2018: Day 106 the one with a flight over Disney World

Dear Reader,

This flight is about to take off. It is going to be a long flight. The flight plan is to go directly from Denver to Orlando. If you remember your basic geography lessons of North America that is a pretty good hop, skip, and a jump across about half the United States. One of the more liberating things I have done in a some time is remove the word count from the top of the blog posts. Is that akin to admitting defeat. It probably really is akin to admitting defeat. Writing 1,000,000 words in the same year is totally possible. Writing 1,000,000 words on the blog in the same year might be a little bit more challenging than I had previously considered. By challenging I mean it is really hard and very time consuming. During the flight I’m going to be listening to the album Grinding Gears by Rabea Massaad. It is an extended play release that first came to my attention on YouTube and using the links at the bottom of that post I went out to Google Play Music and purchased the album in a digital form. It did not appear to be for sale in vinyl at this time. That pretty much meant digital was the way it was going to be for now.

The album contains 9 tracks and a has a release date during 2018. The entire thing is instrumental and does not include any audio clips or sampling of any kind. That makes it pretty ideal to write to in my humble opinion. After this album completed, then I’m going to queue up my Pandora application to run in offline mode. I still have some time left on my 30 day trial that includes 4 stations in offline mode. One of those stations happens to be my perennial favorite Warren Zevon Radio Pandora internet radio station. I’m pretty sure that is going to get some usage on this flight. For better or worse the next 3 hours of my time will be spent in this seat thinking and pondering life, the universe, and everything in between those two ideas. I’m sure somewhere in the middle of that I’ll spend just a few moments wondering about the intersection of technology and modernity.

We are about to take off on this journey. Things are moving along here. A certain amount of speed is just starting to build up and before you know it that speed on the ground will generate enough lift to send us along our way to Orlando, Florida. I’m wondering if when I finally get to my hotel a livestream might be possible tonight. I know it is technically possible, but the amount of energy required to host a livestream is sometimes more than is available. Today could end up being one of those days. Traveling this far sometimes takes it out of me. We will see how things end up. I brought my running shoes today could be the day that a little 10 kilometer run happens. Alternatively, it is also very possible that I will end up walking on a treadmill at the hotel. Getting outside and just running for the sake of running is not something that I have done in years. It has been a long time. Peppercorn the dog used to go on pretty long walks with me all over Colorado Springs. That was fun and exciting, but it has not happened in a long time. One of the best parts about a really long walk is just how much time you have to think as you take one more step along the journey.

Procrastination almost occurred a few moments ago. I tried to access the United private screening inflight entertainment options. All I managed to do was stare at a wonderful, “Additional software required,” message in the middle of the page. That is apparently not going to happen on this flight. It is probably a better option for me to sit and write during the flight. Sitting back and watching some type of nonsense on my Chromebook is probably not the best use of my time. Given that I’m not always the best decider of what my time should be spend on you can imagine that is a true declaration of intent. This flight is weirdly over lunch time and that is probably why I have been looking at the snack options. They have one with cheese and one with nuts apparently. The flight does appear to have a ton of turbulence today. I’m starting to think either flights these days are more and more turbulent or my tolerance for turbulence is decreasing. It could be possible that both arguments are in fact true.

On that series of Google searches just cost me like 10 minutes. It is amazing that I can sit here and surf the internet at 35,002 feet or 10,668 meters. Having access to wireless internet at this speed and height is rather amazing to begin with. I had meant to take a photograph of the airplane before everybody boarded, but that did not happen. Maybe I’ll be able to get a good photograph after we land. Right now the blog post has a theme and is loaded and scheduled, but no photograph has been added for the thumbnail just yet. Today we are going to fly over Disney World or near it or something. The captain of the airplane keeps talking about it. The folks up in the first class cabin got a real thorough briefing on the matter. I was sort of listening and handling a couple phone calls at the same time. I know that listening to two calls at the same time with one in each ear is not the best way to go about things. Most of the time when I am traveling people do not notice the duel calls unless I have to hold both phones at the same time and that makes it pretty obvious.

Somebody I’m sure somewhere has posted photographs making fun of my efforts to listen to multiple calls on the internet. That has to have happened by now. Ok —- I have set up a new challenge for myself in the next 30 days. Some of my current research on artificial intelligence is going to need to get collassed into a paper. I’m hoping to publish that paper on arXiv. That is going to require some effort. They have that platform gated with an endorsement requirement. I’m going to have to send somebody and email with the subject, “arXiv endorsement request from Nels Lindahl.” That is probably the harder part of the challenge here. Writing the actual paper is just going to be a matter of time and a small amount of effort. Figuring out how to get an endorsement is going to require a little bit more time and effort.

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