2018: Day 55 the one with a memorable Jayhawks victory
Word count 135,263 + 1,065 or 136,328 of 1,000,000

Dear Reader,

All this chatter and gossip about the state of NCAA college basketball is troubling to stay the least. At some point in the future fans of college basketball will look back at this dark moment. It will probably get a lot worse before it gets better. All of that churn is ongoing in a swirl that makes things very hard to evaluate. Even with all that going on the University of Kansas Jayhawks were able to claim a 14th consecutive big 12 regular season title. That is a pretty remarkable record. For the most part I would say that Coach Bill Self has recruited players that are not really one and done superstars. The basketball program has had a lot of seniors that have played a number of years at the university. It is hard to reconcile. I’m hopeful that at the end of this year we will know where things stand. All of that news made this victory exciting, but I have some reservations about it.

My new case of Soylent meal replacement drinks arrived today. It arrived in a case of Cafe Coffiest 14 oz Bottles. I’m not sure how long it will take me to consume 12 bottle of Cafe Coffiest, but it should be interesting. My weight has dropped from 226 pounds to 218 so far. I’m going to keep replacing my breakfast and lunches until my weight drops back under 200 pounds. That might seem like a ridiculous goal, but I really do think it is possible. Exercising more by using my walking desk every day will help. Reducing my caloric intake each day is probably going to be the primary driver. My energy level appears to be up and I have not had any issues tolerating the meal replacement powder. That goal has been in progress this week and it should be possible. You might have noticed that the thumbnail today is of that case of Cafe Coffiest bottles. I make it better with a filter and a slightly off angle.

Today I used my one month subscription to YouTube TV to watch some live ESPN via Chromecast. Specifically, I watched the University of Kansas basketball team play a regular season Big 12 conference game against the University of Tech Tech Red Raiders. It was a pretty big game. Both schools wanted to win the game to make a push toward a regular season conference championship. You already know from the first paragraph that the Jayhawks were victorious. It was a pretty good game to watch. This eason has been really interesting. In terms of coaching this is one of Coach Bill Self’s best efforts. The team on the court has faced a really strong league this year in Big 12 conference play. It pretty much takes a solid team effort to win games and that makes things fun to watch. We will see what happens in the postseason, but it will be very interesting.

I was going to spend the next 2,500 words writing about college basketball. However, on second thought that did not seem like very best option. Today included some basement cleaning and some Star Trek Voyager streaming episodes from season four. Apparently, finding the keyboard style TiVo remote in the basement may be impossible. Today I did manage to find three over the air antenna devices in the basement. Oddly enough you might remember that I went out to Best Buy to acquire a new OTA device. Now we have 4 over the air antennas in the house. Three in the basement and one plugged into the TiVo Roamio device in the living room. So far I have been happy enough with the combination of the TiVo box and the Xbox One S. We can watch television, physical media, and stream things.

Topic 1: Google Play Books audiobooks

Maybe it was a highly indulgent choice, but I now own the third book in the Dune series on audiobook. It is a little over 16 hours of content. Before getting hooked on the Dune series the only audiobook I had downloaded was the Steve Jobs biography written by Walter Isaacson back in 2011. Audible had given me that book for free and it was a pretty decent audiobook. You might have figured out that it took more than 7 years for me to want to download another audiobook. We used to buy some of the Clive Cussler Dirk Pitt novels on CD for road trips, but that is about it. I do remember that we had the Journey to the Center of the Earth audiobook at one point. The writing by Jules Verne was a very interesting book for being first published in 1864.

Right now I’m listening to the start of the third Dune book in audiobook format. The first book in the series is really the only one that I go back to from time to time. The rest of the series is something that had entertained me at some point, but mostly has been forgotten over the years. Listening to audiobooks is interesting and a little bit different from what I normally do. Maybe since I’m spending the last few hours of my night writing audiobooks have become an indulgence. All of this writing has reduced the amount of time I have to spend on reading things. The journal articles keep coming and other people keep writing things to read. In fairness the new content is not really the part of the process that would stop me from being able to consume all of it. Nobody really can read everything that is unrealistic. Even building an an artificial intelligence based model to consume all written content would be impossible based on current technology. You could probably figure out how to pull it all into a database, but indexing and making it useful would be a pretty daunting task.

Topic 2: Dealing with cable management

A number of boxes in the basement contain various cables. I have pretty much kept all the cables in a bunch of boxes. Today it seemed like a good idea to take zip ties and start cleaning up the cables. Some of them are pretty old. I’m not entirely sure what some of the cables belonged to at this point.

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