Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Month: March 2020

  • 20200329 Thoughts

    Everyday I open a word processing document to capture my thoughts. Sometimes that works out well enough and others the process fails miserably. For the most part, the process is just a string of thoughts as they happen written into brief snippets that occasionally form paragraphs, but more or less remain exclamations without any supporting thoughts. 

    For example, “Maybe this week I will be able to go back through all my online domains and trim some of that down to the bare minimum.” That exclamation has no supporting thoughts put around it or any real context at all. For the most part it is akin to shouting at the sky and waiting to hear a response that will never come. It could have been expanded to explain my views on managing hosting and updating software versions to prevent calamity.  

    My Pixelbook Go chromebook now has two new Colorado Avalanche hockey stickers on it. For those of you keeping track, that brings my sticker total up to 3 on this chromebook. The first sticker added was a Soylent stacker sticker they sent me a couple of weeks ago. The benefit of the stickers is that each one reduces the footprint of available area for fingerprints to stand out on this strangely matte black surface.

    We had to order more coffee from our friends at The Roasterie (Kansas City). Over the last month I have been enjoying some freshly roasted fair trade coffee. We grind it right before brewing it using a Keurig K-Duo Brewer. This combination of coffee, fresh grinding, and the brewer has worked out well enough. 

  • 20200328 Thoughts

    Something changed in my writing pattern. It is not something that is good at all. For the most part it is something that is terribly, horribly, essentially very rotten in my daily writing routine.

  • Finding your writing voice

    Things are moving along in the world outside my office window. Most of the things I do every day remain the same. The vast majority of the day I sit in my office chair and work at the computer. That sameness should have made it easier to keep writing with the same voice. It should have made it easier to keep writing in the same way, but something changed. At this point, I need to go back to working on finding my writing voice. You should think about what voice exists in your writing. Think about how the story is being told. Think about the way it is being told and how that voice ultimately helps communicate the story.

  • Posting along the way

    Working from an old school perspective on my writing it might be time to just post everything that gets written in the next 10 days. That will pretty much mean keeping a steady stream of thoughts put to paper and sharing them in an unvarnished way without any real editing or any degree of self-censorship. That means for the next ten days you could end up reading anything from poetry about the intersection of technology and modernity to aimless science fiction.

    Here are my general thoughts on social fabric in the moment:

    Our humanity appears to dissolve under the weight of such an extreme moment. Each wave of moments becomes bigger and bigger. Dissolving before our eyes the social fabric that binds our humanity to a shared experience evaporates as our resolve falters. Gaining strength together the things that bind that social fabric together have to be mended beyond a focus on the weight of the moment. They have to be mended because of the moment. Outside of an argument toward specialization that falters on the backward linkages of an increasingly global supply chain, doing anything mends the border social fabric linkages stretched by commerce.

    Thoughts on the freezing fog we had this morning:

    I had been thinking about getting a new camera to be able to take some nature photographs like the freezing fog we had this morning. It does not happen that often, but when it does it is fleeting. Maybe getting a new camera is not the way to go… smartphone cameras have become very good recently, but they are not capable of producing an extreme type of depth within images.

  • Is now a good time to buy trading cards?

    Earlier today I was wondering if now would be the right time to pick up some additional sports trading cards. Right now people are at home (maybe for the next 30 days) and will probably have the time to put up auctions on eBay for sports cards. Posting things on eBay involves taking pictures and writing explanations. My prediction is that the number of sellers will outpace the number of buyers and prices will be favorable. It is also entirely possible that people might turn to their hobbies for solace and the prices might slightly rise or remain flattened. I’m probably going to get into the market and buy some graded George Brett cards, Royals autograph cards, and maybe some Kansas City Chiefs autograph cards.

  • Sunday internet surfing notes

    Times like these call for a bit of self reflection. Instead of thinking about the watershed moment going on outside the house I looked away from that moment and surfed the internet. Maybe that is how I needed to work things out to get more focused on things that matter materially to day to day existence. Every day the rise of technology drives us closer to the overlap between promise and modernity. None of that rise seems to be quelling the watershed moment sweeping the globe.

    Outside of any real rethinking and reflection this morning a few minutes of my time were spent watching YouTube guitar related videos and surfing future guitar purchases. Two guitars stand out in my view. I will probably purchase both of them at some point. That purchase will probably not happen imminently, but it will probably happen. At this point in my journey I have been buying a guitar every year. 

    Solar Guitars: A1.6D LTD- NATURAL AGED / DISTRESSED

    Chapman Rabea Massaad Signature ML3 BEA Baritone Pro in Irithyll Burst

    https://www.andertons.co.uk/chapman-ml3-bea-pro-baritone-irithyll-burst

  • Endeavor beyond the surface of things

    Dig deeper than the first visible layer of the problem. Always endeavor beyond the surface of things. Moving deep takes time and often a little bit of courage. For a long time my base analysis always centered around deconstructing the form, function, structure, and assumptions of any construct. Between those four pillars of exploration my adventures always formed a contribution to my understanding.

  • The one with a call to jury duty

    We have very few civic duties to perform. One of them that comes around from time to time is jury duty. Today was my day to fulfil my civic duty and show up for jury duty. Fortunately, the courthouse is not very far from my home. Getting to the courthouse was easy enough. Arriving about 20 minutes early meant that parking was pretty easy. They have a lot of parking at the courthouse. People seemed to be a little stressed and every time somebody coughed people looked around. It felt a little bit dramatic, but the fear in the room was real enough. This room might be large enough to hold about 50 people. Assembling the jury is the first order of adventure for the day. We all filled out paper forms and signed them by hand. Nothing that occurred during the assembly process was digital.

    Just a few minutes after the start time on the card the first person was dismissed from jury service. Only one of the people that attended was very vocal about not wanting to serve on the jury today. Everybody else in the room just seemed to be keeping to themselves and preparing for the day. Last time I went in for jury duty they dismissed me without any explanation. I just figured it was due to my education level or something. Right now I’m writing and thinking about how hard it is not to touch my face or rub my eyes in this room. It is strange to sit in a room with so many people where nobody is trying to talk or really make eye contact. I’m normally very outgoing and willing to talk to pretty much anybody at any time. That time of social interaction was not occuring at all today. Maybe it is due to the heightened stress people are feeling.

    My shirt has a nice large sticker on it right now that says juror in capital letters. All I can think about is about getting things done. My mind was racing with the question, “If today was the only day left, then what should that time be spent doing?” The answer would probably be finishing the audiobook version of Graduation with Civic Honors. That is something that will take a few hours and would probably be net beneficial vs. the effort. One of the big problems with my do the most impactful thing you can every day to drive things forward philosophy is when things take more than one day to complete. Sure you can try to break things down into smaller parts, but some things just do not work out that way. Creating something new or coding something might take a lot of time. Well understood things can be broken down and understanding it helps make defying it easier. Tackling the big things takes a lot of dedication.

    It is much easier to sit around and watch television than to sit around and write, create, or build something. Yes —- some people are capable of doing more than one thing at a time and that is fine. Doing something and doing nothing at the same time sounds interesting. I typically write and listen to music at the same time. The music part of it is just something that happens in the background; it does not hold my attention. Sometimes that distracts from purposeful writing. Really engaging at 100% and putting everything you have into creating prose is sometimes a different type of artistic expression. It can be completely and utterly exhausting. This exercise of writing while waiting in the jury duty room has produced 600 words of prose. None of it was exhausting. However, this is more an exercise in commentary mixed with stream of consciousness than a critical exploration of modernity. This is just a look at my thoughts and my reactions to the things happening around me.

    After about an hour or so of waiting the judge dropped by the juror assembly room to advise us both trials for the day had been postponed and everyone was free to go home. It was super anticlimactic, but that is how it goes sometimes.

  • Being a better AI beat writer

    Earlier today I realized my duties as a solid AI/ML beat writer were not being fulfilled. Nobody appointed me as the best AI beat writer ever in the history of online publications, but that should be clear enough. Ok finding the right amount of hubris should not be a problem. Maybe doing a little bit of writing to back it up would be a good place to start. For a few months I took the time to sit down and follow everything AI online with a vengeance. The output of that was a series of daily video deep dives into news stories via YouTube. It was fun and it was for better or worse the video version of writing daily beat coverage. It was humbling in some ways. The amount of content that springs up every day is massive. Keeping up with it and trying to provide grounded coverage on emerging trends and covering topics required a lot of thought. It was about more than reacting to the stream of things that were happening in the world. Most of it was about separating ridiculous hype from what was actually possible.

  • Rethinking social media usage

    Given enough time on the internet people tend to get to the point where they are ready to rethink their social media usage. Some folks never will rethink posting an endless string of photos, but all the rest of it has a certain quality to it that makes you wonder. My social media usage is down to really just Twitter and LinkedIn. I’m not going to count my weblog posts as social media usage. Nothing about them is inherently social. They are akin to posting a note in a public space. Very few people ever read that prose. Oddly enough that is fine with me. For the most part my efforts to engage in writing are really in the purest form a merging of thinking out loud and practicing the fine art of putting words to paper or in this case keystrokes to screen. I’m so awake right now this weblog post might even get proof read before it is posted. We just made it to March 2020. That is really interesting to think about. My formative years rested around Y2K and the transition from 1999 to 2000. Twenty years stand between now and then with a wide range of things that have happened.