Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Month: June 2022

  • A few thoughts on the ongoing grand writing experiment

    Getting back to a bit of daily writing in a journaling style seems to be a good thing to accomplish. For some reason this style of writing has dropped off from my efforts. Every week I’m still producing pracademic style content and I’m gearing up to learn how to convert some of that into a LaTeX style editor for academic paper publication. Maybe that is the missing element in my progress as a writer. We will see if it really is the missing element or if something else might be a contributing factor. Within that framework I have a few thoughts on my ongoing grand writing experiment. For those of you who have been along for the ride you know that millions of words have been produced. A lot of them appear here on my trusty weblog, “Functional Journal.” It’s not my flagship production, but it is a central base that I come back to over and over again. Originally, I had considered just putting all content here as a sort of content hub. That is not a terrible idea, but it does discount contributions to other forms and how those avenues of communication work. 

    Tomorrow the 75th post within “The Lindahl Letter” series on Substack will be distributed. All of that content gets packaged yearly into a book format. It gets distributed weekly as a Substack post which is functionally an essay on a topic built for the purpose of being informative and at times thought provoking. That type of writing is different from what gets shared generally on the weblog and that is one of the reasons why jumping on the Substack bandwagon made sense. It also has a very different publication mechanic. The weblog is something people have to elect to go visit. Substack as a platform has a mechanism to deliver the content by email. It follows that newsletter framework which is more of a push to disseminate content delivery vs. my traditional method of providing the content on a digital shelf without marketing or any push. I know that the weblog gets published out to WordPress that new content arrived, and I let it push a notification to Twitter. Based on the amount of traffic that comes in from WordPress or Twitter neither of those communication methods is particularly useful. 

    As a communication platform, Substack has appeared to work out well enough. One of the main differences between my Substack writing and my normal writing paradigm is that all 75 posts for Substack were constructed in the same Google Doc. Each day for general writing I open a brand-new Google Doc and start writing from a blank page. I’m wondering if I should shift to working out of a single manuscript for my daily writing and just accept that it should end up as a publication at the end of the year like the Substack efforts are combined to produce a set of collective works. Maybe that is the right way to begin moving forward. I could easily take this essay and allow it to be the start of that project. I generally do not like working out of a Microsoft Word document using the online editor. That is one of the reasons that all of this work generally happens in Google Docs. I’m sure that is mostly preference based and either one could work as a word processing document management system.

    A few changes occurred between the last two paragraphs. I went over to Microsoft Word and created a manuscript file based on the publishing template I normally utilize. That brand new file and the entire novel directory on OneDrive has now been synced over to Google Drive. I then opened the .DOCX file for editing in Google Docs which seems convoluted, but it works for me based on the efforts I’m about to undertake. Moving forward I’m going to keep working and writing for the weblog within this document. That is the plan and I’m going to stick with it until December 31, 2022. At that point the plan will be revisited and hopefully this document will be published as a manuscript.

  • A guitar building project update

    Way back in 1994 or 1995, I purchased a Gibson guitar in Kansas City. I’m a little fuzzy on the exact year. That is something I can look up. I guess the pattern is YDDDYRRR. My serial number is 93055698. Based on that it is for sure a 1995 and not a 1994 built guitar. Apparently it was stamped on the 305th day of the year or November 1, 1995. I always wanted it to be a different, more custom shop guitar. At the time, I did not really know any better. However, now that I am armed with a bunch of life experiences I have a better idea of how I want the guitar to be configured. To that end, my Les Paul studio guitar project has been completed this summer. 

    Pickups were swapped out from the stock Gibson variety to a set of Seymour Duncan Pearly Gates humbuckers. Those pickups have 4 wires and support more advanced configurations. To utilize that more advanced wiring a Free-Way “Pickup Switch” with a 6 way control was added. That gives me a couple of out of phase options for the pickups. The rest of the guitar updates were more or less just aesthetic choices including a new black TUSQ XL nut, a black nickel Graph Tech PS-8863-BN ResoMax NV2 6mm Tune-o-matic bridge with string saver saddles, and a black chrome Gibson accessories stop bar tailpiece with studs and inserts. I had previously changed out the tuners to upgrade them to a set of black Grover ones. Between the string setup changes and the new pickups it sounds like a totally different guitar.

    My 1995 Gibson Les Paul serial number
  • A ton of digital housekeeping on a Saturday

    To prepare for the annual publication of The Lindahl Letter book I went ahead and loaded up the posts from week 50 to 77. That involved doing the typesetting for roughly 25,000 words that spanned about 100 pages. I’m considering either bundling two years of posts together or just publishing one year at a time. 

    I wrote the social media copy for sharing to Twitter and LinkedIn this week:

    You can check out week 74 of my weekly technology newsletter The Lindahl Letter titled “ML content automation; Am I the prompt?” over on #Substack via the link below

    —> Tags: #MachineLearning #ML #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #MLOps #AIOps

    https://nelslindahl.substack.com/p/ml-content-automation#details

    It got shared over to Twitter here:

    https://twitter.com/nelslindahl/status/1540680693293776896

    The LinkedIn post is here:

    https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6946447208812613632/

    I had posted weekly into Facebook as well, but that yielded very little traffic back to the actual Substack site. After a few weeks of that effort I gave up and just stopped that part of my weekly social media sharing routine. I’m not entirely sure that sharing on Twitter and LinkedIn results in any subscribers, but it does create a small amount of traffic each week. 

    At some point today, I’m going to work on writing the “Substack Week 78: Why is diffusion so popular?” post to create a draft. That is all queued up as a task for the day.

  • Working that backlog management process

    On Friday my Substack backlog was 5 posts ahead. At that level of backlog a personal best was achieved in terms of working ahead. However, that is probably too far ahead. Part of getting to that point was making sure I was ready for a summer break where some vacationing was going to happen. That backlog will allow for continuity of publishing and for a bit of vacation. Right now the backlog is at 4 Substack posts and the last one will publish on July 8, 2022. Generally, I think the backlog should be 2-3 weeks, but it is possible that at some point it will move back to a more real time writing to publication cadence. Part of my writing focus is to build quality content that is not time specific or breaking news powered coverage. I want to examine topics within the artificial intelligence and machine learning space based on the merits of the inquiry and not based on a news reporting type of urgency. I try to begin with the final product in mind. Given that the final product of the Lindahl Letter is that it moves from a weekly Friday Substack email based delivery to a yearly volume of published prose. That focus on building something that can be packaged up for perpetuity remains an important consideration.

  • Welcome to June writing

    Yesterday a Substack post was released and now the backlog stands at 4 recorded episodes which should take us out to July 1, 2022. Right now I should be working on writing the July 8th titled, “What is post theory science?” I’m a little over 100 words into that writing effort and things have seemed to stall. Earlier I dropped a couple videos demonstrating how to record podcast audio on Audacity. They were single cut videos of recording straight into editing. Nobody seems to be watching either of those two videos. That happens sometimes on YouTube. It is a very feast or famine sort of platform in terms of views. I really should keep writing here in this window for a bit, but I’m probably going to hit publish here in a few seconds and send this very short missive out into the world of the blogosphere.