2018: Day 25 the one where I got my 5th NiceHash wallet payment
Word count 63,058 + 3,023 or 66,081 of 1,000,000

Dear Reader,

This whole cryptocurrency mining effort seems to be working out ok. We are moving right along toward my 100 day mining goal. Today I apparently did not drink enough water. Every day my desk is graced with a Nalgene made in the USA everyday 48 oz water bottle. Today however I have only worked my way down to the 32 oz water line. That means I’m going to be drinking a bunch of water during this writing sessions tonight. Drinking 68 oz of water per day seems like a good idea. At this point I’m able to remember to drink that 48 oz water bottle throughout the work day. It is a good start toward drinking 68 oz of water per day. It seems like a decent goal.

Very early this morning the folks over at NiceHash sent a 5th payment to my NiceHash wallet. That means that between January 13, 2018 and January 24, 2018 I have seen 5 payments over .001 BTC to my wallet. Every one of those payments is just a fraction of a bitcoin, but they do add up over time. I’m going to hold every one of these BTC payments until we hit 100 days of mining. That type of action would normally indicate that I believe the value of bitcoin will be increasing. Please don’t read that type of endorsement into my actions. I’m just doing it as part of a research study. A study that you get to read about every day as you enjoy my musings on a daily basis.

NiceHash wallet payments in reverse order:

2018-01-24 04:25:25 NiceHash Mining payment → 0.00125795 BTC
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

It takes 2 payments from NiceHash to have enough BTC to transfer for free from my NiceHash wallet to my Coinbase account. According to the dashboard my next payment from NiceHash will happen on or around January 27, 2018. You can probably recognize the pattern here that is happening from my mining efforts. About every 3 days NiceHash pays out some BTC. Every 6 days I’m able to transfer that BTC to Coinbase. You cannot sell BTC from the NiceHash wallet which means that only the BTC that makes it over to Coinbase can be sold for USD. You can buy mining power via NiceHash and you can be coins directly on the Coinbase exchange. Either way it all seems very interesting.

Back on January 10, 2018, Warren Buffett rebuked the value of bitcoin. Ever since that moment the already wild cryptocurrency ride has gotten a little bit wilder. None of Warren’s words have stopped hobbyist cryptocurrency miners from buying up just about every graphics card on the market that is capable of mining. Some of that I will admit is just people speculatively buying cards and reselling them at higher prices. I bought both of my graphics cards are reasonable market prices. The first one I purchased directly from NVIDIA online back in 2016. It was an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB Founders Edition for $299.00 online. The second one I picked up this year online from Newegg at a total of $323.73. It was a ASUS Dual series GeForce GTX 1060 DUAL-GTX1060-O3G 3GB graphics card. It cost me more than the NVIDIA founders edition graphics card I bought 2 years ago that has double the memory. Keep in mind that my graphics cards server 3 functions: deep learning, gaming, and mining.

I’m not a speculative graphics card investor. Apparently, I do enjoy watching YouTube videos about the strange mining rigs people have built out. That is mostly just a mix of curiosity and my out and out love of technology. People have spent thousands of dollars building these open air graphics card mining rigs. Some of them look very professional and some of them look highly suspect. My next computer build will have somewhere between 2 and 4 graphics cards. It will be either working on deep learning models or mining. That will be based on my needs at the time. That also assumes that the market for mining cryptocurrencies will continue to be profitable.

It is a strange market right now. A lot of speculation is occuring. NVIDIA is slowly trying to move from pascal to volta cards. That is going to disrupt things. Every other day it seems like the value of the major cryptocurrencies are fluctuating wildly. My best guess is that bitcoin is a bubble. Something like Kodakcoin has a value based on an actual work product. I think legitimate valuable use cases exist for blockchain as a technology. This is an example where the early uses of a technology are probably different from the end state. Some of the blockchain methods that produce smaller tailing efforts or more coins might just win out. It is hard to imagine that 80% of all bitcoins that are ever going to be mined have been mined already.

Topic 1: Pure reflection

With a decent 1,000 word vignette to start this blog post things are trending in the right direction. Yesterday things did not go as well, but that is going to happen. Things pop up. Life happens. The journey toward writing 1,000,000 words in the same year is going to see some ups and down. I knew that was going to happen. I’m thinking about dedicating an entire month to writing pure fiction. That could happen. It would be very interesting to say the least. Being a reflective practitioner can be useful. I like to take the time to really think about things in a deep and meaningful way.

Topic 2: Grilling in January

For some inexplicable reason John Paul wanted a hot dog grilled outside yesterday. We had five inches of snow on the grill. Grilling using our weber grill was interesting. I made this wild pinto and habanero veggie burger and a few hot dogs. It was cold outside and the grill did not exactly heat the food very well. That is probably a good reason to avoid grilling outside during the month of January. The primary reason was probably the snow. It was everywhere. I could have probably done a better job of explaining this topic. I’ll give it another try here and see if my prose game can be kicked up a notch.

Frozen tundra was not enough to stop me from grilling last night. Everything outside was covered in a few inches of snow from Sunday. Parts of the yard received over 8 inches of snow. That should have been enough to stop my grilling extravaganza. John Paul was picking dinner. That dinner had to be grilled hot dogs. Oven hot dogs were not going to satisfy the request. My vegetarian dietary concerns were not aligned with that. A quick trip to Whole Foods helped me acquire some Engine 2 plant strong pinto habanero plant burgers. They came three to a package and that seemed to work out well enough.

I ventured outside to find the chimney starter for the coals. Things went ok after a bit of effort to shake the snow off of the chimney starter. The charcoal seemed to ignite ok and things were off to a good start. Our Weber charcoal grill is decently sized. It works well enough. It was covered in at least 5 inches of snow. Some that had turned into ice. After getting the coals going and putting the lid back on the grill I watched the ice melt off the kettle. The temperature got up to about 350 degrees and the hot dogs and plant burgers were put on the grill.

I’m sure the entire cooking process was highly commercial to anybody that witnessed it. The sun was going down and and I had to just sort of wing it. The plant based burgers from Engine 2 did not have any grilling instructions. They just got placed on the edge and they cooked for a few minutes. Only one time during the entire process did my feet leave the ground and I tumbled over in the snow. Fortunately I did not hit my head on the ice and only bruised my pride a little bit. Snow got everywhere. In my pockets, shoes, and all over my coat. I got back up and managed to complete cooking the meal. That was pretty much how things ended up. We had dinner it was exciting.

That second attempt to explain this topic was better than the first, but it could have been written better. One of the joys of writing every day is thinking about what it takes to produce rock solid epic and awesome prose regardless of subject matter. You have to be able to take any topic and tell a story. That story has to be compelling and epic. From nothing something has to spring forward and that is the true art of storytelling.

Topic 3: Clarity of purpose

Writing to the point of exhausting the mind of everything that needs to be said at the moment is strangely liberating and at the same time maybe just the beginning. One of the things that seems to be becoming more and more true is that we do not have the time to have real conversations anymore. Either in the workplace of in our personal lives. The amount of time we have to engage in real and complete conversations is just limited. Very few conversations I have on a regular basis last longer than 15 minutes. This writing session is going to take up about 2 hours of time. That is longer than I spent talking to any one person in a consecutive interval this year. That might be a sad commentary on my interpersonal communication skills or maybe it is an astute observation about our modern life and times. It could go either way. I’m going to assume that it was a solid observation and keep moving forward to break it down into pieces.

Writing in a meaningful way is about having a solid clarity of purpose. That is about knowing where you are and where you are going as you move forward along the way. Some of that is about process and some of it is just about having purpose. Maybe that is easier to write about than to achieve.

Topic 4: Charging the ASUS C101P Chromebook

The USB Type-C charging on my new ASUS Flip Chromebook C101P is fantastic. It is much better than that proprietary charging cable on my last model. The one thing I have noticed is that the right bottom corner toward the edge gets warm during the charging process. It is noticeable. It is probably warmer than it should be. Batteries keep getting bigger. Our ability to charge them keeps getting faster. A few examples exist of where that has gone horribly wrong. I’m over a month into using this device and it seems to very well made. My only real issue with the device is why it has a solid inch of bezel around the whole screen. They keyboard is usable and at times I even kind of like it. Travel between keystroke and input is enough and I have been using it for a couple of hours per day. I do feel like the screen could have been much bigger within the same form factor. This much bezel is just a ridiculous waste of space. I do plan on writing a review at some point with all the pros and cons of the device. This charging heat issue will remain on the watch list.

Topic 5: Today’s fish thumbnail

Yeah —- I have no real excuses for the selection of today’s picture. I think it is a picture of a goldfish that I took. It is not even the best picture that was taken during our trip to the Denver Downtown Aquarium. It did make the cut for thumbnails. I realized that all of these photos are pooling under my Twitter feed. Apparently, at this moment in time I have 610 tweets with a photo or video attached to it. That seems like a good number, but I have no idea how that happened. Most of that is related to YouTube videos and the automatic thumbnails that are created as a part of that whole process. Some of them are rather terrible. I’m sure they use some type of interestingness filter and maybe some of my videos do not have that much dynamic content so the number of thumbnails will always be limited. For some reason it appears the algorithm is a big fan of when I make extreme arm motions. It could be worse I guess. They could all be photos of me with my eyes closed or caught mid sneeze or something.

Wait we lost focus for a second in that last paragraph. We are supposed to be writing about picture I randomly attached to this blog post. However, now that we have talked about it and debated the relative value of to the post I’m wondering if the internal link went from being extra topical to being inherently germaine. It could go either way I guess. Meta content could be presumed to be seperate from the core blog post and therefore make the goldfish separate from the post without any real reason for being here today as part of the post. Maybe even this meta discussion of the blog post during the blog post can open the door to the goldfish being a valuable part of the post. Either way it was just a photo and now it is a thumbnail.

Topic 6: Rounding things out

We have covered a few topics tonight. Some of them were meaningful and some of them were about goldfish. This whole writing journey is about figuring things out. That means we are going to look at and explore topics that capture my attention. That is how things show up here and how they end up receiving consideration. I just check bitcoin prices on the Coinbase dashboard. Maybe being entertained by the drama associated with cryptocurrency has pulled me into that world. No real reason exists for me to want to know if the price went up or down. Even the very small amount of a bitcoin that I have in my wallet is not valuable enough to warrant constant supervision. My time is worth far more than that, but here we are and I’m still watching the prices. Maybe it is the fear of missing out on either the bubble collapsing or values exploding keeps pulling my attention back to where the market is going.

This last little bit of typing for the night should be in rhythm. Each of these keystrokes needs to follow the same type of pattern and rhythm that happens when writing at a good clip. I need to just ignore the red underlines and keep writing for a few minutes. Maybe coming back to them in bulk vs. one at a time will help my writing become a little bit more fluid. It will help me avoid so many starts and stops. Those are the parts of this whole process that make it harder to get going. Maybe it would be a better strategy to just increase my accuracy rating to the point where those red squiggles just do not show up at all during my writing sessions. That is probably a good goal to aspire to you on a regular basis. Sitting down and just writing rock solid prose from start to finish with no real need to edit is something to aspire to achieving on a regular basis. We will see if over the course of writing 3,000 words per day that is something that naturally evolves out of writing or if it is something that never really happens.

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

P.S. Getting into the groove and writing seems to happen in spurts. Some parts of this writing journey feel highly forced. Other parts of it are liberating or at least intellectually stimulating. That has to in some way be liberating. Today I am going to close this blog post out at over 3,000 words and get back on track. I need to close things out before falling asleep. Yesterday was not the best model for moving forward. I think pretty much mid sentence the Chromebook got shut and sleeping commenced. That is pretty much the way ever night concludes these days. This is the path that I elected to walk down. This journey was careful weighted and examined. I even wrote that really inspiring open letter about writing 1,000,000 words during the same year. It seemed like a great idea at the time. Like any really great idea it just jumps out at you in a kind of blatant way. Devoting 2 hours per day to writing was a major commitment. That two hours per day could have gone to a wide variety of things. At this point in time, I think that this two hour time commitment is worth it. I mean it is not like going to see Pearl Jam play Wrigley worth it, but it seems to have its own merits. Maybe tomorrow I will watch Pearl Jam 20 on blu-ray disc. That was a great film. That is a film that I have not seen in some time. I remember really enjoying it and maybe that joy will be good to revisit tomorrow.

Upcoming 2018 Writing Topics:

— Write an open letter for students on the first day of college
— 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.