Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Category: Traveling

  • That one with a long post written during an airplane flight

    I’m on a flight to Orlando, Florida right now. We departed from Denver, Colorado, after apparently some issue with a tray table was fixed. As delays go this one was not a very big deal and only amounted to around 30 extra minutes of standing. I’m pretty confident that we will make up a bit of time during the actual flight. We appear to be traveling at roughly 558 miles per hour. 

    I’m going to spend this 3 hour block of time just writing. That is about to happen. You certainly could sit back, relax, and prepare to read a bunch of prose. 

    During the course of cleaning out a drawer and a stack of papers I briefly considered going down the path of working on some public administration related academic articles. That type of consideration happens from time to time and is one of the things that at some point will probably happen. My 5 year writing trajectory includes a lot of things to complete. One of the things that has been a major part of that effort for the last 2 years has been working on Substack posts. That is a pretty distinct weekly cycle of creation to publish. 

    What I plan on doing here after hitting the two year mark on that one is working toward a different method of weekly creation. Each weekend I’m going to work on creating academic articles and some of that content will be used to feed the Substack posting. Over the last two years things happened a bit differently. The content being created for Substack sometimes found its way into an article or manuscript. Flipping that scenario around will be key to boosting my productivity in terms of academic prose output. 

    That will for the most part give me a set of two windows of 2-3 hours for crafting and generating academic content each weekend. Over time that will be enough to build out and write a bunch of different things. Some of that for sure will be literature reviews. Another part of it will have to be using a combination of publicly accessible dates and automated sentiment analysis to create original work. I should be able to build a sentiment analysis model automation and execute it for each academic paper if that is the dirrention things end up going. It will certainly yield original content. 

    I think as we work into 2023 that is one of the things that I’m most looking forward to producing. Within the machine learning space I have produced original research into the MLOps space and looked at a lot of open source code repositories in that space. At this point, I want to shift away from searching out and reading academic articles and move from conducting an ongoing literature review in the machine learning space to producing some content that makes a substantial contribution. The field has had so much content added recently that just sorting out the ideas coming in is hard enough without trying to consume the best of it or even locate the very best of it. This has to be the peak academic period for machine learning based on the hype cycle. I think at some point in the next couple of years a lot of machine learning researchers will be shifting over to the study of artificial intelligence in general. 

    That shift is probably good overall. My views which have been shared previously are that a lot of both model production and intellectual overcrowding has occurred within the machine learning space. A lot of papers have been written. It’s great that people are producing content and I’m happy they are mostly sharing it online without any paywalls or other limitations. You will have to admit that the sheer volume of it is overwhelming and at this point beyond any method of conventional sorting. Some of it gets promoted by social media and other actual interpersonal interactions where content is shared. People are having to really go out and share a paper to get it noticed or picked up by the top contributors within the field. 

    I think at this point in the program I’m going to drop out of weblog writing mode and work on some different essay related content.  I might circle back to this one or something else might show up.

  • Traveling to San Jose

    Loading up John Wick: Chapter 3 took some time on my flight today. For some reason, the loading of the webpage took a lot longer than expected. Oh no, I got the error, “This video file cannot be played. (Error Code: 246000).” That was disappointing to start off my trip to San Jose, California. I did give it one more shot to see if it would work, but that ended up with the same error code on the screen. Even the live television option would not work. After a couple of minutes of messing around and refreshing the browser I just went back to listening to music. The flight has an hour and a half remaining. Given that much time I should be able to do something special with just my thoughts and this keyboard.

    Writing for the sake of writing is one of the great joys of having enough time to sit back and just think about things. I had considered writing my speech out again during the flight. Sometimes that is exactly what you want to do to get ready to give a talk. Practice does help ensure that the content gets packaged up correctly. Writing about how to operationalize machine learning is something I enjoy doing, but I am not entirely ready to produce a new block of prose. Right now, I am really just refining the content that I have and trying to make the talk better. One of the things I have really thought about is trying to make a better batch of slides. For some reason, my current slides do not feel impactful enough to bring the content to life.

    My goal is to setup and build an entirely new presentation after this week. That is going to involve sitting down and sketching out the story that needs to be told and building the parts of that story out one slide at a time. Working on something like that is going to take some time and a lot of thought and energy. Right now I could be working on that instead of just writing away and enjoying some music during this flight to California. Typing on a flight is really one of those things that works for me and I enjoy it. Some offices are building these little isolation chambers to let people lock in and really focus. Being able to really focus on things has always come easily to me. That is something I should probably not take for granted.

    This privacy screen on my Google Pixelbook Go is still working pretty well. Nothing has really gotten between the shield and the screen. I’m sure at some point that will happen and it will be very problematic. This privacy shield is held on the screen with some adhesive stickers along the edges. Trying to remove it and clean the underlying screen would be very problematic. It would have been much better to get a replaceable screen like the ones some of the Apple products have available. Those privacy screens seem to be much better. I’m not sure having people read over my shoulder is really that big of a deal to me, but at these conferences and traveling all over it seemed to be something I wanted to avoid.

  • Adventures in traveling

    This is a recording of my blog from December 10, 2019

    Today was a day of false starts and a lot less adventure than planned. I got pulled into something that totally slowed down my plan to spend the entire morning digging into those Coursera classes on architecting in Kubernetes on GCP. My flight from Denver to New York City did not have a very stable internet connection.

    Recently, my experiences with internet while flying have been getting worse than before. I remember this technology working a lot better. All I really do is read papers and push things forward in terms of surfing till the end of the internet. Today would have been a great opportunity to really dig in and catch up on some news and read some papers during the flight. Turbulence was bad enough that reading anything with a tiny font was going to be a problem during the flight.

    It seems like the amount of turbulence has been increasing over the last few yes. I do not have any direct evidence to prove that assentation, but I’m pretty sure that it is true. Somebody somewhere probably collects that type of data. If I had a good internet collection, then I would be able to read about it and confirm or deny that hypothesis. Right now, instead, I’m writing on my Pixelbook Go in a Google Doc and watching, “Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shah.”


  • A Monday flight to Dallas

    My goal for the week is get back to writing weblog posts with the same spirit they started with a decade ago. It used to be so much easier to just write and post. That is something that I have been thinking about recently. Maybe it was the amount of time I spent sitting in front of a computer either reading or writing papers. Sitting in my office chair and completing my college education outside a classroom was a major staple of my academic efforts. That is really the reason I made it through about 13 years of college. Reading and writing papers was a major part of my life. Back then none of my efforts were streaming video related. That did not really happen. Sometimes, I watched television, but that had nothing to do with the two monitors hooked up to my computer. The television was a very heavy stand alone box with a glass screen. Streaming is now everywhere and I think it has impacted the way I end up writing. Maybe the best form factor for me to write is a smaller screen laptop. Right now that is my ASUS Chromebook flip. This screen form factor pretty much means the only thing I do with it is work on a single application or browser at a time. That helps my writing efforts. It focuses me down to just a single purpose that might be mixed with things going on around me, but it really is the most focused that I am going to get.

    Somewhere in that last nugget of truth is the real reason I like writing hand written notes to people. Maybe it is a different method of writing, but the same general lockdown into the process of writing is the same. Right now I’m sitting in a window seat on a Boeing 737-700 aircraft. Sure the seats might not be the most comfortable, but without any internet to distract me all I can do is sit here and listen to music in the library on my Pixel 3 XL and engage in the process of writing. Sure I might have taken a small nap at the start of the flight, but that happens. Something about climbing up to the cruising altitude just puts me right to sleep or it least it has the last couple of flights. I’m going to have to remember to proofread this post before hitting submit this time around. Not having an internet connection is a great way to just write without the terrible red squiggles reminding me of a typo. Maybe that is something I need to start doing from this point forward. Maybe just maybe worrying about the proofreading at the end is the right way to go about things. That will certainly stop me from writing and and directly posting. A new step full of proofreading fun will be inserted into the mix and that might just clean some things up, but it might very well slow things down.

    A lot of the content I end up producing never really gets posted anywhere. Some of it is just part of my efforts to bring my thoughts together into something that is easier to understand. Surely it is easier to explain to somebody that mastery allows simplicity. At this point taking the time to master my thoughts is probably the right thing to do. It helps bring things together. Unifying the path forward is a great way to begin walking in the right direction.

  • Black Canyon

    Not every national park offers a patch at the gift sore, which means that the backpack does not always receive additional decoration.