Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Day 83 the one with some elite eight basketball games

2018: Day 83 the one with some elite eight basketball games
Word count 172,817 + 1,148 or 173,965 of 1,000,000

Dear Reader,

18 days are left in this whole cryptocurrency mining extravaganza. My efforts are drawing to close within the scope of the 100 day challenge. Monday will be the day that I have some time earmarked to go visit the local Micro Center. Right now at 05:45 hours Google directions are indicating the Micro Center is about 30 minutes away. That is not really the case. It normally takes an hour to get to Micro Center. You would consider that in the same city, but the round trip is going to clock in at well over 2 hours of just driving time. For the most part that makes a trip to Micro Center to walk around and look at things a half day project. Spending a half day on that type of activity sounds like an adventure. Tonight and tomorrow night we have some pretty good NCAA basketball games on tap. These games are really of the moment and they should be good to watch based on the drive and determination of the players still in the tournament to strive for victory.

Part of the whole writing process during this big year of writing has been to learn how to use the first part and the last part of the day to engage in a little bit of stream of consciousness style blog post writing. That is and will continue to be a good use of time. Taking the time to work on other types of writing projects is also important. Part of that involves working on short stories. Working on more long form fiction pieces is not really practical at this time. My framework has to be about taking one step at a time and putting things together. Outside of working on fiction writing efforts I need to kickstart my 2018 academic writing efforts. Perhaps the outcome of my inquarity into quality this year during my big writing year has focused on my priorities. Maybe this whole 3,000 word per day writing effort is my intellectual Walkabout. Maybe it is my effort to live in the wilderness of the extreme edges of my creativity for a year. Breaking down all of my self censorship and reservations took at least 100,000 words of writing. At this point in the journey, I just sit down and writing based on my reactions and reflections within the moment. Maybe that has reduced my focus as a writing to being of the moment, to being within the moment, to being a part of the moment.

That is probably the best outcome of the entire process. Having a big writing year has to be about being present in the moment and understanding the outcome of spending so much time hammering on the keyboard. A lot of thinking happens during the process of writing at this pace. One of the outcomes of that process seems to be allowing the writing itself to become a reaction to thinking. That distinction is important to understand. Writing has to be the outflow of thought. When things get over complicated the process can become a wicked ouroboros. Within that example the process is the beginning and the end or more bluntly the start and the finish. Treating writing as the journey and the artifact discounts the value of the words to transform things beyond the simple start and finish of the writing session. Reaching beyond the moment where you are present is about being a reflective practitioner that views the past in context and the future in focus. Striving forward is about taking those reasoned and informed steps forward to make things better during the course of interacting with the world.

Part of that process each day has become more and more an attempt to produce 1,000 reflective words at the start of the day. Maybe those words inform the next steps I’m about to take during the day. Maybe that is enough to ground myself in the journey toward an inquiry into quality. A journey toward finding the meaning and experiencing quality throughout the year…

Topic 1: Closing out the night

Some time has passed since the optimism of this morning. Things this morning were stalking up in a way that was full of promise. Hope was springing from every well and the forecast for the day was fun filled with more fun. Alas, reality set in and burned down my optimism reservoir and left me where things sit today. It is like that moment before MacGyver figures out a plan to fix things. I’m talking about the original MacGyver. For me the Richard Dean Anderson version of MacGyver will always be the only version. Unlike Dr. Who who regenerates MacGyver was and always will be Richard Dean Anderson. Ok —- I have said my peace on that one and can move on to trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my night.

For some reason I was very close to purchasing the Audioengine B2 refurbished wireless bluetooth speaker online a few moments ago. That was really close to being something that I purchased. You might be wondering what stopped the transaction from being completed. It was a few reservations I have about wanting a speaker that can play music on its own and does not require my phone connection. My phone rings all the time. Those calls do not need to end up on my wireless bluetooth speaker. That was really the reason that I paused and did not make the purchase. It looks like a pretty nice speaker and it is very close to what I want to get. I had thought about setting up another record player with two speakers upstairs, but that does not seem to be the best option. The setup in my office is working out well enough. Sure I could just use my Bose Qc35 headphones, but sometimes I just want to listen to music that fills the entire room.

Rightnow the Michigan vs. Florida State game is streaming to my television via a Chromecast Ultra being controlled by my Google Home Mini speaker. It was really easy to get going tonight. I just said, “Hey Google play TBS.” That was enough to watch both elite eight games that were on tonight. I’m not entirely clear on why the good folks over at CBS elected to put the games on TBS vs. broadcast television. Let me be exceptionally clear when I say that the programming decisions that television executives make typically make very little sense to me. If those types of things were up to me, then Firefly would still be a tentpole Fox franchise. It only took watching one episode of that show for me to say hey this is great.

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


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