2018: Day 48 the one with some 1394 video imports and a few thoughts on mining
Word count 124,155 + 3,005 or 127,160 of 1,000,000

Dear Reader,

…and things are back to the 3,000 word per day pace. At least for today. Perhaps it will also be the case for tomorrow…

Relaxing this morning is not really happening. My Nespresso Expert machine worked well enough to brew two shots of espresso. A banana was on the counter. It is now gone. I’m sipping the espresso shots and exporting videos from the Sony DCR-TRV140 camcorder using that 1394 firewire card that arrived. Most of the 31 tapes are not exported. I’m not entirely sure what was on the tapes. The export process is pretty simple. I plugged in the camcorder to a power outlet and flipped the switch to VCR mode. It is amazing to be using something called VCR mode again. That is a blast from the past that is happening in the here and now. Sony has some Handycam “import from tape” wizard that pops up now. That thing has a basic, “Import from the beginning of the tape function.” About every hour depending on how much content is on the tape I get a pop up alert to drop in the next tape.

After each tape ejects I drop in another tape and click the import button again. The process is probably going to eat up less than 31 hours. Some of the tapes only have a few minutes of content on them vs. a full hour. I’ll be able to tell exactly how much content was exported by looking at the total amount of data in the folder. One hour of content represents about 12 gigabytes of AVI file. You can imagine with the size of the directory and that piece of knowledge it should be pretty easy to figure out exactly how many minutes were on the tapes. Figuring out what that content actually include may take a little bit longer. Watching video for content is a real time activity that cannot be solved by equation. Maybe Google has some type of advanced image processing that can tag it all, but that is not really going to help me at the moment.

My entire buffer of content for this blogging journey is completely gone. I was working a day ahead before this week started. Now things have returned to a more real time daily blogging effort. This morning my espresso shots are done. Earlier instead of sitting down to write I assembled the new vacuum cleaner. Our old one was not working very well anymore. Maybe four year is all you get out of one of the less expensive vacuums. The new one was on some type of lighting deal. The packaging for it claims it includes some type of one pass technology that will make cleaning easier and less effort. That seemed exciting. Between our two dogs the carpets need to be vacuumed on a regular schedule. You can imagine that both dogs contribute to that probably. Probably on a relatively equal basis. Captain Pickles and Peppercorn are now about the same size. Puppies grow at a pretty amazing pace.

Topic 1: The ceiling fan

In just a few minutes I’m going to get the ladder and balance our ceiling fan. We only have one in the entire hours so it is pretty easy to refer to it as the ceiling fan. My next adventure will be to collapse all the cardboard and take it to the recycling center. Balancing the ceiling fan will be interesting. It is pretty heavy and just slightly unlevel. That means every once in awhile it catches a certain level of vibration and becomes noisy enough to upset my sleeping schedule. Fixing that should have been more of a priority, but it had to wait until this weekend. The leveling exercise did not go as planned. I used some Pledge and cleaned the blades and tried to use a level to get it as balanced as possible. At some point a wedge or a counter balance will be needed to get this fan 100% level. Well being absolutely level might not be possible. It will take some type of structural intervention to get the bubble perfectly between the two lines on the level.

After thinking about it for a little bit I probably could have leveled the extension pole that runs from the ceiling to the fan. Trying to figure out how to level the base motor of the fan was misguided. That will be easy enough to fix shortly. I can work toward leveling the fan here shortly. My mission to clean up the bedroom is almost complete. It is a good step along the way to removing clutter. I cleaned out my random change and things draw. That was fun. It had over $100.00 in change in it. I would not have guessed that much change was hanging out in that draw.

Topic 2: Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton

A new vinyl record arrived yesterday. It was released on February 16, 2018. The record is titled, “Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton.” The vinyl record itself is a gorgeous blue color. It really does look very good and I’m glad to add it to my collection. I actually thought it was a failed pressing when I pulled it out of the slever. The groovers were not as apparent or deep as I was expecting for a blues record of this vintage. The recording should have had a lot more high and low vs. a highly stable groove pattern. Maybe it was the deep blue vinyl that made it appear like a misfire. When the needle lowered down and the recorded popped and hissed I heard the sounds of British blues. This album was originally recorded back in 1966 and it was remastered for release on vinyl this year. Yesterday and today are the first times I have ever listened to this album from start to finish.

Topic 3: My NiceHash mining excavator

I’m not entirely sure if this is normal or not, but my NiceHash Miner v2.0.1.10 beta software launches an excavator.ese application. That thing just jumps around all day. It mines equihash for awhile, then jumps to Nist5, NeoScrypt, Lyra2REv2, DaggerHashimoto , and Blake2s. Seriously, it just jumps in and out of mining different algorithms every few minutes. I really have no idea how or why it gets assignments from NiceHash, but my assessment is that they are nearly random and somewhat erratic. That is probably a reflection of who is buying mining power in terms of hashrate using the NiceHash ecosystem. During this mining adventure I have setup and mined some TurtleCoin. Outside of that mining adventure I have really just just sold the mining power of my NVIDIA GTX 1060 graphics cards to NiceHash. I’m not sure if that is good or bad. I have made over 1% of a bitcoin doing that. It certainly remains an interesting thing to do with my spare graphics card power.

I have elected to allow NiceHash to mine 15 different algorithms: Keccak, Nist5, NeoScrypt, Lyra2Rev2, DaggerHashimoto, DaggerHashimoto/Decred, DaggerHashimoto/Pascal, DaggerHashimoto/Sia, Decred, CrytoNight, Lbry, Equihah, Pascal, Sia, and Blake2s. It really does not mine all those algorithms based on my observations. It mostly just jumps around between the ones mentioned above. I would say the majority of the time it is mining Equihash. That is probably what people are buying hashing power to extract the most. I hope it makes them happy and they are enjoying. Selling my hashing power is not very exciting. It just sort of runs on my computer and makes a lot of excess heat in my office. During the winter that is not that big of a deal. I put the computer right next to the window and have it setup to exhaust the heat literally at the window. That help keep my office from getting all that hot.

Topic 4: Trying new food

Given that my vegetarian diet over the last year has changed what i eat. I figured now would be as good a time as any to branch out and try some different types of food. One of the of the world that has not really inspired any epicurean adventures for me is the Indian subcontinent. Today for example I was sampling a couple of different items. One of my favorite dishes is from a restaurant called the Yak and the Yeti. They make a wonderful sweet potato masala. According to the menu that is a dish composed of, “sweet potatoes cooked in a tomato cream sauce spiced with Masala curry.” That is really the extent of previous adventures. I know that dish makes me happy and it tastes pretty darn good. Today I was branching out and trying to figure out some other things to try. That is sort of the spice of life. Trying new things is an important part of the process. I mean you could just eat the same things every day and go about the same routine every day. That is not really something that I want to do.

Ok —- I thought about that for a few moments and wondered if I could just eat something like Soylent for every meal. I had considered ording 2.3 pounds of the Soylent Cacao meal replacement powder. That might be an interesting way to replace my breakfasts. That just might be an interesting way to go about changing up my diet. I’m not entirely sure how my body will tolerate Soylent. The only reason that I have never given it a try was due in part to fear of digestive discomfort. Maybe I’ll give it a try and see how it goes. It looks like the premixed bottles are pretty expensive compared to the powder. Working toward really digging into the world of Soylent seems like something that should be done by mixing together my own beverages. Well I guess they are meal replacements vs. beverages, but it should be interesting. A tub of Soylent powder will be arriving on Tuesday.

Topic 5: Star Trek Voyager

Today for some reason it seemed like a good idea to just watch some episodes of Star Trek Voyager. At the moment, I’m streaming episode 6 through the TiVo Roamio box. It seems to be working well enough. It seemed like a good idea to maybe get one of the Google WiFi systems to setup a mesh network in the house. I just fast forwarded to Season 4 when Seven of Nine shows up. I’m not sure this series really needed any episodes before Scorpion. The episodes of Star Trek Discovery on CBS streaming are nothing like Voyager. One of the things that I do really enjoy about Discovery is the lack of any nonsense related to the holodeck. I think that Star Trek The Next Generation would have benefited greatly from never having a holodeck installed on the USS Enterprise. That one plot change would have greatly improved the show. A ton of the writing related to the holodeck produced a ton of nonsensical writing and strange underdeveloped plot devices.

Topic 6: Rounding out the night

Naptime may last for another hour or so. That is good news. Today is the day that I need to get back on track with my 3,000 word per day writing goal. At the start of this post my journey was at 124,155 words. It took 47 days to write that many words. That means that I’m keeping a writing pace of about 2,641.59 words per day. This being the 48th day in my writing journey I should be rounding out 144,000 words. You may have noticed that I am now running about 19,845 words behind schedule. That is a daunting amount of words. This last week weas not very good for my overall writing productivity. If you were to divide 1,000,000 words by 365 days, then you would quickly learn that writing a little bit more than 2,739.72 words per day would help you reach that very lofty goal. My overall words per day average is still pretty close to the yearly target.

The best thing to do at this point is to stop worrying about past performance. At this point, I just need to ensure that I’m staying over the 3,000 word per day threshold. That will help generate a little bit of buffer. A buffer is very important to help prevent failure from weeks like last one. Things just did not go all that well this week. My need to write did not help push me toward writing enough words to meet my writing goal. It is good to have goals. Writing 3,000 words per day is a decent writing goal. It is something that I have been able to do more often than not throughout this year, but it is still hard to achieve. This paragraph right here right now is going to push this blog post up over 2,000 words. That is a good start for the day. Given that things are real time that means sometimes between no and about 6 hours when this blog post gives live over 1,000 words need to be written.

Maybe I should select a picture and write 1,000 words about it. That would be one way to move forward. I watched the first to webisodes from the new Stargate Origins series. It was exciting to see new Stargate, but at the same time the series was a little bit questionable. We will see where things end up going and what ends up happening with that show. They could have made a lot more Stargate television by exploring things beyond just Stargate SG-1. Everybody in the house is asleep right now. Peppercorn the dog is 12 years old and enjoys naps. At the moment Peppercorn is just napping by one of our living room chairs. We could upgrade to a projector I guess or maybe at some point we will let Costco sell us a sweet sweet 4K television. This Sony Bravia we have is getting pretty old. It is a refurbished model and it was shipped to Colorado Springs from Japan. It arrived at the airport in a crate from customer service and the warranty program. It has been a pretty good television. We have gotten a number of years of usage from it.

Getting a 4K television is something that will happen.

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

P.S. Getting back on track today is going to be about writing 3,000 words today between breakfast and dinner. After dinner, I need to focus in on writing a post for tomorrow and try to build back up my 24 hour blog buffer. Getting back ahead of schedule is something that needs to happen. Before this year I used to just write blog posts and publish them. That is how things worked for years. It worked well enough and it was about publishing real time. At this pace of writing staying a little bit ahead of things is a good way to help push things forward. At least that way if something was written and rejected I could keep pushing forward.

Writing for fun and adventure is one way to go about it. Writing to think about the future and beginning to breakdown the complex nature of the intersection of technology and modernity is another way. This journey is about taking on and looking at things in different ways. Some of my time has been spent thinking about quality of life and how to move forward. It has been spent thinking about what things are important and why they are important. Those types of questions are good questions. That is what digging deep and writing 1,000,000 words is all about.

This afternoon I’m getting ready to watch the Jayhawks play basketball. That should be a fun time this afternoon. This blog post should be complete by the time the game is on. Working toward writing 6,000 words per day is something that is probably going to happen, but it is interesting. The prose may feel a little bit disjointed. I have been writing a little bit and doing a little bit of work all day. That type of effort happens on the weekend. Any time where I can sit down and write it is pretty easy to move forward. I spent some time yesterday thinking about the future and what things I really want to do and accomplish. That is an interesting line of thought. It was hard to sit down and think about all the choices that occured to reach right now.

My writing methods used to be very closely aligned to my style of functional journaling. For the most part my writing was edited down to just the main bullet points and that is how I ended up going about things. That worked out for years. It was the main method of my writing. It was a series of new thoughts and ideas. This style of writing long form prose is a lot different. It does not seem to be a bad idea, but even after 40 days it had not become a solid part of my routine. I need to round out about another 150 words to hit 3,000 for this post and move on to the next batch of 3,000 words for the day. It seems like eeking out the last 500 words in this post was the hardest part. Maybe as things started to funnel from start to finish the lens of the words contained in this post constrained the end based on the promise of the beginning.

It is also possible that writing the last part was a little bit harder after nap time ended. You can imagine that writing within a state of extreme chaos is harder. It could be that my efforts to figure out how to close out the day are actually hurting my efforts to write at the moment. All I can see is the end and that is no way to spark a beginning. Sometimes it is easier to pick a direction when you have every path open in front of you.