Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Day 22 the one where it snowed in Denver and I got my 4th NiceHash wallet payment

2018: Day 22 the one where it snowed in Denver and I got my 4th NiceHash wallet payment
Word count 54,311 + 3,001 or 57,312 of 1,000,000

Dear Reader,

The weather outside is already causing some cabin fever. You probably thought I was going to say frightful, but that was not going to happen. It is snowing here in Denver. Yesterday the folks took to the stores to stock up on food supplies. The grocery store was a madhouse. People needed to be ready. Today it is just constantly snowing outside a wet type of snow that is sticking to the trees. The thumbnail for the blog post today should give you an idea of what happened. Just note the amount of wet heavy snow that is sticking to the tree. That is generally a recipe for all sorts of problems. Trees are not really designed to hold that much wet and heavy snow. Branches break. That creates chaos. Seriously, it is hard to deal with for a large number of downed branches. That leads to all sorts of problems that just make life more complicated for people.

Beyond thinking about the weather. A fun and exciting milestone did occur today. Very early this morning my NiceHash wallet received a 4th transfer. This one was pretty decent at 0.00133244 BTC with a fee of 0.00002719 BTC. That equates to about $15.84 dollars at the current exchange rate for BTC to USD. You can just Google search, “0.00133244 BTC in USD,” to get the current value. Google has a nifty little calculator box that lets you do conversions in real time. That 4th transfer from NiceHash to my wallet allowed me to make my 2nd transfer to Coinbase. At current cryptocurrency mining speeds and values for my two cards using the NiceHash Miner v2.0.1.8 software I’m getting paid out ever 3 days by NiceHash and amassing enough BTC to transfer to Coinbase for free every 6 days. I know you are wondering how much BTC could I have amassed between January 10, 2018 and now…

2018-01-21 05:32:06 NiceHash Mining payment → 0.00133244 BTC
2018-01-18 04:27:55 NiceHash Mining payment → 0.00119401 BTC
2018-01-15 04:30:34 NiceHash Mining payment → 0.00105970 BTC
2018-01-13 04:51:00 NiceHash Mining payment → 0.00118327 BTC

That works out to 0.0047 BTC in my Coinbase wallet. You can probably tell that amount is nowhere near amassing a whole bitcoin. It would take a long time to mine a whole bitcoin. We are looking at just a fraction of bitcoin with two more decimal places to climb before even getting close to a whole bitcoin. My entire mining effort over the last 11 days has yielded about $55.62 worth of BTC or about $5.00 per day. My profitability could be better if I focused in on optimizing for a few cryptocurrency algorithms. It may not have been the smartest move to pair up a GTX 1060 6 gigabyte memory graphics card and a GTX 1060 3 gigabyte memory graphics card as my mining rig. You may recall I was going to use 3 cards before one of them suffered a physical device failure.

I have been on the hunt for another graphics card, but that is just not happening. Most of the places online are showing huge markups on NVIDIA graphics cards. The hunt is on for a 3rd card. We will see how that hunt ends up. NVIDIA is apparently encouraging retailers to sell to gamers and limit overall sales to a single person. That is rather interesting. Scarcity causes all kinds of problems. It seemed like a good idea minute or two ago to open my office window. We are getting between 4 and 8 inches of snow today in Denver. I’m using some of that winter weather to cool my graphics cards and reduce the overall temperature of my office. I might keep the window open for a few minutes. We will see how that goes. Captain Pickles the dog has already figured out the window is open and is waiting for something to bark at. Talk about laser focus on the task at hand. That dog loves looking out the window.

Topic 1: My favorite YouTuber creators (at this moment)

1. Lost LeBlanc
2. Rob Chapman
3. Sara Dietschy
4. Rabea Massaad
5. Nick from Trainer Tips

Those are the YouTube creators that show up in my daily feed. They are the people who create the videos that I watch on a regular basis. I really only watch a hand full of television shows. That means that YouTube is a major part of my daily routine. Outside of the X-Files, The Curse of Oak Island, and Top Chef nothing really draws me into wanting to watch television. We only have the one television so I have to really want to watch something to find the time. John Paul does watch The Curse of Oak Island with me on a regular basis. They are searching for buried treasure. That is enough to draw in a 5 year old.

Topic 2: Prebuilt mining machines are expensive

Some of these prebuilt cryptocurrency mining rigs are really expensive. Some of them have a higher cost than my first three cars combined. I know people are buying based on the speculative earning power, but some of these rigs cost over 10 thousand dollars. The prices are probably just going to get keep going up until graphics cards are not the prefered mining hardware. I’m assuming that the companies that make graphics card hardware have thought about how to make massive computing blocks that are better for mining. Right now two use cases are overlapping and driving up the price of graphics cards. Both gamers and miners are trying to use the same hardware. I bought my cards to use with TensorFlow and other deep learning applications.

Topic 3: Watching the Jacksonville Jaegers vs. New England Patriots

Today is a day of queso. We got some type of Tostitos medium heat queso blanco dip for the game. It came in a glass jar. I’m going to throw some jalapenos on top of it. So far the entire first quarter has been pretty low key during this AFC championship game. People spent a lot of time talking about Tom Brady’s throwing hand today. I spent a lot of time thinking about computer builds. The last time that I spent this much time working on a computer built it was when I upgraded to 4K on my workstation back in 2016. That worked out well enough. That computer is still running.

Topic 4: Picking the perfect computer case

I’m pretty sure that the Corsair Carbide Series Air 740 – High Airflow ATX cube case will be my next computer case. It might just replace my Lian Li case that my printer is sitting on top of in my office. I spent some time looking at modern Lian Li cube cases. Mine is over 10 years old and is by far the heaviest case I have ever owned or physically picked up. I’m probably going to retire my Lian Li cube at some point this year and build out another case. That purchase could happen at anytime.

Topic 5: The Vikings and the Eagles

Here we go again. This has been an interesting day of football. The NFC Championship game is not as competitive at the moment. My mind has been wondering during the game. Maybe my focus has been lacking today. We have spent almost the entire day in the house. We made one little trip outside to visit Chipotle for lunch. The city plow has just come through and it seemed liked a good time to run out and see the town. We got to see some snow on the group. Well snow was pretty much everywhere. Parts of the yard look like they got more than 8 inches. Other parts look like they got a lot less snow today.

I just realized we are on topic 5 today and just barely to the 1,500 word mark. Some of the topics brought up did not reach the point of exhaustion. I did not pick them up and shake out every last little bit of prose they could inspire. Naturally blaming the process would be a good move at this point, but it is my writing process. Now would be a good time to change subjects… Next week my goal is to schedule a haircut. It has been some time since my last haircut. Getting a haircut could not be a legitimate reason not to host my YouTube live stream. I could always wear a hat. Joni got me that sweet sweet Kansas City Royals at Kauffman stadium last year. The exact reason that I did not host a YouTube live stream today eludes me. Maybe the best answer is that I just did not feel like it today. Tomorrow could be the day that I make my triumphant return to YouTube. It is also possible that tomorrow is the day I manage to get a haircut. Time will tell and by the time tomorrow ends we will know for sure.

We are nearing the end of any chance of a Vikings come back victory today. Time is burning off the 4th quarter clock at what must seem like a rapid pace to fans from Minnesota. You can imagine that not very much happened today. Snow days are like that. I did not have the will to watch a ton of political coverage today. Watching two full NFL games happened. Charles Barkley seems awfully excited today. Charles already seems to be celebrating the win. On the field the game is getting chippy. That happens sometimes. Getting so close to the big game and falling so short I’m sure can be super frustrating.

Topic 6: Achieving writing zen

After writing 1,800 words this evening my mind is finally clear. I have reached a state of writing zen where this is not longer a pure stream of consciousness writing session. At this exact moment in time my mind is not being pulled in any direction. I’m at a complete and total state of peace. For better or worse is it like staring inaction in the face. I blinked and a couple minutes passed. Captain Pickles nosed the door open and just like that the trance was broken. From a state of total peace to a state of wondering what the puppy was going to chew on. That battle probably has at least another year brewing.

My Bose Qc35 headphones are charged. Right now they are delivering joyous Bluetooth driven audio from Pixel 2 XL phone. Apparently, I got lucky and the screen on mine works as designed. Some folks have complained about a blue shift or a blue tint on the screen. Either I just don’t see it and register it that way or my screen is a lucky screen. A screen built and delivered the way the engineers intended. Joni is still using a Pixel XL classic. We have both been pretty happy with the phones. Really it is the camera that drives that happiness both the Pixel XL and the Pixel 2 XL have outstanding cameras. We stopped carrying around our Nikon D3200. That pretty much means that we have to trust our phones to take high quality photos.

Strangely enough a couple weeks ago I did spend some time looking at mirrorless cameras and thought about buying one. Then I realized that carrying it around is also something that probably won’t happen. That is the problem with bigger cameras that use lenses and require a lot of effort. At some point, you might just decide the camera on your phone will do well enough and now that expensive piece of hardware rests on a shelf. I would try to sell it on eBay, but those two times that it got dropped make me hesitant to do that. One of those times was at Disney World in Orlando, Florida. You could hear the entire room of folks pause for a second and gasp as the camera hit the floor. People knew what the sound was and you could feel the empathy from a room full of strangers. It was an interesting moment in time. Obviously, it stuck with me that was a few years back and I can remember it vividly.

Right now I’m thinking about a wonderful sweet potato tikka masala they sell at a place called the Yak and the Yeti. Oddly enough none of the meal services will deliver that to my door. It may just be outside the delivery range. It feels like more and more delivery services exist these days. It used to be pizza and chinese food were the primary delivery option. Sure some pizza places also delivered wings or other random fried things. These days it seems like the number of delivery options has increased to the point where it is hard to sort through all of them. I used the Uber Eats server the other day. I really just curious about how it worked. I’m supposed to be focused on eating healthy plant based meals.

Maybe the rest of tonight will not be about achieving a state of writing zen. It may just be about letting go and writing as thoughts spring forward into my consciousness. I’m still wondering what happens in the last 2 hours of Blade Runner 2049. We pulled the disc out of the blu-ray player tonight. After all of the snow shoveling was done it was time for popcorn, hot cocoa, and the 2nd Harry Potter movie. That was only round one of the shoveling. It snowed a lot today. We had two rounds of shoveling. Our new shovel from Costco worked out very well. Someday maybe in an alternate reality we will have a snowblower. Maybe I’m waiting for a snowblower Roomba mashup that can just take care of the driveway in an autonomous way. Yeah I know that is probably a few years off, but I can hope that maybe Honda delivers me a snowblower robot in the next couple of years. It does not need to be artificial intelligence based or anything fancy like that. I would just like it to charge in the garage and clear snow at the appropriate times.

After a few quick Google search it does appear that yard robots are starting to appear. That might mean that sooner than later a robot will be removing snow from my driveway. That sounds wonderfully pleasant. Denver will keep having snow. I’m probably not going to go out and buy a snowblower. That probably means that day dreaming about snow removal robots is where we are going to end up this year. On the brighter side of things our new puppy Captain Pickles really loves the snow. We will see how long that lasts.

Switching back and forth between my Chromebook and Windows 10 has been really with Google Docs. I would bet that using my Android phone to access the documents would also work out well enough. I noticed tonight that under tools voice typing is a feature. Some of the more prolific authors have talked about using voice typing to really push things forward. I type pretty quickly, but I talk a lot faster than I type. That is probably true for the majority of folks. Tomorrow I plan on giving that voice typing feature a test drive. It might end up being my new writing method. Watching Jean Luc Picard talk to the ships computer to deliver a captain’s log is probably the primary reason I want to use voice typing. The productivity gain is secondary to the sheer joy of saying captain’s log and a stardate to my Chromebook. According to this random Star Trek The Next Generation calculator I found online the startdate today would be 71523.8 or perhaps more accurately, “Captain’s log stardate 71523.8.” That was pretty satisfying to type. Tomorrow just might be epic as I use the voice typing feature to deliver a world class blog post.

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

P.S. Today we got back on track and closed out a solid 3,000 words during the same day without having to dip into a postscript to save things. That was an exciting moment. Somehow it is probably Doc Hollywood’s fault. I did look to see if i they made a vinyl record with the soundtrack for the moment. It does not appear that they did. That would have been an interesting album to put on my shelf. You might be wondering how I ended up watching Doc Hollywood. The answer is pretty simple. For some reason the 1991 song “The One and Only” by Chesney Hawks got stuck in my head. It took me a little bit to recognize it and apparently my mind closely associated it with the movie. Tonight I found the album that song appears on and gave it a listen. I was curious if the rest of the album was similar to the song from the movie. It was not. I fell asleep about half way through the album. To be fair it is not really the type of music that holds my attention. That one song though gets stuck in my head. I’m already gearing up for using the Google Docs voice typing feature. I’m hoping all this hype I have built up in my head stands up to using the actual technology. I’m going going to try it out on both my Windows 10 computer and my Chromebook. One of them might be a clear winner.

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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