Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Month: July 2020

  • Working on a few things

    Today is going to start off with a few thoughts about a presentation I’m working on related to machine learning. Thanks to the advent of the massive digital only online conference it looks like I’m going to be able to record the presentation ahead of time as a video file and submit it instead of delivering the talk live. I’m still planning on delivering a live talk online next month, but the other opportunity seems to allow the submission of a recorded video file. That will be a good opportunity to use my new Sony ZV-1 camera to record some highly professional looking presentation video. That camera captures way better video than my Logitech Brio webcam. Hopefully the presentation is judged by the audience based on the content of the presentation, but solid video will help keep that focus on the content instead of critiques of my ability as cinematographer or my internet bandwidth during the presentation. Watching 4 tech CEOs testify in front of Congress this week made it very clear that people do pay attention to video quality and what people have in their offices. I’m going to make sure that my video quality is better than what they managed to present. My bookshelves in the background are just full of books from my years in college. At this point, they are what they are. They are shelves full of books that represent little chapters in my educational experience. Thankfully the Sony ZV-1 camera will ensure my video quality is solid right out of the gate without a lot of effort on my part.

    What I’m really curious about is if they needed one continuous video or if they wanted it edited with the slides embedded into the content. The ability to record the presentation in sections would make it a lot easier to functionally complete. Maintaining energy and focus for 5 minutes is a lot easier than trying to sustain the same presentation level energy for 30 minutes. That is something I’m going to work on this weekend and see what happens. The content is geared toward a 30 minute presentation and this video needs to be just over 20 minutes. If I’m doing my own editing and transitions between slides, then I could really do some interesting things with the video in PowerDirector 365 to ensure it is a really solid presentation. That is where my thoughts are right now and that is probably not a bad place to be this morning. My focus needs to be more geared toward producing presentations and academic papers. That is one of those things that will always be true. Every year I’m supposed to publish three academic papers in journals to keep up with my academic peers. That is a goal that I’m aware of and have fallen short of achieving. On the brighter side of things it is always possible to achieve that goal moving forward. It is never possible to achieve it retroactively so my focus needs to be on the potential of my future actions instead of dwelling on the academic consequences of my procrastination. 

    Apparently, I need to make a decision today about paying for a Pandora premium subscription or letting that expense lapse. I know that is the case thanks to a giant banner at the top of my Pandora instance. Over the years I have paid for the subscription on and off and I’m not entirely sure why I go one way or the other. My overarching goal of course is to remove any subscriptions from my path as they need to be really compelling to stick around. That is a strategy that a lot of people adopt to help faster savings instead of expense on a monthly basis. Maybe next month I’ll focus on listening to the well over 50 vinyl records sitting next to me in my office instead of streaming content. That is probably one way to go that will be more interesting, but it will also be a lot more work.

  • Collecting some wandering

    Taking some time off was a good idea. It was time to sit back and reflect on things for a few days without interruptions. That was way more important than I thought it would be at the time. Today is just another one of those days where I just need to sit down and practice delivering that virtual presentation. That is a daily 30 minute commitment. A draft of the presentation slides is now reasonably refined enough to support tinkering, but it is done enough to be acceptable. My method of practice will be to sit down in my blue Scaninavian Designs Wau desk chair with the Google Recorder application running on my Google Pixel 4 XL smartphone. This will record the talk with the push of a button and allow me to get a rough transcription after the fact. 

    Just to be extremely clear about the transcription being rough it won’t be a polished gem or anything more than about 75% accurate. Even with the audio recording as a reference point whatever the transcription engine is doing for processing does not work out all that well. My Google account has my voiceprint and has had plenty of opportunity to work with transcribing my voice. Additionally, consider these three other elements; my tone is consistent, I have a mild midwest accent, and my recording voice is near professional quality. Anyway, I’m digressing away from the point a little bit on that diatribe against transcription quality. The point I was trying to make is that the rough transcript would need to be edited to have a good quality written out draft of the presentation text. That is not something that I will want to do with the first few efforts to deliver the talk. It needs to be a little more practiced before any type of transcription into a written version would be warranted or useful. 

    That model of desk chair might sound familiar. It is the CEO chair that was featured in the HBO series Silicon Valley. It comes in blue, orange, and the waitlisted black. I have been surprisingly happy with the chair, but the one element that needs explanation is that the seat is not very well cushioned. You should probably sit in one before buying one if you are expecting an exceedly fluffy cushioned chair of resplendent comfort. This is not that chair, but it works for me and I have zero complaints about it.  That concludes my review of the chair for the moment. Instead of focusing on the things around me I’m going to return to thinking about my time off and how good an idea it was to collect a bit of wonderment in reserve for later. Sometimes you need to bottle it up and store it for later. Collecting some wandering was a solid way to go about recharging, resetting, and reflecting on things. Not only did it help me find the title of this weblog, but also it helped me functionally move along in this effort to engage in my 75th day in a row of daily journaling. That is a solid start to a daily writing routine and a step in the right direction. 

    Even right now I know that the first paragraph that was written today is going to need a few minutes of editing before it can be sent out for publication on the weblog. It took a few days of writing in a row to really get going and now the reflective elements of writing are fully engaged. I’m starting to wonder about form, function, structure, and assumptions during and after the writing process. That means that my mind is really starting to engage at a deeper level during the course of these stream of consciousness writing sessions. The idea is really to think out loud onto the page and dig into the things that come to the forefront of my mind. Focusing in with a relentless pursuit of digging deeper and trying to understand the things are powerful enough to catch my attention. A byproduct of that effort is the incessant writing about writing that occurs, but that is one of those things that probably cannot be avoided at this time. Maybe something will spark a creative flame that grabs my total focus and dials my efforts into that line of inquiry. That is pretty much what I’m waiting for every day and every attempt to sit down and write. I’m waiting for that spark of creativity to push things forward.

  • Reflect on things

    Things are moving along well enough this week. I’m feeling relaxed and well rested. Taking some time to reflect on things and hike around Rocky Mountain National Park was a good idea. For the most part during the hikes I listened to nature and did not even have an earbud going playing music in the background. A 58 minute video of that trip was shared on YouTube yesterday. Using the Sony ZV-1 camera with the Sony GP-VPT2BT wireless shooting grip worked out well enough for the trip. For the most part even without a gimbal or any type of external stabilization the footage turned out well enough. You have to really make sure not to rapidly pan or swing the camera around or things will either blur or become disorienting for the viewer. Even footage of very dynamic nature features like a waterfall turned out better than I expected. 

    Editing the video was easy enough with PowerDirector 365 on my Windows 10 powered desktop. Shooting all the footage on a phone and using the PowerDirector application for Android was functionally easier to edit, but the size of all the 4K video was problematic to manage along the way. Managing a stack of memory cards much is easier than having to manage a daily cycle of editing and cleaning up video on a smartphone. Each 128 gigabyte memory card in the stack is the same size as the entire storage capacity of my Pixel 4 XL smartphone. 

    Today I’m going to finish up working on the slides for that virtual presentation next month. It is time to get those slides into a shareable shape. My goal for today is to close out the slides and have them pretty much ready to go by the end of the day. I’m sure some tinkering will occur along the way. Building a PowerPoint presentation of slides tends to be an iterative process and every time the slides get reviewed a little bit of tinkering occurs until they end up being locked down into a final version. That is normally by deadline not by choice. Given more time more tinkering would probably occur. 

    My thoughts took a turn toward the best use of my time for a few moments. That is always a dangerous fork in the road. Typically when I start thinking about the best possible use of my time, things either end up focusing on writing code or The West Wing (1999) style political speeches. Sitting down to write soaring political prose is one of those things that I am fully capable of doing, but is not generally where my time is spent. Maybe that is a mistake on my part and that is something that is a part of my writing skill set that I should focus on nurturing. On the other hand the more time I spend actively coding my skills will continue improving. Learning and using coding skills are one of those things that improve with practice. 

    My focus today will be on finishing up 7 slides and running through that virtual presentation a few times before lunchtime. Earlier this week the talk got outlined on the whiteboard with time values assigned to each section and the stories that section contains. At this point, I’m feeling pretty comfortable with being ready to complete the presentation. Next week the audio part of the presentation might be solid enough to share. 

  • The one where some new hot sauce arrived

    Yesterday I wrote a couple extra paragraphs while messing around with the newly installed PowerDirector software. You can find those wonderful words at the end of the post from Monday July 27, 2020. It would have been easy enough to cut and paste those words into the post for today, but that would have stolen a little bit of the purpose of having a daily writing habit. It was the wrong path to take and it was a path avoided. My writing process right now involves three distinct steps. First, I’m writing in a Google Docs words processing document instead of using Microsoft Word. I just prefer Google Docs right now for general writing. Microsoft Word still gets booted up for anything more substantial. Second, during this new daily writing streak at the end of output part of my writing session I have been going back to the first line and giving the entire piece of prose some general editing and proofreading. That is a new feature of my writing experience. It seems ever since turning 40 happened this year my interest in proofreading has gone up substantially. Those two things seem highly correlated, but I’m not sure what drove the causation on that one. Third, after the writing and editing process the next thing that happens is the content is moved from Google Docs over to the weblog interface. I just cannot bring myself to write in the weblog interface. It has gotten better over the years, but for some inexplicable reason (maybe habit or routine) that interface just will not do for writing. 

    Right now I’m sipping my two shots of espresso made with the Nespresso Expert machine in the kitchen and wondering what the Heatonist “The Classic Hot Sauce” garlic Fresno edition will taste like. It will probably taste like hot sauce with a lot of garlic in it, but the suspense is building. Truly figuring out the answer to that question is going to have to wait until lunchtime. I’m sure it will be delicious, but my first time using the hot sauce will be with lunch in a few hours. The purveyors of hot sauce over at the Heatonist corporation don’t mess around with the hot sauces they elect to curate. 

    Over the last couple of years I have sampled a fair number of hot sauces from them and they all have been splendid. Some of them have been truly spicey, but that is probably the point of the enterprise. The cardboard box the hot sauce arrived in was well designed. I added a picture of the sauce as the featured image for this weblog post. To help with future continuity I have also started to paste the pictures used in posts into the word processing documents for safekeeping. A lot of my older weblog content is missing photos from when the links were broken during migrations. That is not something that is easy to go back and fix sadly enough. Somewhere in the basement a backup exists of that directory on a classic compact disc or maybe DVD. The last time I tried to grab data off the older backups it was a rather disappointing experience. A lot of the physical media had started to degrade at about a decade of storage. They were kept in temperature controlled rooms in the total darkness of media sleeves inside a box.  

    Right now the sun has yet to come up and the writing process got started at 05:00 hours again today. My goals for the day are pretty straightforward. I’m going to work on editing a hiking video for a little bit in PowerDirector and I’m going to finish up the slides for that virtual presentation next month. Those two things will have my focus today and that is right where things should be in terms of queuing up the right workload.

  • Thinking about ML industry disruption

    Last night I spent some time working on that virtual presentation for next month. Part of that work was focused on figuring out a better way to share a meaningful narrative about calculating return on investment and aligning that to machine learning endeavors. Typically trying to explain decision making using a return on investment framework is difficult enough even within the right forum of interested listeners. When you start introducing the things that machine learning can do you end up with an entirely different conversation especially within the context of calculating return on investment and ultimately the break even point. In terms of pure disruption to industries the advances being made in machine learning are getting closer to being able to be categorized that way, but for the most part that has not materialized. Autonomous driving is getting close, but the wave of disruption to the transportation industry has not occurred at this time. 

    Instead of wholesale disruption you have a series of very powerful augmentations to workflows and specific tasks have been replaced by either an API call or an automated process. My argument is that you really have to know the inflection point where machine learning efforts will move from augmentation of workflows to disrupting industries. That point in time will be where the technology possibilities frontier (TPC) curve sees a radical outward shift creating disruption for those processes and technologies that now lag behind the new curve position. In the above use case the notion of a production possibilities frontier curve would be considered inadequate to describe the disruption. Advanced machine learning implementations would be able to wholesale replace the previous production elements being described or augment them to the point where at a minimum two curves would be required to describe the possibility shift. 

    You can probably tell that I have been actively thinking about how machine learning will disrupt industries and create a large degree of change. I’m not evaluating any degree of social change caused by the disruption. This analysis at the moment is just about impacts to industry and business in general. Within that claim my focus has been specifically on what business use cases will be the most common and how will those use cases create disruption. I’m trying to figure out where the current bleeding edge of technology when it comes to machine learning will intersect with production use cases at scale. We are starting to see significant implementations of elements of machine learning in workflows, but those elements are augmenting task completion in workflows instead of introducing autonomous action. Maybe my expectation of seeing autonomous action is unreasonable. That could be the case right now and it would mean that my current inquiry is going to fall short of proving any type of hypothesis. Honestly, that is an acceptable proposition. It could just be that within the current technology landscape things have not progressed enough to prove a hypothesis that autonomous action from machine learning is the inflection point to industry disruption. My argument would be that defining a potential inflection point would be enough to set the groundwork for a meaningful research project that makes a contribution to the academy. A better way of saying that is that the research in question would be a significant contribution. Conducting research that does not make any type of contribution to the greater academy of knowledge curation seems like a false start. Maybe that distinction is a line in the sand that is just personally important to me based on allocating my time to something. 

    The entire rest of the day is going to be devoted to working on a series of topics defined by my efforts from last night. Enough progress was made last night describing what needed to be researched that I’m about one good whiteboard session away from being able to build an outline of the best possible version of the presentation that I could give and potentially transition the transcript of that effort into an academic paper or manuscript. This is probably going to be a two step effort where a thirty minute presentation will be delivered and after that the content will need to be essentially replatformed into an academic format. I do think it is very intellectually interesting that such a significant disconnect exists between the formats for presentations and research papers. Both are created to communicate something to an audience. You could distill both types of presentation into the written word and share it that way. A respondent consuming that written word could derive meaning from it and learn something. Strangely enough the academic style research paper is structured very differently from a presentation. Generally speaking if you got up and started to read an academic paper published in a prestigious journal to an audience at a conference that was aligned to the topic you would run out of time and the goal of successfully communicating content might not be achieved. You would run out of time and your literature review and presentation of research methods would probably have eaten up your entire 30-45 minute presentation time. 

    —–

    My adventure with editing video from my new Sony ZV-a camera has gotten off to a rocky start. Apparently, thanks to this dialogue box I just found out that, “Your version of PowerDIrector doesn’t support this feature.” The very basic thing I was trying to do was drag and drop a 4K video clip into the editor interface. It appears I’m going to have to download some other version of PowerDirector and see what happens. Right now PowerDirector 365 is downloading. During the installation process I got an error that the other version of PowerDirector is running and that it must be shutdown before I can retry the installation. That was easy enough to fix. Using the Android application version was much easier to manage. This time around I had to buy the software and install some application manager which installed the software for a third time on my computer today. Yeah… that was exciting. I’m going to have to make sure that the copies replaced each other and I don’t have 3 different installation folders on my application hard drive. I use a disk separate from my storage space and the operating system to stage software installations. I’m not sure how smart of a strategy that is to employ, but at the moment it works well enough. After loading the software this time around the application did optimize for GPU encoding. That took about 2 minutes of analyzing and I’ hoping it was beneficial.   

    I’m now going to paste files from C0021 to C0124 in chronological order into the new PowerDirector 365 project and start the editing process. Within my installation of Windows 10 I was able to copy all the files from the harddrive and paste them into the project at one time instead of having to do it one video at a time. This effort moved 105 files into the timeline and made the video one hour and three minutes long. We will see what happens to the runtime as the editing continues. The files were pasted into the timeline a little out of order. I ended up removing them from the timeline and adding them from the video selection panel using a cut and paste. This worked fine and clips C0021 to C0124 were in order. I’m exporting them right now into a single MP4 file. It looks like the 4K video export process with GPU acceleration will take about 45 minutes to complete. The original files were stored in an MP4 format by the Sony ZV-1 camera and took up 63.1 gigabytes on the memory card. I must have done something wrong in the export process. The file that was exported reduced the file size to 23.1 gigabytes. That means the editing process crunched out about two thirds of the data from the original files. 

    That video size problem took a few minutes to figure out. My original produce file format export had used the H.265 HEVC format with a setting of MPEG-4 4k 3840 x 2160/30p (37 Mbps). Picking HEVC was not the right codec to select based on the original video format. The Sony ZV-1 was recorded using an MP4/XAVC S UHD 4K (3840 x 2160) encoding. It turns out in PowerDirector I needed to pick XAVC S and select the XAVC S 3840 x 2160/30p profile name/quality setting to better match the original content. I’ll give that an export later today to see what happens to the file size. That upload to YouTube of the unedited export in H.265 HEVC will take over an hour. I was able to do the full export using the right quality setting and it still crunched down the original files from 63.1 gigabytes to 38.9 gigabytes. The size reduction was better, but the overall size of the files still was reduced heavily. I’m curious to see if any difference is actually visible on my monitor between the two files after they are uploaded to YouTube. 

  • General audiences

    Yesterday I got really focused on preparing for that virtual presentation coming up next month. Devoting my time to that effort every day will have to be a part of my routine for a while. Generally speaking I should always be working on preparing and refining whatever speech is at the forefront of my mind. That activity needs to be ongoing and continuously refined. Last night I walked through the talk and really gave it some deep thought about how to make it insightful for a general audience interested in machine learning and artificial intelligence. People with those interests are probably the ones who would be attending my talk. I’m going to assume they are the general audience who will be listening. That is where things ended up yesterday and how my time got spent at the end of the night. 

    Instead of listening to an audiobook at the end of the night I listened to that new Folklore album Taylor Swift (2020). The album was released this week. Stylistically the album was closer to the type of music I generally listen to than any of the artists previous work. I gave the album a listen as part of the shared experience people were having this week. It seemed like a way to understand a little bit of public discourse that is going on right now related to that album. Some music has been released during the pandemic. Given that touring musicians have been generally wherever they were located when the quarantine started we should probably expect to see more music arriving. Traveling musicians would have seen major changes to routines and lifestyles when the pandemic started to create quarantine situations. Art is art. Hopefully, some of that creative force helps move the things left unsaid into a more public forum for discussion. Advancing the general discourse is an inherent value that art brings to society. 

    That string of thought got me generally thinking about how community standards might be changing right now. I’m not going to spend a bunch of time writing about the Miller vs. California (1973) court case and the nature of community standards. Instead of focusing on that Miller test of obscenity I’m more focused on quality and value to society. While I could spend the rest of the day thinking about the metaphysics of quality. I’m going to save that inquiry for another day. Maybe that will be part of creating a longer chautauqua at some point. Yesterday, we pulled into a parking lot on the trail ridge road in Rocky Mountain National Park. Parked next to us was an adventurer with a motorcycle loaded up for a journey. It was a rather zen moment of personal reflection to think about how peaceful that journey would be as an exploration of quality on a motorcycle camping along the way and enjoying being close to nature. All of that being said my focus right now is on what brings value to the community. The quentasitional description of civic duty usually includes some explanation of engagement. That description will probably closely be followed by explaining the inherent value in the act of voting. Value exists in the process of how a community functions. People inherently have to work together for a community to function. A community of interest exists around that album that Taylor Swift released this week. That community happens to have a lot of engagement both internally and externally related to that specific interest. 

    We have to figure out how to understand the growing community of interest being built around the things that are not generally being said. My focus on value within the community has started to really center around the things that are left unsaid and just how much that dynamic influences communities of place, circumstance, and interest. Inquiring into the nature of community value surrounding that dynamic of disconnected communication and situation is more than just the discourse occurring in the public square. I’m going to try to circle back to this argument later. Right now I’m not able to put the right words together to close out the narrative that was building up related to community value and civic engagement. 

    Interrupted. Nonsense.

  • Practicing a virtual presentation

    For the next few days, I’m going to be practicing delivering a virtual presentation. Instead of planning on standing up on stage and speaking to a crowd this presentation is going to be delivered virtually from my office chair. This format will neutralize one of my best speaking skills: audience engagement. Reading the crowd and adapting to the emotion of the room is a lot easier when you can see the people. At a conference you get the benefit of hearing a ton of other talks and seeing which parts of a talk are going to get the best reactions. That is something that I actually spend a lot of time thinking about. I’ll spend more time and go deeper into topics that the audience might enjoy more. During the course of listening to virtual conference things always just seem more rehearsed and the direct audience reaction is more limited. Generally I just click on links to talks and let them play on one side of my monitor while working on something else. The dynamic of a virtual presentation is totally different. 

    I’m working on practicing the delivery of my talk, “Demystifying Applied ML: Building Frameworks & Teams to Operationalize ML at Scale.” Within the body of that talk are three core topic areas related to ROI, ML frameworks, and teams. Right now I could hit record and deliver the talk and each of those content areas would get 5-10 minutes of coverage. The way I build out the delivery of a talk is not really based on reading from slides. I try to have a series of topics or very short taglines that sign post the content being delivered. During the course of delivering the presentation those core elements get coverage, but the exact phrasing changes every delivery of the presernation. Within a virtual presentation delivery I’m not going to be able to adapt the presentation to the audience. That probably means that practicing the delivery of a virtual presentation is going to be about delivering the best possible version of the talk. 

    My practice method is usually a daily delivery cadence for 15-20 days before the talk. This is a big investment of my time given that delivering a 30 minute talk and then listening to the recording is a commitment of about an hour a day to the presentation. At this point, I’m willing to make that investment and it should help ensure the virtual presentation is delivered in a well rehearsed and cohesive way for the audience. In practice, the recording method is usually just me talking to the audio recorder on my Pixel 4 XL smartphone and then listening back to the recording. The part of the process that helps refine the talk during each iteration is listening back to the content being delivered. My preference is generally for a more extemporaneous style of presentation, but in this case I’m going to try to refine the talk as much as possible before delivering the content to a virtual audience. 

    Talking for 30 straight minutes is not something that I normally do on a daily basis. Even during the course of a presentation I prefer answering questions throughout the talk and engaging in some lively debate. That type of interactive exchange is what I expect in the classroom and prefer even during the course of a presentation. I’ll be curious to see if the virtual presentation format includes a method to receive audience questions throughout the talk or if they get queued up at the end.

    Presentation Topic Area: Machine Learning

    Title Version 1) Figuring out applied ML: Building ROI models, repeatable frameworks, and teams to operationalize ML at scale

    Title Version 2) Demystifying Applied ML: Building Frameworks & Teams to Operationalize ML at Scale

    Description: Solving hard business problems requires operationalizing ML at scale. Doing that in a definable and repeatable way takes planning and practice. Understanding how to match the deep understanding of subject matter experts to the technical application of ML programs remains a real barrier to applied ML in the workplace. Understanding applied machine learning models with strong potential return on investment strategies helps make delivery a definable and repeatable process. 

    3-Audience Takeaways

    1. Beginning to think about the process of building machine learning ROI models
    2. Setting the foundation for defining repeatable machine learning frameworks
    3. Building teams to operationalize machine learning at scale

  • Starting the day

    Right now I’m entirely focused on starting the day. Today could be an absolutely wonderful day. Completing a meaningful writing session this morning almost did not happen. At the moment, I have no coffee or espresso. A gap in planning has obviously occurred. My Soylent meal replacement beverage does contain caffeine, but that is never really the same. Two freshly brewed shots of espresso are sort of my way to start the day. That is not going to happen at the moment. I’m really hung up on that one little detail. It seems to be blocking the start of my day in an unexpected way. Those little parts of our routines can feel so important at times. Making sure the day starts off in the right way is a very important part of my daily writing routine. I’m going to need to change subjects here and jump into something more weighty. It is a few minutes after 05:00 hours. I still have a bunch of time before sunrise to utilize for the purposes of writing. That time would be better spent thinking deeply about something instead of wondering about what would have been with two wonderful freshly brewed shots of espresso. Seriously, even wondering about wonder would be a better use of my time at the moment. 

    At some point next week, I’m going to sit down and edit some 4K video recorded on my new Sony ZV-1 camera. I managed to collect a bunch of nature B-roll footage that could be spliced together well enough to make a complete video. The last time I really edited a video was on my smartphone using the PowerDirector android application. Strangely enough it is really easy to put clips together and trim video segments down using a touchscreen. Next week I’m going to sit down and work using the desktop editor. Sometimes having more features is just having more features and it introduces unnecessary complexity. I’m sure it will become pretty clear pretty fast how the editing process will go. I did learn how to use Avid’s Pro Tools First software package for recording and editing music without a ton of effort. Maybe the video editing will go better than the experience that I’m expecting. One of the nice things about platforms like YouTube is that people have made tutorials for just about everything. Being able to have somebody provide training and walk through the use of something is really something not to take for granted. It is one of the bright spots of collaboration on the internet. 

    Figuring out some of the quirks of the Sony ZV-1 camera has required watching all sorts of videos to get things running properly. The manuals Sony has are seriously lacking and really weirdly written compared to what you would expect to get. I would offer to help Sony figure out how to make better manuals, but they could just trade the cameras to all the online influences they work with in exchange for making better user tutorial videos for the various products. That would be a method of crowdsourcing higher quality manuals for products. That is probably the better path forward for the Sony corporation. It is a path they should probably get working on pretty quickly.

  • Writing about writing

    The next couple of days might feature posts on the shorter side of things. Striving to hit that 1,000 word mark at the start of each day takes a certain amount of time. That amount of time might not be available. My attention may be elsewhere. For the last 67 days a solid attempt at writing a page of prose at the start of the day has happened. It really has happened you can go back and look at the date and time stamps on the posts. Alternative posting methods exist. It does look like the WordPress application on my Google Pixel 4 XL smartphone is capable of posting something in a pinch. We will see if that proves to be necessary. I’m supposed to be staying on topic, but that does not seem to be where my thoughts are wondering this morning. 

    Yesterday at some point I started thinking about taking all these blog posts and compiling them into a publishable book format. That book could be an ongoing narrative about my life and times as a mostly digital writer during my 40th year on this planet. Naturally, that thought was highly self indulgent and I did not take the time to compile all the previous 67 posts into a single document for publication. Posting those thoughts online each day will have to be enough. At one point, I did try to use the same word processing document every day to help create that type of single document type use case, but that just did not work out very well and I went back to the one day one document format that has been the way I write every day. 

    Almost all of my weblog posts are essentially different takes on me writing about writing. The ongoing narrative is the march of time and the things that change in the world around me. Outside of those two things the ongoing constant part of my writing process is my ongoing need to write about writing over and over again. That is part of the process where I ramp up into writing and doing other things. Generally what gets published on this functional journal is a mix of the ramp up and a little bit of the other content that gets generated. For some reason it takes a little bit of writing and thinking for the deeper thoughts to start processing. Imagine a totally blank canvas where some type of foundation has to be set to build up layer after layer of deeper more focused arguments. Something like that ends up happening. Rarely do things start at a deeper level and continue along that way. 

    One of the things I did to reward myself this summer was to make a purchase of 3 new biographies written about the life and times of Warren Zevon. That purchase of 3 new physical books was made from the Barnes and Noble bookstore. Those books were written by Kushins, Campion, and Plasketes. They have been received and are sitting on my desk right now. I’m in the process of reading the book by C. M. Kushins. Normally during the course of reading a book I generally do not want or feel compelled to contact the author. Sometimes I send a thank you note after reading a book if the author deserves it, but that is about the extent of my correspondence. With this book I’m really curious how the content was pulled together and assembled into a coherent timeline.. The content of the book is written in a way that you almost feel the events occurring. I guess my point is that the writing style feels closer to narration than the typical biography. The key difference here is that the narration is insightful with a somewhat deeper knowledge of the subject than I expected. Generally the biography based style of writing is more observation after the fact filled with a bunch of surprised insights strung together.

  • On incomplete arguments

    Getting back into the swing of having a daily writing habit up and running seems to have been accomplished. Adventure! It took a bit of time for the act of daily writing to translate to producing something interesting and more focused on a significant narrative thread. It seriously took about 45 days of effort to move from observational prose to a deeper level of thought. The problem at hand was that thinking deeply about society and being ready to write about those thoughts takes time and a lot of internal processing. Perhaps I should have been ready to start working out the problems and limits associated with things left unsaid impacting civil discourse. That is an important element to consider. That probably should have been more obvious at the time, but it took me a little bit of time to work that out. Yesterday I spent some time digging into the idea of asynchronous communication. One of the things that I keep coming back to after thinking deeply about the things that are left unsaid is how even with the best asynchronous communication methods leaving things out creates incomplete arguments. Sometimes you can get to the point without expressing every single part of an argument. People generally will fill in the blanks when necessary to get to the point. Some lines of argumentation are complex enough that they have to be expressed fully and completely like a mathematical proof. Other lines of argument do not fall into that category of completeness.

    One of the most hollow and incomplete lines of argument going is the soundbite method of communicating in the media. It is like reading the title of academic papers and expressing from that effort that you understand the argument contained within the pages of text. Seriously, soundbytes capture such a narrow part of an argument that entire foundations and meanings are lost. People walk away from hearing that type of communication and have to fill in the blanks. Problematically they don’t fill in the blanks in the same ways. Read the title of any academic paper in the social sciences and ask the respondents to explain what the paper was about. Those academically trained to question everything and engage in rational discourse would tell you they have not read the paper and stop at that point. Outside of that presentation of logic to stop the process the rest of the respondents will prove you with various expelnations. They could not have a shared explanation unless they colluded before the presentation of explanations. That holds true given that the respondents have no context of the paper outside of the title. Somewhere within that line of argumentation is a bit of truth about the problematic nature of the things that are left unsaid in civil discourse. Engaging in a true debate within the public square without complete representation of arguments would inherently be incomplete. Fragmented discussions and incomplete discussions are the hallmark of media transmissions in the digital age. These two paragraphs are about 500 words in totality. They represent an incomplete argument, but outside of a podcast or long form interview this much content would be trimmed down into a soundbite of some type. 

    My writing is not generally designed to be converted into soundbites of any kind. Maybe from time to time a line or two comes across as pithy and insightful enough to be quotable. That is probably an accidental artifact of the writing process and not an intended outcome of my communication methods. These weblog posts are intended to be long form communications of the ideas that are the forefront of my thoughts. Central to that is that almost all of this functional journal content is written via a stream of consciousness based writing process. Literally the words are created from the start of the writing session at the top of the page and stop at the end of the writing sessions wherever that ends up being on the page. This content is written from start to finish in a single writing session. That is how my writing habit translates to prose. Each single serving of prose is then delivered via online posting. Generally that happened without any editing. Pretty much since my 40th birthday I have been engaging in a little bit of editing/proofreading before posting. For the most part this is a new feature of the restarted daily writing process and it involves moving from the end of the block of prose to the beginning and just reading from start to finish to catch things before posting the content online. It probably does not catch all of the little things that should be fixed, but it probably improves the output a little bit and makes it more readable.