Yesterday included a little more writing than usual. Maybe my 40th year on this planet will be a hyper productive one. Today to mix it up a little bit instead of butting up my YouTube subscriptions and sipping on espresso I’m going to spend this 30 minute window writing. Maybe every day the very first thing that should happen after brewing coffee or making espresso is writing. At the moment, my Warren Zevon Pandora internet radio station is actually playing “Reconsider Me” by Warren Zeon (2006). Kicking off every day with a writing session is probably a more productive use of my time than spending it watching YouTube videos. Most of the content that I have been watching online recently has been music related. More specifically the videos have been guitar oriented. I have created subscriptions to a number of guitar equipment geared music channels on YouTube. I’m not entirely sure how to export my subscriptions list to share on the weblog. It might take me a bit to figure out exactly how to do that. The default view when you click subscriptions is of what recent content has been published. That view does not provide a list, but perhaps later today I’ll sort that one out to get a real list created. 

After consuming my first espresso shot of the day it seemed like a good idea to keep writing. Perhaps the second shot that was brewed at the same time will help inspire a few extra thoughtful paragraphs of extreme writing efficiency. It is also entirely possible that this writing exercise will just produce a few pages of meandering prose that drifts from subject to subject. Based on what I can remember of why I stopped engaging in early morning writing sessions was that the quality of these efforts took a turn toward the worse at some point. It is hard to say exactly why that would be or what could be done to help improve the quality of my early morning writing. Sometimes it felt like the prose just took up space on the page ringing hollow and feeling stunted and separated from having a point. That might sound bleak, but it really was based on what I can remember at the moment. 

Every day an hour or so exists at the start of the day that could be spent doing something productive. Finding that spark of creativity at the start of the day during that hour of possible remains the hard part. Sometimes just getting in the habit of writing is enough to get things moving along in the right direction. The last two days all of the writing that has been done was based on using my main computer instead of my Google Pixelbook Go chromebook. The keyboard attached to this computer is the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 for Business. They retail for $44.95 and are one of the more comfortable keyboards that I have used over the years. My current setup includes having two of these in my office setup on different machines. 

Interrupted. Breakfast. Shoes. 

The other problem with my worming writing time is that it will be interrupted at some point. That is pretty much inevitable. Today it was a combination of making breakfast and finding shoes. Typically those types of things stay separated from my writing endeavors described on the pages of this functional journal. My writing tends to only focus on the things that are geared toward pushing forward toward that perfect possible future. Almost all of my energy and thoughts end up being put toward figuring out what is next. That energy goes toward looking forward instead of looking back. Being reflective and understanding the nature of things and the trajectory is important to understanding the ongoing paths toward a perfect possible future. It is the end state that catches my imagination instead of the process of staying on the path. Maybe that is functionally a problematic state or condition to maintain, but that is where things are probably going to stay for the foreseeable future.

I probably need to get back to putting proper titles on my weblog posts. During this quarantine and maybe before it I started using a formatted date followed by the word “Thoughts” to title each new post. That is not a very good way to sign post the nature of the content being shared online. It really is just a method to signpost the date it was created, but it adds no descriptive value to the contained content. Right now I’m struggling with what direction to take. Today I used the default title again. That is probably going to stay how it is given the nature of weblog posts, but tomorrow might be better. 

Interrupted. People departing. 

My Warren Zevon Radio station on Pandora has been streaming some great content this morning. Sometimes it does great and other times it gets overly algorithmically focused on the edges instead of the core playlist. From the Pandora website it is possible to “Tune Your Station” and maybe that is what I need to adjust. Maybe I should change it to discovery or deep cuts. I’ll think maybe discovery is the right thing to pick right now.

Interrupted. Waffles. Dog’s breakfast.

My thoughts have focused on setting up some sample coding projects on GitHub. That is going to be my next adventure. I’m going to continue to set up Jupyter notebooks devoted to working with campaign and election data. That is probably the very best thing I can do right now. I’m going to share out my basic election prediction model and maybe work into some more advanced analytic work using Jupyter notebooks. Well that is a direction that can be taken. Maybe some of that work will naturally transition into a couple of publishable papers or at least an academic trajectory that will yield something fruitful and rewarding. 

Interrupted. Work.