Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Day 82 the one where I shared my Warren Zevon Pandora station

2018: Day 82 the one where I shared my Warren Zevon Pandora station
Word count 171,545 + 1,272 or 172,817 of 1,000,000

Dear Reader,

My desk was completely picked up. Things were looking like they were supposed to look. Somehow within only the matter of a day the entire top of my main desktop is covered in nonsense. A couple hard drives arrived yesterday. They are Western Digital (WD) desktop hard drive SATA 5400 RPM 3.5 inch drives. My new computer build using a Corsair Air 740 case has a bay for 3 slide in and out 3.5 inch hard drives. No screws are involved each bay has a sleeve that holds the drive in place with pins instead of screws. A lot of modern hard drive cages use this design it is way more efficient than the previous models that involved a lot of complex screw configurations and removals to get the hard drives mounted. My new computer configuration will feature three different types of storage. Stay tuned to find out more information on my exact data storage configuration. You can probably safely assume that some future blog thumbnail images will cover that subject.

My Warren Zevon Radio station from Pandora was created back on May 5, 2013. Today is the day I’m electing to share the link with the world to bring joy to the entire planet one click at a time:

https://www.pandora.com/station/play/1406490537159530917

That link just got shared on Twitter and it included some type of headphone emoji. I’m going to admit that when it comes to the world of emoji my knowledge base is limited to the basic set of smiley faces. Most of those I learned how to cause on accident from texting the character set that causes the conversion from text to emoji. That reminds me of the reality that pretty soon my Twitter account will have published my 5,000th tweet. I’m not sure if that is an accomplishment or just a random milestone. That is probably differentiated based on the amount of celebration or personal satisfaction that is involved.

The above set of HTML should be triggering an embedded tweet from Twitter showing the moment I shared my Warren Zevon Radio Pandora station. For better or worse that HTML will trigger a nice embedded tweet until the day Twitter disappears from the internet. Given that will probably happen at some point it would have probably been more produent to take a screenshot of that box and embed an image vs. a swatch of HTML that needs an external site to run. Sure that would be the best way to go about it, but apparently I’m a rebel archivist this morning. Most of the musings I post to Twitter are just links and retweets. Based on my YouTube efforts I had started sharing all sorts of links related to artificial intelligence, deep learning, neural networks, and machine learning. I still think that is the right way to go. A string of links would not make a very compelling blog post. Twitter is a better forum for the sharing of random links to things that catch my attention.

Topic 1: Jayhawks vs. Tigers

We watched the second half of the University of Kansas Jayhawks basketball game against the Tigers of Clemson tonight. During the first half we were still at Toys”R”Us tonight. I do not know if that is the right spelling, but I got it from their website so it must be close enough. It probably won’t matter here soon. That venerable company is closing down. They blamed everything from the economy to birth rates of millennials. Tonight in Denver they had signs up about things being 30% off and we had to spend our gift card. People were darting all over the store it was a madhouse of toy deal seekers. Seriously, I have not seen so many people in a story outside of black friday doorbusters. People were everywhere. They were looking at the deals. It was a little bit overwhelming. We almost bought one of those outside turtle things that holds sand. They also had a lobster one which obviously seemed fantastic.

We made it out in time for a quick dinner before watching the complete second half of the basketball game. Tonight we watched CBS using our over the air antenna. That works out pretty well and avoids any bandwidth costs. The quality of the high definition signal over the air is pretty good. Naturally, sports and movies are the reasons I want to upgrade to a sweet sweet 4K television. We could not get a 4K signal for the game tonight anyway. Over the air has the standard for 4K, but that is not something that is being used in the wild yet. This was one of those games that was just hard to watch. Things were going well and then all of sudden a cold streak almost cost the team a trip to the elite eight. Maybe that should be capitalized. It doesn’t really matter. Being in the top 8 teams in the nation is pretty good. At this point, I’m ready to sit down and watch the rest of the games tonight. It is a lot less stressful to watch games where the Jayhawks are not playing during the tournament.

Topic 2: I’m super ready for the weekend

Sometimes a week can just be so jam packed that take a few moments to decompress sounds like a fantastic path forward. This was one of those weeks. Figuring out how to decompress on the weekend is always a unique challenge. For some reason sitting on the sofa and relaxing does not really appear to be something that is going to happen. A toddler has more energy during any given day that I can hope to muster within an entire week. Even powered by Soylent meal replacements my activity level does not reach toddler speed or wildness. That perhaps is one of those things that may never happen again in my lifetime. Cleaning up my office and getting things back in order may be something that can happen this weekend. We have some basketball to watch. That is probably one of those things that is going to happen. Right now I’m watching the Syracuse Orange vs. the Duke Blue Devils basketball game.

The rest of the night should probably be spent writing. At the moment all I want to do is sit and write about writing and that is not really a useful pattern to follow at this point. I need to pick a topic and write some words that inspire passion or maybe at least some fury. Today has to be a good day. It was the day that I shared my Warren Zevon Radio Pandora station with the world. Pandora does not really indicate how many people listen to that station. It does have a counter on how many people have added Warren Zevon as an artist to a playlist. That is not an addition of a specific song or album it is the straight up addition of the artist. Strangely enough the count on that would be 58 listeners. Based on that alone it would appear the music of Warren Zevon is not really gaining ground on Pandora. Maybe I’ll check back in 30 days and see if that number has gone up or down. Pop ups within the Pandora application are constantly trying to get me to upgrade. At this point, I’m not upgrading out of pure bitterness.

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


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