Yesterday I was wondering about just deleting my data archives. Over the last 20 years I have accumulated so much data. Sure most of it is backed up to the cloud and the writing part of it is a very slim section of the overall data. I was considering just wiping it all and starting over. My thoughts then drifted to a few thoughts about what I might miss after that great data purge. I might need my writing archives, photos, and videos. Maybe keeping all my photos and family videos would be a good thing to actually complete. From what I know all 3 sets of that data are backed up to a couple of clouds and I have alternate copies. I’m not sure why I went to all of that trouble to keep all of that data. We used to print our favorite photographs and share them in books with people. Nobody is going to want to look through 20 or 30 thousand digital photos. They are not even shared online anymore. At one point, all of my digital photos were posted on Flickr or just shared in an online directory. I have considered bringing back a digital photograph section of my weblog to share content. I’m not talking about sharing all my photos this time around, but it would be good to share the ones that people might enjoy or use as a desktop background.
Month: March 2022
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A bit of moving along the path
Yesterday, I accidentally wrote a post for my Substack newsletter. It had been intended to be a weblog post and it was well on the way to completion when it looked a lot more substantive than it should have been. Instead of the type of stream of consciousness related content that ends up being my defacto functional journaling on this weblog this was entirely contained and structured. To that end I went ahead and crossed out a planned publication and put this one into the slot for week 67. Being able to switch things up is important as sometimes during the course of working a writing backlog you have to change up the priority and work something different. Mixing it up can help keep the content fresh and topical to current events. However, that cannot be the only consideration. The content has to be written in a way that it can remain useful even a year or five years later.
Within my regular writing routine I have about 90 minutes in the morning that are mine to direct toward writing and sorting out the organization of my day. You could call it my time of ordering my steps along a path to a perfect possible future. Most of the time it consists of writing within a word processing document until my attention is pulled elsewhere to something else along the way. Today is an example of that routine and I’m pleased that it occurred. During our spring break trip I was not able to maintain my writing schedule. I had worked ahead within the Lindahl Letter posts on Substack. That effort actually yielded a 4 week buffer at one point. That buffer has been reduced down to two extra weeks of content. Adding the audio recording to the mix related to the podcast part of the process really stopped me from tinkering with the posts after they are completed. Within the ability to tinker I just easily move on to the next block of writing on the backlog.
A few notes from yesterday:
After dinner I watched Star Trek: Picard, season 2, episode 2, titled “Penance”.
Before going to bed I listened to a Dream Theater album titled, “New Millennium: The Classic Broadcast 1999.”
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Maybe I should live Tweet today
Today could very well be a live tweeting extravaganza. Two shots of espresso were brewed using a Nespresso machine. 400 calories of chocolate flavor Huel were consumed. Now that I’m all fueled up, I have a couple hours to write.
Today I got left behind during spring break week. Apparently, all the fun is happening elsewhere and it was time for me to be left back at the basecamp for writing and reading. Today is @NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote. It was not a bad day to get left behind.
I finished the upcoming “Language models revisited” post and should be focused on writing a Substack post about “Ethics in machine learning” with my extra time today. I’m looking at other content creation options, but will probably swing back to generating 1,000 words on ML ethics.
A little music was required to begin the writing process. I’m listening to my Warren Zevon station on Pandora. It was apparently created back on May 5, 2013. You can find it here: ? Warren Zevon Radio on @PandoraMusic https://pandora.app.link/hMZALDTGBob
Things are about to get going with Jensen from @NVIDIA. I have the keynote ready to go in a browser tab “GTC 2022 Keynote [S42295]” is waiting to play. Don’t panic with FOMO. It has an indicator of what will be covered, “Primary Topic: AI Strategy for Business Leaders.”
The GTC event has so many sessions it would take a lot of time and effort to listen to all of them. I’m thinking beyond the keynote I might attend, “A Vision of the Metaverse: How We will Build Connected Virtual Worlds [S42114].”
Ok the #GTC22 player failed with the error message “Something went wrong” from the actual @NVIDIA event player and I ended up going over to @YouTube to watch the actual keynote live stream with 6,713 other people watching the premiere. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39ubNuxnrK8
This keynote from Jensen is super choreographed and heavily embedded with graphics. It’s almost overproduced at this point. I’m getting a bit of infomercial flavor compared to the technical content I wanted to consume. However, #GTC22 is holding my attention so far today.
This #GTC22 keynote is really full of machine learning buzzwords. Anybody playing bingo to this keynote probably has already had a winner. They really had Jensen reading a ton of rather dense lists during the recording process.
I was really hoping Jensen would announce they built an actual Jurassic park during #GTC22. Would they have to pay Michael Crichton a royalty?
I’m curious about how the GPU confidential computing will work in practice. The #GTC22 keynote has been interesting so far.
Whoa… That is a fast computer from @NVIDIA. The #GTC22 Eos will be 275 petaFLOPS or 1.4x faster than the fastest science computer in the United States…
NVIDIA Eos screenshot Like Jensen I’m very curious what the next million-x will look like as well. #GTC22 should be interesting this year. I’m gearing up for the “A Vision of the Metaverse: How We will Build Connected Virtual Worlds [S42114]” panel that is starting soon. The videos should be here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHnYvH1qtOYXzWxVdIU1ZDpbLvxbZdyQ
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Purely in service of the written word
Over the last couple of months I have been investing time in the Substack community of writers Over the last couple of months I have been investing time in the Substack community of writers to attend events and meet people. It reminds me a little bit of the blog meet ups that used to happen almost 20 years ago where you got a bunch of people that were passionate about things and wrote about them together. You got really diverse mixes of people attending those events. It was the opposite of today where people are picking the topic and driving toward that type of content today where before it was interest in a platform that brought people together without a shared topic of interest. You had a naturally formed community of circumstance that existed due to the usage of a shared platform and a willingness to connect with other writers.
I’m thinking back to installing Movable Type on one of my servers a long time ago. Before using Movable Type I had been running builds via Microsoft FrontPage which was oddly the most fulfilling online development experience I have ever had. For a writer it was really nice to just produce content and hit publish. All of the complexity of content management was pretty much abstracted away. That admission might surprise you a little bit, but don’t let it fool you at all. My primary purpose of pushing content online is to support the habit of daily writing. Having to know how to work with cascading style sheets and other design elements was just something I learned along the way. All the web development knowledge that I have built up over the years is purely in service of the written word.
I accidentally set up a double Twitter post feature yesterday. Both the weblog and Tumblr are pushing links over to Twitter to share each new post. At the moment, I’m not terribly worried about this new feature, but I could see removing one of the automatic posting features at some point in the not so distant future. Why am I back on Tumblr? Nilay Patel shared a podcast with Matt Mullenweg that inspired me to get back on Tumblr.
I’m electing to share my podcast links via Apple Podcasts these days as it seems to be the most stable podcast service to share. It is pretty unlikely that Apple Podcasts will shut down any time soon. My guess is that a lot of consolidation occurs within the general podcasting space in the next 5 years.
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Talking to other Substack writers
With about 55 or 56 other writers I attended a Substack event called, “category tour kickoff.” It seemed like a good idea to attend a few of these Substack events to get a feel for what other writers are doing these days on the Substack platform. It looks like they have events occurring for the rest of the month. That should be interesting. I’m planning on attending technology related events from the Substack calendar.
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My attention and efforts were focused elsewhere
Yesterday my publishing streak on this weblog ended. Writing streaks come and go along the journey. Two seperate blank documents were opened yesterday and neither of them inspired any typing at all really. One was even opened up on this workstation running Windows 11 Pro. Oddly enough this installation has done pretty well. It was installed on June 29, 2021 which is quickly approaching a one year anniversary. Generally my operating system installations do not last that long. Installing new operating systems happens fairly often or at least it normally does. My last computer case made that very easy to achieve. It had a swappable drive at the top of it that let me easily wholesale switch from Windows to Linux during the booting process. That process also allowed for the option of just installing a new operating system at any time. This go round is a little different. Within my Dark Base Pro 900 computer case Windows 11 Pro is currently installed on the single onboard M.2 drive.
Right now I’m using 3 media creation workflows. First, a podcast creation workflow that involves Audacity and recording audio each week. Second, I’m using a Focusrite with Pro Tools to work with audio recording from a guitar. Third, I have everything setup for recording for YouTube including OBS and a couple other video editing tools. Mostly I sit down at my workstation and engage in the process of writing every morning at the start of the day. That did not happen yesterday of course, but that was more a function of mood than a problem with the actual mechanics of writing. I just could not bring myself to sit down and clear my mind before beginning the writing process. My attention and efforts were focused elsewhere.
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Free up that writing spirit
Recording just completed for week 63 of The Lindahl Letter. I’m still about a month ahead of actual publications at 4 issues loaded and scheduled. I’m still trying to figure out why Substack as a platform did not send out my publication on team time this week. It does not appear to have impacted readership, but I don’t like the unexpected failure. Being on time and having things ready ahead of time is a key part of delivering quality content.
Yesterday ended up being a little bit of an old school blogging day. Topics were covered as they happened and it was just a list of things and observations. Maybe this current streak of publishing every day is starting to free up a little bit of the old writing spirit from wherever it was being constrained.
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Writing inherently is about the creative journey
Right now 4 weeks of The Lindahl Letter are ready to go out: March 11, March 18, March 25, and April 1. Tomorrow morning a few hours will be spent working toward the next edition. One of the unintended consequences of switching to a podcast variant within Substack is that finality comes the moment the audio is locked. Taking the time to read the Substack post and then edit that audio down to be ready for upload pretty much creates a locked-in moment. Something would have to go wrong before I went and opened up the audio to make changes to what was created. That means for the most part on Sunday when I’m satisfied with the content I do one final major edit during the audio recording process. Nothing really helps you catch small errors in a draft like reading it out loud and then listening to it back while you are also reading it. I did stop formatting my footnotes into an APA style. At some point, I’ll probably switch back to that format as I prefer it for publication and beginning with the end in mind makes sense. From a practical perspective it just takes a lot longer and disrupts my flow while I’m working to jump back and forth between style guides and deeper thoughts about the subject at hand.
We will see here over the next few weeks what will happen within the writing process. Some of the upcoming topics will deserve some deep consideration and might need about 20 hours of preparation time. Most of the time I have a pretty good general understanding going into the research rodeo and then I can build out my arguments in a very rapid way. Sometimes developing the foundation takes a good amount of time. Within the context of The Lindahl Letter it is ok to write about the process of building up research and collecting ideas so that helps compared to the more formal process of reviewing literature that goes into writing journal articles. Writing inherently is about the creative journey and the output. Very rarely do people sit down to create prose strictly for communicating an idea to distill a purpose more widely. Most of the time writing is not trying to get the listener to do something or compelling some type of agenda. Most of what gets created is about communication from a writer to a wider audience. Sometimes it is just about a writer putting words to a page that are really not going to an audience at all.
This functional journal for example is entirely written from the perspective that I’m just collecting my thoughts and moving along. Only during that big year of writing where I was working toward producing a million words in a single year did each post start off considering the reader. Most of the time I’m just writing based on the ideas at hand. The journey is the valuable part. If somebody happens to enjoy the prose that was created, then it was a secondary benefit of the process.
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Marching forward with positive intent
Yesterday involved channeling a lot of my energy into marching forward with positive intent. Actually doing that is much harder than it always seems to be when things break down. Every day I’m getting up and writing at the start of the day. That is a good way to get back into my routine of consequential prose production. You have to sit down and do the work. To that end a few years back I took the entire backlog of this weblog and put it into a Microsoft Word document. Oddly enough that backup actually has all the right photographs with the posts. I could use that backup to put the photos back with the right posts. I’m not sure if that is really what I should spend my time doing, but it is certainly something that I could do with my time. Really the only proper backup of the media is in those exported Microsoft Word backups from the “Print My Blog” WordPress plugin. The entire backup of my weblog writings would be an approximately 600 page tour of my writing from around 1998/1999 to 2022.
That content could be exported and put into a hardback book for posterity. I have resisted doing that without taking the time to edit the entire project a little bit before sending it for publication. That big of an editing commitment is a really hard call to make. On the other side of the argument would be if all those posts are just sitting online why do they need to be edited before showing up in a print version. That is probably a decent question to consider. A little light editing for grammar and spelling would make it a lot more readable, but that is how I view the content with 20 years of writing experience and the power of hindsight. Given that anybody that would pickup that type of weighty tome of weblog nonsense should have the best possible experience sifting through the prose a little editing is probably warranted. Some egregious spelling errors can make things hard to read and are off putting. Oddly enough twenty years ago I would have clearly made the case that the argument itself remains regardless of the words supporting it. Really great truths and arguments do have a habit of standing on their own and being shared in terms of broader public mind and generally in the academy. My current views on it are a little different. I typically try to produce the cleanest prose possible even on the first draft.
I’m going to potentially create a version of my weblog in hardcover and just take a look at it to see how it makes me feel to review it in person. That is probably the best way to judge what to do with it next in terms of editing or review. I could take the time to edit it by hand in printed form and that would be an interesting journey. I might do that this weekend or maybe even later tonight just for fun.