2018: Day 40 the one where the winter Olympics started
Word count 109,148 + 3,026 or 112,174 of 1,000,000

Dear Reader,

Tonight the Olympics started. The over the air broadcast from NBC has been pretty good. Tonight I did need to move the TERK indoor antenna from next to the television to the DVD rack. Our television is sitting on a nice stand we picked up when we moved to this house. The DVD rack sits in an alcove on the far external wall. At the moment the TERK indoor antenna is sitting on top of the DVD rack and it appears to be working well. That is good news given the amount of NBC Olympic coverage we are about to watch over the next two weeks. Part of cutting the cord and ending our monthly cable television subscription was knowing that the Olympics would be mostly broadcast on NBC.

My writing plan for today is pretty straight forward. I’m going to write a vignette for the next 30 minutes and then move into essays related to some thoughts on my sports trading card collection, a post about my top ten favorite science fiction television shows, recap of all the video camera equipment I have owned, and all the promise and failures of my first Sony camcorder. Those four topics together should provide enough content to to yield over 4,000 words for tonight. You can imagine that right now this post already has 4 topics listed below. That means that the framework for my writing endeavors already exists. Now the real quick will be how much effort it will take to execute the plan.

Writing my vignette tonight should help ground me. Getting grounded into the habit of writing takes some time and is rewarding. This week has been very interesting. Solving the problems of the world is worth a significant amount of time. We only have so much time to devote to important manners. That pretty much means that we have to figure out where we want to spend our limited time. Trying to solve some of the worlds problems might be a worthwhile use of that limited time, but getting the motivation to strive on requires a little bit of foundation. Setting up that very foundation takes a lot of education and experience. Some of the problems we face are very complex and very challenging. At the same time, it is entirely possible that a simple view of things could end up solving some of the challenges. True understanding of a matter allows people to explaining highly complex topics in simple terms.

I’m about 30% done with my Dune (1965) audiobook from Google Play Books. Tonight could be one of those nights that continues on for awhile. Writing 4,000 words might just be the cause of that late night. I did not start writing early enough today. Part of my writing routine involves a solid morning and evening writing session. This morning was spent trying to catch up with the word count from yesterday. Chasing words had been an important of the day. At some point, you just have to give up on the previous blog post and move on in a journey that lasts an entire year. Writing at a certain speed helps move things along. Tonight is one of those nights that a certain amount of writing speed could be useful. That pretty much means that I need to think in written form and allow that to be translated to the page via my keyboard.

Tonight we watched some mogul skiing and some ice skating. All of the coverage from NBC was pretty decent. The announcers managed to explain things. They spent more time talking than they should have given the amount of spots content they have. They should try to move to a 90% awesome winter Olympic event coverage and only 10% talking heads. To be honest NBC could have people talking on screen sitting in chairs without the winter Olympics. Talking heads seem to flock to television. The winter Olympics only show up every 4 years. This year they showed up in South Korea. So far it seems like the winter Olympics in South Korea will be pretty good.

Topic 1: Some thoughts on my sports trading card collection

All of my sports cards are sitting in some Rubbermaid ActionPacker lockable storage boxes. To be exact they are sitting in a collection of three Rubbermaid boxes. The ActionPacker line is pretty solid. They have held up really well over the years. To the best of my knowledge these boxes will keep my sports trading cards save from weather, bugs, and flooding. These are my thoughts on my sports trading card collection. Some of my cards are encapsulated and graded. Those cards are primarily George Brett cards. Over the last few years, I have been buying up a ton of graded George Brett cards.

My sports trading card collection started out with a bunch of 1981 Topps football cards. My Joe Montana rookie card from that collection is sitting on my desk. It is in pretty rough shape. If it was professional graded by Beckett, then I would imagine it would be a 4 or maybe a 3 out of 10. The rest of the those cards were put into plastic sleeves several years ago. They were inherited and were the start of my collection. The next batches of cards are from 1987 to 1989. They are a collection of baseball cards. My collection from 1987 to around 1995 was primarily baseball cards. It was not until after 1995 that my interest in football cards really started. In the last few years my card collection has shifted to mostly football card packs and graded George Brett cards.

Topic 2: A post about my top ten favorite science fiction television shows

This one is just going to be about my topi five favorite science fiction television shows. Maybe later I will dig deep and make a true top 10 list. As always this list is just a reflection of this moment in time.

1. Firefly (2002)
2. Farscape (1999)
3. Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda (1999)
4. Battlestar Galactica (2004)
5. Dr. Who 10th Doctor (2005)

Oh dear —- None of the Star Trek shows made it into my current top 10 science fiction show list. It also appears that I have narrowed the list from 1999 to 2005. The reason that Star Trek The Next Generation got left out of the top 5 is that it has so many episodes that when I rewatch them do not hold my attention anymore. Maybe it is entirely the fault of Wil Wheaton (Wesley Crusher). However, I’m willing to admit that the Wesley Crusher factor is not the only reason. I’m pretty sure Star Trek The Next Generation would be number 6 on my list. You will have to stay tuned to find out what ends up on my top 10 list.

This topic thing is not really yielding huge epic essays on the these topics. All of this should have gone better based on my outlining and planning. Maybe my setup broke down at the point that I did not outline each one of these sub topics into at least 5 parts to generate essay like long form prose. At the moment they seem to be getting a paragraph or two of coverage and that is not going to be enough to leg this post out to 4,000 words like a broken bat infield single. That was a baseball reference. You are welcome for that. You can probably expect more baseball analogies and folksy stories within the blog. That is coming. It is just one of those things that you can expect to start to see as things dig deeper throughout the course of the year.

Topic 3: Recap of all the video camera equipment I have owned

I’m pretty sure all of my equipment has been Sony. After looking through some of my tapes and equipment it looks like original Sony camcorder is gone. It has probably been a couple years since I could even remember exactly what it looks like. I still have 2 tapes from it. They may or may not be working tapes. Maybe that is something that I can purchase on eBay. Even if I managed to get a device that could play the tapes getting the content offloaded to my computer would be a challenge. I kind of remember plugging the device into my television and not really having a method to really edit the video.

My next two camcorders are sitting on a shelf in my office. I’ll dig into the exact models and such later on. At the moment, I would need to get the step ladder to be able to reach them and that is probably not happening until after coffee round two occurs. One of them is standard definition and the other is high definition. All of the tapes from the two of those Sony camcorders are sitting in a binder that was designed to hold tapes. This is one of the few times that I purchased the correct holder and they have all been in the correct holder for years. I really mean years. Some of those tapes are just so old now. I’m starting to wonder if the magnetic values are starting to give up the ghost.

To the best of my knowledge I never really recorded video journals on the tapes. Some of them have audio of me talking about things like a narrator, but none of that is all that useful. I’m wondering why that one Sony camcorder is missing. Maybe it broke and got thrown away. I really have no memory of it since college. It could have gotten put in some box and is long since gone. The only reason I’m thinking about it is because I’m wondering where the tapes that might have been in the case for it went. I know 2 of them are in my current binder. That binder is sitting right in front of me at the moment. It does not have a brand on it. It is one of those black nylon looking binders that people put CDs in and this one holds tapes. This thing has about 30 tapes. I counted them again it contains 31 tapes that include a variety of content. Apparently the side that i thought was the front was the back and it is a Case Logic case. It even has that little light bulb with lines coming out of logo on it. All the tapes in this little binder appear to be 8mm video cassette tapes. Some of them are from movies I started to direct and gave up on. The next Clerks is not hiding in this binder. My skills as a video director or cinematographer are still highly suspect.

My Friday night project is going to be related to figuring out how to get a Firewire cable setup and exporting content from my newest Sony camcorder. I have one terabyte of storage space ready for all of this video. I’m even willing to stop my NiceHash Miner v.2.0.1.10 beta software for a few minutes to install a new pci card. I think this motherboard only has pci express slots open. That could be a problem. One second I’m going to to check on the one Firewire card I found in my old Lian Li cube style case. Ok —- so I made an error on this one. The last Sony HandyCam I purchased was an HD AVCHD 4.0 Mega Pixel model that recorded on an internal Hard Drive. It has an HDMI out and a tiny little HDMI cable in it. It also has one of those usb outputs that will probably let me access the files on it with ease.

Well this model HDR-SR10 digital HD video camera recorder that was made in Japan by the Sony Corporation is charging. The one thing that I am really reliable about is putting the cords for camcorders back in their travel cases. That problem has to do with what a pain it was to get new cables back in the day. Their were expensive and you had to go to multiple places or custom order proprietary cables. I’ll let this thing charge for about 30 minutes and offload any content that is on it. I can probably even ghost the drive to figure out if any recently deleted content is hiding. It is all video files that should be possible. This computer does have PowerDirector 15 installed. I’ll probably use that to manage the content or exports if necessary.

I just turned that Sony HDR-SR10 on using while it was charging. It defaulted back to January 1, 2008. It has a touchscreen. That was fun. It has 29 video clips on it. I wonder if Sony still has the software for it on the website. Those 29 video clips contain my last trip to Hawaii and Cancun. The one series has a lot of content from a wedding. The Sony website pointed me to a free software called PlayMemories Home Installer. We will see how that one works you today. Right now the software is working on importing 13.8 gigabytes of video content to one of my backup drives. It looks like this could take awhile. Based on this new research it appears that I only have one camcorder that can play actual tapes in the house. That is probably going to be problematic. Out of the 31 tapes that camcorder may only be able to offload one type.

Topic 4: All the promise and failures of my first Sony camcorder

My first Sony Camcorder was epic. It was full of promise. At the time I had no idea that the standard definition content it recorded would not stand up to the test of time. I thought it made fantastic files. I would record things and watch them on the television again. That was basically how it worked. These little tapes had a label with the date and what was on them and that was pretty much it. I knew how to edit VHS tape content using a deck, but this was different. I basically had to offload the content from the Camcorder like clips to a VCR. Stiching things together was the extent of my video editing skills. That all changed when things could be imported to the computer. Throughout my college experience those tapes pretty much languished. That is probably why only a couple of them exist. I know at one point a stack of them existed. That camcorder never really sent me down the right path. Maybe it was a lack of technical skill on my part. My ability to capture epic video has never really been one of my core competencies.

Topic 5: The illegal ivory poaching in Zimbabwe

Someday our 3D printing technology will become very advanced. People are already working on methods that would allow a 3D printing of bone. Maybe a material called hyperelastic bone will replace the market for ivory. It is entirely possible that 3D printing could introduce something new and better to the market. Really any advances in technology that help make elephants less valuable for ivory is a step forward. My knowledge about elephants is limited. The ones I have seen at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo and the Denver Zoo seemed aware enough of their surroundings. I have seen them interact with people. Advances in technology could solve a variety of problems. I’m not exactly certain of a policy solution to the ivory problem. My first thought would be based on supporting policy framework devoted to permanently restrict all import and export of ivory. My second thought would be on a personal level to avoid purchasing, owning, or participating in anything related to ivory.

Topic 6: A few thoughts about today’s thumbnail

My Google Pixel 2 XL was just hanging out this morning. I picked up that phone and snapped a photo of my Sony HandyCam HDR-SR10 and that Case Logic binder. It is not the best photo that I have ever taken. It is however the thumbnail that is attached to the post for today. You can enjoy it and muse that my desk was at least clean enough to take that photograph. That means that the process of getting things in order and removing clutter is working. That is awesome.

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

P.S. Today is one of those days where I was not able to get everything done. That is always a frustrating moment in time. My strong preference is to work real time and to have everything done from my to do list. Figuring out how to avoid having a to do list is about more than just maintaining a stop doing list. Today I had some time to think about that while giving blood. Every 56 days I have been giving blood for the last half year. It is not something that I normally spend all that much time writing about, but it is something that I do to make a contribution. At some point they will figure out how to make synthetic blood, but that has not happened as of yet.

My goal for the day was to write 4,000 words. That just did not happen. I guess things are going to work out well enough at 3,000 words. Tomorrow will have to be the day to help catch up and move things forward. This last little bit of writing effort felt a little bit forced. Maybe I’m tired. That is a bad sign given that I still need to write another 4,000 words today or tomorrow morning. That might happen tonight. It is Friday after all. It is a night where I can write as late as I want and just deal with the consequences tomorrow. It is going to be interesting. Maybe I’ll be able to finish a good chunk of my Dune audio book tonight. That would be a fun way to just finish things out tonight. This last very long sentence should push the blog post over 3,000 words for the night. It did not push things over the edge it came up about 10 words short. That is fine, but now is the time to stop writing in this Google Doc and move over to the next one.