Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Month: June 2020

  • An upgraded tremolo block

    Overall I have been very pleased with the new upgraded brass tremolo block on my guitar. Adding such a heavy block of brass to the tremolo block where the strings attached to the guitar made a huge difference in sustain. A solid chord or a single note will ring for about 30 seconds which is fairly amazing considering all that was added was a block of brass. Maybe playing guitar is my method of daily meditation these days. With the amplifier or just freshly plucked off the rack without amplification I’ll play for a few minutes and then go back to whatever I was doing. It has gotten to the point where I don’t really think about what I’m playing on the guitar. Playing just sort of happens without a ton of effort. That is probably the key to why the whole process resembles a little bit of meditation. Something that has drawn my attention is a degree of contemplation about the change in tone moving from a pot metal block to a pure brass block. The change in sustain and tone overall is evident. You can feel the change in the vibration being passed along to the body to the guitar. You could say the tone is tangible based on feeling the vibration of the entire guitar.   

  • Another obligatory Monday

    Apparently no precipitation is expected today. It was one of those days where I woke up and looked at the weather. Today is yet another obligatory Monday. It happens every week and it opens both the door to getting things done and a reminder that the weekend is over. My efforts to write a bunch of prose this weekend did not work out exactly as planned. It seems like in this time of quarantine a lot of time is spent just thinking and sitting. Somehow that thought does not end up translating to the creation of prose. This presents a problematic scenario where investment is occurring into a thought exercise and the outcome is not a string of prose. My efforts to produce increasingly dense and longer strings of prose have been thwarted. That is a problem that can be fixed with a little bit of effort and dedication. It involves being willing to wrestle with the blank page and to keep going until the pose flows across the screen. At a minimum, investing the time to sit down and work on things should be possible. The outcome of that action is what will remain in question. Things will either work out or the grand writing experiment will provide examples of false starts to try to avoid in the future. 

    Without a strongly defined research trajectory things tend to move aimlessly. My time has to be devoted to completing something. That something needs to fall within the general research trajectory. Sit down with a piece of paper and start writing down things that need to be solved and then work on a research trajectory that is geared toward solving some of the things that need to be solved. That is pretty much the right way to go about trying to figure out what direction to intellectually take as progress is being made toward a perfect possible future. Maybe that exercise seems a little bit simplistic, but figuring out what direction to take the next step is as important as the action of taking that step. You have to know where you are going and be willing to go to that place. Along the way things will go well and challenges will appear out of nowhere to make things harder than they should be as you take one forward step at a time.

    Interrupted. School.

  • As technology fades

    Yesterday I really started to dig into all the various laptops I have owned over the years. Getting a new laptop used to be an extremely joyous time filled with promise and adventure. It was seriously exciting. It was an event. I packed that Hewlett-Packard (HP) Pavilion ze5300 laptop in my backup and carried it all over the United States. In retrospect, it was a very heavy and extremely noisy computing device that had absolutely horrible battery life. A few years can offer a fresh perspective on things. In the technology world something that seemed epic can quickly fall into the background. Ultimately as the technology we use fades into the background the actual things we focus on have to come to the forefront. As technology fades the path to a prefect possible future has to come into picture. We are moving ever closer to the intersection of technology and modernity. At the point where technology becomes ubiquitous it will either be the fulcrum driving action or a tool used to drive action. Within that distinction is probably the most important difference that can be stated. Within our perfect possible future technology has to be a tool for good and not inherently the plumbing of our civil society. 

    Things got a little deeper in the last paragraph than they usually do at 05:00 hours, but that happens sometimes. It could be all the nostalgia that has been building up for a time before quarantine. I did seriously entertain the idea of buying a Pavilion ze5300 laptop yesterday on eBay. If the one for sale had included the power supply, then it would probably have been an impulse purchase that would be delivered sometime next week. I do not need or want a laptop that old. My current Corsair Cube cube custom build computer runs just fine and is the primary device I’m using for writing these days. Maybe next year I’ll go down the path of building out a new workstation, but that is not happening right now. I have seen a few builds with four district graphics cards in the case that could be pretty epic. Right now I’m doing development that runs in a Jupyter notebook. That pretty much means that the underlying hardware is less of a problem than writing code that just works. This early in the morning the only writing that is going to happen is a bit of stream of consciousness style prose. That happens every day now in a way that is almost starting to become a daily writing habit. 

    Yesterday afternoon, I replaced the tremolo block on a Fender deluxe stratocaster guitar body. Whatever metal block that came with the body that was purchased on eBay was replaced with a very heavy brass tremolo block. I meant to do a pure tone comparison recording before and after, but the process of doing the change was so easy that it was over in about 20 minutes. I have a ton of recordings using my Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 audio interface. Surprisingly the audio interface was super easy to use and setup. Using a standard cabled cabinet simulated output from a tube amplifier the audio interface just directly captures the sound of the guitar. That is about as simple a method to capture audio as I could manage to set up in my home office. It just worked from the start with no real configuration for troubleshooting. I’m not sure if either the new brass tremolo block or maybe refitting the custom neck to body added a lot of sustain. It is probably the combination of both things that helped make the guitar really ring out. 

  • Removing all that clutter

    My desk is covered in all kinds of stuff today. Throughout the week for some reason I let all sorts of clutter get placed on this desk. Today just might have to be a day devoted to removing clutter. Today will for the most part be spent inside the house. A wide variety of things need to be worked on today. This week things just stacked up and that needs to be resolved. Yesterday I even shifted my guitars from the left side of my rack to the right side. That means things are changing and I’m one of those moods where the things around me are about to get moved around. My efforts to remove all the clutter around me really do come in waves. It happens from time to time. Looking back at some of my desk photos from the last 20 years I have made my fair share of nests of stuff. All of my focus and attention was on what was being created and none of my attention was on the clutter being accumulated around me while I was working. Either I have become a little more grown up and now want a clean environment or I lost that edge that helped me focus no matter what was going on around me. 

    Things don’t have to be perfect to sit down and write. You just need a little opportunity that includes some time and a device capable of capturing thoughts. Maybe I could make a list today of every laptop that has ever been owned by me. It took me about 15 minutes by searching some of my older weblog posts to make the list of 8 devices below:

    1. Hewlett-Packard (HP) Pavilion ze5300 laptop
    2. Sony VAIO VGN-T250P laptop
    3. Dell Studio 1535 laptop
    4. HP Envy X2 11t-g010nr (hybrid 2 in 1 tablet with detachable keyboard)
    5. Google Nexus 9 tablet (it had keyboard type book sleeve)
    6. ASUS Chromebook Flip C101P
    7. ASUS Chromebook Flip C302
    8. Google Pixelbook Go

    Some of those computing devices had better runs than others. I remember carrying that HP Pavilion ze5300 all over the place. It was the loudest device I ever owned. It was like a fan powered tornado with a screen. It looks like on eBay I could buy another one for $75, but oddly enough the power supply alone seems to be worth about $20. All of the proprietary power supplies were hard to deal with back then and are probably even harder to figure out now. Oh no… the Pavilion ze5300 for sale on eBay is located in Denver. I almost bought it until the item specifics clearly called out the lack of a power pack. It could have been my ultimate Diable II gaming buddy.

  • A blank page gives no feedback

    Every day starts the same with a little bit of righting here on my workstation. I’m well on my way to developing a writing habit. We will see if the activity of daily writing is going to be sustained long enough to celebrate the development of a writing habit. Writing on my Google Pixelbook Go Chromebook does not seem to happen very often. The keyboard is comfortable enough and the form factor of the device is near perfect for what I need. 

    Strangely enough I seem to prefer to code on the Chromebook and write prose sitting in my downstairs chair on my Windows 10 desktop. Maybe the formal practice of sitting down to write and putting my smartphones in the Pelican G40 sets the stage for a little bit of writing. Getting everything setup to be able to complete a stream of consciousness writing sessions can be a little involved. It is a commitment that requires sitting down and working until the work is done. Sometimes an interruption will occur, but for the most part you are sitting down to write until the writing is done. That is pretty much the method I employ to write. 

    Today is a Friday (exciting!) and that means that it should be full of hope for a productive weekend. A few opportunities are waiting throughout the weekend to take some time to get things done. Blocks of uninterrupted time are wonderful. They are illusive. Over time they have become harder and harder to sustain. Both Saturday and Sunday morning will feature an hour or two of uninterrupted time that could be spent accomplishing something. A lot of my writing is iterative based on writing sessions that push something forward. You could say it is like thinking out loud to a blank page that is always willing to listen. That same page never has any feedback to give the act of working on a topic by writing iteratively. A blank page gives no feedback; it only offers the opportunity to make something out of nothing. Building toward a perfect possible future is going to require a lot of making something out of nothing. 

    One of the things I have been thinking about is finishing up a 100 days of data analysis course that really walks somebody with no Python coding skills to being able to take action. Maybe that is a little bit ambition, but I’m thinking that is what I want to spend some time doing here this summer. It could provide the foundation for a few other activities go forward. It felt good to publish some machine learning Jupyter notebooks on GitHub. I might need to get one of the  Octocat logo stickers for my Pixelbook Go. It is entirely possible that I will not come across one of these stickers. It is pretty unlikely that I’m going to go out of my way to order one of those fancy Octocat stickers. 

    Interrupted. School.

  • Moving along today toward something

    Things are moving along today toward something. It feels like today I might get some things done. At the start of the day it is good to have a feeling that includes some type of forward momentum toward something. It could be the espresso talking or it could just be time to get some serious writing done today. My Warren Zevon station on Pandora is actually playing songs by Zevon. Summer is here for sure and the weather is getting warmer. All of the news about the pandemic is daunting right now. Things have moved westward and not in a good way. Maybe it is a bit of nervousness that has stirred my need to write. All things considered these are strange times indeed. 

    At some point, I’m going to write a review about the new camera that arrived this week. It is a Sony ZV-1 camera and it should help making and creating videos. For some reason, I also purchased a Sony camera bag for it to keep all the accessories together. That is what I keep telling myself. The camera could fit in my front pocket. It probably did not need a new camera bag, but one was purchased and is here on the counter. Yesterday I walked around outside the house and took some pictures of nature. It was not about documenting my surroundings or making art. I was just really curious about how well the camera was going to work in practice. At the start of this weblog, a lot of the posts were digital pictures of things that I observed. My original Flickr account was mostly a photostream of things that happened along the way. It was a glimpse into my daily life and the things that I ran into from day to day. 

    Over the years I have missed the community and networking that happened on the original Flickr and weblog communities. Sometimes at the start of the things the people who like to be on the bleeding edge of technology get together and maybe it is shared enthusiasm and interests that makes the experience powerful and memorable. It could have just been the right people at the right time coming together to create some things. Recently, I started using Flickr again, but it is not the same experience. With my free version of Flickr it clearly says when I go to post things, “You can upload 997 more photos and videos.” I’m pretty sure that hitting that limit will be easy enough, but deciding to move away from the free tier of the service will be the hard part. Sometimes I have wondered why Flickr as a company did not become what Instagram did given that it had a super passionate user base and was worldwide. Maybe the mobile aspect of the whole thing was the key differentiator in the products and the focus of how they were used. My perspective is a little different on the whole thing given that I don’t really engage in professional photography. Sometimes I make really large composited panoramic images, but that is more to see what happens vs. artistic expression. 

    Interrupted. Work.         

  • Oh Wednesday…

    Today feels like it is going to be an interesting day. I’m trying to stay away from writing very short posts. Those are the ones that people seem to visit and probably wonder what I was doing that day and why the one post they stumbled upon is so short and unsatisfying. Along the way a lot of one or two sentence posts have been shared. Some of them were probably the foundation for a Tweet or maybe something else happened. One of them that people keep visiting is about the first time “The Simpsons” show was run from start to finish as a marathon. It was a lot of cartoon driven episodes to stream in a sequence by a network. At the time it was like a commitment of half a month of time to sit and watch all the episodes. That was before the time of pandemic and lengthy quarantines. People might have been more likely to wonder how somebody would stay inside and watch so many years worth of a show. Now the context is different on that question. 

    Interrupted. School.

  • An unfocused writing day

    Today started with a bunch of clicking on links and checking web pages. Instead of writing a little bit of internet surfing happened. Today my two shots of espresso are a little more bitter than usual. Normally the Starbucks espresso roast capsules for the Nespresso machine are very consistent. My writing productivity level is unfortunately not that consistent. Sitting down and working on this session of writing should have been my first priority at the start of today, but instead of that my focus was all over the place. Today has been an unfocused writing day. Even right now I’m thinking about refilling my 48 oz Nalgene bottle instead of being focused on writing. Maybe I should circle back to writing later on today. That is probably the prudent course at this point.

  • Working on a new presentation

    This week my time is going to be spent on working out my new speaking presentation. It is about time to get going on that project. At the moment, the working title of that talk is, “Effective ML ROI use cases at scale.” I’m not totally sold on that title and that might be why it is taking me so long to finish this presentation. Previously back in November I gave a talk in New York City about, “Figuring out applied machine learning: Building frameworks and teams to operationalize machine learning at scale. Thinking back on that now it was a very long title for a talk and a very different time before quarantine and the pandemic. Building that presentation ended up in a roughly 5,000 word presentation that was recorded into Mp3 format for easy listening. You can find that content here:

    https://new.nelslindahl.com/2019/11/10/ai4-healthcare-nyc-2019/
    You can find about 5,000 words and an audio recording from a previous talk by following the link…

    Writing this new paper is going to include a few different exercises along the journey. To help include you in the adventure I’m going to try to describe the process before it starts. Generally, I have used two different writing strategies to build out new presentations. One of these might work for you or might need an entirely different writing strategy. First, sometimes I just sit down and write the presentation from start to finish. Previously that has happened a few times and in one solid writing session driven by the headwinds of inspiration a paper goes from start to finish in one session. You could say in that example of a writing strategy you have to wait for the spark to strike and the paper will just end up happening. Second, I will take out one of my notebooks with blank pages and sketch out the structure of the paper and then start filling out the necessary sections like building random bricks in a wall. That analogy does not work in practice, but in the world of writing you can generally work on any part of the paper. That is the power of imagination within the process. Using a little bit of imagination you don’t have to build the paper from the bottom up like setting bricks in a wall.

    Seriously, I’m not even entirely sold on the current writing project. It is a work progress to be sure. Three different titles have received attention; “Effective ML ROI use cases at scale”, “Building effective ROI ML use cases”, and “ML use cases at scale with effective ROI.” At some point along the way the title could even change. Right now the structure of the presentation is probably going to center on 5 solid ML use cases and how the ROI is calculated for those examples. That is probably all it will take to round out the presentation. My best to get this done is to start a shell in Microsoft PowerPoint tonight and work to get the PowerPoint slides built out one at a time. Completing the presentation in PowerPoint will allow me to have all my thoughts lined up and ready to present. The next step in the process would be to write out the complete talk. Working on that plan will generate another roughly 5,000 word block or prose that could be easily converted into some type of academic paper. It is possible that the paper will only surround the best use case or perhaps the machine learning return on investment model itself. 

    Interrupted. School.

  • Wondering about the future of content

    Maybe all this weblog content should be taken offline. This functional journal represented like 20 years of writing. Some of it false starts and a lot of it incomplete in nature. People seem to be trimming down backlogs of Tweets and other online content. Sometimes I consider purging it all and just moving along. This work is archived. Pulling it down from here would not even make a ripple in the grand ocean of innovation and creativity.

    Working on the next writing project is always on target. Editing and working with previous work is not even on my radar most of the time. Obviously, it is something that I probably should invest more energy and effort into, but it never becomes a priority. I’m always placing value on what’s next. All of my attention and focus is on what I’m going to do next. That attention is never on what I have been doing. That is how it works and how I evaluate things. Potential matters. As a writer you don’t generally value the potential of a previous pile of work. This makes me wonder about the future of content. Library shelves provided a curated look into the collective works of content deemed memorable. Somebody thought it was important enough to log it and keep it on the shelf. Beyond any reasonable expectation for storage on a library shelf the amount of content available has accelerated to the point where no library could reasonably physically hold it, have the time to evaluate it, or provide the curation function historically associated with a library. 

    Online from internet browsers we have access to so much new content being created every day that a certain degree of displacement is bound to occur. Classic novels and literature will be thinned out to the vital few gaining popular references over and over again. Academic writing is great for sign posting where the ideas were built from during the literature review and other sections explaining the origins of ideas. Outside of academic work something has to be pretty impactful to be referenced. Sometimes it takes a movie franchise to make a book super popular. Other times a super popular book will drive the creation of a movie and sometimes a franchise will develop from that seed. 

    These are the things that I am super curious about today. I’m wondering about the future of content and drinking some espresso. 

    People are using services to clean out Tweets older than 90 days. First, the facts are clear that this is a common enough request to need services. Second, people seem to be using these services on an ongoing basis. My own personal library of Tweets is generally useless. It is a bunch of links and one line references to things that caught my attention. Twitter is so ephemeral in how it represents the now. As time elapses the usefulness of the content expires exponentially. The value of a sporting event being televised peaks during the broadcast and replays generally are less valuable by an order of magnitude. It makes me wonder if all that content being produced has a flashpoint of value that peaks and falls off into an abyss. Within that abyss all the abandoned content just gets ignored for the most part. The only people going back to read old Tweets are generally researchers. Search engines are smart enough to pretty much ignore that forest of one line zingers and stale links that is the aging Twitter stream.

    The amount of academic writing being published has skyrocketed with the advent of online distribution and journals that exist solely online. The barrier to entry of having to print and distribute a journal evaporated. That is important as to continue physically printing a journal it had to have enough subscribers to support that ongoing and expensive endeavor. Online journals have a much lower sustainment cost. This also creates the possibility of increasing fragmentation within the academic community. Following the trail of references in papers is what binds the academic community together. It is that shared activity of running down references that removes fragmentation and focuses the academy itself on the key contributions. At the same time, just seeing a reference over and over again and not being able to get access to it or really find it can be exceedingly frustrating. That is the type of problem that creates reliance on the sources of information and publications that are stable and easy to access. Working within topics that require working in multiple languages or trying to access international journals can be increasingly difficult. 

    I guess given enough time to reflect on the future of content my concern about academic literature is dissipating. People will reference and get access to the ideas that influence the academy. That is going to happen based on the near perpetual desire of the people participating in ongoing academic research. Everything else outside of that is where all my wondering about the future of content ended up focusing. Content owned within movie studies and the frameworks they use to distribute will probably continue to be fragmented based on the ever growing islands of online streaming. Independent projects are more ephemeral. A lot of that content gets shared on platforms like YouTube that are here today and gone tomorrow. Given that independent content shared that way would have to be rehoused to continue distribution that content is at risk for being inaccessible. A lot of creator based individual driven content streams fall into that category. One one hand it is great that people are able to share content and some of it gains a real audience that gets to enjoy it and participate with the creator. Alternatively, what happens to that content in the long run.