Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Day 30 the one with some Kansas basketball and some writing goals

2018: Day 30 the one with some Kansas basketball and some writing goals
Word count 78,137 + 3,007 or 81,144 of 1,000,000
Words behind goal: 8,856 (February goal will be 3,317 words per day)

Dear Reader,

This missive of consciousness will be streaming to you a little bit later in the day than expected. Last night I shutdown my ASUS Flip Chromebook C101P before hitting my 3,000 word writing target and went to bed. All the writing that was going to happen had happened. The intellectual well was dry. At that point, the journey was done for the day. My thoughts were basically over for the night. Today my mind is alive with thoughts and observations. None of them are very nice. That is probably the byproduct of this wicked migraine. These things happen from time to time, but today is one of those weird days where my headache has lingered. Ugh —- enough about my wild migraines.

This weekend is still looming big in our household. Everybody is just a touch worn down from all the birthday party shenanigans. I have started looking at getting some more Denver Nuggets tickets. That game was pretty fun to attend in person. We are drawing closer to the end of the season. In May just before my birthday the NBA finals will begin. Maybe next year the Nuggets will build a team that could make a legitimate championship run. I’m ok with just seeing some competitive games. This last one was pretty good. So good in fact that you are going to be graced with another Denver Nuggets thumbnail today. This one attached to this blog post is of some actual live game action. I was looking for another really good weekend game that starts early enough to work with my schedule. I’m not big on staying up until really late at night. That is not really something that I want to do on purpose.

At a pace of 3,000 words per day we should be hitting 90,000 words written by the end of day 30 of this writing challenge. You might be surprised to know that today is day 30 and we are not on track to hit 90,000 words. After 29 days my word total was at 78,137. You can probably tell that productivity is not hitting the mark. To hit the 1,000,000 word mark my daily average in 2018 has to stay about 2,739.73 words per day. After 29 days my average words per day is at 2,694.38. That is close to the target, but it is below the target. To catch up in one solid shot of writing it it would require a big day of 11,683 words. That is probably not going to happen tonight. I mean it could happen. It would probably require a good deal of inspiration to strike all at one time. I would pretty much have to catch writing lightning in a bottle. It will probably be a more effective strategy to just increase my writing target by a couple hundred words per day until things average out.

I did not realize until writing this post that I was so far behind my daily writing goal. This is one of those things that did not happen all at one time. Several days had to contribute to this curious problem of lower-than-expected writing output. I’m going to try to write as much today and tomorrow as I can manage to help catch up. I knew that writing 1,000,000 words in the same year would be hard. It will take a sustained level of dedication. From here on out it has to be about exceeding my daily writing goal. One day at a time. One batch of 3,000 words at a time. I’m going to stand up from my desk and run a victory lap after hitting 100,000 words for the year. That is going to happen at some point next month. It will be an exciting moment and it will be followed up by 9 more 100,000 word writing milestones this year. That is an exciting thing to think about. It is still a little bit daunting.

I’m thinking about potentially including the differential within the byline. That might have helped me avoid getting behind on delivering my writing goal. Sometimes having a really solid beramater for success can drive things forward. It is also possible that maybe it is better just not to know exactly how far off the goal really is in terms of writing productivity. Keeping that type of bellwether statistic at the ready might just cause the prose to be forced. You will already know from the top of this blog post if that metric was included. I’m not sure even if gets included today if it is a metric that should linger at the top of my blog posts. Writing 3,000 words per day has turned out to be a really legitimate challenge. I probably just need to grab my C101P when my alarm goes off at 5:30 AM and start writing. Those first few minutes of the day are not very productive. Those minutes before coffee are always just a little bit off.

Topic 1: Kansas Jayhawks vs. Kansas State Wildcats

I’m gearing up to watch some basketball tonight. The game is on ESPN tonight. At some point, I will be getting bowl of Nearly Naked popcorn. That is my go to snack at the moment. Captain Pickles is running amuck in the house at the moment. Something is going to get chewed up. Puppies are difficult at times. I do not ever remember having as much energy as this dog does. It comes in waves and it is intense. Today should feature a college basketball game that is enjoyable to watch. Those Kansas State Wildcats tend to put up a fight, but they don’t really have the caliber of players necessary to compete in the Big 12. I’m still a little shocked that the Big 12 still only has 10 teams. At some point, it would make sense to expand back to 12 member institutions. I’m gearing up to watch some basketball tonight on the old Sony Bravia television. I looked at some of the new Sony 4K Bravia televisions. They look pretty fantastic, but the cost was on the prohibitive side of things.

I did spend some time looking at projectors tonight. It would be nice to be able to project up on the ceiling. Television has been about screens. Eventually we will see screens be replaced by some flavor or headsets or projectors. That is something that I would have thought would happen before 2018. For some reason it seems like smartphones, computers, tablets, and televisions are still the primary content consumption devices. Projects are not in that top 4 media content consumption devices. Perhaps that might change at some point, but it will not be this year. This game is much closer than it should be here as we are approaching half time. Kaylee is almost asleep. I’m going to be able to watch the 2nd half and eat popcorn downstairs.

Ok this game has 2:25 left in the first half. Svi is really starting to develop into a complete player. Coach Bill Self is going to have to work on developing the team as a whole this year to have a solid tournament run. Halftime is here. Kansas State missed their last 12 field goals going into halftime. The halftime show is not compelling at all. I have come to the conclusion that both sports television and the 24 hour news challenge folks should expel the guests that just spew nonsense. If the guest or host cannot engage in substantive conversation that elevates the level of discourse they need to be removed. I’m just tired of the shouting and rampid talking over people that happens on television. That is just an unnecessary level of nonsense that makes its way onto television.

Topic 2: My next computer case

For the last week or so the Corsair Carbide Series Air 740 – High Airflow ATX Cube Case has been sitting in my Newegg cart. One of the specs on it is 3 internal 3.25” bays. I’m wondering exactly what parts should be included in my next computer build. Now really is not a very good time to build a computer. Prices on components seem to be higher than the last time I build a computer back in 2016. I looked all over for my stack of motherboards and could not find them in the garage. It is possible that the motherboards are gone forever.

I’m thinking of just ordering the case ahead of time and build the computer one part a time. This game just keeps going with the Jayhawks not really pulling ahead.

Topic 2: My 7th NiceHash Miner Payment

Very early this morning NiceHash sent a wallet payment my way for the last 3 days of mining efforts. This was by far my smallest payment from NiceHash. Apparently, that day of letting xmr-stak run mining TurtleCoin was enough to depress my overall payment by about 0.0002 BTC. Converting that to USD equates to $2.17 at present BTC to USD values. They change all the time, but you get the picture of the opportunity cost to stop renting hashing power to NiceHash and mine 1,038 TRTL. At this point, I can comfortably say that the opportunity cost of $2.17 USD was well worth it.

NiceHash wallet payments in reverse order:

7. 2018-01-30 04:28:59 Mining payment → 0.00102840 BTC
6. 2018-01-27 04:51:21 Mining payment → 0.00120973 BTC
5. 2018-01-24 04:25:25 Mining payment → 0.00125795 BTC
4. 2018-01-21 05:32:06 Mining payment → 0.00133244 BTC
3. 2018-01-18 04:27:55 Mining payment → 0.00119401 BTC
2. 2018-01-15 04:30:34 Mining payment → 0.00105970 BTC
1. 2018-01-13 04:51:00 Mining payment → 0.00118327 BTC

The 7th payment does not cross the 0.002 threshold in my NiceHash wallet for a free transfer to Coinbase. You can imagine that the whole process of mining and transferring to Coinbase is based on having the BTC in a wallet where it can be exchanged for USD. That is the game plan. At the end of the 100 days of mining adventure all that BTC that will have been collected will need to be sold to USD via the exchange to allow for paying off the graphics card that was purchases. At the very least it will be an offset to the cost if not an overage.

Topic 3: On my Nexus 9 tablet

My Nexus 9 tablet is still running. Today it seems to be faster and run better than the day I bought it. It is an LTE enabled tablet. I set it up on the Google Project Fi data only service. That makes it a great little device for browsing and accessing the internet on the go. Most of my writing efforts have switched over to the ASUS Flip Chromebook C101P. That device has no LTE antenna and requires a Wi-Fi connection. I guess my Google Nexus 9 tablet went end of life back in October 2016. The last security update it has downloaded was the September 5, 2017 android security patch. Apparently the end of guaranteed security updates was October 2017. I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to do to update the device. It is running Webroot SecureAnywhere mobile complete security. That is probably the best thing I can do now that the system itself is not being updated by Google. It is a great little tablet. I’m going to use it until the day it stops working.

That is the hard part of buying technology. Google has some different upgrade paths for technology and it is very interesting. My Chromebooks appear to upgrade as long as Google is making updates to Chrome. Phones and tablets seem to have a different upgrade path that involves an end of life cliff that just makes them less valuable over time. I’ll admit that my smartphones do not really last longer than the update window of a couple years. For some reason, I am rather hard on my phones. They get used daily and travel with me all over the place. That combination of being carried everywhere and heavy usage pretty much means they are not going to last forever. My Nexus 9 tablet oddly just keeps marching along. A couple quick searches of my Inbox found this email update, “Your Google Store Order from Jun 28, 2015 Has Shipped.” that means that my Nexus 9 is only 3 years old. It feels like a much older device. I guess that is the way of technology these days. Things are going end of life in the technology world at an increasing pace.

Topic 4: Hard drive mining

At this point in time, I do not really understand all of these folks mining using hard drives. It seems rather interesting and I’m going to spend some time today working to understand it. It seems a little bit like an interesting setup. I’m wondering if this is going to star a run on hard drives at some point. We have seen a massive run on graphics cards. They are pretty much sold out everywhere. It seems like the setup for this type of hard drive mining is more intense than just installing NiceHash. Maybe the barrier to entry for the process will help keep some of those hard drives on the shelf. It might be worth a trip out and about to see if these massive external hard drives are disappearing from shelves.

After giving this whole hard drive mining thing some thought my real question about the whole setup is not profitability it is what it would do to my internet bandwidth. I have never hit the bandwidth limit from my cable company. I’m wondering what would happen if you put 100 terabytes up on this storage system. I’m assuming that means that you are going to pull data up and down. I’m going to try to learn some more about how the process works so I can understand my concerns about bandwidth. You can tell that this is a topic that I’m very curious about and what to learn more about. So many of these new mining methods, technologies, and even schemes are spinning up. I do mean schemes in the nefarious sense of the whole thing. Some these things cannot possibly be legitimate.

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

P.S. The hunt for my glasses continues. I am not exactly sure where the lastest pair of them actually went. This n-2 pair is working out well enough. These last couple of days I have really needed to put on the glasses and go about my day. That is not really something that happens on a normal basis. I wear them a bit each week. Mostly when I am looking at the screen for long periods of time. Most of my computer based efforts are really 20 to 30 minute spurts. Very few of the things besides writing require over an hour of dedicated screen viewing in one sitting. That is really a very good thing and something that I have tried to ensure holds true. I had thought about the day in terms of 30 minute blocks. I try to stay focused within each 30 minute block on something that requires my attention. Anything that starts eating up more and more blocks I start to ask myself why that activity or topic is requiring so much time and effort. Maybe that is the key to how I start to break down complexity in solvable blocks.

My office is almost cleaned up. The underside of my desk is clean enough. I still need to work on some cable management. I have a photo of Captain Pickles looking out the window that will be a thumbnail at some point. You can see in the photo that last bit of under desk cable management that needs to be completed. It is a process. That part of the process is not complete. Today my focus should have been on the built in wooden office bookshelf sitting next to me. It is on my right and it is a mess. Maybe I’ll change things up and focus on the bookshelf behind me and work on cleaning all of that up. I do need to take down the reflective picture frames and move them to the other wall at some point. They have been creating lighting challenges for my videos.

I’m going to start from the bottom shelf of bookshelf and work my way up one shelf at a time. That should be a good way to start making some progress on getting the entire room cleaned up. My time here in January is drawing short and now is the time to finish cleaning things up for my triumphant YouTube return when February starts. I want the backdrop for my videos to be free from clutter and nonsense. So much stuff has been dumped on my bookshelves and that it has been there for years in some cases. I’m not sure any of it is needed on a daily basis. It is just stuff. It is just stuff that sits on a shelf. Outside of residing on the shelf it does not do anything useful for me. That means cleaning it up should just reduce clutter and have no real impact on my day to day activities. You will be able to tell soon enough if my efforts were successful or if more work still needs to be done.

I’m writing the last sentence or two of the post for today. It is strange enough that Google Docs believes this post is over 3,000 words and my weblog software does not. I guess we have to keep using the weblog software as the single source of truth.

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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