Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Day 91 the one with Easter Sunday

2018: Day 91 the one with Easter Sunday
Word count 180,605 + 1,426 or 180,605 of 1,000,000

Dear Reader,

Well today was a wild day. It was a day with an early morning visit to Church and a brunch. For me Easter Sunday is a brunch-worthy occasion. For those of you who know me well. You are already well aware of my aversion to bunch time meals. Dinner time meals provide at least some hope of interesting conversation. I’m not a fan of breakfast food or the small talk that goes with brunch. To that end my engaging in or attending brunch is highly limited. Maybe it was a bit of daydreaming, but I had thought about writing some short stories today. Earlier today that idea was at the forefront of my thoughts. The idea to sit down and hammer out some pages of a short story is always on my mind. The need to write drives a lot of my actions. The folks over at Barnes and Noble shipped my books. They will arrive here next week. That should be exciting and it will be a good excuse to read Being and Nothingness again. It has been some time since that book by Sartre has been my primary focus. That is the funny thing about reading a book it can bring a variety of worlds into the frame of your primary focus for consideration.

This is what I am considering at the moment… Apparently, the Easter bunny did not bring me any candy this year. We did make a trip to our local Walmart to get buy some 4K Blu-ray discs. I purchased the Thor: Ragnarok 4K package which includes a digital copy, 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray disc, and Blu-ray disc. Apparently, the disc I thought was a 4K Blu-ray is actually a 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray disc. They added some words to that one. Either way it works out just fine. All of my physical media purchases of movies this year have been geared toward getting both the 4K and HD versions of the movie. Given my current bandwidth restrictions based on arbitrary and capricious internet data caps from the cable company it would be unrealistic to think I can stream a ton of 4K movies. Seriously, why must all of my data have some type of cap. Putting together terrible plans with data caps cannot possibly be helping things.

I had been thinking about getting one of the Next video doorbells, but the constant 2 megabyte per second upload to the cloud connection would decimate my bandwidth limit. It seems like as the internet gets more things the demands on bandwidth will only increase over time. My plan does not even afford me the option to buy more bandwidth. I’m at the wall of what is possible with my current provider. Nothing more is really possible via my current modem. Sure I could upgrade to a 1 gigabyte connection, but that would just allow me to exceed my bandwidth allotment at a faster rate. I’m not sure it would really get me anything at this point. That is a good enough reason to avoid switching out services.

I’m considering upping my Soylent consumption for the next 7 days and shifting 66% of all my meals to a pure Soylent diet. That seems like a good thing to adopt here now that 3 months from this year are in the history books. I have two more cases of the coffee flavored Soylent in the garage. That should allow me to make this dietary change without any barriers. My Pandora internet radio station is doing a pretty good job at the moment of playing the right songs at the right time. It seems like buying the Google Home Max might just be the right option for my music needs. It would be much cheaper to just pick up a Google Home and move on, but the sound quality of the Google Home Max seems to be a much better option. I have spent some time looking at Audioengine options and some other wireless speaker products. I’m not sure what direction things are going to end up going, but I’ll figure it out here shortly.

Topic 1: Mixing things up with my computer builds

Tomorrow may just be the day that I start to mix things up with my computer builds. I quick search on eBay showed a few options for NVIDIA GTX 1060 graphics cards. I tagged on the phrase founders edition to that search and a few options jumped out. At some point, I was thinking that the number of GTX 1060 graphics cards for sale on eBay would increase rapidly. That is something that is still impending. It will probably happen at some point this year. Sure the release of the next generation of NVIDIA graphics cards will probably help fuel that sell off. Tomorrow I’m considering pulling both of my GTX 1060 graphics cards out of my Storm Stryker case and dropping them over into the Corsair Air 740 case. I’m still really displeased with the amount of sound those new WD 5200 RPM drives are producing, but it is possible the graphics card fan noise will make that seem less extreme.

Topic 2: Wondering about vinyl records

This week may just be the week that I make it to a vinyl record store in my area. It looks like Denver has a few of them. My journey to buy more products local is working out swimmingly. Travel times are up and hunting things down is very real consideration. I started wondering why no application exists to just figure out how to hunt things down. You think a service for finding where to buy things in your area would be easy enough to build out. You can search the internet to find a store or to locate something. None of that will help you see the inventory or verify that the thing you want to locate is actually sold by that store. Part of the reason online sales have increased at such a rapid rate is probably related to the convenience and the specificity involved. You can pretty quickly drill down to the right product and buy it. Sure that is something that I want to work around. First, every purchase needs to be something that I want to buy and should purchase, Second, figuring out how to support businesses with at least a local presence benefits me and my community. Third, I have a bunch of other reasons, but I’m not going to write them out and make you read them today. I’ll save that for a later adventure.

Buying physical media like records or even buying 4K Blu-ray discs is about owning the content. That comes with some very real benefits. I could sell it again or give it to somebody. Digital rights to a file or even having a digital file opens up all sorts of interesting considerations. My entire online music collection is not permanent. Now I fully recognize that my vinyl record collection or my physical media movies are not permanent either. They do have a much longer potential shelf life. Sure my collection of HD DVD discs is now for sale on eBay. I totally guessed wrong on that one. Strangely enough I still think the HD DVD format was superior, but it did not win out. It probably would have made more sense to get rid of all my HD DVD discs years ago. For some reason that just did not happen. They have been with me on several moves and for several years. Somebody might very well buy them next week. We will see how that goes. You can buy one on eBay apparently. Somewhere in the basement we have one I think in a box that probably has not been opened since we moved to this hours. I’m assuming it still works.

It looks like you can buy one of these HD DVD players for sale at under $50 and you can get a ton of movies pretty cheap in bulk lots. Maybe that explains the market for them. It is some type of lingering secondary market based on pricing and availability. I’m sure the movies still look pretty good and you could get the television to upscale the signal. It is an interesting example of market conditions after a product has become end of life. I’m sure an academic paper or some type of research is hiding within that use case.

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


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