Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Day 21 the one where we visited the Denver Aquarium

2018: Day 21 the one where we visited the Denver Aquarium
Word count 51,296 + 3,015 or 54,311 of 1,000,000

Dear Reader,

Today was the day we visited the Denver Downtown Aquarium. It is located downtown near the NFL stadium formerly known as Sports Authority Field at Mile High. Apparently, this year is the year that the Denver Broncos stadium will be getting a new name. You might be aware of the closure and liquidation of Sports Authority corporation back in 2016. None of that really impacts the Denver Downtown Aquarium, but it is interesting. We got a Groupon the other day that included 4 tickets and $50 toward a meal. John Paul did not really slowly and methodically navigate the aquarium. Our visit took about an hour and ten minutes to navigate the aquarium part. We probably should have went back through the aquarium part again at the end of our meal, but that did not happen. Kaylee was pretty tired.

Right before sitting down to write these inspired words I was eating some J. Luehders vegan soft gummy candy. The package says they were fruity flowers flavored. Overall they were a lot more tasty than I expected. After lunch today at the aquarium I needed a little pick me up. Today for lunch I had ordered an appetizer for lunch. That seemed like a solid decision. It was going to be a wonderful Bruschetta. The menu noted that it was a mix of roma tomatoes, mozzarella cheese, red onions, balsamic reduction, olive oil, basil, and some toasted baguettes. The baguettes were really pretty decent, but the rest of the ingredients were mixed into a 4 inch high tower. You might be wondering why they shaped the bruschetta topping into what looked like a highball glass that was turned upside down. Compressing it into that shape and compressing it may have limited the potential for a crisp fresh taste. For more of my epicurean adventures you can check out my Instagram feed.

Topic 1: Watching the Jayhawks

Tonight the University of Kansas Jayhawks are playing a basketball game against the Baylor Bears on ESPN at Allen Fieldhouse. That was a lot of content in one sentence. I probably could have broken that down a little bit better. We have plenty of time to work on that type of writing throughout the rest of the year. This game has been closer than I expected. Within the first half the Jayhawks were not able to really pull away from the Bears. I’m not a fan of the extreme yellow color that Baylor has chosen to use. It is visual striking and distracting. This uniform and shoes combination is much better than the ones they have had in the past.

This second half is giving me some anxiety. Baylor is really battling back and keeping this game close. We watch a lot of basketball. You are probably getting a feel for just how much basketball we watch. Watching live sports is probably the best use case for our cable television subscription. I’m not really aware of a method to stream every University of Kansas basketball game. That subscription would probably allow me to just invest in some gigabit internet and move on from cable television. We pay for a lot of channels every month. Some of the channels could disappear and I would never know. I basically assume they have content and are real channels. No actual basis for that leap of faith exists. Maybe it would be worth an hour of my time to flip through every channel we pay for. It is possible that one of these channels might be life changing. On the other hand it may also be possible that the cable television subscription model is ridiculous. Ok —- I have thought about it for a few seconds and concluded that the model of bundling channels is just ridiculous. Executives built this mess and have not managed to work beyond this brand of ridiculously tomfoolery even in the face of incredible pressure from online streaming services.

We pay for Netflix. My X1 cable box is even capable of playing Netflix shows or cable shows. It really is pretty well integrated. Tonight however none of that matters. We need to watch the 2nd hour of Blade Runner 2049. The first hour was pretty decent. I’m ready to watch the 2nd hour. This game is still really close and we are closing on 5 minutes left. Ughhh… Baylor has the first lead of the night. This team has been creating anxiety for Jayhawk fans throughout the year. The ending of this game was wacky. That happens. This is an example of where having a 4K feed would have been much better.
Topic 2: Writing at a slow pace tonight

This flu that has been going around may be wiping me out this weekend. Something has zapped out my energy level. It may just be from a lack of sleep. Kaylee has had the flu and that has disrupted our household. Today I spent a ton of to time watching YouTube videos about computer cases. Some of them were really big computer cases like the Thermaltake Core W200 super tower chassis. It is a wickedly large computer case. My Storm Stryker is a full tower case. It has the capacity to do pretty much anything you need to do. This new class of super tower cases are pretty epic. They have room for wild liquid cooling and massive fan assemblies. Some of them are designed to allow two power supplies and motherboards. Those YouTube videos are pretty much a rabbit hole that I went down for like two hours this afternoon. Kaylee was napping and I should have been writing, but that just did not happen.

My prose today has not been as fluid. Things have developed slower and been a little forced. Powering through 3,000 words per day is about overcoming the slow periods. It has to be about finding a way to move past the roadblocks, obstacles, and pitfalls. Maybe that is the essence of my plan to alway stay positive. For those of you who have seen my YouTube videos you know that I focus on staying positive at all times. Throughout these first three weeks of my writing endeavor I have avoided writing about my focus on staying positive. One of these days I’m going to spend an entire day hammering out my leadership philosophy and explain why I focus on staying positive.

Topic 3: Watching Doc Hollywood

Michael J. Fox has made a variety of interesting movies. Tonight I elected to watch Doc Hollywood or at least a decent amount of it before we flip over to Blade Runner 2049. I think at one point I owned the movie on DVD, but it may have been lost a long time ago. At one point all of my movies got put into a binder and that sort of destroyed them. Those binders just seem to apply thousands of tiny little micro scratches to the discs every time they are pulled in and out. That is my experience with them anyway. The first and second generations of disc binders just ended up destroying things. Now I keep the ones I have in the case. That method requires more space, but it seems to be a better long term storage option.
Topic 4: Rounding out the night

It took a few nights, but I’m about finished with “The 100 Greatest 90’s Alternative Songs” playlist. Tonight I am closing out from 87 to 100. Listening to music and writing is kinda my thing. You may have noticed that. I have written more than 50,000 words on this new ASUS Flip Chromebook model C101P. Based on my initial observations I think the keyboard might just make it to 1,000,000 words this year. That is probably a pretty good number of keystrokes for a laptop keyboard. I was not able to figure out through a quick Google search how many keystrokes a keyboard is built to accomplish.

I’m trying to figure out what album will be next after that playlist ends. Maybe it will automatically suggest something new. It could end up being a Warren Zevon kind of night. That happens more than you might imagine. Tonight has really been a slow writing night. My rate of prose generation has been subpar. Even with two shots of espresso and some type of raspberry cookie my writing productivity did not improve. Even my write of typing has been slower today. Maybe rounding out three weeks of writing at 3,000 words per day is a some kind of barrier I have not encountered before. Maybe I’m about to get my second wind and it will carry me to the finish line. A quick check of the originality index of my prose would probably quickly identify that each day these words are hot off the press. They are newly minted prose. It always pleases me when something that I write is searched on Google with zero results. Sometimes I search for a sentence or a paragraph to see if anything pops up.

Writing brand new and original prose is really a decent achievement. People are building natural language processing AI that can spit out whole novels or books. My hope would be that my degree of originality still outpaces those artificial efforts. I suppose at some point that may not hold true and that machine generated prose will defeat my efforts in a head to head battle. Chances are that the machine will produce prose at a much faster rate. My typing generally yields my 3,000 words in about 2 hours of work. Some of that is more efficient than other parts, but the magic happens in those two hours. Maybe a rock solid AI could spit out some prose within a matter of seconds. That within itself is a scary thought. I have reached a level of productivity where I no longer have time to 100% proofread my work anymore. That would probably not be the case for an AI system. It could probably call a proofreading subroutine or even an entirely different system to edit and revise. That could even be built into the process and editing could be a part of the native workflow.

That last paragraph was not the most inspiring of passages. Art is art. I write for myself. My writing efforts are my primary form of self-expression. That makes my art my art. Writing 1,000,000 words in the same year is about self-reflection and moving beyond the things that limit possibilities. Worrying about future competition from artificial intelligence is just not worth it at the moment. That phrasing would probably be more meaningful if the last few paragraphs were not in direct contradiction of that statement. This is my blog and I’ll must and move on if I want. Welcome to the blog version of intellectual thunderdome. It is nowhere near as dangerous as the original. Really it is not even remotely the same thing. These last 8 songs are really dragging on. The top half of the playlist was much better than the second half without question. That is probably not all that surprising of a thing to say.

Kaylee is almost asleep it may be time to watch Blade Runner 2049 shortly. That blu-ray has been waiting in the Xbox One S all day. At some point, I’m going to need to have a few days that run over 3,000 words to make up for a few of the days where I fell behind. No day has been missed entirely, but my average word count per day is less than 3,000 words per day and that has to improve. The only way to make that happen is to start exceeding the minimum threshold. Intellectually I know that I just have to average more than 2,740 words per day to hit 1,000,000 words. That makes eeking out those last few words even more challenging. I have to make up some ground to offset sick days and other lost days. I know that is true and that it has to be accounted for. Apparently, that is not enough on its own to drive me forward to achieving the goal.

Topic 5: Brade Runner 2049 Night 2

I just spent some time wondering if configuring my NiceHash Miner software v2.0.1.8 to only has a specific algorithm could increase profitability. Right now it bounces around to about 6 different mining pools using different algorithms. All that hopping around cannot be the most efficient method to go about things. Speaking of methods that are not all that efficient taking 3 nights to watch Blade Runner 2049 is perhaps questionable. I don’t really see a way around it.

Well it does not appear that movie night is happening.

My Bose Qc35 headphones have run of of charge. They are now charging and of no use to me for the rest of the night.

That was pretty much all that happened. I mused about people building 19 GPU mining rigs using the ASUS B250 Mining Expert motherboard. Based on a quick search of YouTube it does seems like people really are hooking 19 PCIe slots GPU risers into this motherboard for some epic mining. My mind cannot fathom just how much heat this one setup would generate. Just the two graphics cards running down by my feet under my desk in my Storm Stryker case put off enough heat to make my office feel warm. 19 of them would make things very interesting. Like tropical heat wave interesting.

Joni is mildly concerned about the amount of time I spent looking at mining rigs on YouTube, but it is a combination of research and entertainment. The odds of me spending $10,000.00 on building a sweet sweet mining rig are very low. Seriously, that is probably not going to happen. The dogs have better odds of getting the gold plated dog bowl they always wanted. I just find the whole thing wildly entertaining and it doesn’t really cost anything to watch YouTube videos. People sharing their prize mining rigs is really one of the best use cases for YouTube. It brings content sharing to the people and allows a community of folks interesting in mining to come together from all over the world. Make no mistake about it folks from all over the world appear to be mining. I watched several videos that were not in English yesterday.

Dr. Nels Lindahl
Broomfield, Colorado
Written on my Storm Stryker custom build PC and my ASUS Flip Chromebook C101P using Google Docs

P.S. Well at least we crossed the 2,500 word barrier before the postscript. At this point each day I’m running behind by a few words. This script was written the next morning and while it is epic and full of transcendent prose that brings joy to the world it should have been written yesterday. That is how it goes apparently. Writing 3,000 word sprints in a single shot seems to elude me. Maybe after a few more days of practice things will improve in week four of the journey. My interests in mining and understanding cryptocurrency is really picking up recently. The amount of content related to that subject I’m consuming is hitting a record peak. That is both good and bad. I have spent the last year really ramping up on artificial intelligence knowledge.

I’m going to dig into this Learning TensorFlow book shortly using the Google research Collaboratory online VMs. That will let me keep mining on my main machine while I unlock the secrets to machine learning, deep learning, and one day artificial intelligence over on some servers Google is powering I’m assuming with a renewable energy source. That is an assumption on my part, but I think I remember reading something about that. On sec. Let me check. Nope that was accurate. Google is purchasing enough renewable energy to match the consumption of its data centers. They even have a web page setup devoted to sharing this knowledge Google → About → Data Centers → Renewable. That seems like a decent investment number.

We are rounding out the last words for this blog post. I have given up on using the word weblog in posts and have just switched to blog. Go figure it seems easier. Things change and that is one of those things that changed. My Nespresso Lungo pod was extra tasty this morning. It brought joy to my world. That is really the reason that machine is my favorite espresso making device so far. I’m having trouble picking music to write to this morning. That does not happen very often. Most of the time picking out an album to listen to is the easiest part of my day. Today was not one of those days. That may mean it is time to break out some classic Eric Clapton albums and swee where we end up. I started at the very beginning of the Eric Clapton solo album discography and began searching eBay. You can get some seriously lower priced classic Clapton if you are not overly concerned with how the sleeve looks. I just started searching down the list and picked up the first few and have been working my way down the list. I’m sure at some point I’ll find somebody selling a lot of the albums, but that hasn’t happened yet.

Now my thoughts have wandered off toward the next blog post. That is ok. We have just about reached 3,000 words for this blog post. It is time to put a bow on this one and call it a day.

Upcoming 2018 Writing Topics:

— Some thoughts on my sports trading card collection
— A complete ranking of the hot sauces that I have tried
— A post about my top ten favorite science fiction television shows
— Recap of all the video camera equipment I have owned
— All the promise and failures of my first Sony camcorder
— That one with a roadtrip to Florida
— Applied AI: A use case based exploration
— My ode to minor league hockey
— Progress within general AI vs. specialized use cases
— My review of the ASUS C101P Chromebook
— On leadership and the modern workplace
— The best way to archive digital content

Feel free to leave topic suggestions in the comment section.


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