Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Month: February 2020

  • Rethinking adventures

    Somewhere along the way writing gave way to watching. We consume things at an unprecedented pace. We create differently than we did before. Our tracks stand beyond the view of our native sight. Space is vast beyond reason. The internet is like an ocean that grows exponentially. No matter how fast that ocean grows it will never expand beyond the vastness that is space. Look up at the stars and know that other stars look on them in the truly vast.

  • Dealing with subscriptions

    Today I’m starting to look at any subscription costs that might have crawled into my life. You have to stay vigilant and fight off ongoing subscriptions. It is one of those things that you need to do from time to time. After spending a few minutes working on that endeavor, I started to think about audio recording. Those two things are probably not related. I’m not sure how I ended up switching from one thing to the other. 

    A few notes on my Audacity: Noise Reduction settings… 

    Here are my settings on Step 2 of the Audacity software noise reduction effect:

    Noise reduction (dB): 8
    Sensitivity: 12.00
    Frequency smoothing (bands): 2

    This is what I am using right now for recording audio related to this weblog.

  • Weekend wandering

    You probably have sensed the newly developing theme on this weblog in the last few days. My thoughts have focused on the idea of wandering around from my daily routine into something else or at least some other pattern. Right now, I am literally watching a review of the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip phone. If this thing could end up being a watch face that folds out, then it could be a game changer. Samsung needs to dominate the Z Flip watch market. That could end up replacing my need to bother with carrying around a smartphone.

  • Wandering onward

    This is a recording of my blog from February 15, 2020

    Saturday morning has arrived and things should be going well enough. At the moment the only thing that seems to be happening is a bit of muddling through as I wander onward toward living the dream. My new microphone shield arrived this week. I ended up getting the, “Marantz Professional Sound Shield Live Vocal Reflection Filter.” It is a much larger product than I expected to receive. I thought it would be much smaller from the picture, but when you don’t read the specifications that sort of thing happens. I’m still contemplating setting up and running a daily Nelscast again for 6 months to see how it goes.

  • Wonderment overshadowed

    This is a recording of my blog from February 14, 2020

    Today was one of those days where I did not want to pick a category for this weblog post. That might not be the best way to start this post, but hey that is where we are right now at the moment. I already watched a video on YouTube about the Orange Terror Stamp guitar pedal. It may very well be my bridge amplifier between moving from a Marshall solid state to a tube based world. Sure enough that is where I am at right now. Sometimes in the next 45 days that Orange Terror Stamp pedal will probably arrive here at the house.

  • Writing revisited

    This is a recording of my blog from February 13, 2020

    Earlier today I opened up the Microsoft Word template I use for writing novels. It has been some time since an actual novel was produced. Right now the outline of one is sitting in a notebook right in front of me. It was written by hand using a fountain pen in a notebook that has not really been used for notes since 2009. One of the things I have wanted to do was get back to keeping an idea book. Some of the things written into that notebook are inevitable false starts. A few of them might be useful or at least somewhat useful journeys into the creation of prose.  

    Weblog post: Digital cameras revisited

    Writing workflow? Twitter (tweets document) → posts create 

    Should I move back to just taking notes online so they are all ready to review in the warm breeze of sunshine? 

    It would be pretty easy to just take notes in a word processing document throughout the day. My notes are pretty much observations or things I need to circle back on at some point. This method of taking notes helped me close the circle on a lot of different threads.

    Our ability to get to the current state of news around us has become broken. Picking up a newspaper used to bring you so close to glimpse of the current state of the world. It was a view that was at least clear enough to relate to others. News editors curated the state of the world and dished it out daily to read in an ongoing narrative that built a shared tapestry for people to relate and communicate with each other. 

    Will big enough news events find an audience? Does big news find people?

  • A slower writing pace

    Whoa… my writing pace in the last couple of weeks has really slowed down. Maybe the rising political tensions have drowned out the spark of creativity. It is also entirely possible that my attention was just focused on other things. Writing is about taking the time to write.

  • On advancing advances

    Today I know that only 3 hours of productive time are still possible. That window should be enough to do some meaningful and important things. Each day is full of slices of time where things can get done. Maybe that is what makes our choices every day so important. Part of the challenge I face is staying focused on the problem at hand to drive things to resolution. My focus can get pulled from one thing to another. In the middle of changing focus the thing that was promising gets pushed outside of the window of possible. Within that framework even the best intentions end up faltering in the face of measured outcomes. That is exactly how you end up not advancing the planned advances in that mythical parade of desired output. Kick the can down the road on breaking down that hyperbole at your own parrell. Sometimes you just have to focus on making sure you are advancing all the things that need to be advanced.

    One of the things that grabs and holds my attention is always the promise of a perfect possible future. Society in general works toward being better together. Maybe a stronger civil society brings people together in ways that benefit everybody. That is an argument that is easier to make at the start of things than at the end. Right now I’m listening to original music by David Duchovny which always makes me strangely hopeful. That is probably better than browsing the internet to look at potential guitar equipment purchase. It might be better to focus on doing some academic research or writing some code. Reading papers is pretty easy these days. So many of them are being openly published online. Preprints are a great source of rapid access to what people are thinking. The gates have been removed and you can kick the tires on all kinds of ideas within the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

    One of the things that I need to focus on improving revolves around making sure to link to articles that catch my idea. Some of them get shared on Twitter as a method of archiving my digital path, but it would be more beneficial if all those links just got shared daily and in some type of more advanced literature review based framework that organizes the links into a consumable order. Strangely enough knowing where to start is often the hardest part of reading all the relevant works on a certain subject. Without question that is about taking the time to consume all the outstanding arguments on a topic. With that foundation in hand you can start to move around and assemble complex arrangements of thoughts to present things in different ways, provide supporting evidence to advance theories, or even challenge things.

  • Thinking about a new speaker cabinet

    At the moment I’m thinking about setting up a new guitar speaker rig. The speaker cabinet will be the Orange PPC212 vertical 2×12. It is probably my favorite cabinet at the moment and I’m pretty sure that is what I’m going to buy to replace my Marshall MG15HCFX mini stack speaker setup. I’m pretty sure that I’m going to end up pairing that with the newly released Orange Terror Stamp 20W value hybrid guitar amp pedal. My guitar pedals should run into the 20W Orange Terror Stamp with no problems and it should be pretty easy to use or store away. That setup should allow me to get the Victory amplification Kraken preamp pedal… which should be an answer addition to my ability to create soundscapes.