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