2018: Day 101 the one where I tested YouTube streaming from my browser
Word count 193,808 + 1,149 or 194,957 of 1,000,000

Dear Reader,

Things did not go all that well today. Earlier this morning I sat down and started up a live stream using a new YouTube streaming method. Apparently, from the YouTube Creator Studio live streaming section a new option exists to pick camera. That pretty much allows YouTube to stream live from the browser using whatever webcam was attached. I’m wondering if that might work better from my Pixel 2 XL phone. The webcam on this Chromebook is HD and it works. Overall the quality of the live stream was not the best, but it worked. So that happened today. Yesterday was a banner day in terms of hitting the 100 day in a row writing goal. I almost had enough time to figure out a postscript yesterday. The whole effort to write a postscript has been falling by the wayside over the last few weeks. That is probably because the blog post for each day is written and published without any time for a witty aside or any afterthoughts.

Today is probably going to be a shorter blog post. Tonight is one of those those nights where the time to write evades me. Earlier tonight I was thinking about how much I have enjoyed using and working with Tensorflow. Maybe that is something that I should be devoting more time to working with and enjoying. Sometimes the things that we work on are not something that we choose. Sometimes we do get to make some choices about how we are going to spend the time that we have. In my case, every night this year I have elected to spend the last few hours writing. That is pretty much what the last 100 days have included. Every night I take stock of where things are at and spend some time pounding the keyboard to produce some words. That is about getting my thoughts down and moving on to whatever is next. Some of that thought exercise has been about trying to figure out how to handle my future academic work.

One of the things that I have really focused in on is how I can spend some time writing and researching about Tensorflow and artificial intelligence. Those two topics in general have really caught my attention and inspired me to dig in and try to understand them with a great degree of depth. Part of that was focused around reading and learning about all the news I could find related to deep learning, machine learning, neural networks, and natural language processing. Sure both of my deep learning machines setup in my house are ready to do something fun and exciting. That effort needs to be both educational and it needs to drive some type of academic paper. Part of that is related to my need to publish at least 3 academic papers a year in a peer reviewed journals. A multitude of journals exist. Writing papers is something that takes time and effort.

I’m trying to knock out at least 1,000 words tonight. That is going to take a little bit more effort tonight. Right now I’m having trouble getting into a writing groove. The words are not flowing at the moment. I keep thinking that if the travel on the keyboard and a few more thoughts show up this stream of consciousness will pick up speed and get going. For some reason that is not really happening at the moment. Maybe the topic that I picked for tonight only took up that first paragraph and now I am just grinding against failure instead of fighting for success. Tomorrow I’m going to start working toward figuring out how to include more lessons on using Tensorflow into my live streams. Getting more hands on and showing folks more about how artificial intelligence efforts can be accessible seems like a good way to go about things.

That seems like a good way to move forward. Within the context of the blog post title today I learned that trying to stream using this Chromebook does not provide the ability to share my screen. Screen sharing is one of the cornerstones of how I like to distribute and share content. Live streaming with video only is not really where I want to go with things. Within that format you can share information, but you cannot really show things. Taking and sharing content at the same time has really been the essence of my live streaming efforts. Tomorrow I am going to have some time to sit down and write. That time has to be used in a smart way. The topic for tomorrow needs to be epic. It needs to be something that can inspire at least 3,000 words. At the moment based on this post falling short tomorrow I’m going to need to pick a topic that can help me produce 5,000 words in one super big writing session. It would probably be a better strategy to wake up at 0530 hours and write 1,000 words.

Right now I’m looking at my notes and trying to pick the best possible topic for tomorrow. At the moment I have not found a topic that inspires me. Maybe it is something that will show up after a good night’s sleep. That might be how it happens. I’m probably going to have to grab my notebook here in a few minutes and try to write down the top ten possible topics. Maybe setting up a few topics might help find the right now. At the moment, I’m going to try to just type them up in this word document and forgo writing by hand in a notebook and transferring things back to my notebook.

1. Use cases for artificial intelligence at the edge
2. Fair use of artificial intelligence within government agencies
3. Access and use of local government data sets within artificial intelligence use cases
4. Artificial intelligence competition and nation states
5. Augmenting secondary education to advance artificial intelligence
6. The invisible decider the role of AI as a hand in decision making
7. Echoes of modernity in the age of artificial intelligence
8. Changing communication models and the fall of mass media
9. Quality and the art of life maintenance
10. Writing like a memory jukebox producing one store story at a time

Well making that list was probably as useful as teaching a course about meetings. Nobody seems to be making a massively online course about meetings. That just does not appear to be a thing that the internet is willing to bring forward into the public consciousness. More often than not I start out by wanting to see the edge of what is possible. Pushing that boundary takes up a lot of my time and occupies a lot of my thoughts.

Dr. Nels Lindahl
Chicago, Illinois
Written on my Storm Stryker PC and or my ASUS C101P using Google Docs