + 1,181 or 178,943 of 1,000,000

    Dear Reader,

    Ring the bell. Not in defeat. Ring the bell to signify a new round of adventure. Reflecting on why we pick the directions we pick take a certain something. Probably a little bit more than just ringing a bell and starting a new round of inquiry. Today the blog post title was almost something about picking ideas that rise to the level of whiteboard level thought. To me that has a very specific operationalized definition. The topics or narrative threads that are complex enough to be evaluated on a whiteboard session. For better or worse that means they require some degree of ideation followed by some type of analysis. For those of you awesome readers that have been around this digital space for some time you probably know my prefered framework for analysis involves deriving the form, function, structure, and assumptions (FFSA) related to the subject in question. That may not be the best methodology, but it is my methodology and it helps me understand the world around me in a deeper way.

    So the word whiteboard did not make it into the title of the blog post today which revolves around reflecting on why we pick certain directions. Sure you could reduce down the complexity of our analysis and decision making to a science of muddling through. You would argue that we accept the decision in the moment, but engage in a dispositional intellectual pivot from that moment forward. Beyond being a relatively interesting turn of phrase a dispositional intellectual pivot is meant to highly that we make the next decision based on the moment it is not based on the previous position. No inertia or implied degree of consistency is driving us from one decision to the next. No overall guiding philosophy helps to derive a decision making path. I’m not really ok with that line of thought or the fact that it is a pretty well accepted framework for folks to use at this point. I tend to fall back on some value choices related to being transparent, being collaborate, and actively working to prevent failure. You can probably see just how trying to uphold those values would be in conflict with a dispositional approach to decision making.

    My phone is alerting me that a new episode of The AI Podcast from NVIDIA is available to listen to on my Google Play Music application. That is pretty good news. Much like the trap of listening to audiobooks at night really good podcasts tend to lower my writing output. It looks like it is trying to get me to listen to episode 51 which is about saving lives by predicting extreme weather. That podcast is pretty much a trifecta of my interests. I like to learn about severe weather, deep learning, and podcasts entertain me. One of the great things that YouTube and podcasts in general provide is a forum for long form discussions. A lot of YouTube technology related shows are really jus podcasts with video. That is not a bad thing. Some folks prefer to watch folks talk and some just like to listen to the sounds. Sure that is fundamentally different than knocking on the sky to hear the sound. One is a purely reflective action and the other is more about learning and being entertained. You could argue that deep reflection could help you learn and entertain you, but that might be a little bit more inside baseball than I have patience for at the moment.

    All of this writing is supposed to be linking back to inquiry about picking directions. Some of these musing are probably tugging at the edges of that narrative thread, but maybe it is not addressed it head on enough to really bring the best of the topic under full consideration. Digging a little bit deeper directly into the reality of picking a direction might help move things along. Being present is the moment helps you understand the context of the choice. It helps bring it all together as you figure out that next step. Each step along the way is a part of the journey. Throughout the journey different directions and decisions are going to get made. That is a much a part of life as anything else. You cannot really find a routine and repeat the exact same steps every day. Things change and the world around us is not static. Sure part of that is due to the impending intersection of technology and modernity that will be a touchstone for everyone that experiences that moment. Really it will be a touchstone for everyone that sees the ramp up of technology that breaks down modernity.

    Topic 1: I’m picking a new vinyl record store

    Given my new focus on buying items locally here in Denver I’m working to pick a new vinyl record store. Sure I could just buy older vinyl from eBay, but that lacks the experience of looking at records and visiting a store. A quick search of online vinyl record stores produced a pretty interesting list. Another search helped me locate all the physical records stores near me. A few actually exist here in Denver. Going to visit one and being willing to look around and buy something on the spot is a different buying experience for me. Most of the time my vinyl record buying experiences either involve a whim or an opportunity. Sometimes a whim is as simple as hearing a song and thinking i’ll buy that on vinyl. It is a little more complex to sum up an opportunity. Sometimes I get an email or a notice of some sort that a band I’m interested has a kickstarter or a small printing of a vinyl record. Those opportunities usually trigger a buying decision. A quick search for “vinyl record store near me” found a few that are pretty darn close. I’ll pick one and go visit it to see how things go. I’m sure you will hear a little bit about that journey as we go along.

    Topic 2: Some new Hot Ones hot sauce

    Ok —- I need to make another YouTube hot sauce review video. The first one that I did for the Last Dab was pretty fun to do and worked out well enough. My latest purchase of the Last Dab Carolina Reaper edition is a little bit intimidating. It is probably a very intense hot sauce. Sure making a couple of my vegan wings in the oven and drenching them in hot sauce is not that hard. Trying to convince myself that it is a good idea to consume millions of scoville units worth of hot sauce is always the hard part. I’m good with really hot sauces up to a point. The Last Dab sauce with Pepper X was hot and I remember it being extremely hot, but it has some solid flavor to it.

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

  • Day 87 the one where I lost a YouTube subscriber

    2018: Day 87 the one where I lost a YouTube subscriber
    Word count 176,734 + 1,028 or 177,762 of 1,000,000

    Dear Reader,

    My YouTube channel went from 118 to 117 subscribers. Strangely enough that actually made me want to make more YouTube videos and get back on an upward subscriber trend. I know the audience of folks that wants to watch videos about artificial intelligence news is limited, but it is probably somewhere around 10,000 maximum. Going from 117 to 10,000 subscribers would probably require a combination of luck and extreme persistence. This is the 87th day of my writing adventure. If I had elected to make a YouTube video every day for a year, then maybe that subscriber account would be growing. It is also entirely possible that it could have barely moved. People still watch my older videos. That I guess is a good indicator that my future videos have some type of audience out in YouTube land.

    This whole writing every day plan is good, but trying to produce 3,000 words per day is proving to be a questionable plan. Tomorrow is a day that has been set aside to rest. It will be a day without working and that is pretty good. My big plan for the day is to go bowling and visit the eye doctor for my annual checkup. From what I can tell my vision is pretty constant year over year. Sure I should probably spend less time in front of computer monitors, but that is not really going to happen. I have spent a lot more time writing on this ASUS Chromebook Flip C101P. I do not even really look at the screen anymore during the whole writing process. I’m aware that the cursor is moving, but my attention is elsewhere. That is how it goes I guess during these epic stream of consciousness binge writing sessions.

    It started raining this afternoon and soon enough the rain turned to really big snowflakes. None of them were sticking to the road, but it was a deluge of very wet snowflakes this afternoon and early evening. I really just wanted to work deluge into a sentence. That happened. I guess i can go to bed now and call the day complete. Ok —- that is not going to happen at the moment. I’m going to push through and try to get at least a few words written tonight.

    Topic 1: My new hard drives are so noisy

    I had thought maybe it was just an overreaction to the noise level of my hard drives. That does not appear to be the case. My new hard drives are just super noisy. Two WD Blue 2TB Desktop Hard Disk Drive – 5400 RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5 Inch model WD20EZRZ drives were dropped into my Corsair Air 740 case. Both of them appear to just be loud and super noisy. Today i downloaded my cloud backup to one of the drives and it was really noticeable. It also caused my internet provider to send me a download warning. Apparently downloading my cloud archive was enough to burn up about 10% of my monthly bandwidth allotment. You can imagine that both amused me and I found it exceedingly sad.

    One of the advantages of running solid state drives is really silent operation. Those 5400 RPM SATA drives use a platter and make a ton of pinging and popping noises. It has been some time since I had to really sit and listen to hard drives. The level of noise is actually pretty terrible and might just be enough for me to move those drives into my Storm Stryker case and start the process of finding some more data drives for my new computer build. Tomorrow I’m going to power down the drives and verify that the noise is 100% caused by those 2 hard drives. I might try to capture some of the sound for a sweet sweet YouTube video about how annoying hard drive noises are terrible.

    Topic 2: Parts have been ordered

    Two new parts are on their way from California to my house. A small DVI to HDMI converter and a little bluetooth USB antenna. Both of these parts are for my new computer build to help me create the functionality of a KVM switch without paying for one. They have gotten really confusing and expensive these days. For some reason tonight my Pandora application on my Google Pixel 2 XL smartphone is playing a ton of advertisements. I’m getting one about every 5 minutes. It seems like they really want me to go to either a Disney World resort or Myrtle Beach. Sure I’m up for a Disney adventure at some point. I had tried to get that video adapter at Best Buy, but that did not work out.

    I just got totally distracted by my interest in going to see the Ready Player One movie. That looks like it will be a most excellent distraction filled with a ton of entertainment. The reviews even seems to be complementary. For some reason the movie theater popcorn is always just so much better than my microwave popcorn. We have an air popcorn maker and it does ok, but it is also not on par with the movie theater popcorn. It is hands down one of my favorite things to snack on. Perhaps that is one of the main reasons that I still go to the movie theater. I really just want a giant tub of popcorn. That may very well be the case.

    Topic 3: I’m still thinking about a new wireless speaker

    Tonight I spent a few minutes searching for a new voice activated speaker system for upstairs in the house. The Google Home Max looks like a great speaker, but it is about $200.00 more than what I want to pay for a new home speaker. At the moment, I just want to be able to ask the speaker to play music and enjoy the sounds. That pretty much rules out most of the bluetooth speakers that need my phone as the driver or interface. I have zero interest in answering phone calls on this speaker.

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

  • Day 86 the one where I wondered about graphics cards

    2018: Day 86 the one where I wondered about graphics cards
    Word count 175,326 + 1,408 or 176,734 of 1,000,000

    Dear Reader,

    Thanks to watching an advertisement for Walt Disney World on my Pandora internet radio application I got one hour of uninterrupted listening. Indeed you may have discerned by that previous sentence that paying for Pandora is still something that is on my avoidance list. At the moment that decision is probably more stubbornness and defiance than solid decision making. I’m sure in some ways a monthly subscription to Pandora would entertain me and provide me a certain amount of utility. That would probably be quantified in terms of utils of joy. Sure I could spend the rest of the night entertaining you with some sweet econometrics related to deriving the utils of satisfaction that purchase would net me vs. the opportunity cost of say several epic tacos. You will have to go on waiting for that analysis to enrich your day.

    Today I’m going to spend my time musing about a few things one of which relates to my trip to Best Buy today. Yeah —- I got in my car and drove to an actual Best Buy store. It was actually full of people and they were milling around doing stuff. My interest today was in getting an displayport to HDMI adapter. They will have one. Sure it is an easy drive. I can get it today. All of those things seemed plausible. I could see the slots on the shelf where that adapter would have been sitting. It seems like a lot of electronics stores are using some type of just in time inventory. However, I’m wondering if that slot has just been open on the shelf since I bought what might very well have been the last adapter they sold. It works well enough. It connects my strange docking station that has a displayport, but not HDMI output to my 34 inch monitor from Costco that only has HDMI ports.

    My new computer build in the sweet Borg cube Corsair 740 case is being powered by a basic AMD Radeon graphics card. That graphics card is just a placeholder for one of the NVIDIA GTX 2080 or NVIDIA GTX 2060 graphics cards that I plan on buying directly from NVIDIA at some point this year when they go on sale. All of the intel I have been able to gather online seems to point to production ramp up sometime in July. I can wait that long to buy a pair of NVIDIA graphics cards. That should not really be a problem. However, I have two computer monitors in my office. I would like the new Borg cube to be able to use either or both computer monitors. From my old TiVo purchase a few years ago I have a 20 foot HDMI cable. It is seriously monstrous and is wrapped in some type of mesh. I zip tied up the slack and connected the Radeon graphics card to my primary monitor. I crawled under my Studio RTA executive glass desk and started to plug in a second HDMI cable to the graphics card. That effort failed miserably due to the fact that the Radeon card only has one DVI, HDMI, and displayport connection. Sure enough that problem was the reason for my trip to Best Buy. Next time I will probably check online to see what Best Buy has in stock.

    Topic 1: The flawed nature of how we consume news

    This topic right here was almost the title of the blog post today. Instead of that eventuality I went with the graphics card related title. That seemed more germaine to the content of this post. However, that does not diminish the value of the content that is about to be shared. Take a moment and think about how we consume news and get information today. For the most part our consumption of information is disjointed, dated, or imperfect. That is easy enough to write and a little bit harder to explain. Newspapers based on the medium are always going to be lagging indicators of what is going on. Print in general only becomes further from the now with each passing moment. The name of the game in news reporting these days is to be first and move on to the next wave. It is never ending washing machine spin cycle that starts and stops without an real timing or reason.

    The way we get news from television, internet video, or even online website is typically in bite size servings that are more expedient than informative. Every part of how modern news is setup for distribution limits the actual possibility of expansive complete coverage. Sure you might think that assessment is hard, but people typically just get a little bit of content here and a little bit of content there. Getting actual comprehensive briefings of issues remains elusive for most people. You have a better shot at reading comprehensive and detailed coverage of a professional sports team vs. an actual geopolitical issue. My argument would be that the way we package information is to blame for creating and sustaining this problem. Most content is packaged for ease of distribution to as wide an audience as possible. Assumptions exist about how that asynchronous communication might occur. A lot of that happens based on a broadcast with a hashtag trying to solicit online interactions on Twitter or some other social media platform. Online content always opens the door to comments and or responses.

    This is a topic that I have spent a lot of time thinking about today and something that I’ll plan to keep revisiting until I get it right. This is pretty obvious stuff, but it is relatively hard to communicate in a complete way. Within this blog format I’m really just bound by my own limits of writing skill and time. Figuring out a better way to deliver content and help people get on the same page is very important. My phone only has 30% battery left right now and the minutes of my uninterrupted listing hour are quickly passing by.

    Topic 2: My thumbnail choice for today

    You might have guessed that view of the second floor of the DMNS. It was taken this weekend during a trip to the museum. I have a few pictures from that trip that will be attached to blog posts this week. They do not really have anything to do the posts themselves. They are just here to help me derive utils of joy from the process of trying to write 3,000 words per day. You may have noticed that I’m not making any illusions of being able to sustain my 3,000 word per day writing goal. At this point, I’m just holding out hope that a few large writing sessions will help get things back on track. That does not really appear to be happening. Sure I could try to force the issue and really drive myself to hitting the word count. I tried that it generated some less than inspiring prose. Some of it was good and some of it was not exactly up to acceptable standards.

    Topic 3: Internet caps for cable modems are ridiculous

    Seriously, what more can I say to help defend the statement contained in the title of this topic. My feelings about the situation are that internet caps for cable modem users are ridiculous. You can extend that to pretty much all internet caps. Companies should not sell internet speeds that cannot be sustained by the user base. Creating a cap on how many gigabytes of data I can move around from home per month is pretty much arbitrary and capricious. Creating a terabyte limit per month for a customer is an interesting strategy. I got a warning today that I’m at 50% of my monthly bandwidth limit. It is almost the end of the month. It is really unlikely that I’m going to use up the other 50% of my bandwidth in the next couple days. Obviously, due to the nature of not being able to roll over the data and being capped makes me want to use up all my extra bandwidth before the end of the month. This month was sort of a special use case vs. the general use case. Streaming NCAA basketball to watch the Jayhawks probably accounts for the increase in usage.

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

  • Day 85 the one with a trip to Micro Center

    2018: Day 85 the one with a trip to Micro Center
    Word count 174,782 + 544 or 175,326 of 1,000,000

    Dear Reader,

    Welcome to 20:00 hours. Today was a day without words. It was a day of software clicks and adventure. Upgrading computer parts is always a ton of restarts and clicks. Today I dropped a new version of Ubuntu Studio and Windows 10 developer preview (they call it inside preview or something now) on my Corsair 740 custom computer build. Strangely enough my Ubuntu Studio build from another computer spent a few minutes thinking and booted with an entirely different hardware setup. Setting up my Windows operating system was a little bit different today. I logged into my Microsoft account and located the inside program. They let me download an ISO, “Windows 10 Client Insider Preview – Build 17115 English.” It took just a bit to download the 4 gigabytes of Windows ISO. Thanks to the power of the Rufus application I was able to drop the ISO on a USB drive and that was that.

    The BIOS on the ASUS X299 TUF Mark 1 motherboard worked really well. I was able to very quickly get Ubuntu Studio running and install Windows 10 on the m.2 drive. That is the primary drive the system attempts to boot into by default oddly enough. It took a bit to get all the software installed. The two Western Digital 5,200 RPM hard drives that were installed in the case are louder than i remember them being. It is entirely possible that the fans in the new care are just so silent that the hard drives with actual mechanical parts seem louder than they used to be. That is entirely possible. The Corsair 740 case is also pretty open in design. It is possible that maybe sound just gets out it much more easily than my Storm Stryker case. We made the drive down to Micro Center. It was a decent drive. The drive was preceded by a trip to the train store.

    Topic 1: Caboose the Denver train store

    Today the trip to the Caboose store was pretty easy to manage. Today was my first trip to the Caboose model train store. It is a very nice store. They have a ton of stuff on the walls and it is all set out spread out pretty well. Some train stores are more or less boxes and shelves. They do not make an effort to arrange things in an artistic way to make them more appealing to customers. Comic book stores are frequently guilty of that. They end up being box and boxes of comics and shome shelving. We had a pretty good time at the train store for about an hour talking about track layouts and designs. We ended up moving from a small circle to an oval track layout. Probably my biggest learning of the day was the price of N scale engines. Spoiler alert —- they are expensive little devices. Some of them were like $400 bucks and the cheapest ones were right around $100 or so. That just seemed a little bit more than I remembered. I may be surfing Ebay for the next few weeks to look for N scale model train engines.

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

  • Day 84 the one where my fantasy baseball draft happened

    2018: Day 84 the one where my fantasy baseball draft happened
    Word count 173,965 + 817 or 174,782 of 1,000,000

    Dear Reader,

    This is the year that my fantasy baseball team will decimate the competition in route to a championship. That might just be pure hubris. I’m visualizing that eventuality. Sure most of my attention is being focused in on thinking about getting a slice of pizza from Ernie’s Bar & Pizza. They make a very decent slice of cheese pizza. In a couple hours I’ll be sampling one yet again and can give an update on the 2018 state of the pizza. It looks they have some margherita pizza on the menu and that sounds pretty spectacular today. At this very moment and pretty much all year I have been in the don’t buy things mode. It is a great mode. That is pretty much the way things are going right now. That Audioengine B2 wireless bluetooth speaker looks good, but I’m thinking Google will release a new round of speakers.

    Topic 1: My fantasy baseball draft and some Jayhawks basketball

    Ok tonight I grabbed my lap desk and brought it upstairs to write. For some reason today the word have not flown. This morning I did not hammer out a couple hundred words. Right now at 20:00 hours I’m sitting down to write the bulk of my words for the day. You may have already guessed that means that I have two hours right now to hammer out whatever words are going to arrive today for publication. At the moment, I’m watching ESPN Sport Center via YouTube TV on my Pixel 2 XL Smartphone. That is working out well enough. Sure my fantasy baseball draft happened tonight, but I’ll probably remember the University of Kansas Jayhawks basketball game against Duke instead. Ok so that slice of margherita pizza from Ernie’s Bar & Pizza was pretty darn good. You don’t really have to take my word for it. It should be pretty easy to scroll back up and take a look at the photographic evidence of just how epic that slice of pie looked. What made it really good was the fact that it was probably a cheese pizza that they threw margherita pizza toppings on before heating it for a second time. That pretty much meant that it had all the crisp crust and solid pizza structure before the tomatoes interfered with the structural integrity of the pizza. It was a pretty darn good slice of pizza.

    All I want to do at the moment is write about the basketball game that happened tonight, but instead of doing that I’m going to finish writing about my fantasy baseball draft. That draft included 23 players total. The first 10 were keepers within the league. Everybody got to keep 10 players from their previous roster.

    1. (1) Billy Hamilton (Cin – OF) Keeper
    2. (13) Jonathan Schoop (Bal – 2B) Keeper
    3. (25) Ryan Braun (Mil – OF) Keeper
    4. (37) Adrián Béltre (Tex – 3B) Keeper
    5. (49) Joey Gallo (Tex – 1B,3B,OF) Keeper
    6. (61) Salvador Perez (KC – C) Keeper
    7. (73) Kelvin Herrera (KC – RP) Keeper
    8. (85) Alex Cobb (Bal – SP) Keeper
    9. (97) Julio Teheran (Atl – SP) Keeper
    10. (109) Matt Albers (Mil – RP) Keeper
    11. (121) Stephen Strasburg (Was – SP)
    12. (133) Lance McCullers Jr. (Hou – SP)
    13. (157) Masahiro Tanaka (NYY – SP)
    14. (169) Adam Jones (Bal – OF)
    15. (176) Johnny Cueto (SF – SP)
    16. (181) Danny Duffy (KC – SP)
    17. (193) Javier Báez (ChC – 2B,SS)
    18. (205) Brett Gardner (NYY – OF)
    19. (217) Jake Odorizzi (Min – SP)
    20. (229) Ian Kinsler (LAA – 2B)
    21. (241) J.A. Happ (Tor – SP)
    22. (253) Josh Hader (Mil – RP)
    23. (265) Dexter Fowler (StL – OF)

    If you know anything about baseball, then you probably already know my team is in trouble this year. My goal for the year is to watch the waiver wire and any breakout rookies to see if I can augment my roster and improve this year. The draft this year went by lighting fast. It took like an hour to do 23 rounds. That is pretty much an amazing speed. The entire time the draft was occuring all I could think about was regretting not getting a pizza to go from Ernie’s Bar & Pizza. Just one slice was not enough. Maybe it would have been overkill to get an entire pizza to go, but that was the direction that would have taken things from good to great and potentially back down the culinary mountain. It is entirely possible that walking a block with the pizza and letting it get cold would have ruined the joy of my previous pizza experience. At this point, we will not know that ship has sailed and it may be some time before that theory can be tested again.

    Topic 2: The Jayhawks in the final four

    This was one of those days and one of those games where I’m pretty sure Coach Bill Self is pretty darn happy that Malik Newman is on the Jayhawks roster. That was probably the key difference between going home this weekend and playing next weekend.

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

  • Day 83 the one with some elite eight basketball games

    2018: Day 83 the one with some elite eight basketball games
    Word count 172,817 + 1,148 or 173,965 of 1,000,000

    Dear Reader,

    18 days are left in this whole cryptocurrency mining extravaganza. My efforts are drawing to close within the scope of the 100 day challenge. Monday will be the day that I have some time earmarked to go visit the local Micro Center. Right now at 05:45 hours Google directions are indicating the Micro Center is about 30 minutes away. That is not really the case. It normally takes an hour to get to Micro Center. You would consider that in the same city, but the round trip is going to clock in at well over 2 hours of just driving time. For the most part that makes a trip to Micro Center to walk around and look at things a half day project. Spending a half day on that type of activity sounds like an adventure. Tonight and tomorrow night we have some pretty good NCAA basketball games on tap. These games are really of the moment and they should be good to watch based on the drive and determination of the players still in the tournament to strive for victory.

    Part of the whole writing process during this big year of writing has been to learn how to use the first part and the last part of the day to engage in a little bit of stream of consciousness style blog post writing. That is and will continue to be a good use of time. Taking the time to work on other types of writing projects is also important. Part of that involves working on short stories. Working on more long form fiction pieces is not really practical at this time. My framework has to be about taking one step at a time and putting things together. Outside of working on fiction writing efforts I need to kickstart my 2018 academic writing efforts. Perhaps the outcome of my inquarity into quality this year during my big writing year has focused on my priorities. Maybe this whole 3,000 word per day writing effort is my intellectual Walkabout. Maybe it is my effort to live in the wilderness of the extreme edges of my creativity for a year. Breaking down all of my self censorship and reservations took at least 100,000 words of writing. At this point in the journey, I just sit down and writing based on my reactions and reflections within the moment. Maybe that has reduced my focus as a writing to being of the moment, to being within the moment, to being a part of the moment.

    That is probably the best outcome of the entire process. Having a big writing year has to be about being present in the moment and understanding the outcome of spending so much time hammering on the keyboard. A lot of thinking happens during the process of writing at this pace. One of the outcomes of that process seems to be allowing the writing itself to become a reaction to thinking. That distinction is important to understand. Writing has to be the outflow of thought. When things get over complicated the process can become a wicked ouroboros. Within that example the process is the beginning and the end or more bluntly the start and the finish. Treating writing as the journey and the artifact discounts the value of the words to transform things beyond the simple start and finish of the writing session. Reaching beyond the moment where you are present is about being a reflective practitioner that views the past in context and the future in focus. Striving forward is about taking those reasoned and informed steps forward to make things better during the course of interacting with the world.

    Part of that process each day has become more and more an attempt to produce 1,000 reflective words at the start of the day. Maybe those words inform the next steps I’m about to take during the day. Maybe that is enough to ground myself in the journey toward an inquiry into quality. A journey toward finding the meaning and experiencing quality throughout the year…

    Topic 1: Closing out the night

    Some time has passed since the optimism of this morning. Things this morning were stalking up in a way that was full of promise. Hope was springing from every well and the forecast for the day was fun filled with more fun. Alas, reality set in and burned down my optimism reservoir and left me where things sit today. It is like that moment before MacGyver figures out a plan to fix things. I’m talking about the original MacGyver. For me the Richard Dean Anderson version of MacGyver will always be the only version. Unlike Dr. Who who regenerates MacGyver was and always will be Richard Dean Anderson. Ok —- I have said my peace on that one and can move on to trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my night.

    For some reason I was very close to purchasing the Audioengine B2 refurbished wireless bluetooth speaker online a few moments ago. That was really close to being something that I purchased. You might be wondering what stopped the transaction from being completed. It was a few reservations I have about wanting a speaker that can play music on its own and does not require my phone connection. My phone rings all the time. Those calls do not need to end up on my wireless bluetooth speaker. That was really the reason that I paused and did not make the purchase. It looks like a pretty nice speaker and it is very close to what I want to get. I had thought about setting up another record player with two speakers upstairs, but that does not seem to be the best option. The setup in my office is working out well enough. Sure I could just use my Bose Qc35 headphones, but sometimes I just want to listen to music that fills the entire room.

    Rightnow the Michigan vs. Florida State game is streaming to my television via a Chromecast Ultra being controlled by my Google Home Mini speaker. It was really easy to get going tonight. I just said, “Hey Google play TBS.” That was enough to watch both elite eight games that were on tonight. I’m not entirely clear on why the good folks over at CBS elected to put the games on TBS vs. broadcast television. Let me be exceptionally clear when I say that the programming decisions that television executives make typically make very little sense to me. If those types of things were up to me, then Firefly would still be a tentpole Fox franchise. It only took watching one episode of that show for me to say hey this is great.

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

  • Day 82 the one where I shared my Warren Zevon Pandora station

    2018: Day 82 the one where I shared my Warren Zevon Pandora station
    Word count 171,545 + 1,272 or 172,817 of 1,000,000

    Dear Reader,

    My desk was completely picked up. Things were looking like they were supposed to look. Somehow within only the matter of a day the entire top of my main desktop is covered in nonsense. A couple hard drives arrived yesterday. They are Western Digital (WD) desktop hard drive SATA 5400 RPM 3.5 inch drives. My new computer build using a Corsair Air 740 case has a bay for 3 slide in and out 3.5 inch hard drives. No screws are involved each bay has a sleeve that holds the drive in place with pins instead of screws. A lot of modern hard drive cages use this design it is way more efficient than the previous models that involved a lot of complex screw configurations and removals to get the hard drives mounted. My new computer configuration will feature three different types of storage. Stay tuned to find out more information on my exact data storage configuration. You can probably safely assume that some future blog thumbnail images will cover that subject.

    My Warren Zevon Radio station from Pandora was created back on May 5, 2013. Today is the day I’m electing to share the link with the world to bring joy to the entire planet one click at a time:

    https://www.pandora.com/station/play/1406490537159530917

    That link just got shared on Twitter and it included some type of headphone emoji. I’m going to admit that when it comes to the world of emoji my knowledge base is limited to the basic set of smiley faces. Most of those I learned how to cause on accident from texting the character set that causes the conversion from text to emoji. That reminds me of the reality that pretty soon my Twitter account will have published my 5,000th tweet. I’m not sure if that is an accomplishment or just a random milestone. That is probably differentiated based on the amount of celebration or personal satisfaction that is involved.

    The above set of HTML should be triggering an embedded tweet from Twitter showing the moment I shared my Warren Zevon Radio Pandora station. For better or worse that HTML will trigger a nice embedded tweet until the day Twitter disappears from the internet. Given that will probably happen at some point it would have probably been more produent to take a screenshot of that box and embed an image vs. a swatch of HTML that needs an external site to run. Sure that would be the best way to go about it, but apparently I’m a rebel archivist this morning. Most of the musings I post to Twitter are just links and retweets. Based on my YouTube efforts I had started sharing all sorts of links related to artificial intelligence, deep learning, neural networks, and machine learning. I still think that is the right way to go. A string of links would not make a very compelling blog post. Twitter is a better forum for the sharing of random links to things that catch my attention.

    Topic 1: Jayhawks vs. Tigers

    We watched the second half of the University of Kansas Jayhawks basketball game against the Tigers of Clemson tonight. During the first half we were still at Toys”R”Us tonight. I do not know if that is the right spelling, but I got it from their website so it must be close enough. It probably won’t matter here soon. That venerable company is closing down. They blamed everything from the economy to birth rates of millennials. Tonight in Denver they had signs up about things being 30% off and we had to spend our gift card. People were darting all over the store it was a madhouse of toy deal seekers. Seriously, I have not seen so many people in a story outside of black friday doorbusters. People were everywhere. They were looking at the deals. It was a little bit overwhelming. We almost bought one of those outside turtle things that holds sand. They also had a lobster one which obviously seemed fantastic.

    We made it out in time for a quick dinner before watching the complete second half of the basketball game. Tonight we watched CBS using our over the air antenna. That works out pretty well and avoids any bandwidth costs. The quality of the high definition signal over the air is pretty good. Naturally, sports and movies are the reasons I want to upgrade to a sweet sweet 4K television. We could not get a 4K signal for the game tonight anyway. Over the air has the standard for 4K, but that is not something that is being used in the wild yet. This was one of those games that was just hard to watch. Things were going well and then all of sudden a cold streak almost cost the team a trip to the elite eight. Maybe that should be capitalized. It doesn’t really matter. Being in the top 8 teams in the nation is pretty good. At this point, I’m ready to sit down and watch the rest of the games tonight. It is a lot less stressful to watch games where the Jayhawks are not playing during the tournament.

    Topic 2: I’m super ready for the weekend

    Sometimes a week can just be so jam packed that take a few moments to decompress sounds like a fantastic path forward. This was one of those weeks. Figuring out how to decompress on the weekend is always a unique challenge. For some reason sitting on the sofa and relaxing does not really appear to be something that is going to happen. A toddler has more energy during any given day that I can hope to muster within an entire week. Even powered by Soylent meal replacements my activity level does not reach toddler speed or wildness. That perhaps is one of those things that may never happen again in my lifetime. Cleaning up my office and getting things back in order may be something that can happen this weekend. We have some basketball to watch. That is probably one of those things that is going to happen. Right now I’m watching the Syracuse Orange vs. the Duke Blue Devils basketball game.

    The rest of the night should probably be spent writing. At the moment all I want to do is sit and write about writing and that is not really a useful pattern to follow at this point. I need to pick a topic and write some words that inspire passion or maybe at least some fury. Today has to be a good day. It was the day that I shared my Warren Zevon Radio Pandora station with the world. Pandora does not really indicate how many people listen to that station. It does have a counter on how many people have added Warren Zevon as an artist to a playlist. That is not an addition of a specific song or album it is the straight up addition of the artist. Strangely enough the count on that would be 58 listeners. Based on that alone it would appear the music of Warren Zevon is not really gaining ground on Pandora. Maybe I’ll check back in 30 days and see if that number has gone up or down. Pop ups within the Pandora application are constantly trying to get me to upgrade. At this point, I’m not upgrading out of pure bitterness.

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

  • Day 81 the one where an 18th NiceHash mining payment showed up

    2018: Day 81 the one where an 18th NiceHash mining payment showed up
    Word count 170,643 + 902 or 171,545 of 1,000,000

    Dear Reader,

    This started at 05:30 hours this morning. A couple days back my 18th NiceHash mining payment showed up. You can tell by the gaps in my payments the time between payments from NiceHash in BTC from reaching the .001 threshold has been increasing. It appears that has been caused by a combination of things: 1) algorithmically mining gets harder daily, 2) the price of BTC is up compared to alternate coins, and 3) the price people are bidding for hashing power has dropped. Those are the things that come to mind right now after my first pull of lungo style espresso from my Nespresso Expert machine. It was glorious, but it has yet to fully open the possibilities of the day. At the moment my thoughts are way more tactical and process related vs. strategic or imaginative. Seriously, I’m sitting here listening to Pandora on my Storm Stryker custom built computer looking at cryptocurrency mining statistics. We are quickly closing in on my 100 day cryptocurrency mining experiment. At the end of that journey, I will try to write up my thoughts on what happened and provide some reflections on what happened.

    NiceHash wallet payments in reverse order:

    18. 2018-03-20 Mining payment → 0.00107147 BTC
    17. 2018-03-11 Mining payment → 0.00115447 BTC
    16. 2018-03-05 Mining payment → 0.00109993 BTC
    15. 2018-02-28 Mining payment → 0.00112356 BTC
    14. 2018-02-23 Mining payment → 0.00106113 BTC
    13. 2018-02-19 Mining payment → 0.00119364 BTC
    12. 2018-02-15 Mining payment → 0.00102799 BTC
    11. 2018-02-12 Mining payment → 0.00102953 BTC
    10. 2018-02-09 Mining payment → 0.00102322 BTC
    9. 2018-02-06 Mining payment → 0.00101337 BTC
    8. 2018-02-03 Mining payment → 0.00135065 BTC
    7. 2018-01-30 Mining payment → 0.00102840 BTC
    6. 2018-01-27 Mining payment → 0.00120973 BTC
    5. 2018-01-24 Mining payment → 0.00125795 BTC
    4. 2018-01-21 Mining payment → 0.00133244 BTC
    3. 2018-01-18 Mining payment → 0.00119401 BTC
    2. 2018-01-15 Mining payment → 0.00105970 BTC
    1. 2018-01-13 Mining payment → 0.00118327 BTC

    You can tell from that reverse order listing of my NiceHash wallet payments the time between payments is just increasing. My two NVIDIA GTX 1060 graphics cards are not able to sell mining hashing power at the same rates they were able to get earlier this year. Right now all they are really doing is making my office hotter. You can see in the thumbnail associated with this blog post Captain Pickles the dog enjoying the excess heat.

    Topic 1: Google Home Max

    Giving up my Amazon Echo device I ordered back on November 18, 2014 meant that I have started looking for a bluetooth stereo for my bedroom. The number one contender at the moment seems to be the Google Home Max speaker or some variation of that type of device. I’m not entirely sure how Google engineers managed to make that thing cost $399. A solid build probably should have yielded a $199 and $299 version. My Audioengine A5+ speakers are currently selling for between $399 and $469. Those premium powered speakers are absolutely fantastic desktop speakers. All of the video reviews of the Google Home Max on YouTube seem to indicate that it is a pretty darn good speaker, but the price tag has me wondering. Audioengine does have a couple of options that would meet my needs include the new A5+ wireless speakers or the B2 wireless speaker. The B2 option is selling for $225 right now and might be a good option. I would be able to control it with either my Chromebook or my Pixel 2 XL smartphone.

    Topic 2: Surfing the web

    We will be watching a ton of NCAA tournament coverage to wrap up this week. Most of the games seem to be on CBS which is great since we get that channel in high definition via our over the air antenna. That makes it much easier to watch the games. No bandwidth is burning via the whole streaming setup. So far this month we have used about half our total bandwidth allotment from the cable company. I’m not sure what will happen when we upgrade to a 4K television. I’m going to need to watch the bandwidth limit a lot closer. That is for sure. Streaming 4K eats up a lot more bandwidth. My custom build computer streams YouTube in 4K, but most of those clips are pretty short. Watching longer movies on the television will eat up a lot more bandwidth.

    Topic 3: Looking at computer parts again

    My new computer build is going along pretty well. I spent some time looking at computer parts today. The new Intel i9 processors look pretty good, but they are still really expensive. Overall that new build is lacking a GPU, CPU, RAM, and a liquid CPU cooler. It might be worth a trip to the Micro Center computers and electronics store to look at all those parts and figure out a path forward. In just a few days my 100 day cryptocurrency mining challenge will be over and I could pull my extra GPU out of my Storm Stryker case and wait patiently for the next generation of NVIDIA graphics cards to be released. Nothing seems to be in stock on the NVIDIA website except the Titan V GPU. That graphics card clocks in at $2,999.00 and is way out of my price range. That is probably the reason that it is still in stock. It is so expensive that very few folks building a computer are going to want to buy one. I’ll probably end up picking up one part at a time. That is pretty much this computer build has gone. At a minimum I’ll need to get one stick of DDR4 RAM, a CPU, and a liquid CPU cooler of some type.

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