Today was going to be one of those days that builds up and then drifts away. Maybe that is my fault. Every day you have the chance to seize the day and make something special happen. One of the things that I really enjoy about attending conferences and learning new things is that it creates the potential for a spark of invocation. Maybe that means pulling two things together or maybe making something out of nothing based on the spark of innovation. It is one of those things that when you see it you know it and it can slip away so quickly. Some days are just like that and you can make things happen that would otherwise take a long time. It is those moments of clarity that you cannot waste. You have to treat them like the precious opportunity they are to move things forward.
Today my Google Pixelbook Go Chromebook actually paired to my Pixel 4 XL smartphone to get mobile data without any problems. That was nice. Where I am sitting right now does not have any really solid WiFi options. During the course of writing I do not need to use very much bandwidth to access the internet, but it is nice to have the option. Typically, I find not having access to the internet slows me down. It is probably just one of those things I need to work on moving past at some point. Earlier today I was thinking about a bunch of different academic paper topics. Sometimes it is easier than others to put the drafts together. I used to keep an idea notebook that helped push my research interests forward. Maybe it is time to bring that back. My overall publishing productivity has been down in the last 5 years. The only way to really work on fixing that is to actively write papers. Part of that is working literature reviews and the other part of it is completing research projects.
My automated survey technology was ready and running for years. Maybe now is the time to turn that setup back on and pull together the data necessary to create a few research papers. This time around I could just share the code on GitHub and allow others to make the data collection magic happen. That is probably the right way to go about things. The only drawback for reproducibility is that the code would have to run on some server, but people have a lot more ways to get a server these days. Maybe that is something that I will start working on later this week. I’m still trying to finish up that “Google IT Automation with Python” course series. It has taken a little longer than I had expected. I’m probably going to have to focus in on knocking out part of it every night for the next 20 days to really finish it up. That has to happen in tandem with my efforts to create a new speaking presentation that focuses on walking some machine learning use case ROI example from start to finish.
It seems like a few things are stacking up. Normally, I like to work in real time and finish anything that pops up with extreme alacrity. From time to time that is not possible. The things that need to be done are bigger than the slices of time that I have to complete tasks. Like right now that course is eating up a lot of cycles of time that could be used to do some other things, but learning and pushing things forward is an important part of the process. Being a lifelong learner is a commitment that requires both time and effort to make happen. It would be easier to stop taking on hard challenges, but that would not be the right thing to do.