2018: Day 28 the one with Denver Nuggets, Butterflies, and my 6th NiceHash miner payment
Word count 72,117 + 3,011 or 75,128 of 1,000,000
Dear Reader,
Get some espresso. Check. Consume that espreso and start the day. Check. Facing a questionable parth forward to writing success tonight is going to be about sprinting to 3,000 words. Between visiting the Butterfly Pavilion all morning for a birthday party and watching an entire Denver Nuggets game today was packed with out of the house adventure. Maybe we should just start with the basic themes that are fueling my writing this year and then try to dig deep for some thoughtful words to close today out. That sounds like a good method to move forward at the moment. The time to write is now. This written session will be all about catching up and breaking through an obstacles or barriers that might be slowing me down.
First up just might be an update on where things stand based on my 100 day cryptocurrency mining marathon. Earlier today all of my cryptocurrency mining efforts yielded a 6th NiceHash wallet payment. My computer has been running the NiceHash Miner software v2.0.1.9 all day every day with two GTX 1060 graphics cards. That resulted in a payment very early this morning of 0.00120973 BTC with a fee of 0.00002469 BTC. That is about $13.78 in USD. My journey toward mining cryptocurrency for 100 straight days continues. That pretty much means that we will be mining from Monday, January 1, 2018, until Wednesday, April 11, 2018. During that time frame every two payments from NiceHash I’m able to transfer funds for free to the Coinbase wallet. Today I ended up with a total of 0.0072 BTC in my Coinbase wallet. That works out to about $82.31 in USD. That number fluctuates rapidly throughout the day. My mining efforts so far are pushing closer and closer to paying off my graphics card purchase.
NiceHash wallet payments in reverse order:
6. 2018-01-27 04:51:21 NiceHash Mining payment → 0.00120973 BTC
5. 2018-01-24 04:25:25 NiceHash Mining payment → 0.00125795 BTC
4. 2018-01-21 05:32:06 NiceHash Mining payment → 0.00133244 BTC
3. 2018-01-18 04:27:55 NiceHash Mining payment → 0.00119401 BTC
2. 2018-01-15 04:30:34 NiceHash Mining payment → 0.00105970 BTC
1. 2018-01-13 04:51:00 NiceHash Mining payment → 0.00118327 BTC
At this point adding an NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti graphics card to my computer case would be the best option to really kick up my mining efforts. Unfortunately, the prices of those cards have gone up so much that it does not really make sense to add one for 100 days of mining. It would take a lot longer than 100 days to mine enough using NiceHash Miner to recoup the costs. Assuming that the the NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti fully optimized could make about 6 dollars per day and cost about $1,000.00 it would take about 166.66 (decimal repeating of course) days to make back the investment on a pure cash basis. That is not really all that bad all things considered, but it is longer than my timeframe. I’m going to sit back and wait for some sweet NVIDIA Volta or Ampere architecture cards to start rolling out into the wild. You can probably imagine that over the course of the next few weeks I’ll be trying to learn more about the graphics cards that NVIDIA is going to be producing in 2018. The Pascal architecture was an epic leap forward that really did change the landscape of computer graphics. That type of achievement leaves people asking what will be next. People are curious about that from three different perspectives. First, gamers interested in VR, 4K, or just super immersive displays. Second, people driving deep learning forward are hungry for more and more CUDA cores to drive processing forward in new and interesting ways. Third, the increasingly wild wild west of cryptocurrency miners is always looking for the next great technology to increase profitability.
Topic 0: A Kevin Rose podcast
Thanks to the power of a Google Play podcast subscription I have been listening to Block Zero a podcast about cryptocurrency from Kevin Rose. Without hesitation I can say that Kevin has been contributing to my general entertainment for over a decade. These first three podcasts for Block Zero have been really good. The first episode in the series went down a general macroeconomic rabbit hole that was super interesting and oddly technical. It was really interesting to listen to a very engaging conversation about the future of blockchain and just what the idealized version of the technology could do within the broader context of global economies. Each of these podcasts is probably too involved in technological discussions to truly pull in a general audience, but I appreciated them. I guess my note on this one would be a thank you to Kevin Rose for putting this podcast together. Maybe I will figure out how to send Kevin Rose a thank you tweet later on today. I’m not sure if this humble blog is something that draws the attention of Kevin on a daily basis. Maybe Twitter is not the right platform either, but hey it won’t hurt anything to give it a try.
Topic 1: Top Chef Colorado S15 Ep6
It seemed like a good idea it to put on Top Chef Colorado Season 15 episode 6 during naptime at the house. That did not seem to help my writing progress. Today was one of those days that I got sucked into watching the show instead of writing. It turns out that was a questionable choice based on my time management today. Both Joni and I have been rooting for Brother Luck on Top Chef this year. We were patrons of the Craftwood Inn back in Colorado Springs back when Brother Luck was the chef. The episode today was just maddening to watch. I probably should have just spent that entire hour head down writing. That would have helped out my word count. Trying to circle back and write 3,000 words after attending a Denver Nuggets game that started at 7:00 PM on a Saturday night might not have been my best effort at decision making.
Topic 2: Denver Nuggets and Dallas Mavericks
Gates opened at 6:00 PM for the game. We left the house right after 5:30 PM. That gave us enough time to get gasoline and make our way to the Pepsi Center. Traffic was hit or miss just like any journey down I-25. It is a highway listed on the map and it does have all sorts of speed ups and slow downs. Congestion and just out and out poor design have plagued travels for years. Things never really go smoothly on that road. Bottlenecking at on ramps and just general problems happen all the time. Getting to the game on time worked out well enough. We were able to park right in the first lot off Speer. They call it Toyota something. We ended up parking in the second row of cars facing the main entrance road for the Pepsi Center. It was very easy to part and ultimately very easy to get back out of the parking lot. The only really befuddling thing that happened was related to the price of parking. It was $20 cash to park in that lot or $15 if you paid by credit card. That seemed like a scam of some sort, but the printed signs said the same thing. If it was a scam, then they were all in on it. I checked Twitter and nobody else seems to be worried about it.
After arriving and getting parked we ended up being able to walk across the street and stand in line for about 5 minutes before the doors opened at 6:00 PM. Things were going well and we were on our way to our seats. Our seats were just 7 rows back in kind of a corner area to right of a basket. It was super easy for John to be able to really watch the game up close. Essentially we were right next to the television cameras. I’m sure they were really expensive and sadly only HD ready. They were not even filming the game in stunning 4K resolution. That has to change at some point. A major leap in the technology infrastructure surrounding filming live sporting events probably has to change. Those courtside cameras and the cabling, internet pipe, and video editing and processing equipment will have to be upgraded to support 4K content.
This item needs to be addressed, but it did not really upset me at the time. It just sort of grossed me out. John dropped a hot dog on the ground. It resulted in having to make a hard call on what exactly to do with it. It would have been pretty easy to let the kid eat a hot dog off the Pepsi Center floor. Alternatively, it would have been an option to rip my slice of pizza in half and call it good. Obviously, I ripped my slice of Marco’s pizza in half and we abandoned the hot dog. It was one of those things were the hot dog made it from the concessions stand all the way down the steps to our seats. In the process of trying to sit down and add ketchup from packets to the hot dog it just sort of rolled out of the tray and onto the floor. I actually became aware of it from the folks walking by saying “Oh no” and muttering. These things happen I guess.
National Basketball Association games are just better in person. Things seem to move faster. You can really see the pace of play. Something is always happening. They pretty much throw t-shirts or other things into the stands throughout the night. Games are managed really well and things are entertaining. John Paul made it through the entire game. 48 minutes of basketball were viewed. The Nuggets won the game with a defensive stand. All and all things went pretty well. I think the game turned out to be a great birthday present. We even got a Denver Nuggets knit hat for $5 at the start of the game. I think we also got a 1990’s Nuggets poster of some sort. I’m not entirely sure what it was we did not unroll it. We also got an XL Denver Nuggets shirt during one of the 3 point basket celebrations. The person sitting in front of us with a Denver Nuggets Faried 35 jersey on snatched the shirt out of the air one handed and in one fluid motion handed it to John.
Topic 3: Rounding out the day
Without a solid opening vignette yesterday and some poor planning we are at about 2,000 words for the day. I wrote until falling asleep. My best effort was not good enough to bring success to this writing endeavor for the day. My goal went unfulfilled. That is problematic. Right now we are eating into my one day buffer. We have talked about it a little bit before, but I try to finish up the blog post for the next day about 24 hours ahead of posting schedule. That gives me enough buffer room to keep on moving and have some pauses in the whole process. It also gives me enough room to catch up if something goes wrong within my writing schedule. That is what happened this weekend. Right now these words being written really early in the morning should be for tomorrow not today. That pretty much means that throughout Sunday I will be trying to play catch up. It is not that bad really. Today is a day where i just need to produce over 4,000 words to close out the week on a positive note.
I just uploaded 7 photos from the game last night to my blogging software media folder. That means that throughout the week you will get to see some wild and exciting photographs of live NBA action or maybe just photos of the court. That is good news on the thumbnail front. Either I will captures something better this week or I already have it covered. You would be surprised at how much capturing a good thumbnail weights on me throughout the day. Some days I just do not travel around very much. You have to really focus in on taking good photographs when you are out and about to have unique and interesting thumbnails. The only place you would really see them all in chronological order would be on Twitter. It saves all the media from my tweets in one general area. Each blog post contains the photos, but they do not get saved as a gallery anywhere on my website. Pretty soon I will have amassed 31 photos for the month of January. I do not think they will be compiled into a coffee table book of epic photographic artwork.
This blog post for today might just come up short. Writing at this daily pace is supposed to force me to dig deeper and cover topics more fully. That does seem to be happening. I am starting to really move beyond being purely word economic as a writer and provide better coverage of content. Expanding coverage and really thinking about the topics being covered helps fill out all of the supporting details or explore related reasoning. On a side note, I have noticed that my typing this morning is drawing more and more red squiggles from Google Docs. That pretty indicates that I am tired. Fully booted up and well rested my typing is pretty spot on. When I get tired I start leaving out words from sentences and letters from words. The general idea and intent of the expressence are their, but the utterance itself lacks grammatical fortitude.
Pancakes just happened. That means that this catch up writing session has just extended past the early hours of the morning into just the morning. Today I gave some vegetarian hot and spicy patties a try. They were pretty good. I have been eating the maple version with my pancakes. I just switched out my music from industrial rock to the top songs from Halestorm. I had to ask the internet what category of rock Halestorm the band falls into. Apparently if American hard rock was a category they would be the epitome of that category. Otherwise they are probably considered to be hard rock. I am certain that they are not an industrial rock band.
Topic 4: That last effort to close things out
Things are alive in the house by now. Between the wildness of 2 dogs and 2 kids things could be classified between running amuck and outright chaos. That happens. I’m about to go fill up my 48 ounce Nalgene with water for the day. That is pretty much the official start of my day. It lets me know just how much water is on tap and that things are moving right along. Today was a day that started with music vs. listening to the news. Listening to the news this year has been an interesting endeavor. My honest belief is that I could do a better job moderating a news cast than most of the anchors that allow people to just talk over each other in an endless string of self serving sound bytes. That type of surface level conversation compresses the learning potential of the news and creates an echo chamber of political edges that ignore the general will of the people. People just want to know what is going on in the world around them. They want to know if the things that are going on are going to impact them in a positive or negative way. Most of the politics surrounding everything else is more complex than a series of sound bytes is ever going to be able to cover. Seriously, covering things in a meaningful way would take a lot more time than what even the 24 hour news channels devote to anything. It probably has to do with the nature of how news is consumed in single servings at random times. Building up a ton of knowledge about a topic through deep and meaningful conversation requires time. Single serving consumption of major news events with a few minutes here and a few minutes there will never thread the needle to understanding of complex issues. So we have that communication problem to overcome.
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 has hands down been a day of playing catch up. This has been a busy weekend. That happens from time to time. In this household it is going to happen at least twice a year on birthday weekends. Figuring out how to best manage the challenge of writing 3,000 words a day and not dropping any other balls is really difficult. That might just sound like hyperbole, but it is really just literal prose. Keeping up with my 1,000,000 words in a year challenge is going to require a huge time commitment, but it really should not stand in the way of general family merriment. Oops, I forgot to fill up that water bottle. I’ll be right back…
I’m back to round out those last 50 words necessary to push this post up and over the 3,000 word threshold. Those words will be written one word at a time with a positive attitude focused on what can be done and what is possible as this day starts to kick into high gear. Ok —- we are about to hit 3,000 words and be caught up just in time to start working on another 3,000 words for today.
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.
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