Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Category: Daily updates

  • A few hours of extreme focus

    This week had two days with a more active degree of functional journaling. It’s interesting to keep the Google Doc up and just drop little insights into it throughout the day. It reminds me of years ago when the internet was exciting and awesome or at least it seemed to be full of wonder. 

    Today will be the 21st day of the vlog over on YouTube. It has been a long time since daily video delivery was a part of my workflow. 

    I uninstalled Dropbox from my phone. 

    I have spent a lot of time on block 142. It has involved going down all sorts of rabbit holes to dig into a variety of different adjacent topics.

  • Focusing on being super productive today

    Today started with a little bit of work on block 138. That is the last locked and loaded block recorded and ready to release next Friday. Right now the block is pretty tight and does not include any fluff or enhancement at all. It’s just right to the point and at this point in time I’m just going to go with it and allow that shorter content block to publish as written on Friday, September 15, 2023. 

    Yesterday, I flipped my LinkedIn profile to open to work for recruiters to see. Today the first set of those types of messages started to show up. 

    It turns out at some point I started drafts of blocks 139 to 142. Something must have disrupted my writing rhythm a bit in the last couple of weeks. Generally, I don’t develop 4 blocks of content and then get surprised by them during review. It’s probably an understandable oversight. I have spent a lot of time learning and messing around with LangChain. Throughout the rest of the year my big plan is to lock in the content for 2023 by finishing writing blocks out to 156. My Google Doc with year 3 all staged and ready to go had that content lined up for completion. At some point, future Nels is going to have to take that Google Doc and move the content into Microsoft Word for manuscript formatting and publication review. 

    Let’s dig into these one at a time. Starting with block 139. At this point, block 139 is ready to be recorded as a podcast and staged for publication on Substack. That review process took about 20 minutes.

    Moving on to block 140 should be easy enough. I’m on a roll now. This block of writing is another rather short post. It could probably use another pass and maybe some extension into generative AI. This one is not ready to be recorded as a podcast. 

    Block 141 was already a polished gem of a post and won’t really require all that much effort to revise into being ready for podcast recording. 

    It turns out block 142 was only about half way done so that is where I must have stopped the design and review process. That makes this about as standard as it could be for the plan of having 5 weeks in planning or review. I was sitting with 4 blocks of content drafted or nearing completion. 

    At this point, I’m going to swing back and try to get block 140 ready to record. That will put me at 3 blocks of content ready for podcast recording. That leaves about 15 blocks to complete throughout the rest of the year. That seems reasonable at this point. 

    I hopped over into the Audacity software and recorded blocks 139, 140, and 141. All 3 are now scheduled for publishing on Substack. That puts the backlog at 5 weeks. I’m going to need to dig into the next blocks of content, but I have a good backlog to allow for the preparation of high quality content. 

    Started this course: https://learn.deeplearning.ai/google-cloud-vertex-ai/lesson/1/introduction

  • A few notes along the way

    As a brief aside about the content on the weblog here we are going to swing back into some of the more functional journaling side of things. You will notice that at the end of the day or potentially the next morning I’m going to post the content generated throughout the day. I’m just going to be jumping in and out of my trusty Google Doc being used for the day and drop my notes inline with a bit of editing and linking. Those notes will then get published on the weblog. This is a throwback style of blogging that harkens back to the beginning of the functional journal days of content creation. 

    Started the week 6 run of the swing state survey. The batch size was reduced from 300 to 150 on this run. Initially findings were that the 300 batch size took most of the day to complete. 

    I really did not need to do any Google searches for docking stations, but sadly that did happen yesterday. The Dell Performance Dock model WD19DCS was the one that stood out to me [1]. 

    Assuming a 5 hour block of focus time. I’m trying to figure out what I should target, research, build, and demo today. 

    Building a generative AI active use case map of what people are doing might be interesting. 

    I spent some time working on LHH scheduling for a resume review and a couple of sessions on how to best use LinkedIn.

    Right now I’m battling the good fight against my backlog for the Lindahl Letter year 3 which is going to run from content blocks 105 to 156. I just moved the content blocks for next year into a new document called backlog. At some point in the not so distant future, I’m going to spend some time thinking about what 52 blocks of content should be lined up for 2024 and the 4th year of the Lindahl Letter. You may note that on two separate occasions this year that well planned and curated backlog was completely and totally torn up in favor of a change in programming. 

    There are 46 days until October 21, 2023. Each new day presents an opportunity to deploy some type of demo. Each and every day represents an opportunity to build something epic. I have come to the conclusion that building and deploying some interesting prototypes to showcase building skills is the way to go moving forward. 

    Interesting paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.08998.pdf 

    I started to learn about Kajabi which was interesting. I have handled my own website hosting for a long time and have not used anything like Kajabi, but it is super interesting how they are bringing a full marketing stack together.

    I’m still sort of conflicted about my WordPress setup not being able to automatically send a note that something was posted back to Twitter/X.

    I’m now focused on block 137 and am going to spend a few hours updating that missive. It’s locked and loaded to come out now on Friday.

    Footnotes:

    [1] https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-performance-dock-wd19dcs/apd/210-azbn/docks-and-stands