Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Month: September 2022

  • No more Tumblr posting for me

    My weblog menu has been updated to remove a link to my Tumblr page for the top menu bar of the site. This seemed like the right thing to do given that I just deleted all my content and account on the Tumblr site listed below. I have not posted any original content on that site. The only content that was posted was pushed over from this weblog. It seemed like that echo was not very useful and given that my weblog does not have to have a digital shadow to exist I went ahead and hit delete on that Tumblr page.

    https://www.tumblr.com/nelslindahl

    If anything ever ends up back on that page, then it was not from me and is unauthorized as far as I’m concerned. Right now it just says, “There’s nothing here.” At the moment, that is just fine given that my intention was to delete all the content and stop using the site. My big plan for the night after hitting that delete button was to write this weblog post and hit publish before the month comes to an end. I’m ready for October.

    My current social media strategy for this weblog is to allow WordPress to post a link with each post title to Twitter. That will probably continue for the foreseeable future. I’m not sure it creates much traffic from Twitter back over to the weblog, but it seems to be something that brings me joy so it will be allowed to continue.

  • Oh those pesky routines

    Shifting back into a routine of writing some daily observations down took just a bit of effort. Giving up writing in Google Docs and switching to mostly writing in the Microsoft Word application involved changing up my routine. This very document can be opened online or I can continue working out of this Microsoft Word application on my main desktop computer. Given that right now the main stretch of productivity that I have as a writer is at the start of the day this setup works out well enough. Right now for some reason it is the first couple of hours of the day where I’m able to produce solid prose and push things along. In the evening, I’m not able to compel myself to spend time writing. Sometimes that is problematic if I’m not able to be fully productive during that early morning writing session. No capacity for catch up really exists.

    Yesterday it had seemed like a good idea to use a large book to raise up both of my computer monitors by a few inches. I’m going to give this new elevated viewing solution a few days to see if I got the height correct or if it needs adjustment. My Dell monitors simply don’t have that much height adjustment on them and I wanted a better ergonomic setup where my eyeline was looking just about the middle of the screen from my current chair configuration. I’m still rocking the Scandinavian Designs WAU desk chair in blue. Overall the chair has worked out well enough, but it has always been a place holder while I try to convince myself to buy a Herman Miller chair for my home office. That will probably happen at some point in the not to so distant future.

    All of those pesky routines are the ones that drive my productivity forward on a daily basis. Waking up before everybody else gets up and starting to write is the key part of that routine. A lot of other things get pulled into that pattern. Sometimes it is cleaning up my workspace or something else that pulls my attention, but that is all about using a distraction to procrastinate. The main mission from the desired routine is to produce words. Today that attention got focused on this weblog post which oddly enough was about the very routine that produced it.

  • Thinking about baseball a bit

    We have had some rather cloudy weather in Denver for the last couple of days. It plunged the temperature from triple digits down around 40 degrees pretty quickly. Right now I’m looking out the window and wondering if it is going to rain. My weather app says it is just a couple hours of fog that will be lingering this morning, but it feels like it will rain. We attended the Colorado Rockies vs. the Arizona Diamondbacks gave on Friday where it sort of lightly rained the entire game. Yes, that game ended with the Rockies winning 13 to 10. During that deluge of run scoring we got to see a 9 run inning from the Diamondbacks offense. Which to be honest is pretty remarkable within the scope of a major league baseball game. We had seats that were just far enough back to be under the ledge of the section above us which worked out really well given that it was lightly raining.

    One of the things that we heard a ton about while driving home from the game was the new rule changes that are coming for Major League Baseball (MLB) for the upcoming 2023 season [1]. Apparently, we can expect bigger bases, rules to control defensive shifts, and probably the more impactful introduction of a pitch timer. I’m not exactly sure why bigger bases really matter. The change to the pitching clock will probably be the most important element included in these changes. Some baseball games go quickly, and other games are more glacial in nature. This effort to introduce the pitch clock is designed to help reduce the overall length of the game and increase the pace of play. It sounds like the pitch timer might speed up the pace of games by about 30 minutes. Basketball as a sport and a game easily supports the introduction of a shot clock as it becomes a constraint on the offense. This timer is a bit different and for some pitchers it is going to be something that at time is truly devastating.

    Any time a pitcher is dealing with a bit of discomfort or potential pain or just gets intro trouble and is rattled on the mound the pitch time will just keep moving along. You have no time to just try to work some things out as you try to control the game from the pitching mound. I think this change will end up strongly favoring the batter in 2023. It may just help create a degree of plate rhythm for batters that will have a major change to on base percentage and ultimately batting averages. My guess would be that we will see a lot more hitters crossing the 300 club in terms of batting average. If we see anybody break into the 400 club, then that will give you a pretty good indicator that the rule changes fundamentally changed the balance of the game.

    Footnotes:

    [1] https://www.mlb.com/news/mlb-2023-rule-changes-pitch-timer-larger-bases-shifts

  • Striving for a trajectory of growth

    Yesterday some consideration was given to the idea of transitioning to a very old school method of writing weblog posts. This might be the moment that I’ll flip the switch and write in a slightly different way as things mover forward. Sitting down with pen and paper affords a certain opportunity to sling words without the direct consequence of them being published. Twenty years ago, I just sat down and wrote whatever came to mind without any degree of self-censorship. Returning to that framework of writing might not be entirely possible, but it could be one of those things that would make sense. That would mean writing about whatever mundane things or grand considerations that come to mind at the point of the writing exercise. At the very end of the day, I used to just sit down and write and drop whatever came to mind onto a site hosted with a Microsoft FrontPage backend. That for those of you who do not remember was a WYSIWYG editor that produced HTML pages as a final product.

    Back in those days my grammar, spelling, and overall editing was lacking. Those things have improved over the years, but still have a way to go as with all things we can work to refine our knowledge, skills, and abilities to grow along the way. Perhaps that is the great debate of our time. It’s the questions of striving toward a trajectory of personal and professional growth or living within the moment and simply sustaining things as they are. This same question is asked of both companies and people. Coming out of high school it was strongly suggested that I spend time in college. At the time, I had two choices that stood out on that front. I could have attended the local community college or gone to one of the state colleges. Either way would probably have moving things along in generally the same trajectory. Back in 1999 the cost of college tuition was a lot lower than it currently happens to be and I’m not entirely sure the services being offered are that different.

    Anyway, back to the question at hand really about the nature of striving for a trajectory of growth. We have come so far as a society in general and the nature of changes to our civil society have changed the social fabric in what I broadly consider positive ways. We have a lot more knowledge available to people, science, and medicine. That growth did not come without problematic situations, conditions, and challenges. Looking back on the last 50 years, 100 years, and 200 years things within society have changed a lot and core to that change is technology. I’m not sure today is the day that I have enough time to really sit down and write about the changes to civil society as we approach the intersection of technology and modernity. We have a very real approach of a couple potential singularities that will have profound effects on the nature of our social fabric and how we view civil society in general. Those very real watershed moments have the potential to change things profoundly and we are not particularly ready for those events.

    We will however keep moving along and striving for that perfect possible future as we work together toward pathing that allows for personal and professional betterment. At the very heart of that social compact that we share remains some things core to the freedoms that we need to generally work together toward that end of personal betterment. At the moment, I should take a bit more time to write about community and draw these arguments out with support and logical extension. That however is not entirely practical as the day is grinding to a start. Sunrise is still about 30 minutes away, but I won’t be able to capture that entire block of time and use it for writing. Other obligations are about to step in and separate me from this work processing document. That is the necessity of things that require time and are commitments outside of the opportunity to write freely at the start of the day. Commitments stack up over time and that seems to be a central truth of adulting.

  • Oh those weekend thoughts

    Time quickly passed this weekend. I spent a fair amount of the weekend just resting my back. Somehow and it was one of those ineffable things I managed to tweak my lower back last week. It lingered into the weekend and I’m hopeful that today is the turning point where things will get better. Oddly enough a bit of back pain is enough to slow down and destroy my writing sessions. Apparently, I need both my mind and my body to be in agreement to sit down and create some prose. Right now I need to write two more posts for The Lindahl Letter to have my writing on schedule for a bit of a break here in October. The two posts are generally in the draft to build stage of the process.

    My process really does involve having about 5 weeks of posts in planning or revision at any given time. Some of that is researching what needs to go into the posts in terms of articles and links the other part is the slow writing process of adding in the content as necessary. I could go with an approach where the content is just written the weekend before and sent out that Friday. Adding the audio recording changed that for me and made it to where I needed to work a bit ahead to be able to complete an audio recording. Almost all my audio recording happens first thing in the morning during the absolute quietest time in the house. Only a small two hour window exists on the weekends where the household including the dogs are going to be relatively silent.

    My office picks up banging or other loud noises. A few of them have made a podcast along the way, but you would have to listen very closely to notice. During the course of recording live streams on YouTube I ran into the same type of ambient noise problems. The podcast audio is cleaned up compared to the live stream content. To be fair on that one the live stream content is not cleaned up at all. That is not something that you really go back and clean up for audio quality.

    I may have to go to my alternate writing schedule where 7 day a week future posts receive tinkering. This is all about working out the first two October posts. I’m sure it will end up getting completed, but at the moment on this particular Monday things are not moving along very well. I spent some time watching YouTube videos about various guitar parts. That happened. It happens from time to time. My interests typically shift between looking for computer parts and looking at guitar parts. One of the things that has saved me a bit of activity in the last few years is that computer parts were really hard to come by and the rate of change on motherboards and chipsets was low. I did take the time to price out a brand new computer build this weekend and it can get really expensive pretty quickly.

  • Start of the month watch winding

    I’m a few days late in the monthly winding of my watch to the correct date. The time as you can imagine is generally right but depending on the number of days in the month the date may not be anymore. The watch I’m wearing right now only keeps the time and date. Now that all of the watch related mischief has been managed it is time to confess that I have been looking at decorative wood watch boxes. I don’t really have enough watches to need one. For some reason it is one of those things that has drawn my attention. Maybe one day I will have enough watches to need a special wooden box to hold all of them, but that is not something that will happen any time soon. I seem to acquire a watch about once every ten years or so based on a very limited sample size of two watches. I’m not counting smartwatches as they generally something different and not built or kept across a great span of time. I have had a number of different Fitbit watches over the years. The latest one was not charging well anymore, and I ended up switching back to wearing a more traditional watch.  

    Beyond not taking care of my watch winding this month I have neglected to write any weblog posts. Right now, while I watch the extended cut of the “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” that writing drought my come to an end. This version on HBO Max appears to be 3 hours and 48 minutes. I’m probably going to have to take a break in the middle of watching this version to have lunch at some point. I broke down and paid the team over at HBO Max upfront for a year of streaming content. Right now, my streaming services have built up to three total providers. We annual subscriptions to HBO Max and Disney+. On a monthly basis the team over at Netflix is still being paid. That is probably the streaming service most likely to terminated to bring the count down to two at some point.