Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Month: November 2020

  • Browsing black Friday deals

    My main computer at the moment runs inside a Corsair Air 740 case.[1] Today for some inexplicable reason on reboot from a Windows 10 update my Ubuntu drive booted. I’m not entirely sure how that happened. In the boot order for the drives set in the bios of the motherboard the Windows 10 drive is supposed to have priority. Today it appears on this black Friday day full of deals my Windows 10 drive did not have priority in the boot sequence. That was something that had to be fixed to get back to writing this post. 

    Guitar related deals and computer hardware related deals are all over my advertisements and flooding my email inbox. A lot of merchants have wished me a Happy Thanksgiving via email and let me know that deals are happening right now. I have not purchased anything this week from any deals online. Nothing has really caught my fancy or compelled me to make a purchase this year. We pretty much finished up our shopping last month in preparation for a long winter of quarantine. 

    Footnotes:
    [1] My Corsair Air 740 was purchased back in January of 2018

  • Oh Thanksgiving

    Right now I’m going to delete five applications from my Android smartphone that are not currently being used. The five applications that got removed included some scouting app, wizards unite, AMC theaters, a wave file editor, and schwans. It seemed like a good idea to just start at the bottom of the list and look for removal candidates. I’m not running out of storage space or anything like that type of system level restriction. This was a case of digital pruning. It was am example of cleaning things up. At the moment, I’m writing on the same device that just was involved in that act of cleaning. I’m not very comfortable writing without a full keyboard. This phone has a qwerty keyboard. I’m just not comfortable with it.

    All my energy should be focused on this novel I’m about to right, but that is not happening at the moment. The document template is already setup. I could easily pull it up and work on that instead of this post. Maybe I should go totally old school blogger and just publish at the end of each writing session. Theoretically I could probably embed a Google Doc directly in the post and people could watch the creativity occur in real time. That would probably lend itself or a weekly audio recording of the previous 7 days of content. 

  • Something more

    Today started with snow in Denver. Yesterday I went ahead and put my rather custom Jackson Kelly guitar back in the basement. It had not been played in some time and needed to go back into storage. At the moment, I’m swapping mostly between the Chapman ML3 Bea and a custom Fender Deluxe stratocaster build. Both of those guitars sit here to my left ready to play at a moment’s notice. Actually turning on the amp and pedalboard is a lot more work. This morning I spent part (over an hour) of my day off watching a video about Klon overdrive pedals from JHS.[1] Right now at the moment my guitar pedal board consists of 8 pedals. None of those pedals is a Klon or a copy of that type of pedal. That works out just fine for me and my random ambient jamming at the moment. I did spend some type looking at Klon type pedals on the internet again. The one pedal that caught my attention some type ago was the Mjolnir from Mythos Pedals. It looked pretty good and people really seemed to like it. 

    Footnotes:
    [1] From JHS Pedals on YouTube, “LIVE: Everything You Need to Know About the Klon Centaur Overdrive,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ast9xQyTEU

  • Thinking about new speakers

    Well —- I do not really feel like writing today. Even a few episodes of Andromeda on tubi was not enough to kickstart the writing process. It appears this monday is just a slow day. I’m going to work on cleaning up some stuff around the house and maybe even tidy up my office.

    All of the furniture in my office was changed out, but I’m still working on the sound setup for my main computer. The Audioengine A5+ speakers are connected to the record player behind me and it would take about twenty feet of audio cable to connect it to a digital audio converter. 

    Digital content subscriptions:

    1. Disney+
    2. Netflix
    3. CBS All Access 
    4. Hulu
    5. ESPN+

    I’m trying to figure out if I need all 5 of those digital content subscriptions.

  • A few updates

    Somebody called me overly technical the other day. I’m not really sure what to do with that piece of external observation. Perhaps this week I’ll spend some time thinking deeply about the nature of communication and engagement. Being technical and being clear spoken are not mutually exclusive. It is definitely a topic worth more consideration. 

    Well my adventures with tubi have been reasonably good so far. I’m on season two of Andromeda and the almost 20 year old show is holding up well enough. It is somewhat peaceful just to let some episodes play in the background. Maybe that is one of those things where the fictional universe with continuity and a known conclusion feel more comfortable than our current pandemic driven reality.

  • Watching some Andromeda

    Apparently, some type of streaming service called tubi exists and has Andromeda (2000) loaded up for streaming with commercials.[1] I had never run into this service before, but it appears to be owned by the Fox Corporation and is a real no subscription required streaming website. My surprise at being able to watch Andromeda with no purchasing or login friction aside, the streaming service seemed to be ok. I was able to watch season 1 episode one “Under the Night” without signing up or really doing anything outside of clicking.  

    Footnotes:
    [1] Andromeda https://tubitv.com/tv-shows/385390/s01-e01-under-the-night

  • A bit of weekend coding

    This weekend I’m chewing on some of that Microsoft Learn Python coding training.[1] Instead of doing the exercises in Microsoft Visual Studio Code I’m working out of Google’s Colab online notebook system. It adds a little extra mental challenge to do everything, but in a different environment. I’m thinking about restructuring some of the content to be a more weekly look at how somebody could pick up and learn Python with tutorials based on chained lessons in a Jupyter notebook. That could make it a little more interactive for the respondent working through the learning points of emphasis. 

    Footnotes:
    [1] Learning path: DocsLearnBrowseTake your first steps with Python

  • All that coding

    All I really want to do today and during this weekend is spend some time coding in Python. That should be easy enough to focus on today. Recently, I have been working on some of the Microsoft training that is freely available. This section of the Microsoft website seems to be called Microsoft Learn and it has a ton of free content you can consume.[1] As you can tell I’m trying out a traditional footnote approach this time around. Bracketed footnotes are being used to just reference things in a post. This seems like the most durable way to do that while I’m writing and using WordPress. Fancier ways exist to do these types of things, but they are not as durable or transferable between spaces utilizing a method of copy and paste. Beyond that aside I’m still focused on spending some type of coding in Python. 

    Footnotes:
    [1] Direct website link https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/browse/

  • Thinking about 2020

    This has been a truly strange year for a multitude of reasons. Things appear to be trending upward in terms of the pandemic and people are about to enter another period of increased isolation. Generally I think people are are of that dynamic, but are trying to figure out how to function well enough to manage things. One of the things about writing in this functional journal in the past was trying to discuss complex things in a very direct way. Things just go so sideways this year that even trying to write about complex emotions was not working. It was not enough to communicate a series of feelings. That in part was probably due to the crushing inability to move on from that perpetual upward trending that could be seen in news reports and on tracking websites. From that understanding it became harder to try to get a foothold between the emotions of being isolated and the uncertainty of what would happen next. Together those two forces have a powerful combined effect on society in general. Wondering what will happen next at such a mass scale is itself a watershed moment for the nation. 

    That last paragraph contained a very condensed version of my thoughts on the matter. Today I have been thinking about 2020 and what this year has meant. A preponderance of it is already gone, but the effects will linger on for some time. A generation will remember the uncertainty and the crushing feeling of failed containment. Maybe that feeling is what I’m trying to capture, but I simply do not have the capacity to summon words to adequately describe it. People strive forward for improvement to make contributions to the academy to build society. Our nation has been built based on a framework of expanding institutions. We witnessed those institutions challenged in ways that defied the very normative fluidity with which we expect civil society to function. Outside of the strain on institutions even our most basic supply chains began to break down. That realized the actual reliance people have on institutions even the ones sustained by capital exchanges for commodities. A very small percentage of the total population is capable of surviving without being able to shop for food. That is probably one of the driving factors to why the uncertainty this year is so confounding and worrisome.

  • Thinking about my social media usage

    This post happens to be all about rethinking my social media usage. Back on April 4, 2018, I stopped using Facebook. Right now I do use Twitter and LinkedIn. Both of those applications are in my startup tabs for the Chrome internet browser. That means that every time I open Chrome on my Chromebook or this Windows 10 computer both of those applications open up. Doing that means they are right in my field of view and they both generally get some attention. I use both applications in very different ways. LinkedIn is generally a place where I just check the alerts and messages before moving on. Based on whatever algorithm they use for interest they suggest a few posts that I should read or that I might be interested in consuming. Generally speaking I follow the suggestions of the algorithm and take a glance at the content. For the most part it points me at things that I find interesting. Scrolling through LinkedIn generally is not something that is worth my time and I find it to be disjointed anyway. It would be easy to just focus on consuming LinkedIn one day a week instead of on a daily basis. For most people I’m not sure there is any real benefit to being a daily active LinkedIn user. 

    My experience with Twitter has been a little different over the years. Generally I do not encounter anything toxic in my feed. The people that I follow share scholarly content and thoughts about machine learning or artificial intelligence. It is highly disjointed as a communication medium. I pickup the feed in chronological order and only see very small parts of the overall stream at any one time. That means that I have no context of the importance or amplification of any one thing in the stream. Based on where I started and stopped reading I could miss something really valuable or be totally unaware of some type of drama. Given that I do not engage in academic drama of any kind that is not really a problem. When academics decide to fight in public sometimes I will get my popcorn and read the back and forth, but for the most part I figure they should focus that energy on publishing papers. Nothing serves as a zinger like publishing work that contradicts, disproves, or generally questions your rival. That is far more impactful than a furious Tweetstorm that will dissipate into oblivion within days. On a side note I did have to verify that Tweetstorm was a single word. Apparently, it is a somewhat commonly used word. 

    Somehow I totally forgot about YouTube. Over the years I have made a few videos on YouTube and it does have a comment section where people do engage. For the most part my engagement on YouTube is to enter comments and push the like button on videos that seemed interesting. I know that both comments and likes help content creators to amplify their videos based on algorithmic sharing. To that end I generally try to write unique comments and engage to support the content creator. That is not really social media in my mind it is amplification of content. Given that it involves my name and is on a media platform it has been included in this diatribe about social media usage. That seems to be appropriate. It could at some point in the future be more social in nature, but at the moment it is rather here and gone in terms of focus and attention.