Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Category: Daily Thoughts

  • Opening a big year

    Right now at this very moment I’m considering opening 2024 as a very big year. It would certainly be possible to write 3,000 words a day throughout 2024. Maybe opening up a big year would be a good way to go about moving things forward. I have this recurring thought that it is now time to get to the next frame and progress things forward. Throughout 2023 I had that feeling that more could have been done. It was the year where more was always possible, but otherwise illusive. 

    I’m considering jumping into two audiobook series after finishing all The Expanse books: 1) Consider Phlebas and 2) Downbelow Station. Earlier this evening I listened to the audiobook preview of both books.

  • A weekly block of research and writing

    Each day when I wake up time could be devoted to writing. My knowledge, skills, and abilities need to be applied to something each day. I’m sitting at this crossroads where my attention is pulled between multiple things. It would be better to go all in on something. Bringing all my focus to one thing and really working on it would be a good path forward. It would be a clean and clear path forward. Perhaps the easiest thing to do would be to go back to my three folder plan for publishing papers. That plan involves keeping three classic manilla folders with in progress academic papers. Based on the day and the time one of those folders would be the focus of the day and I would try to complete academic works to ultimately advance to the next paper. That conveyer belt of ideas is one way to keep moving things forward. 

    Over the last 3 years I have used an alternative format to that three folder strategy for writing academic papers. I moved to a plan where I keep 5 research notes in planning or review. Obviously, based on empirical evidence from that strategy it radically increased my writing output and ultimately my pace of learning. Within that set of heuristics it was a very successful pivot. Being all in on completing a weekly block of research and writing is probably not a path to an end state or an ultimate journey. For the most part it’s a clearly definable process that is both definable and repeatable. 

    Engaging in the process of daily writing and publishing a blog is really just about being reflective. For the most part, that type of writing has nothing to stand on or no basis for being recalled later for having value. It’s a reflection of what happened and as the written word it remains a form of art for what it is and what it will always end up being. That being said, it is probably better to spend time creating blocks of research notes or ultimately stacking those into articles, manuscripts, or other longer forms of written communication.

    Weblog update: After writing those last 3 paragraphs, I went into the settings for the weblog here and turned off the Newsletter option under Jetpack. That should reduce the sharing of this weblog content and ultimately allow it to exist as it does for the purpose of being a place to think out loud. I have two Substack newsletters that are written to exist outside the process of thinking out loud. They are structured content meant to be consumed in a different way.

  • Doing a bit of learning

    Let’s recap from yesterday:

    I was able to work on a few Salesforce Trailhead badges. I’m now at 25,800 points. That means only 9,200 points stand between me and reaching the Expeditioner rank. At some point, I’m going to have to spend a little more time on some of the more complex higher point badges.

    Yesterday, I finished 35% of the Foundations of Cybersecurity course on Coursera. I’ll jump into the next week of that course today. 

    Five big things for 10/5/23:

    1. I need to spend a couple of hours working on an Agile certificate
    2. Build something on LangSmith
    3. MPSA
    4. Substack Block
    5. Cybersecurity course

    I jumped into the “Building ChatGPT Plugins: How They Work and How to Use Them

    Welcome to ChatGPT plugins” course on LinkedIn.

  • All those recaps seem to add up

    My weblog posts are going to have a bit of continuity from day to day. It’s going to be about accountability and focus. Getting to that point will be about digging into the 5 big things for today and then spending a few moments thinking about how the previous day went as a sort of retrospective element to the start of my day. 

    Let’s recap from yesterday:

    Throughout this entire week I have been completing a bunch of Salesforce badges. That is going to continue for the next few weeks. My big plan for the month of October is to get to climb the ranks of Salesforce Trailblazers to the rank of Ranger. 

    That post for nels.ai was completed and should go up today. 

    I still need to finish up week 1 of the Foundation of Cybersecurity course by Google on Coursera. 

    10 weeks of survey data have been collected over at the nelsx domain. I downloaded all the information necessary to work out a paper submission for the MPSA by 10/9. I need to write out about 2,250 characters to complete the submission.

    Five big things for 10/4/2023:

    1. I’m working on Foundation of Cybersecurity course by Google on Coursera
    2. On the SFDC front I have 23,525 points and need to earn 11,475 more points to reach Expeditioner rank.
    3. Learn about the LangSmith Beta
    4. Work on MPSA submission
    5. Work on a content block for Substack
  • My routine at this point is pretty settled

    My routine at this point is pretty settled. That works well enough as a base layer for refinement. Part of that effort has been to bring back a good written five big things per day to think about what needs to get done and then bring the focus and attention on those items to move them from items on a list to completed action items. 

    Five big things for 10/3/2023:

    1. I’m going to work on a few more Salesforce Trailhead points today. Right now I need to earn 11,775 more points to reach the Expeditioner rank. 
    2. Write nels.ai post and get that loaded up for tomorrow
    3. I’m going to work on week 1 of the Foundation of Cybersecurity course by Google on Coursera [1].
    4. Do some cleanup on the nelsx domain
    5. Submit paper to 81st Annual Midwest Political Science Association Conference – I have until 10/9 on this one. 

    Footnotes:

    [1] https://www.coursera.org/learn/foundations-of-cybersecurity/home/week/1 

  • A really big Monday for focus

    October has arrived. I’m not sure why that is a milestone that matters, but sure enough it seems like it got celebrated a bit. Last night I watched the entire Chiefs vs. Jets game via the power of OTA broadcast. I stayed up well past my bedtime to watch the game. The game became closer throughout and stayed that way until the very end. It was a little anticlimactic to watch Mahomes slide to victory, but it was an example of good clock management. 

    Last week I converted a bunch of posts from the weblog to private. I’m sitting at 156 published and 2,237 private. Right now 4 posts are staged up from the Substack content on the weblog. I did go back and make sure all the Substack content stayed open, but a lot of just random notes have been dropped into private mode. No real way exists for somebody to subscribe to the private content. 

    Five big things for 10/2/2023:

    1. Right now I have 18,150 Salesforce Trailhead points. I need to earn 6 more badges and 16,850 more points to reach Expeditioner rank. Today I’m going to complete a Salesforce badge or at least a few modules https://www.salesforce.com/trailblazer/nlindahl 
    2. Work on a chapter of the Feedback book
    3. Learn more about the Google Cybersecurity Certificate [1]
    4. Sketch out block 145 of The Lindahl Letter
    5. Complete and package the week 40 survey

    I’m going to admit that some of the Salesforce Trailhead content I prefered to read on my phone. It’s possible that I don’t really like to read across very large spans on my monitor. 

    Footnotes:

    [1] https://grow.google/certificates/cybersecurity/#?modal_active=none 

  • Attending an event and some focus time

    Committed the first real post for nels.ai and have that system up and running for publishing on Wednesdays going forward.

    I’m attending the CIO Future of Work Summit this morning. The first event was titled, “The Radical Next: Designing the Organization of the Future.” 

    Throughout the day I stayed in the sessions. A few of them were pretty interesting:

    • “Is There an Easier Way to Manage and Remediate Risk?”
    • “Game Changer: Deploying Gen AI to Maximize Customer Experience”
    • “From Shadow IT to Shadow AI: How to Gain Visibility and Rein in Unauthorized Usage”
    • “Deliver a Cost-Effective, Sustainable & High-Quality Digital Workplace”
    • “Friend or Foe? What’s the Role of Automation and GenAI for the Future of Work?”

    Edited and scheduled vlog day 33.

  • A lot of housekeeping tasks

    Setup for the new nels.ai domain is now complete. The process ended up needing a bit of time (over a day) for the DNS to sort out. I’m going to spend some time focusing on building content for the new domain today. 

    Polling for week 38 was completed and loaded. I need to do some benchmarking this week. 

    I need to release a version of my base election prediction proxy model. The chalk model was not very predictive on a single factor. It’s time for a new and better model. 

    I set up https://linktr.ee/nelslindahl today. This is one of those platforms that I’m not entirely sold on, but I thought it was time to build out as a profile. 

    I signed up for https://openai.com/form/red-teaming-network

  • Working on learning

    I set my alarm an hour early to join a class called “Application Development with Cloud Run” which was a part of Google’s Innovators Plus: Live Learning Events. I plan on attending a few of these events, but for some reason this series of events runs very early in the morning. 

    You can see my Google Developer profile here: https://g.dev/nelslindahl 

    Apparently I have a Google Cloud profile as well here: https://googlecloud.qwiklabs.com/public_profiles/ff63ebc9-8d5b-49a8-9c70-25c0c292ab73 

    “LocalGPT Updates – Tips & Tricks”

  • Aligning the backlog for 2023

    Today was the first day in the vlog series that I forgot to upload the video the day it was created and had to quickly finish the upload after my alarm went off. That meant instead of writing this delightful post I had to work on the upload flow. Don’t worry the video was posted an hour later in the day than the normal series, but it went live and all is well. I’m using a basic video editing workflow where all the content is created on my Pixel 7 Pro, content is edited in PowerDirector on the phone, and then it just gets uploaded to YouTube. I’m actually getting fairly proficient at using PowerDirector after 29 days of consecutive vlog updates. The YouTube Shorts format works well enough and making content that is always less than 60 seconds is a different sort of challenge. At this point, I think that is a better format than turning out sub 10 minute videos. 

    Last night I got into a fight with my writing backlog. I have been looking at the remaining blocks of content for the year and trying to consider what could best occupy that space. I’m very clear on what will be created in 2024. I have a book in mind that needs to be written and I’ll go about creating it one block of content at a time. Probably from start to finish in my normal writing style. That effort will yield a roughly 20 chapter book. Aligning the backlog for 2023 has taken a bit of time and I’m really considering either combining my code development planning and writing planning or splitting them up. One of those two things needs to happen. Generally, I keep my writing backlog separate. That has worked out well enough. I’m starting to approach a window where I’m probably going to spend more time coding than writing words. I’m sure that is a good thing and naturally a part of the cycle of creation.