Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Month: September 2024

  • 20240929

    Getting back into the swing of daily writing takes a combination of purpose and dedication. You have to want to jump in and engage in the writing process. At the same time, you have to be focused about the process with a real dedication. Between those two things the process can take off and writing will happen. I have found that sitting down and writing that first paragraph is easier to make happen than continuing into a full writing session where a bunch of words are produced. My process really was to sit down and writing until the writing stopped every day. That process over the last few months has been broken. My daily output in terms of prose plummeted. It was just not a good thing to have happen.

    Storing the written word used to involve opening a word processing document every day and just writing. Sometimes things would get placed into another document for storage. For larger projects I tend to work out of that document on an ongoing basis. I try to write section by section in a sort of linear start to finish basis. That is how I tackle larger projects. You are probably aware that the faucet powering that grand writing project was turned off and otherwise not working. I’m going to try to get back into a pattern or routine of writing at the start of the day and producing good quality content. That process really will be about purpose and dedication. Not only will it be about those two things because that is necessary, but also it will be because they were included in the first paragraph and the show must go on to completion.

    My big project for the day is to rework my backlog. Right now, the backlog document I keep has become unwieldy and is just assembled poorly. That is probably from a lack of proper backlog grooming. Before engaging in that effort I took a look at both my five year writing plan and my research trajectory documents. Both of those documents actually need to be revisited and improved. That is probably a project for another day. Today is the day that the backlog needs to be brough up to date and potentially published as a distinct page on my weblog to help surface the content in need of attention.

    Publishing the new backlog was pretty easy. The list was culled down to the current size during the great backlog grooming of September 29, 2024. My plan going forward is to keep updating that weblog page as a live backlog of topics that I’m considering writing about. Please note that separate backlogs exist for other projects as well including the Lindahl Letter and nels.ai which are distinct and different from this backlog. Both those backlogs exist in Google Docs that contain the content that was written for both of those online projects.

  • 20240928

    My thoughts are starting to get a little bit more organized. Lately (the last few months or so) getting things in order has been the priority and figuring out what to take action on has been a distant second. Consider for a moment that I spent about half an hour messing around with the widgets for the sidebar on the weblog before just removing all the changes. After a little bit of consideration, it was easy enough to delete all that work because the weblog just does not need anything else beyond a basic level of presentation. Most of the views are mobile based anyway and widgets, sidebars, and other dense content display methods are not viewable as columns anyway. Mostly the mobile display methods just turn everything into a series of objects in one column. Turning everything into a manuscript style is probably the right way to go at this point. No real need exists to spend time making anything extremely customized.

    Today I’m watching some college football and trying to enjoy the weekend. During the first part of the day a lot of cleaning happened. Sometimes that time can help kickstart some future writing. Stopping and doing something completely different really does sometimes improve the writing spirit and output.

  • Editorial note

    My writing output over the last few years became over indexed on artificial intelligence and machine learning. Going down that rabbit hole was good at first and it was an effort truly focused on depth and breadth within the subject. Unfortunately, my focus lingered and instead of writing research notes about technological innovation, civil society, and the intersection of technology and modernity that pesky over indexing occurred. Now thanks to a moment of reflective practitioning I’m breaking out of that pattern and returning to what I consider a better balance of writing topics. Thank you for being along for that journey and the upcoming course correction.

  • 20240915

    I’m considering just using the date for the title of my upcoming posts on the weblog. My preferred file format for dates still happens to be YYYYMMDD which has worked out well enough for years now as a file storage formatting.

    The NFL Red Zone broadcast had a ten game live look in box this morning. That was really intense. It was super hard to follow without question. I started the day by walking an hour on the treadmill which was super exciting. I’m learning that it is easy enough to focus during my treadmill time. Focus was not really needed as a good part of the day was spent watching NFL Red Zone in spurts and just waiting for the Kansas City Chiefs to play football.

    Apparently, I left my weblog archival system in a complete state of disrepair during the last upgrade. Thousands of posts are in a private archive and only a handful are surfacing. Maybe now would be the time to just retire the entire weblog. Over the years I have deprecated and dropped several domains. It turns out that managing and keeping content online just seems less important than it used to be twenty years ago. Maybe my interests have just veered over into publishing books and articles. It is probably better to produce solid research notes that could be combined into a manuscript, expanded into an article, or maybe just published as a collection within a book. For some ineffable reason my overall rate of productivity just cratered this year. It has been a very bad writing year.