Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Month: May 2021

  • Horizons vs. edges

    Today could be a day of deep focus on things just down the road a little bit. Pondering that perfect possible future is always near the edge of my thoughts, but today for some reason I’m not trying to look just past the edge of what is possible. At the moment, I’m just looking at the horizon and my focus is not just beyond it at the moment. Maybe my two shots of Nespresso have not kicked all the way in or it is going to be one of those days where questions outpace whimsy. Anyway that pretty much sums up where my thoughts are at the moment. My talks as a speaker are generally lined up for the year. I’m doing weekly research for The Lindahl Letter into machine learning and at some point I’m going to spend some time working on traditional academic papers. 

    One of the deeper questions about my academic trajectory has been about really focusing on churning out academic papers and putting all of my focus on that path toward journal articles or continuing down the more general road of writing. It’s a real conundrum and for the most part I have let the wind take me in the direction of my greatest interest for the last 10 years. That direction has been toward the path of doing and being closer to the pracademic side of things than the traditional academic way of muddling through. Now that my experiences are stacking up in a positive direction it might be time to work on that balance and figure out somewhere in the middle to exist. From everything I can tell right now the academic world is facing a real overwhelming supply surge in content creation that is not resulting in the type of synthesis that translates and summarizes the overall fields. Driving complexity into specializations has made the depth part of the equation so overwhelming that any attempt at pure breath in a field fails for one person to handle.

  • Ready that writing timer

    Set that 15 minute timer and get ready to write. Sometimes you need to get out a timer. Be it old fashioned or digital timer and set aside some time to write. The simple act of chasing the keys on the keyboard for a specific block of time can open the door to adventure. I suppose you could just as easily drop the needle on your favorite vinyl record and start writing along to that as well. A lot of ways to make time exist and the process of somehow getting into the flow of writing is the important piece of the puzzle. That is where things start to get going and where things start to come together. At the start of the day I was looking forward down the paths of a ton of different perfect possible futures. Things have to get done to help move along those paths. Momentum alone is not going to help me realize the best possible outcomes. That is part of a process of working toward the right things and being ready to close things out.

    That is where my thoughts are focused at this very moment. I’m deeply thinking about being an activity closer today and just getting things done. Today is not going to be a day of reflection, it is going to be a day of resolution. Sure better ways of saying that in a more refined way exist, but I think the point got made. Today has to be a day of getting to the point. Supporting a nexus of indecision at this point remains counter to getting things done. I’m ready to start this day and keep things moving along. That is a great way to kick off Monday. Welcome to the start of a great week. I’m almost on track to write a page of prose about that timer that started a little bit ago and is still going. For some reason this paltry amount of prose took me a pretty decent block of time to create. My thoughts were clear, but they were not flowing at a really solid pace this morning. That is pretty much the way things have been going for the last few days. 

    Some time ago I really invested and worked toward writing 3,000 words per day. Doing that really required a block of time in the morning and at night to invest in the creation of words. You have to kickstart the day early with good topics you are passionate about to get to that type of word production. Sadly a lot of that ended up in a closed loop of writing about writing during the course of writing. Breaking out of that loop required doing and thinking about other things. One of the ways I’m avoiding that pitfall right now is the weekly Substack post I’m working on that breaks that cycle. That involves researching and digging beyond the natural flow of words about my process and digs into something more tactical in the now. You have to be ready to focus in on things and get things done, but sometimes having a writing assignment can kickstart that focus. To help myself along the way I have a long running list of topics to cover. That series of guideposts helps keep me on track and avoids missing the writing target.

  • A very slow Sunday

    Rain is falling in Denver. My allergies are out of control, but we will keep on moving along.

    Like thirty minutes passed since that first sentence sprang into existence. I’m not entirely sure what happened this morning, but the flow or prose seems to be broken. Maybe this is a case of writer’s break vs. writer’s block. It is also possible that maybe it took just a little bit for the two shots of Nespresso to kick in and begin to fuel the day.

  • All that extended learning

    Things are looking up today during this Saturday morning writing extravaganza. Rocky the dog needed out before the sun was up today and that helped kick off a bit of a writing flurry. Thankfully I was able to complete an initial draft of my Substack Week 16 post. That is good news given that it needs to go out for publication on Friday, May 14, 2021. That will give me a few days to tinker with the post before it goes live. Writing posts about machine learning is generally not a draft and go process. Those types of effort need some rework, extended drafting, and research. A lot of time, I end up with questions that need to be researched. That is the heart of why the process is important to me. I want the process of writing and thinking about machine learning to force me to go out and research questions. Learning springs forward from that process and doing that over the course of an entire year is the way to really dig in and be a lifelong learner in a space that is experiencing rapid change. 

    I’m on a two week plus daily writing streak, but some of the posts were a little bit shorter. Each morning my goal is to sit down and write a full page of prose from the start of the page to the bottom of the page. Sometimes I sit down to write and that first paragraph happens and then a wall emerges. It is a wall formed from the lack of time or a loss of momentum. On the brighter side of that at least I have been compelled to cut and paste it from this Google Doc over to WordPress and publish. That means it is not a case of self-censorship it is just a case of not having enough time to devote to the exercise or the energy to complete the daily writing exercise. Getting past the first paragraph is the important part of the process. You want to start digging deeper in the things that might come to the forefront of your mind. However, getting to that point requires the time to just sit down and write for a bit. Over the years, I have gotten better about not producing throw away content. Most of the time that I sit down in front of a keyboard these days the content is either weblog focused or Substack focused. I’m not spending very much of my time investing in the act of writing academic articles. That is where my focus probably has to change. 

    For years I used to keep three manila folders with the seeds of academic papers in them as I progressed toward publishing. That helped me move along better a couple different ideas until one was ready to send and out and share with the world. Getting going will probably require picking a topic that needs a survey to test the question at hand and drive the search forward. Given my academic training that is the way to really start to move forward. Conducting and working with survey research is something that I enjoy, but don’t do all the time.

  • Working on that writing plan

    Today the last of the pre-worked Substack posts goes out. I’m going to either need to work ahead or keep up with the weekly publishing schedule in real time. The topics are pretty well set up, but the content needs to be pulled together. That is on my schedule for this weekend. Tomorrow morning will be the key driving inflection point on that effort. Either I’m going to actively engage in the writing process or things will get off schedule. My next big adventure will be working toward pulling all that content into something interesting. Right now it is 63 pages of content and that number will grow by the time I hit a year worth of posting.

  • A day of whims

    Yesterday, I completed a few things and along the way totally let my whims take me wherever they were going in the moment. I wanted to title this post “Gone by the whim.” That word play appears to be frequently used online and to that point by me it was quickly abandoned for this post title. Instead you got the playful, “A day of whims.” Within that phrase the essence of my day was pretty well captured. From the start to the finish of the day I just sort of went with whatever came to the forefront of my thoughts until it was time to go to sleep. Strangely enough I did go to bed a little bit early. All of the things that I had wanted to do were done for the day and it seemed like the right thing to do. 

    My list of things that need to be written and worked on did not keep me awake last night. That is a positive sign that no real degree of hypergraphia was present. Projects that inspire real passion to complete have kept me awake many a night trying to squeeze out those last few pages. Sometimes I was not even aware that so much time had passed due to some really extreme focus on the task at hand. My writing efforts typically follow a feast of famine pattern. I have extremely productive periods where something is going to get written and those times have to be treasured and not interrupted. Other times I can keep on moving along like a professional writer, but it is not the same as when the spark of creativity strikes. 

    You have to avoid sitting around and waiting for the proverbial creativity kettle to boil. Sometimes you have to lay out a writing project like the schematics of a house being built and just work on each part one at a time based on the plan. That is where having a daily writing habit developed like my morning one page writing exercise is helpful. Just sitting down and writing can open the floodgates and let the words flow. Other times it is just a mechanical process of moving thoughts to the page. 

    I stepped away for a couple minutes and got some donuts from the grocery store. Right now my domain is throwing an “unexpectedly closed the connection” error. I’m not entirely sure why that occurred, but it lasted for about 11 minutes. Maybe here in a little bit I’ll take a look at the error logs and try to figure out how often that is happening these days.

  • Some blocks of time

    Throughout the next two days I’ll be able to work on whatever boils to the forefront of my thoughts. That is a powerful way to go about deciding where to spend your time. Right now I have the time to sit down and write without interruption. Pandora (Music & Podcasts) is playing in the background and the day is just starting. Apparently, Pandora is working to note how much they love podcasts. During the course of giving up cable and not really paying to subscribe to any news services I learned to like podcasts. Initially a lot of my time and listening energy went to the Leoverse (TWIT, TWIG, All About Android).[1] At one point, I had even trained my old TiVo box to download the Leoverse and I watched it like a television show. I still have the ability to boot up my Google Podcasts application and listen to Nilay on the Vergecast or Josh on the oddly erratic Tomorrow podcast.[2] The longest running theme in my podcast listening experience is probably the combination of Nilay and Josh. Right now Pandora has been switched off and I’m listening to the latest episode of The Vergecast and typing along. 

    That last paragraph was a little bit indulgent, but that is what today is about. My thoughts and efforts can go in any direction. Nothing was planned for today between breakfast and dinner. I elected to just let my whims of the moment take me along the path to doing things today. 

    Footnotes:

    [1] The Leoverse is contained on https://twit.tv/ 
    [2] Nilay’s The Vergecast and Josh’s Tomorrow podcast

  • The keystone of my daily activities

    Yesterday, I meant to go back and finish up the page of prose that was started and full of false starts. Apparently, I did not go back and work on that effort at all. I just walked away from that writing effort after a single paragraph of prose. Circling back is something that normally happens without hesitation for my writing efforts. In the past, I have jumped in and out of writing efforts without any real friction. It probably had to do with where my focus was placed yesterday. Writing was not the keystone of my daily activities. It was an afterthought along a journey of things that had to be blocked and tackled.

  • False start writing Monday

    I’m a couple false stars into this writing session today. For some reason the prose starts to get going and then the pace falters. That could be due to the rain today. Apparently, in Denver, Colorado today it is going to rain throughout the entire day. Capturing a bit of that rain sound had seemed like a good idea, but so far this is not the type of rain that is super noisy it just seems to be rather consistent. Oh yeah, in an update to what I was thinking about yesterday apparently finding a session drummer is much easier than I thought that it would be online. That plan to add drums to my epic quarantine album could be coming together today. That is a rather exciting possibility that might just get going today.

  • Containing all those words

    Each day I’m still working this ongoing writing project out of new Google Docs files. Instead of keeping all this content in a single file I’m producing new files each and every day. That probably reflects my predetermined bias to not release this content within any type of publication. That probably has to do with my efforts to just write a page each morning and the pages themselves do not have any real continuity between them except they were written by the same person in a time series. That should generally create some degree of ongoing narrative or a degree of continuity. For those of you who have been checking in on this weblog content for years (potentially 20 of them) you inherently know this last paragraph was historically correct. Content gets produced without any ongoing narrative. Maybe the only common theme across all of my writing relates to general questions about the intersection of technology and modernity. That alone is not enough to create a thread that binds all of this prose together. For better or worse each writing session happens on its own. 

    Today Rocky dog was kind enough to wake me up before sunrise. That should have created the opportunity to sit and write without interruption for about an hour. Seizing that time to make something happen would have been a good idea, but instead of that you got this missive on containing words and managing content. Not that this missive is not going to be a solid page of prose, but I feel that is not really stretching any philosophical frameworks or questioning anything deeply. It is entirely possible that today is not going to be a day where deeper work is going to be accomplished. However, at this point my writing processes should be fully warmed up and the possibility of creating something interesting should be primed. Google Docs as a web based piece of software has gotten better at providing live editing suggestions. 

    Back in June of last year (2020), I apparently completed a full 33:03 minutes of a guitar based EP album. Yesterday, I decided that it might be a good idea to send that off to a session drummer to see if it could be upgraded from guitar based to include drums. That would add a bit more consistent rhythm to the album and might make it better. To that end I’m going to work on figuring that out later today. I’m not entirely sure how expensive half an hour of session drum work would be or how long that would take to complete. I had briefly considered using an automated drumming program, but that would be awkward and poorly match my entirely analog guitar efforts from last year.