Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

A blank page gives no feedback

Every day starts the same with a little bit of righting here on my workstation. I’m well on my way to developing a writing habit. We will see if the activity of daily writing is going to be sustained long enough to celebrate the development of a writing habit. Writing on my Google Pixelbook Go Chromebook does not seem to happen very often. The keyboard is comfortable enough and the form factor of the device is near perfect for what I need. 

Strangely enough I seem to prefer to code on the Chromebook and write prose sitting in my downstairs chair on my Windows 10 desktop. Maybe the formal practice of sitting down to write and putting my smartphones in the Pelican G40 sets the stage for a little bit of writing. Getting everything setup to be able to complete a stream of consciousness writing sessions can be a little involved. It is a commitment that requires sitting down and working until the work is done. Sometimes an interruption will occur, but for the most part you are sitting down to write until the writing is done. That is pretty much the method I employ to write. 

Today is a Friday (exciting!) and that means that it should be full of hope for a productive weekend. A few opportunities are waiting throughout the weekend to take some time to get things done. Blocks of uninterrupted time are wonderful. They are illusive. Over time they have become harder and harder to sustain. Both Saturday and Sunday morning will feature an hour or two of uninterrupted time that could be spent accomplishing something. A lot of my writing is iterative based on writing sessions that push something forward. You could say it is like thinking out loud to a blank page that is always willing to listen. That same page never has any feedback to give the act of working on a topic by writing iteratively. A blank page gives no feedback; it only offers the opportunity to make something out of nothing. Building toward a perfect possible future is going to require a lot of making something out of nothing. 

One of the things I have been thinking about is finishing up a 100 days of data analysis course that really walks somebody with no Python coding skills to being able to take action. Maybe that is a little bit ambition, but I’m thinking that is what I want to spend some time doing here this summer. It could provide the foundation for a few other activities go forward. It felt good to publish some machine learning Jupyter notebooks on GitHub. I might need to get one of the  Octocat logo stickers for my Pixelbook Go. It is entirely possible that I will not come across one of these stickers. It is pretty unlikely that I’m going to go out of my way to order one of those fancy Octocat stickers. 

Interrupted. School.


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