2018: Day 33 the one with the missing computer power supply problem
Word count 87,502 + 3,321 or 90,823 of 1,000,000
Dear Reader,
It is 7:12 PM and things are just starting to calm down for the day. Things ramped up today and did not slow down. That happens from time to time. You may have noticed that my YouTube live stream had a triumphant return today after a brief hiatus. My first attempt at hosting a live stream today did not go as planned. It actually went terribly. The stream started and no audio was present. Both my primary microphone and my backup microphone were not streaming any audio. That as you can imagine would make for a pretty boring live stream broadcast. Today my Open Broadcaster Software had to upgrade and somewhere along that path the microphone settings needed to be refreshed. That was an easy enough to fix and implement. Within a minute or two I was backup and streaming. I had to go into my videos on YouTube and delete that false start before it got posted. That was easy enough to manage.
Today I had an idea for a television show called Crypto. It would follow a startup cryptocurrency founder and a core group of friends. It could be like a better version of the television show Chuck filled with interesting asides. The team could get pulled into feuds with state actors, rival coins, and highly strange investors. I’m thinking the show could really be about the community of folks it takes to get a cryptocurrency setup and keep it running. Maybe at some point I’ll adapt my idea into a series of short stories and publish those here this year during the long race to 1,000,000 words. That seems like an interesting way to spend part of my writing time. I started to sketch out a whole season of episodes with a few character arcs. It could be great mix of cryptocurrency fanfiction and epic techno thriller. All of the state sponsored efforts and schemes are ripe for serialized satirical hyperbole.
Today included some wild cleaning efforts. One of my favorite collections of my collegiate publications was moved from one wall to another. An original photograph from my cousin was moved from the back wall to the front wall. One University of Kansas magnetic dartboard moved across the room to hang above the door. All of that happened pretty quickly. Cleaning up the rest of the bookshelves took a little longer than expected. They were full of all sorts of nonsense. I’m guessing they had about three solid years worth of nonsense spread out all over them. Things get put on bookshelves and they just stay in there. I guess that is sort of the point and also part of the problem. Only one shelf remains to be cleaned in my office. That should be the hardest one to clean, but hey it is possible.
You may have noticed the thumbnail for today’s post is of Captain Pickles the dog looking out the window. All of those cords hanging down in the photo are not managed properly. They are now. My desk is clean and things are working out well. I had tried to do a photo mashup the clean and the unmanaged table. Captain Pickles the dog did not cooperate for the 2nd photograph. That happens sometimes. You can enjoy the majestic look of Captain Pickles being super focused on the world outside the window. Learning about the world around around us is always fun. It is amazing just how focused the dog can get on searching and looking for anything that might happen outside the window. Not that much happens outside the window. A lot more searching happens during the process than actually finding something. I spend a lot of time thinking about the process of searching for things. Part of striving forward and staying positive is about looking toward the edge of what is possible. That edge is really powerful. We strive to get to that edge and to keep pushing it forward. Every day the idea is that the edge of what is possible gets a little farther from where we started. That is the basis of the journey and the foundation of how we sustain our momentum to keep fighting the good fight to improve and enhance the world around us. Sure some folks might believe the here and now is a true utopia. I’m not inline with that thought.
Topic 1: My Corsair Air 750 case arrives tomorrow
You might have guessed from the title of this blog post the problem that exists. It seemed like a great idea. I was going to boot up my old graphics card connected to my n-1 motherboard. It has some RAM and a decent processor. It could power up an operating system and allow me to set up one more cryptocurrency mining computer in my office. It was going to be devoted to mining TurtleCoin. I was going to call it the Borg computer. It would run from parts assimilated from other computers. Resistance as it turned out was not all that futile. Without a modern power supply the entire build was a risk. By risk in this case I mean that it was not going to work at all. That as you can imagine was enough to make me frantically search the basement for the missing power supply. The power supply in my Lian Li cube is capable of powering an original AMD Athlon 64 bit CPU and a bunch of peripherals that are connected with IDE cables. It simply does not have enough wattage to power a modern graphics card and motherboard. It is also really old and kind of loud.
Tomorrow the new case will arrive and I will work on getting some things connected. It will be a fun little adventure, but it was not be a satisfying one. Hitting the power button will not make anything happen. A computer needs a power supply. That is just one of those basis computer 101 facts that anybody that got one of those A+ (Plus) certifications from CompTIA IT Certifications. That power supply needs to be connected for the magic to happen. I’m thinking about making the trip down south Saturday to visit the Denver Tech Center Micro Center. Ordering a power supply at this point does not feel like the right thing to do. This feels like a problem that only a trip to Micro Center will fix. Being able to go visit Micro Center in Kansas City and just walk around was something that I took for granted. No stores near me really sell computer parts. We have some big box retail stores, but none of them sells a combination of awesome parts like a Micro Center. Even at this time of night the drive would be 35 minutes. Strangely to me that feels like driving to a different city.
I may get online and make sure they have the power supply in stock before making the drive. I could probably pay for it before hand and still just walk around the store for fun. This is something that a service like TaskRabbit might do for me. That would not be as satisfying as actually roaming around a real technology store for an hour or so. The risk with a trip like that is that I end up coming home with more tech than just a power supply. Ok —- apparently I thought TaskRabbit did a lot more than what the website indicates. Go figure. That was a misunderstanding on my part.
Topic 2: Watching the Bitcoin values
Throughout the day I have been keeping an eye on the dashboard over at Coinbase. It shows the real time values of 4 key cryptocurrencies. Today was not a banner day for those folks that have invested in Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, and Litecoin coins. Last year Bitcoin had almost hit $19,206. Right now it is sitting at $8,771.14. I’m wondering if we are going to see a plunge to under 5K tomorrow followed by some type of rebound. It seems like all the exchanges use BTC as a benchmark or standard for conversion. My humble mining account holds 0.0072 BTC. It is worth less USD this week than last week, but I’m still going to wait out the 100 days to see where things end up. Tomorrow will be a very interesting day for people who buy and sell cryptocurrency.
A massive hype bubble for bitcoin existed. Pretty much every time somebody did a Google search for the coin it was predictive of price increases. The more people that wanted to know about bitcoin the higher the prices went. Right now things are just falling. People online do seem to be showing some signs of panic.
Topic 3: Giving up cable television
We had cut the cord before and stopped paying the monthly subscription rates for cable television. I’m not entertaining the idea of giving up the cable modem, but cable television is probably not necessary. We really only have one television in the house. The kids really only watch Netflix. I’m going to start looking at what it would cost to just buy internet services. It may take a bit to research all the internet providers in my area to see which one provides the best uptime and service. It looks like DSL or cable modem are my two choices for internet provides. The DSL was ok back in Colorado Springs, but the upload speed is a deal breaker. I really just want to move up to a gigabit internet service. I already looked at replacing my cable box with a TiVo OTA box. It seems like a responsible thing to do, but I need to dig in a little more and look at all the options and figure out the right path forward.
I did some research and it does appear that we can reduce our monthly costs by about half. We just might be giving up cable television this year. I’m seriously considering buying the TiVo Roamio OTA 1TB DVR and switching to internet only service. Right now this seems like a brilliant idea, but it takes time to figure out all the logistics. Our only real concern related to live sports programming is having access to University of Kansas basketball games. They are mostly on the ESPN family of networks these days. Being able to watch those games is key to being able to make the switch and reduce my monthly entertainment costs. We have to buy a new TiVo box and or figure out how to use the Xbox One S as a DVR. Either way we have to buy an OTA HD antenna. So many are on the market these days. It is sort of hard to figure out from the ratings and reviews which of the OTA HD antennas is really the best. That is key for me during this transition. We need a really good antenna. My search for the next few weeks is going to be about trying to find the world’s best OTA antenna. If you have a suggestion to help me get on the right track, then please drop a brand and model or a link in the comments.
Maybe it will be a good thing to not have access to cable news on a daily basis. I really do like to check on CNN from time to time throughout the day. I guess giving up cable has been done before and things worked out ok. We will see how it goes. I’m pretty sure that is the path we are going to go down at some point this month.
Topic 4: Rounding out the night
Cleaning up my office and removing clutter has been a big part of my efforts this year. One of the problems I have been dealing with relates to accepting clutter. It is easier to just leave the clutter and move on. It is much harder to address it and fix things real time. This post today will push my word count over 90,000 words written on this blog this year. I have pretty much removed any mental clutter and put all my thoughts down on paper. That is a really powerful thing to complete. It is a monumental task to knock out. Being ready to write free of negative baggage is important. My goal is always to stay positive. Staying positive and trying to move forward is the key to figuring things out. You may have guessed that I truly believe in staying positive and keeping a high degree of motivation going.
My glasses are still missing. Today i’m going to clean up my laundry pile on my dresser and check each one of my suit coat pockets to see if my glasses are just in hiding. It is also possible that maybe they fell between the seats in my car. Those are the three places I’m going to search for them today. It is possible that they got left someplace. That means I have two remaining pairs of glasses hanging out with me. I don’t really like my n-1 pair they are not that comfortable. My n-2 pair is great, but they have a few scratches and are a slightly older prescription. They still work, but they are not perfect and they do not have the blue light filter. I think at some point this year I am going to get a new pair anyway. It might be a good idea to go ahead and move up my eye doctor visit for the year.
Topic 5: Fitbit Ionic initial thoughts
My new Fitbit Ionic is way more comfortable than my Fitbit Blaze. I’m not exactly sure how and why that is the case, but I hardly notice the Ionic. It feels pretty comfortable from the start. The battery life does appear to be about 4 days based on my usage patterns. I did end up changing up the clock face to the Tabs design. It says that clock face was created by somebody called DevRag. They called it a stats intensive clock face and that is pretty ture. Overall it is my favorite Fitbit Ionic clock face at the moment. I did take a few moments and looked at the sport band for the Ionic. The one I ended up buying is what they call slate blue and burnt orange. The face edges are burnt orange vs. silver. It just caught my eye and I liked the style better than the black or silver watch frames.
Topic 6: My fountain pen collection
My fountain pen collection has not been growing lately. I’m really happy with my Parker IM Premium Matte Black Fountain Pen with a Medium nib. I use only a Parker blue ink that comes in a little ink well bottle. I have been refilling the pen with a Parker fountain pen converter that uses a standard twist fill method. It works great and it is my daily workhorse writing instrument. Switching over to fountain pens has been a new adventure for me and it is something that I have really enjoyed. I had no idea what a nib was and how it worked. Ballpoint pens were how I engaged in writing. They were my writing instrument of choice. That was the case until very recently. It has probably been within the last year that I started using this one fountain pen and refilling it from an inkwell.
I gave up on using regular paper notebooks and started using large plain hard cover Moleskine Art Plus Sketchbooks. The fountain pen works great with that thick paper. Writing by hand is something that is great for taking notes and for brainstorming. You can imagine that the fountains pens and the whole day dreaming and brainstorming practice work out great. It took me a little bit to get used to writing with a fountain pen, but now it is my favorite way to interact with paper.
Dr. Nels Lindahl
Broomfield, Colorado
Written on my Storm Stryker PC and my ASUS C101P using Google Docs
P.S. We are digging into the second day of february right now. I’m writing every day and producing words at a record pace. I really need to start digging into topics in more detail and spend more time really debating the topic on the merits digging a layer deeper into the form, function, structure, and assumptions related to that topic. Right now I’m burning through topics at a pretty fast rate. Some of these one paragraph topics are just not getting enough discussion. I’m opening the topic and giving it some coverage, but things are not getting taken to the next level. Writing at this pace is going to involve changing up a little bit of my writing effort. I really wanted to put together a ton of words today and push my writing efforts over 100,000 words for the day. Last night I sat down to write and just could not produce at that level. It probably has to do with not picking topics to write about that inspire passion on my part.
Writing about things that you are passionate about is just easier. The prose is less terse and more epic. You can imagine as we move forward toward writing another 900,000 words this year. Picking the right topics will be very important. That is going to pretty much ensure the success and prevent the failure of this writing journey. You can imagine that producing 1,000,000 rambling stream of consciousness based words would be hard to follow. Right now my efforts have to get a little bit more targeted. I might need to sit down with my trust fountain pen and sketch out about 5 topics for the day and then execute that plan every day on time and with quality. We have made it do day 33 of this journey and I’m learning that making outlines and getting a plan together is actually a really important part of the writing process. Maybe just winging it is not enough to get things done anymore.
Maybe this week could have been more fun. I just could not really get into a solid groove for writing sustained bursts of words. I’m wondering if maybe trying to write more in the morning and waking up at 5:00 AM next week might be a good test case. Maybe an extra 30 minutes of early morning writing will be enough to push things forward. The only problem with that strategy is that the more typing that happens that early in the morning the greater the chance that the dogs will wake up the kids and that will just kickstart the entire day. The dogs are always a consideration in the process. They are at their absolute loudest first thing in the morning. I’m exactly sure why that is the case, but it does appear to be true.
The total word count for this blog post is quickly approaching 3,317. That is a big target to hit. I have removed the upcoming topics section and that just makes the target even more interesting. What I still think is really interesting is that the word count between Google Docs and WordPress is different. They must be using very different algorithms to determine what exactly is a word. For me the definition is simple. Every non punctuation related utterance separated by some sort of spacing is a word. I did some quick searches on it and the answer does not appear to be easily found. Maybe that is something where I will dig into the code and figure it out. I did figure out how to add a countdown to my 100 days of cryptocurrency mining extravaganza. That is pretty exciting I guess. Countdowns are always fun to have on the website.
This last sentence is going to put us over the word count edge for the day. With that in mind stay positive and keep striving forward.
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