Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Month: August 2019

  • Entry #10 – Hot Sauce

    Today was an exciting day in terms of hot sauce management. My collection of hot sauce has gotten out of control recently. Earlier today, during a trip to Target, I purchased a new container for my hot sauce collection. Right now 18 bottles of hot sauce are being stored in the garage fridge. A few of the older ones had to leave my collection. I’m going to need to eat hot sauce at least 2x a week to be able to start to reduce the number of bottles in my collection. That is important to help create enough room for new hot sauce additions. A few of them are on my short list of things I would like to try to see if they can make the vaunted top five list.

    hot sauce collection


    I started to write a short story:

    “Elson entered the parking lot from the northeast side. A few people were milling around the parking lot that morning. They were in various states of getting, having, or finishing breakfast. It was that time of day. Things happened slowly for some and in highly entrenched patterns for others. Today was a day where a bagel was going to be a part of breakfast. That was about to happen.”

    My goal for today is to try to plug that little bit of a short story into the GPT-2 model to see how the AI would continue my efforts.

  • Entry #9 – Purpose

    Grappling with the idea of finding a purpose is a fight worth having. Everyday I wonder about the nature of having multiple purposes or trying to strive toward one overarching big thing. That is really the difference between purpose and duty.

  • Entry #8 – Opportunity

    Perhaps a view exists that future problems are not really problems they are just opportunities for action. This creates a scenario where the present is more about driving things along to create opportunity than allowing anything to be final. That view does not really sit well with me or how I tend to approach things. Everything that comes into my view receives a healthy dose of skepticism based on an analysis including form, function, structure, and assumptions.

  • Entry #7 – Questions

    Earlier today/yesterday, I started looking at a few different options for buying a single Callaway 7 iron golf club. The new club designs are so expensive that it seemed like a good idea to just test one out to see how things would go. This aside has nothing to do with my plan to keep writing. Getting a new golf club is without a doubt a distraction from the act of writing. Sure getting out on the golf course is calming and can help build up the foundation of things that might well lead to a breakthrough. That is probably not a direct exchange of one thing for the other. In reality, it is more of a tradeoff.

  • Entry #6 – Wondering

    I cannot totally control where my mind will take me. This is a statement of pure truth. These words should ring true to you if you know the joy of creating words. No edge of a hollow promise should be anywhere in the knowledge that thoughts wonder and that is both frustrating and amazing. Creating something from the blank page brings forward a different feeling. It really is some combination of satisfaction and delight. For me it is probably best described as joy with a little something extra. Maybe joy+ is the right way to think about it.

    Today started out with me taking a few notes using Google Keep to record either audio or simply as a notepad to write down a few things. Over the years, I have learned it is far better to seize the moment and capture what has been created than to hope it can be retained for later. It always seems that later comes and the original joy has been lost and the idea falters or fades away. Sometimes that idea never even bubbles back up to the surface it was here and then gone forever without any real determination of how much value it might have had.


    You are welcome to read my words if you want. They are generally published in an open fashion online for anybody to take a gander if they so desire. Some of that action of publishing is about my desire to be a public intellectual and some of it is just how my thoughts get rounded out. They arrive and are worked on from keystroke to keystroke.


    A flurry of activity happened on an eBay auction for my old DSLR camera the other day. Things went swimmingly with the 10 day auction and a number of people bid on the camera. However, the payment never arrived and I ended up walking down the murky road of second chance offers. Really it is just an exercise in hope that somebody might pay before the item has to be relisted and the entire process has to be started over again.


    The spell was broken and this writing session is coming to an end. Something else caught my attention and I switched out of writing mode and into something else.

  • Entry #5 – Tradeoffs

    Always tradeoffs. We make choices. Some of those choices involve a tradeoff. Some of them do not involve a tradeoff. Others are just bannal marches along the daily path forward a repeat of the day before. Earlier today I started to wonder a little bit about just how to best setup a writing plan for the day. I started looking at the ASUS 14″ C434TA 2-in-1 Chromebook – Intel Core m3 – 1080p on the Costco website. Maybe it is still my best option or maybe the Pixelbook 2 (codename Atlas) will be amazing. It does seem to be enough to keep me using this Chromebook that is missing about five keys. Fortunately, none of them really stop me from typing and pushing things forward.

  • Entry #4 – Reflecting

    This entry was almost called thinking, but it very quickly became the one about reflecting. Every day I’m sitting down and thinking about what I’m going to produce at the start of the day and reflecting on what happened the day before. This is not at all a writing Scrum session it is more reflective than action oriented. The actions are compelled from the value they provide not from some type of burn down chart toward a major accomplishment. Sure that has a place and a time and it was not what happened within the journal I was reading. That was more or less about the struggle to produce. The struggle to create. Making something from nothing based on ideas plucked out of thought and placed on the page.

    One of the elements of writing fiction is standing up a fictional world that becomes so real you can almost touch or taste it. At the end of my 99 entries, which should end up taking about 99 days to produce, I’m going to have a collection of 100 words. That may very well end up being the title of my eventual treatise, “100 Words: Engaged daily writing for 100 days.” That is where my thoughts are at the moment. It is a moment full of hope and promise. Something about hope stands on its own fueled by promise and optimism.

  • Entry #3 – Pathing

    Every day I’m sitting down at the start of my day and reading one of the 99 entries in Working Days by John Steinbeck. After reading the entry I start working on my own writing journey. In my own way, this is my effort to work along the same path of journaling and writing that happened back in 1938.

  • Entry #2 – Updates

    This morning was diverted to apply some patches and updates to a few websites. That happens from time to time. It really seems to happen at random and in spurts of updates. Within that frame of thought it could be said that today was a day of updates. Perhaps going with that is the way to think about things. Yesterday, I dug up a copy of the three chapters I put together last year. It might be better to start working on them as 3 different short stories. Perhaps at this point it would be better to build a collection of short stories that together could build up to something. Maybe that is the right way to go about moving forward this morning. At the moment my mind is very focused on what time of day it is vs. what I should be writing. Autopilot is a funny thing as coffee begins to wipe away the cobwebs guarding alertness.

  • Entry #1 – Functionally Journaling

    Being a writer is about little more than the act of writing. The barrier to entry is really just three things: a medium to store content, something to write with, and time to write. Right now I’m reading an old library copy of Working Days by John Steinbeck. So far the recipe to writing seems to be the persistence necessary to finish pages. Some people just let things happen and others write within guidelines to fill in the blanks on a known destination.

    My efforts fall into two camps of thought. On the academic side of things I write to a journal template or a specific manuscript format. Outside of academic efforts I tend to write in a more stream of consciousness style. The next 99 entries in this series of thoughts will be more than a chautauqua that drones on about the intersection of technology and modernity. These entries are going to be about the process of functionally journaling my efforts to move passed self censorship and simply write as the writing happens. Maybe that is a naive first move in a game of chess that revolves less around the rules than the outcomes.

    Some time ago… like last year… I penned 3 chapters of a novel that were not entirely terrible. This may very well be the start of a new writing endeavor. Given the other things that I owe in the next 90 days this might not be the right time to take on this type of new endeavor. Somehow that might help get this entire thing running in the right direction.