2018: Day 62 the one with a weekend adventure of cleaning
Word count 145,418 + 3,002 or 148,420 of 1,000,000

Dear Reader,

It is early in the morning. Soon 06:00 will be approaching and everybody will be awake in the house. Right now just a few things are going on. I’m awake and writing, but my Nespresso Expert machine has not been powered on. Soon enough it will be time for my Soylent meal replacement breakfast. Overall my diet is mostly vegan and replacing two meals with Soylent 2.0 probably helps sustain that. Eating vegetarian is on the roadmap for the foreseeable future and eating a number of vegan meals is going to be a large part of that. At the moment thanks to YouTube TV I’m watching Top Chef Season 15 Episode 13 via streaming. The season is coming to a an end here soon enough. This week they are in Aspen, Colorado cooking outside. That is over 3 hours drive time from the house. It turns out that after giving up cable the only two things that I really searched out were University of Kansas basketball games and Top Chef.

The thumbnail for today is from when I went to see the movie Black Panther in Dolby Cinema. Strangely enough they played a very long and involved Walking Dead promo before the movie started. My only real exposure to that show is from commercials. I’m aware that it is still on television, but that is about it. Given the longevity of the series people must be watching and enjoying it. My kid has a ton of comic books from Robert Kirkman. They are not related to the Walking Dead franchise they are from the Super Dinosaur series. That one is totally kid appropriate. I think the thumbnail turned out ok for today. Getting a new and original thumbnail for every day is really starting to be a challenge. It turns out that I am not that creative of a photographer. I’m not even all that consistent of a photographer.

We had to go to the mall. It was a treacherous trip to our local mall. Things didn’t work out all that well. We ended up coming home and I had my Soylent and a couple of vegan hot wings. Today it seemed like a good idea to rock some habanero based wing sauces. The one that was the clear winner today was the Red Habanero & Black Coffee Hot Sauce by Queen Majesty. They might be out of New York City, but they make a very good hot sauce. It is hot enough to remind you that what you are eating is rather spicy, but not hot enough to stop you from wanting more. That is really the brighline for how I evaluate hot sauces. I want it to be full of flavor and just hot enough to make me sweat. Some of the hot sauce out in my garage fridge right now are justs hot beyond reason. They are the kind of hot that makes you not want to eat them after you know what you getting into.

Here pretty soon the University of Kansas Jayhawks are going to play basketball game against the Oklahoma State Cowboys. The game will be played in Stillwater, Oklahoma. I may or may not have purchased some microwave popcorn for the game. That should be a good game time snack. Figuring out good game snacks is getting to be more and more of a challenge as my diet moves from vegetarian to more vegan. The game today should be a very good game. I’m pretty sure that we will see Coach Bill Self going deep into the bench to show a really strong rotation. This is not the type of game where the starters are going to need to play 40 minutes of basketball. We are ready to watch the game on ESPN thanks to our one month subscription to YouTube TV. My goal after basketball season is to cancel YouTube TV and have no subscription to any television channels. We will be totally reliant on the TiVo Roamio to record live television. That will be the only method to watch television in the whole house. That is a big move and it is a movie that has been a long time coming.

Topic 1: Jayhawks vs. Cowboys

Today would be a good day for an explosion of words that could help push me up to over 150,000 words on the year. It could be the type of day for that type of word output. Both breakfast and lunch were replaced with Soylent. I have had some decently hot sauce with some vegan wings. I’m pretty much ready to engage my Nespresso Expert machine to brew two shots of espresso and settle in to watch some basketball. You might have guessed that espresso and popcorn is not really something that goes together. That is true for the most part, but it works out ok. I’m ready to write. This Chromebook has 68% power left and that should be plenty to grind out a few thousand words.

I made some popcorn, but the Jayhawks have not really elected to play basketball here in the first 10 minutes of the game. Surprisingly, I had to perform a factory reset on my Google Chromecast Ultra today. It is now connected to a different network in the house. Today streaming YouTube TV to my Chromecast Ultra from my Google Pixel 2 XL smartphone was not working. Given that a whole lot of Google powered technology was involved things should have worked out just fine. When things did not just start working after a reboot it seemed like a good idea to hold the tiny little button on the Chromecast Ultra until it completed a factory reset. That happened and the Google Home application picked up the newly reset device and the software side magic happened. Strangely enough I think the Chromecast Ultra is actually working better at the moment. Maybe something was wrong.

ESPN broadcasters are literally showing an interview during the game in a side by side box. That is purely disrespectful to the game. I really have been disappointed with overall broadcaster quality of the ESPN games this year. It is not hard to provide solid play by play and a little bit of entertainment during a game. I would be happy to help ESPN figure out how to be better, but I’m guessing based on the general degradation of the network over the last couple years they may be closer to the end than the beginning. This game is not looking good for the Jayhawks at the moment. We are getting closer and closer to halftime and the team is falling further behind. Captain Pickles is not laying down to take a nap during the game. This is prime puppy napping time.

The team is showing a little bit of effort here during the final couple of minutes before halftime. Well that is a large deficit going into halftime. Oh buddy —- the second half did not go very well either. It was the last regular season game of the year and it did not go well. This year is a year that Coach Bill Self should be winning some coach of the year awards. We will see what happens here in the Big 12 tournament. That will be a true test of the team and provide an indication of what might happen this year.

Topic 2: Searching for a new motherboard

My new Corsair 740 Air case is sitting in my office under my desk. It is pretty much ready to go. The next part that I’m going to purchase on the road to building a new computer is a really awesome motherboard. Right now my focus is on the ASUS TUF X299 Mark 1 or Mark 2 motherboards. The ASUS TUF X299 MARK I LGA2066 DDR4 M.2 USB 3.1 DUAL LAN X299 ATX Motherboard for Intel Core i9 and i7 X-Series Processors is probably leading my hunt at the moment. I know that searching for a motherboard is something that I have written about a number of times this year, but it draws a lot of my attention and things that draw my attention are going to get written about. That is sort of how this whole daily writing thing goes. The things that pull me in and require my focus are going to get talked about. They are going to be the focus of my writing. Maybe the only example of something that I spend time doing and have not written about is my searching for a Disney World vacation.

The search for my next computer build configuration is really more fun than actually having the computer. For the most part The Borg Cube is just going to just hang out to do work. It won’t be a real daily use computer. My Storm Stryker build will probably still be my primary use box. I don’t even need a sweet computer to mess around with Tensorflow anyway. Google has made it really easy with Colaboratory. I can pretty much do whatever Tensorflow nonsense I want to do with this Chromebook. That is a powerful thing to be able to do anyway. Building out an expensive three graphics card deep learning rig may not be the best use of my technology. It is probably what is going to happen here this summer assuming that NVIDIA drops the new volta cards on the market here in time for my computer build.

Topic 3: Rounding out the night

Here we are again driving toward 22:00 hours and the publication of this blog post. I pretty much spin up my Google Doc and write for a bit. At some point, I open a new blog post and paste in what I have based on my first writing session of the day. That is what would publish if nothing else happened throughout the day. Obviously, I have been racing toward my goal of 3,000 words and that means that I tend to cut and paste my writing efforts over a few times to see how things are trending. At the moment, I kind of amused by the Qwerkywriter S typewriter inspired mechanical keyboard. That is not a device that I need to have for any reason, but it looks awfully nifty. Maybe it is just shiny enough to inspire a few more words per day. Right now I mostly write on this Chromebook and that is probably how things will go until this keyboard fails. At that point, I will probably get a new Chromebook. This form fact for the C101P is just 10.4 x 7.2 x 0.6 inch (WxDxH). It is a rather small computing device. The keyboard is about as small as it can be to maintain comfort and have some travel within the keys.

Somehow I feel like the Qwerkywriter keyboard should cost about $150 vs. the current price of $300. Some of the reviews of it are pretty interesting. People seem to really like writing on that device. My prefered typing interface is the Microsoft natural keyboard. It is the split keyboard slightly angled ergonomic build that is in offices everywhere. I own two of them right now. My first one actually wore out after years of use. It takes a lot of typing to wear out a keyboard. I’m wondering just how long this Chromebook will last. I have written a ton of words on this one and the letters are not even starting to fade at all. That is really surprising. Sure I take the time to power down the device and clean the keyboard and the outside with industrial cleaning wipes every week. That type of cleaning is probably not necessary, but it makes me happy so it is probably going to keep happening.

Sure I’m listening to another Coheed and Cambria album tonight. This one is from 2015. It is called, “The color before the sun.” So far the album seems pretty decent. To the best of my recollection this is the first time I’m hearing it. It sounds like a Coheed and Cambria album. It sounds pretty good on my Bose Qc35 headphones. At the moment it appears that I have just under 2 hours to write another 1,000 words. That seems totally doable. That is probably possible without picking another topic. If I just elect to sit here and type until the limit is reached, then this journey will probably work out one sentence of stream of consciousness writing at a time. I may have to pick out one more album to listen to tonight. This one I’m listening to may not be enough to cover the rest of this writing session.

Tonight just might take an interesting turn. It took a fair amount of words to hit this point where my mind is clear and I’m tired enough that self-censorship won’t slow me down at all. Maybe at some point the right combination of content and motivation will hit and I’ll start writing a short story or something else fiction related. I really thought by now this posts would have descended into a series of loosely related short stories. Some of them might even be pretty decent. That has not really happened at all. This year has not been a year that included very much fiction writing. Sure i listened to three audiobooks. That was exciting. It probably slowed down my writing output. I write much faster when listening to music it turns out. That is not all that surprising really. Even passively listening to an audiobook engaged my imagination in ways that probably will always limit my writing efforts.

Topic 4: What was this blog post about anyway

We had some adventures today. A lot of traveling around happened. My dinner tonight was supposed to be at the Olive Garden. We arrived to the one near us at around 17:00 hours. It was packed. I’m talking like full parking lot and a 45 minute wait to have dinner. Apparently, I underestimated the overall business strength of our local Olive Garden. People must have really wanted some breadsticks and a never ending bowl of pasta. It was Saturday night, but it was really early in the evening. I did not expect to see so many people eating dinner at that time. One of the things that I have been thinking about indexing relates to the amount of open retail space in the United States. Maybe all that empty store space that I am seeing will start filling up again, but I’m sure that is what Amazon is working to stop. That entire online sales model is about shrinking down the number of feet of retail space per American. That is something that I find very interesting. Owning retail space is probably one of those things where the value of the property is going to be diminished over the next few years. Even here in Colorado we see a lot of open spaces. Just today I drove by former Sports Authority and Best Buy locations. Sure you might be thinking that I also went and shopped at a mall today.

Our local mall was very busy. I’m sure most of the stores in the mall are doing ok. We are making a real effort to shop at the mall and other businesses near us. It is much easier to buy things online and wait for them to arrive. That is really not the model I’m interested in experiencing. The last really hands on and in person storefront that people use exists in grocery stores. Even those stores are facing challenges from online sales and rushed delivery systems. That is something that I have started to wonder about. Think about the long term model of electric transport vehicles in constant motion delivering things to people who don’t really have to leave the house anymore. Any disruption in the just in time delivery system will create mass chaos. Denver for example gets snow. Sometimes it gets a lot of snow. That delivery system will stop during a snowstorm. Most people will not be prepared for a couple days without any type of delivery. That is the type of thing that I have been wondering about today.

Sure we are probably a year or two out form a real electric vehicle supply chain that is constantly moving and delivering things. That is coming and it will probably be here before we know it. We may experience a world where only high end items are sold in actual store fronts to people who want to shop in that way. I’m not giving up on all food in favor of Soylent deliveries at this point, but seems like something that could happen.

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

P.S. This month is off to a pretty good start. Things are looking up so far and the failures of February are not carrying over to this new and interesting month. The promise of March Madness is still looming large. This year I’m gonna try to stay positive and watch as much basketball as possible. In past years I pretty much give up on basketball when the Jayhawks stop playing for the year. That is something that I am going to try to avoid this year. I’m going to try to stay invested in the NCAA tournament from start to finish. That is my strategy at the moment. A lot of that has to do with the fact that I’ll really only be able to watch the games on CBS. Thanks to the need to watch the new Star Trek Discovery show I do have a CBS streaming subscription. I’m not sure if that will help me watch the NCAA tournament, but I’m kind of curious. I’ll probably record all the games to my TiVo Roamio and watch them out of sync. I’m sure all those games will push some of the winter Olympic coverage off of the box. I’m sure that coverage is probably not needed anymore.