Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Month: July 2023

  • I’m still not sold on Substack Notes

    I’m not entirely sure that Substack needs to generate an alert in my activity feed every time somebody posts a note. I’m sure that note is deeply exciting, but I’m not going to click on it in my activity feed notices. That is just not going to happen. For the most part the Substack Notes area of the site did not really appeal to me in the same way that reading topical missives that are more produced does. I tried a few times to compose a few notes and it never really stood out to me. Maybe it will improve in the future, but as of right now I’m just not sold on Substack Notes. That is where my head is at on this one.

  • It’s ok, you can just stop using search engines

    Just type in the website you want to go visit. Are you in need of some news? Just go to your favorite news website and read whatever that proprietor is sharing as the latest news. I’m not talking about drifting over into the world of private search. I’m just saying you can probably live without using a search engine to help you move along with your day to day tasking, projects, and or adventures. Maybe you moved to a new place or something came up where you absolutely have to use a search engine to help move things along. Sure, I get that one off or specific need, but for the most part generally speaking it’s ok you can just stop using search engineers in your day to day life. Nobody ever puts a search engine on their everyday carry list of things you need. Maybe just skip that next random search for something.

  • Considering a new laptop, again

    This morning started off a little bit slower than it should have. Somebody turned off their alarm and slept in for an hour. It was me. I claimed that extra hour of sleep. I started looking at System76 laptops again this morning. Right now I’m torn between the Lemur Pro and the Darter Pro. I like the idea of 14 hours of battery on the Lemur Pro. However, the Pixelbook Go chromebook I’m using is showing no signs of failing any time soon. We will see how that one plays out. My big plan for this morning is to work on two blocks of content related to weeks 135 and 136.    

    Half of that writing objective is now complete and the content for week 135 is out of draft and will need to sit this week before being edited again after some time passes. That is one of those things about having content in review for a number of weeks that improves it. As a writer I need a bit of time to pass before I’m ready to really provide solid editing, review, and remediation to my own words. The research and digging part of week 136 is up and running. I’m out on Google Scholar and digging around into content. This is one of those use cases for buying a tablet I think where it would be easier to sit around and read PDF documents of academic articles while holding a tablet. Reading articles on my phone is a recipe for problematic experiences. The form factor just does not work for me and I don’t enjoy it. You can imagine that it destroys the experience for me and that is enough to stop the progress. 

    Generally, I read things sitting at my computer which is currently setup to support a 4 screen view where my Chromebook only gives a single screen view when that is preferable. My desktop setup is totally immersive with two 38 inch monitors vertically stacked on an ATDEC stand. This is going to end up being a productive weekend where 4 blocks of content were for the most part created, reviewed, or completed. I even found the tripod and an extra battery for my Sony ZV-1 camera in a backpack that is rarely used. Things are moving along. 

    My side quest backlog is also working well enough during the weekdays. I am far enough ahead of that and my regular writing plan efforts that this afternoon I might be able to whiteboard for a couple of hours and really refine the side quest backlog. Friday evening I wrote out 3 good things I needed to accomplish this weekend to really strap rocket boosters to the side quest and I’m 1 of 3 complete on that target list. We will see what happens within my efforts to close out the other 2 outstanding items.

  • A good Saturday morning of writing

    It was a very solid morning for producing blocks of content. Instead of achieving one block of content creation this morning. Two blocks of content were actually created. Both weeks 133 and 134 were finalized and recorded. That puts me 4 weeks ahead in terms of scheduled posts. It’s nice to be locked in till Friday, August 18, 2023. My writing plan involves trying to ensure one block of content is created every week. Maybe it would be better to go back to the plan for producing a big year of writing content, but trying to produce a solid million words of content in a single year is a big task to try to accomplish. 

    My attention got super focused on E138 of the All-In podcast this morning. Generally, I like to listen to people talk about things in the background. To that end podcasts are pretty great as they provide a continuously updating stream of that type of content. 

    I broke away from the writing project to go see Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) at our local theater. My previous rating of the movies stands the same 3-5-1-2-4. I have seen all five movies at least twice per film.

  • Getting into the swing of coding again

    I opened my first issue on GitHub. The author responded to it, which was exciting. It’s distinctly possible that I’m going to fork that repository to have it do something a little bit different than what the author intended. My fork would be a depreciation of some pop up functionality to make the overall plugin easier to use for people who were just wanting to engage some direct links to other pages. One of the things that I’m seriously considering is just setting up a backlog and keeping interaction notes for my efforts. 

    That made me wonder if GitHub kept a native backlog feature. Based on my initial searching it does not appear that GitHub has such a thing. My primary writing backlog is something that I keep in a Google Doc at the end of the document. Functionally, I work on one unit of writing a week so having a backlog of 5 items in planning and review and then tons of uncommitted items is not a very big deal. Working on a coding project is a different type of effort compared to that one unit a week writing project. I’m going to need a better way to manage my backlog or I’m not going to ever get to code complete as a single developer on the project. 

    My current plan is that every day I’m going to try to spend an hour dedicated to building code either right before or after dinner. I have some detailed sketches of what needs to be built out and I’m working on building and coding it live in production. Some of the bigger elements of the project are probably going to need several hours of attention at one time to get set up. That will need to be a weekend activity to be sure. On the brighter side of things only a few of those types of large efforts exist.

    I broke out the extra large notepad and started some sketches. My process is a little different from most people. All of the concepts and ideas normally get crunched in my head first and then I draw out the slides or the graphic after that process completes. It’s not an iterative sketching process when I build things out. The thing has been brought into existence before I try to memorialize it with a graphic.

  • Pruning my Substack subscriber list

    Earlier this morning I was working on the 135th block of content for The Lindahl Letter and it seemed like a good idea to just prune the list a little bit. One of the best ways to do that is to sort the overall subscriber list by activity and then just remove people who have zero in the activity column. My list now has less than 10 subscribers who are not actively doing something with the weekly email that goes out. I have not had anybody resubscribe after the rounds of pruning that have occurred so far so it seems to be an effective strategy. They probably did not want the email and were just being polite about clicking that unsubscribe button. 

    I have considered setting up an annual subscription plan of a nominal $2 to sort of reboot the list a little bit, but have not elected to execute that strategy at this time. It turns out that Substack won’t really let you set up an annual subscription plan of less than $30. I’m not entirely sure what the minimum monthly plan cost would be, but I’m guessing it would be $2.5. That would be an equal measure of the yearly cost divided by 12 months in the year. A few online searches seem to indicate that the cost would be higher on a monthly basis. 

    Things are all set up to make the switch to a paid subscriber model, but I have not actually made that change. I’m going to think about it for a couple of weeks and make a decision.

  • Commit to making the idea a reality

    Today started out with my looking back at what massive stack of prose got produced yesterday for the old weblog and it was not impressive. Seriously, it stacked up to just a single line of content, “I’m about to really dig into each state in terms of analysis.” A lot of thinking went into writing that line of text, but it was not a very impressive display of producing the written word. My overall 5 year writing plan is still in place and I’m working on my backlog to produce a single block of content from that backlog each week. Achieving that output requires spending the early hours of both Saturday and Sunday working toward creating some good quality words and conducting research. I’m trying to stay 5 weeks in planning and review at any given time. That means that I’m doing a bit of research at times and other times I’m writing. Generally speaking the goal is to produce tight blocks of writing content that deliver on the topic in the best way possible. 

    At this point in the journey, I have added a weekday activity to my efforts. This is in addition to my normal backlog production and it involves building out some new things. Working on an actual project is both awe inspiring and daunting. It took a little bit to form up all the things that needed to be set up to get this thing live and running and then it took a bit to take the plunge and just start development. That effort is going to involve a ton of automation, research, set up and sustained productivity on my part. I think it will end up being a rewarding project a year from now. You will be along for the ride. After I get the foundation setup to the point where it can be shared from stealth mode into proper production I’ll probably chronicle the journey. 

    • Commit to the idea
    • Figure out what needs to be done to realize the idea
    • Take the plunge and begin work on delivering that realization
    • Build a realistic backlog of what needs to be done
    • Figure out if you can do that by yourself
    • Commit to making the idea a reality

    Right now in the process I have the idea and have begun the process of figuring out exactly what needs to be done to realize the idea. Naturally, I started to build the project code and set everything up live in production. It’s highly unlikely that something brand new will take up too much attention at the start and for me it’s easier to see something live and running than to think about it in the abstract. Pretty much from this point forward I’m going to spend some time every evening until the project is fully automated working to make it a reality. This has also started a new musical journey where I have switched from my Warren Zevon or NIN channels to a pure diet of Paul Oakenfold’s best songs on Pandora.

  • Things are starting to line up

    Sometimes you put some ideas on a list. A few of them get crossed off from time to time. Things are starting to line up. After just a bit of those things starting to work out things seemed okay. Putting together a plan at this point makes sense. I have all the broad strokes of what needs to be worked out. That vision of what the perfect possible figure would entail is enough to get things moving along. Right now 226 missives are sitting in a draft status. I’m going to start working some of them out every night or deleting them from the backlog. Some of those drafts go all the way back to 1998 apparently.

    The oldest one dating back to 1998 was pure trash and I don’t have any memory of writing it at all. It has been deleted from the backlog and that honestly felt pretty good. 

    Some of that older draft content from 1998 and 1999 included some papers. That prose was lacking and a few of them are getting deleted along the way. 

    The best course of action was just to delete all the drafts. It was the best plan forward. They were all just false starts anyway.

  • 5 science fiction series I have enjoyed reading

    I’m going to go ahead and share this list of 5 science fiction series that I have enjoyed reading. I have been working on this list for a bit. Depending on how you count the books some of the series have more or maybe less, but I have provided links over to Good Reads so you can see the more exhaustive listing of all the books in the series. You may have a different listing of your favorite 5 science fiction series. That is totally ok by me. Feel free to share other high quality series that I should check out. You have a good indication based on the below list the types of things I enjoy reading. 

    • Dune (6 original books) happens to be my all time favorite series. This is probably the set of books I have read the most. The first 6 original books are my favorite set of the Dune universe, but I have read every other book in the series up to now. 
    • Expanse (9 books) I’m sure you have heard about the books by James S. A. Corey. They quickly became a new addition to my list. It is rare that during the course of reading a book series I cannot wait to find out what happens next and push on past my bedtime, but a few moments in this series had my complete attention. 
    • Ender saga (12 books) I’m a fan of both the regular saga and the shadow series of books about Ender and Bean. Considerations about the author aside, I have enjoyed the series of books and have read them more than one time as a complete work. 
    • Foundation (7 books) Yes, you can watch this series on Apple TV these days and I don’t think it resembles the books. It’s an adaptation for sure. I think the regular foundation series holds up pretty well all things considered.  
    • Kovacs (3 books) The most adult series on my list is also a more recent set of books by Richard K. Morgan about the life and times of Takeshi Kovacs. Just to be clear on this one I would read another round of books about Takeshi. I think some room exists for more adventures somewhere in the universe of Takeshi Kovacs. 

    Postscript: My affinity for one of these series of books is not an endorsement of any author as a human being or anything like that. Why that would be an expectation of things like a book list is beyond my understanding. Assuming the author is capable of producing world class and renowned prose that is readable, epic, and otherwise delightful I’m willing to be glad that they did. We can always debate or consider other parts of a person’s life and beliefs along the way. To me a book is what is contained on the pages from start to finish. I’m willing to judge that book and decide if I want to read it and enjoy the content contained within the pages.

  • Just a bit of blogging about blogging

    I considered installing the ActivityPub plugin to my WordPress instance, but decided against setting up that integration until I know more about what data could be exchanged [1]. A lot of interest in ActivityPub has been building as Threads by Instagram has been launched. Maybe the social web will continue to fall apart or maybe some type of interaction system will be built out of the current ActivityPub standard or whatever comes next from that potential setup. Yesterday, my interest in the Threads application peaked. It was sort of fun to install the application and to see something new. For me the feed experience was just not very good. It was a lot of brands and social influencers trying to engage with me and that is a far cry from the mix of academic Twitter that I interact with mixed with a lot of machine learning and AI related researchers. 

    My Twitter experience has always been pretty good in terms of those academic and research based connections. I’m not in the market for any advertisements of social influencers. My path is pretty clear and my work plan exists and won’t change all that much during the course of my 5 year writing plan. I’m really curious to see what happens with the most active users. All those really active users are going to end up going somewhere and they will build a critical mass. In my estimation it would be unlikely that the mass of the most active users would end up fragmented or broken apart. That need to get to a point of critical mass to allow the social network to be in the end the most social it can be will probably win out over time.

    Footnotes:
    [1] https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/