Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Month: October 2019

  • Ok Halloween

    Ammiditantly, I really enjoyed searching Twitter for the phrase, “ok boomer.” In honor of that indulgence, I’m naming the weblog post for today, “Ok Halloween.” You probably get the spirit. Tonight I’m going to kick it old school and live blog Halloween. You are welcome in advance.

  • Those first Pixelbook Go impressions

    Right now I’m starting to type with the Google Pixelbook Go for the first time. A few of the reviews I had consumed this week talked about how quiet the keyboard was during normal use. I’m wearing my Bose Q35 headphones right now and listening to music at a reasonable volume. I can still hear the keyboard during my rapid typing. I’m wondering if the noise is more or less my fingers traveling against the keys or if it is a mechanical noise made by keystrokes. If you strike the same key over and over again, then the sound is not present, That probably indicates that the typing noises I’m hearing right now are from the way I am typing not from the keyboard itself.


    Game seven of the World Series is on Fox right now. The second inning is on. I’m going to spend the night writing. Getting used to this new keyboard is taking a little bit of time. The keyboard on my ASUS Flip has a very specific feel. This Google Pixelbook Go has a decent keyboard that is very different from what ASUS has to offer. It always takes me just a bit to get used to working on a new computer. I’m still a little surprised that Matt Scherzer is pitching tonight. It really sounded like Matt was done for the year.

    My first real observation about the Pixelbook Go is that it shows fingerprints both on the shell, keyboard, and mouse. I have only been using it for a couple of days and I can already tell it is showing signs of use. My Dell laptop has not had the same problems. It normally takes a bit of time for this type of wear to show up on a laptop. It does not in anyway impact the functionality of the device, but it is just a little bit unexpected.


    Getting down to writing is about taking the time to translate thoughts into keystrokes. At the moment, I’m sitting down on the sofa and working on a bit of writing. It is about the feel of the keys and the process of moving along from one thought to another. I’m going to try to ignore the spell check and get into the writing groove for a little bit here. It is a bit of a throwback to the stream of consciousness writing that generally occupies my days. Today was an interesting day. I dusted my bookshelves. That is just how far it went today. Part of cleaning up my office is about getting my personal workspace into a top notch writing condition. Sure — I know that having a clean office is not related to my willingness to sit down and write. Really all I need is some type of writing medium and time. That is pretty much how it works.

    The zoom on this Google Doc has been changed to 125% from width. The text was a little bit to big on the screen and needed to be condensed down just a little bit to better enable writing for long periods of time. Tonight is one of those times where writing is going to happen. Game seven of the world series is about to move into the sixth inning. Nothing is stopping me from spending some time using this new Pixelbook Go. Over the years, I really wanted to get one of the original Google Chromebooks, but the price was just out of control on those. This device was about two hundred dollars more than the ASUS Chromebook that I would have purchased to replace my C101P. This form factor and spec seemed to check every box for the things that I needed and it was exciting to purchase.


    The seventh inning is about to start. This keyboard is starting to become comfortable. I’m getting used to typing on it and that seems to be helping my productivity. A lot of the advertisements these days seem to be talking about food deliver or the delivery of things. Maybe the better way of saying it is that a lot of the advertisements these days are focused on delivery. That feels like a relatively new phenomenon over the last few years. For the vast majority of time that I can remember the primary delivery advertisements were for pizza. Times have changed for sure.

  • Oh all that snow

    Denver started off running a little slower as a city this morning. This October snow storm is dropping a sustained precipitation. Perhaps better said another way — the snow keeps falling and it just has not stopped. My window overlooks the front yard and I can see the snow as it falls. Wind is thrashing the snow about. Earlier this morning, my Google Pixelbook Go landed at a FedEx sorting facility in Denver. Today weather allowing might be the day that my new Chromebook arrives. That is something that seems to be pretty exciting. I considered trying to use the Dell KVM switch built into my monitor to make the mouse and keyboard at my desk available to the Chromebook. That configuration is probably not something that I need to setup or would ever really use. I might set it up just for fun to see how the Dell monitor KVM switch performs.


    Ok — setting up the KVM switch on the Dell UltraSharp 38 Curved Monitor model U3818DW was really easy. Honestly, I just unplugged my Microsoft ergonomic keyboard and wired Corsair gaming mouse from the Corsair Cube and plugged them into the U3818DW. Windows made the discovering new hardware sound and all of a sudden both the keyboard and the mouse just worked. I did run the USB downstream port cable back to the computer, but the keyboard and mouse worked without that cable being connected.


    A FedEx driver was able to deliver the Google Pixelbook Go today. I booted up the device and signed into my account. Right now I have the USB Type-C cable plugged into the Pixelbook Go and Chrome OS is extending the screen to the Dell U3818DW. The KVM switch automatically switched over and the keyboard and mouse both work really well with the Chromebook. I now have a pretty decent one cable docking configuration setup to use Chrome OS as my primary workstation operating system. I’m not sure how that will work out in terms of productivity, but it is possible.

  • Wondering about shipping this week

    Tomorrow might be the day that my new Google Pixelbook Go ships. Denver snow is happening right now and probably will continue for the next couple of days. Weather might interfere with the delivery. Either way it works out; now is the time to get back to really writing a ton of words every day. Earlier this year, I figured out how to print my entire weblog and save the content as a stand alone document. Printing that many pages was interesting. Part of what made it so interesting was how much of my writing content did not get printed. The vast majority of things that have been written were not posted online. Every day I tend to open a word document and engage in the process of writing something. Each day that happens and those documents are generally stored by year. Online right now my document archive goes back to 2002.

    A few documents probably exist from before 2002, but getting to them would probably be problematic. Anything that was stored on zip drive is probably gone forever. A few of my compact disc archives exist from around that time period. Most of that content was of questionable quality to begin with when it was written. From what I can tell the first real round of writing in a style that was published online happened around September 23, 2002. From what I can tell that is about the time I started to really dig into philosophical questions. It also happens to be the year I spent the most time writing novels and short stories. At the time my writing had zero inhibitions. No self censorship happened at all during the course of writing.

    One of the things I did notice is that organization used to be a lot more central to how content was presented. Over the last ten years posts have just been entered and they are pretty much stored based on the order they were produced. Some rough categories exist, but for the most part it is just an ongoing narrative with no real organization. Maybe that is ok for now, but at some point things are going to need to tighten up a little bit. The sheer volume of content is unwieldy and difficult to consume. That could simply be a reflection of the fact that it was never really meant to be consumed. Next year I’m seriously considering taking another run at writing a million words and publishing them online. That pretty much means dedicating the time each day to produce 2,740 words per day or 1,000,000 words divided by 365. This little aside so far is just a five hundred word entry. That would fall short of the minimum daily contribution.

    My Pandora internet radio service played a video add for me and gave me an hour of uninterrupted content this evening. That was nice and the Kansas CIty Chiefs are playing in the big Sunday night football matchup this week. Both of those things should help me produce more words, but they really are not helping all that much. This ASUS Chromebook Flip C101P has seen better days. Right now the keyboard is missing five keys. They broke some time ago and did not need to be replaced. Fortunately they are not keys that are commonly used.

  • Whoa that writing thing happens

    Two shots of espresso happened this morning without much fanfare. Outside it is snowing like the winter season is now in full swing. Temperatures outside dropped about 40 degrees between last night and this morning. Something about that just seems jarring. I was going to have an “and” after the word “jarring” in the last sentence, but celebrating that point was unnecessary. Things are getting going and that writing thing is starting to happen. Now is the time for great waves of productivity. We are staring at so much change that just keeping up requires way more focus and dedication than ever before.

    My thoughts have been really focused on where all the attention is today. People are writing and trying to explain the world. If you take a step back and think about the totality of knowledge we have collected sometimes explained as all the publications accepted by the academic world, then it might become apparent that the pace of change has outpaced our ability to consume it. Right now out in the world out attention is super dispersed nothing really is capable of catching the entire public mind. That is a problem in the macro sense of how we consume knowledge and work together as a society to get things done. In the very micro sense of just a specific field of academic inquiry it is getting harder and harder to consume all publications. That is essentially the problem facing us as we move forward. If you cannot curate the knowledge being built in an academic discipline, then how do we curate the greater stream of knowledge to help people keep pace with change.

    That being said. It is really important to absorb that argument. Dilution is occurring as the pace of present knowledge creation increases. I’m willing to accept that argument. A consequence of that argument is that civil society as a whole has become more fragmented as our understanding separates from our shared foundation of knowledge. We used to have a reasonable shared understanding that was used to describe the public mind and how we relate to each other. That shared understanding in my humble view is breaking down at an increasingly problematic pace. Perhaps this argument deserves a better presentation or something more than what has been provided. I’ll try to do better later. Maybe that is the crux of the problem we are facing.

  • Reviewing the Google Pixel 4 XL smartphone

    The phone arrived via FedEx delivery on Thursday, October 24, 2019. Ordering the phone from the Google store was pretty easy. I ordered it on Tuesday, October 15, 2019 during the Google hardware event. For those of you keeping track of my phone orders you are probably aware that I have had every major model of the Pixel phone. The 3a is not a major model version and I did not purchase one of those phones. Anyway, I have had the Google Pixel 4 XL smartphone in my possession for 48 hours of testing. 

    Observations:

    • Google Photos is having all sorts of problems updating/syncing. It is seriously confused by the 20,000 photos I have stored online. When you load the Google Photos application it just says, “Getting your photos…” obviously that is not ideal or acceptable. 
    • The camera does take really great photographs. I have been really impressed with it so far after a couple days of Halloween costume pictures. 
    • Day one from the start of using this new phone, I was a little worried about the battery life. Those worries were well founded. The battery life is really not very good at all. The Pixel 3 XL would make it to about dinner time without being worn out. This new phone is burning battery so fast I’m looking to charge around lunchtime. That is a massive step backward.
  • 20191014 Thoughts

    Whoa… today was a day when writing did not really feel like a good idea. Things just went a little bit sideways and did not seem to have much forward momentum. That is sort of where my thoughts ended up earlier. Instead of dwelling on that it seemed like a good idea to brew a mug of green tea and watch a little bit of The Curse of Oak Island on Netflix. Maybe that helped get this session of writing going a bit tonight.

    I checked my notes from Google Keep and thought a little bit about the big Google announcement tomorrow. It is entirely possible that tomorrow a new Google Pixel 4 XL will be my next smartphone. We will see how the preorder process and the pricing ends up landing during the event. Apparently, tomorrow just might be the day that a new Google Pixelbook gets launched. This ASUS Chromebook Flip has seen better days and is currently missing a few keys, but otherwise works. Tomorrow might just be the day that a new Chromebook and smartphone are ordered.

    Earlier today I started thinking about picking up some new vinyl The Doors records. That piece of extremely keen insight was in my Google Keep notes. A lot of notes have been piling up recently and some of them probably deserve a bit of discovery. That typically involves taking a thought and exploring it via written prose for a few minutes or maybe an hour. Nothing really seems to get more attention than an hour these days. Actually have an hour to devote to any one thing is pretty rare these days.

  • 20191008 Thoughts

    One of the things that has occupied my thoughts today is a question about how to build a boot up mixtape for the state of the day. I’m not really thinking about a get psyched up collection of songs. Instead I have been thinking that it might be good to make a recording full of compelling purposes for taking action to help get me start every day.

  • 20191006 Thoughts

    Today I’m digging into threat detection and log analysis.  This could get very interesting very fast. Don’t worry, you should be able to see the results on my GitHub probably in a Jupyter notebook format. Right now my efforts are focused on Apache logs since that sounds like a good way to start. 

    Instead of brewing two shots of espresso with my Nespresso Expert machine this morning I elected to go with a strong pull of Lungo style coffee. It was delightful coffee as usual. 

    The folks over at Google are still providing the Colaboratory research project for free and that is awesome. That is the first place I go for noodling around with Python these days. 

    Theoretical guitar build MarkVII… 

  • 20191001 Thoughts

    Whoa… today started out with two scoops of Soylent Mocha or roughly 400 calories of breakfast. Things got going a little bit slowly today. That in part is due to a very early start to the month. I’m trying to make the most of my October.

    For some reason, I spent some time looking at Frank Zappa vinyl records on eBay after listening to Mattias IA Eklundh on YouTube for like 45 minutes. The song “A Reshuffling of Atoms” is currently my favorite Mattias jam online.