2018: Day 78 the one where I wondered about building a 3 level Go board
Word count 167,857 + 1,214 or 169,071 of 1,000,000
Dear Reader,
Yesterday was a big day in terms of making decisions. Giving up on Amazon as a company was a difficult call to make. We are one day into my post Amazon world. All of my music has been downloaded. I’m back listening to the Pandora music streaming. We will see how long before I break down and pay for the premium Pandora service without advertisements. You might think that dealing with the loss of Amazon would be my primary worry for the day, but you would be completely wrong. I watched a ton of episodes of Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda television show on Amazon Prime streaming. That was great, but the streaming journey has ended. My next goal from a creator or maker perspective is to create a frosted glass or plexiglass 3 level Go board like the one featured in the series. The idea of playing 3 level Go sounds fantastic. The game itself is pretty challenging on a large board. Playing that across 3 levels sounds like an epicly relaxing way to challenge my mind. I have already started on some designs.
Admittedly —- I really thought that was a the thing I could buy on eBay or somewhere online. That does not appear to be the case. Sure I could just buy three go boards and set them next to each other. Alternatively, I could buy three go boards and build some type of shelf system for them to allow 2 players to engage in a 3 level go board game. That would probably be easy enough. It might be worth at this point to commission some type of construction project or maker team to build a repliclica 3 level go board from the Andromeda series. Chances are unless somebody responds to this post with a suggestion on how to get one of these boards my new hobby just might be assembling replica go boards. It looks like the project would require a base system and 3 boards of made of of something like plexiglass. The boards probably need to be made out of some type of transparent blue plastic. Making them out of glass does not not seem like a good idea. Some of the concept sketches I found show the overall board being about 14 inches tall and the 3 boards being 12 inch by 12 inch squares. The go boards shown on Andromeda seem so to be 10 by 10 game boards. That would probably be easier to build and play than a 12 by 12 game configuration.
We will see how long it takes to push things forward on the custom go board creation front. My first move here is probably going to be to figure out how to buy some plexiglass squares and figure out how how to drill into them and make the proper slot for attaching to the base. I assume drawing or etching the go board on them will be the easier part of the process. I’ll go to the hardware store and find something that could be the base. This is now seeming like a project that could be completed with an online order for acrylic blue transparent tires and a few trips to the hardware store. Maybe building those boards will be my new hobby. It could be a pretty solid little adventure. We will see how that goes or how long it holds my attention. I do know how to use eBay to sell some awesomely epic 3 level go boards…
Topic 1: My Pandora account
I logged back into my Pandora account on my Google Pixel 2 XL smartphone today. It looks like the monthly service fee to avoid commercials is $4.99 per month. That is not all that unreasonable and I remember why I made that purchase before. I’m not the world biggest fan of listening to the same advertisements over and over again. My Warren Zevon radio station was till a part of my account. Throughout the last 30 minutes it has not played any songs by Warren Zevon. I pretty much hit thumbs up on every song by Warren Zevon, but the station for some reason just plays everything related to material by Zevon. That does not appear to be anything that I am going to fix any time soon. The only part of this whole paragraph that I could personally fix would be paying for the subscription without advertisements.
At some point along this journey I’m going to need to figure out a solution to my night music problems. I could just listen to Pandora streaming and try to ignore the advertisements. Just as I was about to switch to a new topic the channel finally played a song by Zevon. That screenshot I just took on my Google Pixel 2 XL smartphone of my Pandora account was easy enough to capture. I’m hoping it gives you an idea of what the application experience looks like. Somehow I just watched an advertisement video for 1 gigabit speed internet from Xfinity and now I get to listen to 1 hour of uninterrupted Pandora. That was strange, but at the same time it will be nice to have an hour of just music to support my writing efforts for tonight.
Topic 2: A status on my new computer build
At some point this year the folks over at NVIDIA are about to release a new series of graphics cards. My new computer build is lacking a CPU, RAM, and a CPU water cooled fan. The build it self will be able to support up to 3 graphics cards and that is pretty much what it will do at some point. That type of GPU power could really power some deep learning using TensorFlow. At the moment, that sounds like a splendid idea. The waiting game is going to be hard. It would be easier to stay within the Pacal series of NVIDIA graphics cards. That however is easier in the moment and less fun in the long run. Those new cards are probably going to be epic and awesome for GPU accelerated TensorFlow efforts. I guess you could say the overall status on my new computer build is assembling slowly one part at a time. Maybe it would be easier to explain that two of the parts that will be included in the build are in flux. First, I’m pretty sure that the new Intel i9 processors are going to come down in price at some point. Second, I’m willing to wait a little bit to get one of the next generation NVIDIA graphics cards.
It does look like on the Newegg website a bunch of graphics cards from NVIDIA are back in stock. My search is for GTX 1060/1070/1080 graphics cards with sort from lowest price to highest price. The GTX 1080 cards look pretty awesome, but they were just out of my price tolerance when they came out. Oddly enough I never would have guessed that graphics prices would have gone up. Most of the time technology prices drop after release vs. steadily increasing before a shortage occurs. It seems like all the speculative cryptocurrency mining adventures decimated the normally oversupplied market for graphics cards.
Dr. Nels Lindahl
Broomfield, Colorado
Written on my Storm Stryker PC and or my ASUS C101P using Google Docs
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