Smartphones and streaming did not make me uniquely happier. The things that I have decided to consume need to be memorable. Not more memorable or somewhat memorable, but actually something that is easy to remember because it was impactful. Art that elicits emotion falls into that category. The first time I heard the album Texas Flood (1983) by Stevie Ray Vaughan it stopped my perception of the rest of the world and focused my attention on the music. So much of what we consume is just very single serving content that won’t ever be memorable. Sometimes just taking the moment and enjoying the silence between things is enough to really start to think deeper about things.
Month: August 2021
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Working things to a completed state
Today I started to think about returning to writing in a manuscript based document on a daily basis instead of booting up a new fresh word processing document every day. It might be time to start to pick up a big year writing challenge again and see where that takes me this time around. Generally, the only thing that ends up being written in a publishable format are academic papers. Those are sort of paint by numbers based on the required sections anyway and benefit from working with the end product in mind. Every now and again I do write a novel that ends up being worked that way. Over the last decade I have a bunch of false starts in a folder that need to be worked to resolution. It could be more fun to just really focus on working things to a completed state. I tried to write the title of this post eloquently as, “hustling things to done,” but that turned out differently in the end.
Yesterday the whole process of writing just failed. It was one of those days where creativity sneezed and nothing happened. It was a false start of a day and that happens sometimes. Part of returning to a framework where I move from trying to write and work really hard for an hour at the start of the day to producing about 3,000 words per day involves a real change. To produce a steady stream of 3,000 words per day I’m going to have to carry around my Chromebook and pretty much take every opportunity to write. That generally involves trying to find 3 or so hours a day to spend in a productive writing posture. That is 13% of my total day spent writing, but if you only count usable time by removing 8 hours for work and 8 hours for sleep that quickly escalates to 38% of my usable day.
I’m going to stop writing this post and move over to work on something more long form.
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Oh that Windows 11 processor list
The folks over at Microsoft made an update to the “Windows 11 supported Intel processors” list yesterday on Friday, August 27, 2021.
Screenshot of the i7-7800X in the list It now appears that my i7-7800X has now made the list of supported processors.
Screenshot of my i7-7800X system information However, that change has not made it all the way down into the preview just yet as I’m still getting this warning:
Windows insider program hardware warning Based on the strong reactions to the Microsoft Windows 11 processor lists so far I’m guessing that this will keep garnering more news coverage. While I’m glad that buying a new motherboard, process, and memory will not be required on my part, the amount of hardware out in the wild that will never be able to move to Windows 11 is staggering.
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That autobiographical record order
Today started out with a spin of the album “Actor” by St. Vincent (2009). Buying vinyl records is something that really lets me jump into the work of an artist without any compromises. I opened the vinyl record and sat it on the record player with side A up and let it play. At the end of that side of the record I’ll either let it play again or move on to side B. This time around I made a slight mistake with the discography and grabbed the second album by St. Vincent. I was going to try to listen to them in order to see the progression of the artist over time, but I’ll have to circle back on that one at some point. Later today my big plan is to move my vinyl record collection from the top shelf of my bookshelf to a lower shelf. My record collection has grown to the point where I cannot keep it sorted into autobiographical order anymore. I’m going to have to take the plunge and go alphabetical with my entire record collection.
My vinyl record collection… 2021 before the new sort -
Selling a computer case on eBay
Winning that graphics card in the Newegg shuffle involved having to purchase and take possession of an unwanted computer case. It arrived yesterday basically in the box from ASUS with a shipping label on it. A lot of people are selling brand new listings of this case on eBay.[1] That tells me that a lot of the other people who purchased this case immediately turned around to sell it online. I’m probably going to end up selling mine at a loss, but I really wanted the graphics cards so that is the cost of doing business with Newegg and the shuffle system. The ASUS ROG z11 mini-itx/dtx mid-tower pc gaming case is smaller than any computer case I have ever used to build a machine. Sometime next year I will be replacing a few parts in this computer that I’m using right now. As of right now, the Windows Insider preview build of Windows 11 Pro has flagged that my computer does not meet the minimum hardware requirements.
For some reason Microsoft has decided to come up with a hardware requirement standard for WIndows 11 that will literally make more than half of all computers obsolete. The environmental cost and consequence alone of such a decision is mind boggling. Whoever came up with this decision should probably have to develop a method to handle all the elecontics waste they just created worldwide. That is a problem anyway for the computer industry. A good portion of the precious metals used to make a computer are very difficult to separate from the build making recycling very difficult. A large portion of old computer hardware ends up in landfills.
Footnotes:
[1] It looks like this case has 16 listings on eBay and none of them have any visible traffic https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=ASUS+ROG+Z11+Mini-ITX%2FDTX+Mid-Tower+PC+Gaming+Case&_sacat=0&_sop=15
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Missing the window
Things on the writing front yesterday ended up being a bit of a rambling mess. Given that the objective is to create words that is an acceptable thing, but not a desired outcome. The window for writing today may have passed. An entire book could be written on the subject of missing the window. Sometimes it is worse to be too early within the window and things simply falter or sometimes being too late in the window makes things fall away from the streaming now. For better or worse when the time comes to be in the window getting it right the first time is an important part of making it work.
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A bit of a rambling mess
Sometimes the best part of working within the weblog format is thinking out loud and reviewing things from the previous day. It gives you a moment to be reflective about the nature of things and the happenings that might otherwise have been overlooked. During the course of writing my post yesterday that was oddly enough shared today and back dated as for some reason I never posted it at the end of the writing session was very focused on when to write about what. That last sentence was awfully long. I probably should go back and break it up into a few minor sentences. It was a bit of a rambling mess. Maybe it will be best to leave that rambling for posterity to enjoy.
Yesterday, I decided to post about my Substack newsletter on LinkedIn. That posting sequence was held off for thirty weeks of writing and newsletter building. To grow the newsletter more it would probably be prudent to post a snippet and link each week. Generally that is something that I have been hesitant about. The other thing that I was able to complete yesterday was sorting through all the networking requests that were sitting in my LinkedIn pending invitations screen.
I received an invitation to speak at a conference in October. My research paper related to my conference talks should be done by the date of the talk and that content could round out a solid 30 minute speaking engagement. However, at the moment I’m undecided on committing to anything for the rest of the year.
It took a quick search of Google Photos for the search term, “whiteboard,” but the, “Upcoming Research,” section of the weblog is not filled out. My first cut at putting something up as a list which is fundamentally different for my research trajectory sketch went up today.
This is just a list of upcoming research paper topics that I have started to sketch out as of 8/24:
- Open source MLOps paper (from talks)
- eGov 50 revisited paper
- Local government technology budget study
- The fall of public space paper (could be a book)
- A paper on the quadrants of doing
- A brief look at my perspective on interns
- Some time of perspective on the audience size of ML and why…
- ML model stacking
- Something on reverse federation
- A hyperbolic look at the conjoined triangles of ML
- A literature review of modern polling methodology
- A literature study of mail vs. non-mail polling methodology in practice and study
- ML mesh
- A paper on political debt as a concept vs. technical debt
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Upcoming Research
Yesterday I completed an order for a couple of St. Vincent vinyl records. I’m going to give them a listen and see what I think about the records after a couple of spins.
Today I added a static page to the weblog called, “Upcoming Research.” As a space for online content it is going to be devoted to the 5 research projects I’m working on and as part of my daily focus on having a trajectory statement it makes sense to codify current work.
My modus operandi for creating prose is to open a new word processing document every day and begin with a blank page. To this end my tabula rasa approach requires me to bring forward something from nothing. However, given my renewed focus on producing papers and other manuscripts that means a sustained focus will be required. Maintaining a sustained focus on one thing is a different type of modus operandi compared to trying to really clear your mind and work from a state of a pure stream of consciousness that approaches a true state of tabula rasa. While it is totally possible that both methods can be utilized. They are mutually exclusive by definition. One is a seeded method to preload content and the other is a method to avoid preseeding ideas or intentions.
I’m back on my intermittent fasting diet of only eating two meals between 1100 hours and 1800 hours. For the most part the meal plan works out well enough, but it is challenging to sustain for several weeks.
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Adding one computer case fan
The only addition to the Dark Base Pro 900 Black rev. 2 from the “be quiet!” computer case I had to make with the new graphics card was the installation of a noctua NF-A20 computer case fan right at the front of the case between the normal front case fans and the hard drive cages.[1] That very large premium quality 200mm computer case fan barely fits in that spot. The other changes that I ended up making after installing the new graphics card happened at the bios level. First, I had to load up the ASUS UEFI bios utility to run the QFan control settings which ended up displaying, “All fan calibrating.” Second, I turned off the XMP element of the overclocking and allowed the CPU to run at its normal out of the box clock speed. My CPU is being cooled by a Corsair water cooling block and it exhausts up and out of the computer case. That means the heat generated by the ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3070 Ti 8GB graphics card is mostly centered in the middle of the case. The addition of that 200mm noctua computer case fan to push air directly across the case toward the open back has helped considerably.
The rear of the Dark Base Pro 900 only has one case fan and that was probably the root cause of the problem. Instead of having the heat exhaust out the back of the case the airflow from the fans at the top of the case was pulling the heat from the graphics card up into the water cooling block area where the CPU heat persists until thermally exchanged by the top fan exhaust. This entire blog post has been about adding one computer case fan. At some point, I’m going to need to take the fan out and file off just a little bit of the edge facing the glass window. I was able to secure the glass wall back on with the four thumb screws, but the fit was very tight and would benefit from a reduction of just a little bit of plastic edge on the noctua fan.
Footnotes:
[1] Here is a direct link to that noctua NF-A20 fan https://noctua.at/en/products/fan/nf-a20-pwm -
New graphics card setup adventures
Throughout the week I have been making little updates and modifications to the Substack post for this week. All of that pre-work was really smart this week to help ensure quality for the next issue of The Lindahl Letter that will come up on Friday. Right now this computer is running my new ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3070 Ti graphics card that arrived yesterday. Overall it is much louder than my last graphics card and it required a totally different power cable setup. I had to do some work in terms of cable management yesterday to get ready for the graphics card installation. A trip was made to the basement to find the bag of extra Corsair modular power supply cables and fortunately they had included a lovely Corsair Type-4 PCIe 6+2 cable. With the right cable in hand the only challenge was removing the power supply shroud in my award winning Dark Base Pro 900 Black rev. 2 from the “be quiet!” computer case. Right now the shroud has been put back into place without the middle section 3.5” solid state hard drive section. That space now supports a direct path for the power cable to run up to the graphics card. At some point, it might be prudent to do some better cable management, but that will be a project for later. Everything works right now and that is good.
All of this brought me to the world of trying to figure out and manage my myriad of case fans. I’m still shocked that my Windows 11 instance does not have an easy way to manage computer temperatures. I installed the software associated with my motherboard manufacturer to examine and control the fan speeds. After looking at that dashboard for a few minutes I installed the ASUS GPU Tweak II software. That was easier to understand and it had a few profiles related to gaming and silent modes. The GPU temperature scale goes from zero up to 131 degrees celsius which would be insanely hot. According to the docked monitor my graphics card is running with a minimum of 38 and a maximum of 49 degrees celsius. I have been watching it for a few minutes and it appears to be running at around 39 degrees which seems fine.