Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Year: 2021

  • Some digital housekeeping

    It is that time of year when I open the bookmark manager in Google Chrome and try to clean things up a little bit. The next few observations about the links I’m keeping around the top of my browser.

    I have a guitar pedal link saved that I’m considering for purchase. It’s up first on the bar just below the tabs. That link will probably end up getting transferred to the “Older” links folder at some point. That is the final resting spot for links that get accumulated in Google Chrome. 

    Next up is a link to the Google Doc that holds all of my Substack posts both previously written and outlined for the future. That document holds countless hours of effort from the previous year. At this point, I don’t really need to make a new document and storing all of the posts in one document has been useful overall. 

    Right next to that Google Doc is my link to YouTube subscriptions. This is a stream of all the videos from channels where I’m a subscriber. Honestly, this is the best way to use YouTube to display the most recent content you care about. If you are just using the regular stream, then you are missing out on seeing all the content the channels you subscribe to in one list based on upload time. 

    For some ineffable reason, I still have a link to the Newegg Shuffle right in the middle of my screen. I was checking this daily at one point to buy a new graphics card at retail pricing from Newegg. Right after typing this sentence that link is getting moved to the “Older” folder. 

    After that link was removed the next 6 are just eBay searches that I like to scan every day as a sort of relaxing way to consider something different. I created a folder and put all 6 of the links into the folder to make the bookmark bar a little bit more tidy. Now it is very easy to right click on the new eBay folder and just open all of the tabs at one time. This will save me a bit of time moving forward. 

    9 more bookmarks were hanging out after the eBay folder and I just moved them all to the “Older” folder as they are not currently important to me on a daily basis.

  • End of year projects

    Week 46 of The Lindahl Letter came out on Friday and this weekend I started really deeply working on the posts for the rest of the year. The posts for the rest of the year have enough of a draft completed that they could go out right now and things would be ok… things would not be epic or even really acceptable at this point, but the foundation exists and that is a start. My weekend writing efforts have to be kicked up a notch here going forward. It looks like I may need to start working on a presentation for 2022 as well. I’m going to follow up on that one and figure out exactly how many minutes of coverage will be required.

  • Working on manuscript updates

    My writing schedule has been updated for Sunday on a go forward basis. The schedule now includes a morning writing session to review my Substack post and work on academic articles for 1-3 hours, publishing a note on LinkedIn about the last Substack post, and sending a Tweet about my last Substack post. Working within that writing schedule will probably help increase the readership of the newsletter. To pick up my subscribers the content is going to need to be posted to Twitter and to LinkedIn. This week I even elected to login to my highly dormant Facebook account to share the link. 

    Over the last two months my writing productivity has really plummeted. That is something that needs to be rectified here one day at a time. Reversing a trend like that is just about spending the time at the keyboard to write larger blocks of prose. I have a manuscript in progress that is entitled, “On Machine Learning: The Lindahl Letters of 2021.” I’m going to publish my entire set of 2021 Substack posts in one long manuscript format. All of the content has been put into a basic manuscript draft and I’m currently working on starting at the beginning and reworking the content from start to finish before publication. This is one of those things that I’m probably going to need to send to my editor before final publication. Right now the manuscript is about 165 pages long, but that could easily get longer before publication. 

    Earlier this morning I just could not manage to get back into the flow of writing. A trip to the donut store and a stop to get some coffee happened, but a bunch of time writing never occurred. Getting back on schedule with a writing routine has to be my primary focus moving forward. Yesterday I created a draft post with two solid paragraphs of content. For some reason that was where my productivity stopped. I’m about to watch the Kansas City Chiefs game on Sunday night football. During that game my plan is to try to rework the content and get it ready for publication on Friday.

  • A busy Sunday writing day

    Today was super productive in terms of writing. For some reason, I got up this morning and worked to take my Substucks and work toward getting them into a publishable format. That all started with a moment of introspection, “Right now I’m wondering if The Lindahl Letter newsletter currently published on Substack should be offloaded as a year one manuscript for publication. It would be pretty easy to just take the 52 posts and strip out the links/thoughts and Tweets sections.”[1] A few moments later a second thought occurred about the subject as well related to the possibility of switching up topics every year for a really deep research focus including 52 different inquiries. That one I’m not as sure about, but well over an hour was invested into formatting the The Lindahl Letter into a Microsoft Word document ready for publication via a book aggregation service that handles publishing across a multitude of platforms.

    The advertising plan seemed a little bit sad after the first draft. It went a bit like this, “Sometimes when the internet is not working do you miss having a physical copy of The Lindahl Letter on your bookshelf?” Yeah, that did not seem compelling to me either. However, if that is something you were looking to have, then you can look forward to a publication of the one year manuscript. Right now the topic list is out to week 59 and I have a few more topics to transfer from my Google Keep files. That took the planned writing list out to week 65 which was a little bit better. I’m going to need to spend some time working on more topics to feed into the list. So far during the writing process the topics have sort of been generated in little spurts of creativity. 

    Footnotes:

    [1] At the moment, only 46 of the 52 posts are written and ready to go. Outside of that temporal problem the manuscript is mostly done.

  • Working into a bit of writing

    I’m going to let this missive go out as a Tweet storm using the Twitter Thread feature today. Generally I have just allowed it to do a single Tweet which would allow people to get back to the weblog from Twitter via the link if they wanted to read that particular gem of intellectual audacity. Really they are mostly just my musings about the intersection of technology and modernity of the process of writing. 

    Yesterday I constrained my writing session to blocks of 280 characters based on a Twitter limitation. A consequence of that constraining was that only 5 blocks of wonderful prose were created during the writing session. Some of them were pretty good, but a couple of them got stilted and otherwise sad. Trying to take an idea that was just written and then editing it down to the limit of 280 characters was really time consuming and just slowed down my entire writing process. My writing had no flow or effective path forward. Writing and them immediately editing that block of prose is not the way to go for my writing endeavors. For better or worse it is best to ride the winds of inspiration to produce prose and circle back when the winds calm down to edit after the point of inspiration. That is pretty much the best method for me to generate prose. Effectively that means opening a blank word processing document (Google Docs) and just typing until the need to type is done. A long time ago I used to really have to write before going to bed for the night. You could describe it as a bit of hypergraphia or the compulsion to write. 

    All these ideas would show up and just sort of swirl around. At the time, I felt like they were all the most important things I could commit from inspiration to recorded prose. Being compelled to write really did end up taking a lot of sleep time and converting it to working time. Eventually over the course of writing millions of words my daily writing sort of morphed into something that happens in the morning instead of the evening. I wake up and in that foggy period of waking up and getting ready to go I work on writing until I do not want to write anymore. Maybe the mix of writing all day and working on academic things, Substack posts, and other projects has been the key to organizing my writing into a series of routines. I could end up with a better writing schedule beyond my reserved weekend morning writing blocks and sometimes a Friday evening block of time. Those times are usually enough to really dig in and do some academic work. To get that type of work done I need blocks of time that are uninterrupted and allow me to do deep work with a degree of focus that is beyond my other writing sessions. 

    Given all of that previous argument above has been written and recorded, I have been working into a bit of writing for about thirty minutes now. A lot of my blogging content ends up being about the feeling and process of writing. I sit down and allow the stream of consciousness writing session to occur without any real control of it or reservations about it. To that end sometimes I end up with a bunch of process related content about writing and thinking about writing. You can find the other content being produced under separate cover based on academic articles and other types of content creation like Substack posts. At one point all of the content ended up floating around in the same stream and for me that worked out well enough as the whole process was to get things inflight for me out of intellectual curiosity.

  • Writing in Tweets

    Maybe my weblog post today should be drafted in sections that are the length of a maximum Tweet at 280 characters. That will shrink my paragraphs by a lot for this post. I’m considering just composing a bunch of blocks and then posting them on Twitter as I write some prose today.

    My writing plan to produce a Substack post each week has been working. Week 42 about time crystals has now been written and will go live in 6 days. In 10 weeks, I will have hit my goal to publish a weekly machine learning based post for an entire year. https://nelslindahl.substack.com/

    Earlier this week I moved my office desk from my downstairs office. I did spend a majority of my time in that office sitting in my blue Scandinavian Design’s Wau desk chair. My desk and that chair are now upstairs for a few weeks. A majority of my time will now be spent upstairs.

    My internet modem is now upstairs. I was worried that the gigabit speed would be diminished by the house wiring vs. a direct run to my office. Comparatively the speed loss was 20% from the top end. That is acceptable for now. My plan in a few weeks is to move back to my office.

    Editing the idea I want to communicate from each paragraph down to 280 characters really slows down my writing output. Maybe it will help me be more word economic and succinct go forward. My writing is not really overly wordy to begin with so editing down requires real effort.

  • A bit of writing

    Writing. It all started with opening a Google Doc from my browser shortcut. A date was set in the first line using the familiar year, month, and day format that will sort forever onward in series. The location of the work for the day came next in the string of words that were type. In this case it was my Dark Base Pro 900 based desktop computer. Finally, at the top of the document it was noted that this is a weblog post in search of a title. Later in the writing process a title will appear as if it spontaneously came out of a spark of imagination. That is pretty much literally where things come from as far as I can tell. No random title generator was used during these efforts. That point of intrigue would be more effort compared to the rich rewards of taking the time to actually write on a daily basis. 

    Part of this daily writing process is about improving my craft as a writer. Practice helps build up the habit of writing. That is how we improve as writers. The other part of my effort is to focus and organize my thoughts. It is about taking whatever happens to be at the forefront of my mind and really bringing focus to that content. Sometimes it yields interesting prose and other times it just helps me begin the day with a heightened awareness of higher order thought, consideration, and a respect for the path toward a perfect possible future. Every day the effort is to improve and understand the chaotic world around us. Naturally, a part of that is thinking about the intersection of technology and modernity. Within that intersection are profound changes for civil society and our journey relating to each other.

  • A much slower day

    Today is one of those days where letting go of things to get to a zero space is really hard. I generally try to clear my mind of all thoughts and concerns before starting the writing process. Getting to that zero space just did not happen today. The pain from the pinched nerve in my neck is not back or anything like that as a blocker. For some ineffable reason the calmness at the moment of being present remains elusive today. A little bit of chaos reigns this morning and it really did manifest with some dirty writers block this morning. We are about 100 words into the process of writing today and I’m still working to shake off that layer of doubt and plunge into the act of writing meaningful prose. Certainly, the very best way to get to that point is to keep writing and working on progressing forward. Sometimes the very act of typing and working to move forward can kick start the process. 

    Today is by far a much slower day than it should be for sure. Without question the first 30 minutes of the day so far were a wash in terms of getting things done. Things feel like approaching an uncomfortable space weighted down and without clarity. Maybe within the confines of that scenario something more interesting will emerge like some time of allegory that resonated like the cave from Plato. Lofty as that goal might be it is better to strive toward something of permanence in the long run from usefulness than to accept the chilling effect of total writing false start. As you can gather from these stilted and otherwise unrefined words this second paragraph did not fare all that better than the first one today. It’s possible that the home stretch of this page will break on through to something with a deeper meaning. 

    Uncertainty abounds and in its wisdom the possible dances before us. Without the possible chaos of uncertainty the path to a perfect possible future would be absolute. Variability and chaotic progress bring forward the essence of what makes us react to the intersection of the present and the path that moves us along to that perfect possible future. Within that dissonance and the choices that are made we abide the possible and strive. Perhaps it is within that dance of striving toward a future that helps us deal with the very nature of uncertainty. Taking a methodological approach with each step punctures the web of uncertainty and clears a little bit of a view into the perfect possible future, but nowhere enough to really ever be able to get a truly unobstructed view. That inherently is the dance between the now and a perfect possible future that stands as an ideal away from the pressures that confine us and raise uncertainty.

  • Thinking Pixel 6 Pro

    Yesterday you could pre-order the Google Pixel 6 Pro from the Google Store. Throughout the last few years I have had every major series of the Pixel smartphone from the inaugural one to the Pixel 5, but yesterday for some reason I did not even consider completing the pre-order. This is a major shift in my technology buying habits for smartphones. For the most part the one piece of technology I have always been super interested in being an early adopter of was smartphones. For years now I have actively tested beta releases of Android software and enjoyed the process of being an early adopter. This time around I just decided to sit on the sideline. 

    Part of that is my declining interest in using my smartphone all the time. You may have previously read about my efforts to contain my daily smartphone usage. First, I have a Pelican G40 personal utility go case that stores my smartphones to keep them out of reach during the day. It is crush proof and waterproof and is also a very effective deterrent to checking smartphone notifications. Let’s be honest about it, the vast majority of the attention grabbing alerts and notifications are just not all that necessary. I don’t need them to grab my attention throughout the day. Disrupting my focus and causing me to switch context between subjects is not something I really need from my smartphone. I have a tab in Google Chrome that shows me my text messages and that is really all I need during the day. Second, over the last few months I have been testing a vtech connect to cell system throughout the house. We have 3 house phones that ring any time somebody calls my smartphone and gets passed the built in Google call screening features. 

    That pretty much explains my two pronged strategy to avoid my smartphone usage throughout the day. Due to the nature of my commitments both text messages and phone calls have to be answered, but everything else that is contained on my smartphone can simply wait till the end of the day. Part of that is trying to shift to using my main computer for anything that would need to grab my attention. That allows me to work toward getting some deeper work done and really applying my focus and attention to the problems at hand. I worked and was productive for years before having a smartphone and I want to get back to that simplicity.

  • Getting back to whiteboard days

    A quick check of the old weblog will clearly show that the last post produced by me was on Friday, September 17, 2021. Something along the way ended up creating a scenario where writing was not working out on a daily basis. That something was a pinched nerve in my neck that just devastated my ability to concentrate. As it turned out the process really did take the longer side of the 4 to 6 week recovery time suggested by internet sources. Honestly, a lot of laying on the floor and thinking happened instead of sitting and writing. Initially in the first couple of weeks after the injured nerve occured I really could not sit and write for very long. A lot of emails were sent from a phone screen while laying on the floor. Things that needed to get done still got done, but it was not the easiest of times to manage for sure. Being able to really truly deeply focus on something was just out of reach. Principally that scenario was frustrating and hard to recover from on a daily basis. It was the first time in my memory that I could not sit down and produce prose at a time of my own choosing. 

    Some of the content produced between now and that last publication back in September is just terrible. It is really not very good and it did not get published for a reason. It was kindling on the false start pile for sure or in this specific use case it is just a series of word processing documents destined to be forgotten. Today really has been the first day that with a bit of clarity and some time I was able to sit down and listen to the clickity clack of the mechanical keyboard. This missive is not really a targeted or focused draft of content directed at solving a specific problem or anything like that to be sure. I’m supposed to be writing about getting back to whiteboard days and what that means for the nature of content creation. To me it has a very specific meaning and it is about throwing ideas up on a space that is meant to be erased to work on them without permanence. Sometimes you need to work to refine something before you spend hours writing about it and investing in a proper written explanation. Some ideas are going to be great for consideration. A little bit of consideration alone does not mean that it is worthy of taking it to the next level and that is where a little bit of whiteboard work can help with things. 

    Over the years I have written about the benefits of keeping an idea journal/notebook. Sitting behind me in the bottom drawer of a credenza are a stack of notebooks. They contain a varying degree of useful too incredibly unusable ideas and written missives. That is the nature of working and reworking the process for a specific purpose outside of creating a record. For me that purpose is very clear and it is about the nature of pushing things forward. It is an exploration toward a perfect possible future where things are lined up and work out for the very best both personally and in terms of society. That might seem lofty and unorganized, but in principle it sums up my daily routine and efforts. 

    * This post was lightly edited for readability after it was written.