Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Day 43 the one where I got my 11th NiceHash mining payment

2018: Day 43 the one where I got my 11th NiceHash mining payment
Word count 118,196 + 2,124 or 120,320 of 1,000,000

Dear Reader,

Writing just wrapped up on the day 42 blog post. That was just in time to start this writing session. My level of writing today will need to be kicked up a notch. That should be easy enough. Back in 2015 I switched out my keyboards to the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard model 4000 for business. It was a decent switch. These natural ergonomic keyboards work really well. I have not had any problems with them at anytime during the last three years. For the most part I really do appreciate the comfort and build of the keyboards. I’m not an expert in ergonomics, but they really are very comfortable keyboards for extended writing sessions.

It feels like this year has been one long extended writing session. Things are just getting started. The places we will go will be amazing. That is the promise writing brings. It is a road that can take you anywhere. Imagination is a powerful and amazing thing. Tonight is going to be a wild writing night. I’m watching both kids and they have no interest in watching the Olympics. That pretty much means it is time to turn on Frozen (2013) and hope for the best. Toddler logic is a strange and unpredictable thing. That seems to be what is going on right now. We will see how it goes.

Topic 1: A real vignette

I think maybe the start of this blog post was a false start at a vignette. That probably means that right now we should roll the dice again and see if some better prose is forthcoming. It is a rather simple test to conduct. I’m just going to start writing here and see where it leads. Yesterday was a day of plans and that did not work out all that well. Today is a day of action. A day of striving forward on the path toward figuring things out. The nature of our economic condition is a state of perpetual spending and cost. It is hard to figure out a steady state within our very modern economy that does not require some type of spending. That state sparks the question at all times of what next. Within that question a ton of branches exist and that is where it all starts.

Maybe starting out with some economic questions about the nature of things is not the right way to open the door today. It might be easier to sit back and listen some music from The Doors. You might have guessed that my go to standard of Warren Zevon tracks is not appropriate for deep thoughts about the economy. Warren’s view on things may tend to stack the deck in one direction. That could be interesting or it could just be a path to wickedly mercurial false start. It could be that thought was pure hyperbole. Maybe I just wanted to work Warren Zevon into this post. That just might be the case.

Oh yeah —- I figured out my 1394 fire card problem today. You can imagine my surprise after opening the Lian Li case to pull out my trusty 1394 firewire card that I had completely forgotten about only to learn it would not work. That old motherboard features traditional PCI cards. My newer motherboard only has video card and PCI express slots. I stared at it for a minute or two and frowned at it. None of that helped. The configurations did not match. Physically the 1394 firewire card in my possession would not match and fit the motherboard slot. It was a deflating moment. I think in the back of my mind this is something that already was known, but I was ignoring it in favor of a false hope. That meant it was time to make a decision. I was either going to buy an adapter that could connect a 1394 cable to a USB port or get a new PCI express firewire card.

It seemed more certain to go the firewire card route vs trying to mess around with cable adapters. Ordering the card online was pretty easy. It seemed like a bad idea to drive around looking for a legacy firewire card from a big box store. Sadly it seems that the shipping process will be delaying my adventure into figuring out what exactly is on the 31 tapes for about a week. It could be worse I guess. Each of those tapes may be full of memories or they may just be tapes that have given way to the inevitable decay of magnetic storage. I’m hopeful that some of them contain some interesting footage or at least something that reminds me of my college years.

Topic 2: Wondering about wonder

Visualization can take you a long way. At the start of this endeavor I visualized all 1,000,000 words printed in a coffee table format with gilded edges. Like the complete works of William Shakespeare only in prose form and limited to one story about the last year. I guess it is really nothing like the complete works of Shakespeare. That was a pretty poor analogy. I’ll try to do better I guess. Anyway —- I visualized the final product as a printed manuscript on my coffee table. I don’t actually own a coffee table. Maybe I visualized it on my dream coffee table. We did see a coffee table at American Furniture Warehouse that we almost purchased. I’ll visualize it on that imaginary table for now. That seems like a better idea than just visualizing it sitting in the middle of the room on the floor for no reason. I mean Peppercorn the dog would leave it alone, but that sounds exactly like the type of thing that Captain Pickles would chew on. Now I am visualizing an entire years worth of writing being chewed on by our dog.

You get the point nonetheless. The idea of visualizing the finished product is an important part of the journey. Any journey with a map has a beginning and an end. You know where you are going and how you are going to get from the start to the finish. That is also true about this writing journey we are on this year. I started to think about where things are going and what will happen along the way. A lot of thinking and exploring is going to happen in the next 300 days. That is for sure. 2018 is shaping up to be a very productive year. Even if I just figure out what was on all those tapes I will have accomplished something. That Sony software I downloaded should help me export the content. I’m sure most of it is not in HD. intellectually I’m already preparing for the disappointment of stand definition video. It is like a pop up box on my 4K monitor. A small little window into the past that lacks enough pixels to be awesome.

Topic 3: Things are getting quiet around the house

Everybody is getting ready for bed. Even the dogs are starting to wind down for the night. I’m getting ready to settle in to a couple hours of writing before bed. I’m not exactly sure what topic will recieve my attention, but it will probably be technology related. That seems to be a common theme across a lot of this blog posts. My attention over the last year has been devoted to the exploration of artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, and neural networks. You can see hours of content on YouTube about that journey. I’m still planning to bring the live stream back this month. I might even do a couple throwbacks to the Nelscast format. It could happen.

Topic 4: I got my 11th NiceHash wallet payment

Mining cryptocurrency is an adventure. All of the market swings have happened and I’m betting they will happen again. I’m watching the countdown for my 100 day mining adventure. Right now the big mining adventure has 58 days left. I’m guessing that the end of this whole mining adventure the outcome will be about $300.00 worth of BTC. It took me about 30 days to mine 1% of a bitcoin. That means that at the end of the 100 day mining adventure all my efforts using NiceHash mining software should yield about 3% of a bitcoin. That may not seem like a lot of mining, but it is a reasonable amount of mining for 2 graphics cards.

NiceHash wallet payments in reverse order:

11. 2018-02-12 Mining payment → 0.00102953 BTC
10. 2018-02-09 Mining payment → 0.00102322 BTC
9. 2018-02-06 Mining payment → 0.00101337 BTC
8. 2018-02-03 Mining payment → 0.00135065 BTC
7. 2018-01-30 Mining payment → 0.00102840 BTC
6. 2018-01-27 Mining payment → 0.00120973 BTC
5. 2018-01-24 Mining payment → 0.00125795 BTC
4. 2018-01-21 Mining payment → 0.00133244 BTC
3. 2018-01-18 Mining payment → 0.00119401 BTC
2. 2018-01-15 Mining payment → 0.00105970 BTC
1. 2018-01-13 Mining payment → 0.00118327 BTC

You may have noticed that during this adventure I have been reporting the payment process and have recently removed the time of the payment. That level of detail was probably not required to communicate the pace of payment. Maybe it would be better to show how many hours between each payment, but I think give you a list with the dates shows that pattern to anybody that is interested. For me the process is for better or worse to document the whole cryptocurrency mining adventure and talk about what it took to keep the computer up and running for 100 days.

Seriously, it is a process to monitor the temperatures and the reboots to see if the NiceHash Miner software v2.0.1.10 beta has stopped running. When the software stops running the mining stops happening. You can imagine that every bit of time the miner is offline reduces the overall profitability of the equation. This run at mining is set to span 100 days and that means being offline for a day is going to slow things down and give a false accounting of what is possible within the window.

Topic 5: Living without cable television

I’ll admit that it has been over a week now since any content from the Curse of Oak Island has some my way. I did breakdown and catch up on Top Chef using the YouTube TV streaming service. Otherwise I have been ok so far without messing around with surfing channels on my cable television box. Maybe this will increase my usage of Netflix. We will see how that goes. The amount of content on Netflix has shrunk a lot from what I remember. It seems like the corporate focus on original content has take over the content library for them. That pretty much means that I may have to spend more time on YouTube. It is easy to find content on YouTube. I follow a number of very active creators that produce all sorts of content. That is a pretty much never ending string of distractions. I had tried to watch the Limitless television series again on Netflix and that did not turn out very well. The first few episodes were ok. After episode 5 the series just seems to start falling apart.

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

P.S. This week is going to be a challenging week in terms of time to write. For the most part I am not going to have any morning writing time this week. Things are going to have to happen in the evening. Only having one key writing session per day is going to require me to focus and get things done in an expedient fashion. My theory at the moment is that I’m going to have to break my evening writing sessions up into 3 sprints of 1,000 words. It will be key to pick 3 really good topics to help me push things forward. That is a good recipe for knocking these things out. We will see if it is a recipe that I can manage to execute in a reliable way.

As we settle into day 43 I just need to pick a direction and go. Picking that direction has been a real problem so far this year. My typical stream of consciousness style writing is good for about 1,500 words per day. To create this volume of long form prose I’m going to need to pick a topic and start generating more content around that. I need a tentpole media property to focus the efforts of my blog on building toward something of value. That focus needs to be related to a specific topic.

Somehow the search for a 1394 firewire card has create a tremendous amount of clutter on my desk. Things were going so well in terms of keeping my office clean. I’m not sure what happened exactly, but it appears that everything that was on the floor is now on my desk. That is a problem. I do not even have enough room to set down breakfast.


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