2018: Day 97 the one with some words about words
Word count 184,440 + 2,000 or 186,440 of 1,000,000

Dear Reader,

That title might be the most epic shade thrown on my journey to 1,000,000 words in the same year. This post started off with a quick search on Google to figure out how many days are left in the year. According to the power of the internet as of right now… 268 days, 6,444 hours, 386,693 minutes, and 23,201,599 seconds remain this year. That sounds like a lot of time. Maybe it is a significant amount of time or maybe it is just a drop in the bucket. That probably depends on your perspective and thoughts about time in general. At the start of today I still needed to write 815,560 words this year. With 268 days left that pretty much means that I need to average 3,044 words per day to achieve my goal. When you spell it out that way it does not seem all that impossible. You just have to divide 815,560 words by 268 days. Maybe the first quarter of the year. Was not my best writing effort. Maybe it was just the warm up period for the real push forward.

I’m game to keep working on the journey. At least that’s what I was thinking around lunch time today. Sure now its 21:19 hours and as you might have guessed from the time this blog post has to wrap up for the day in the next 40 minutes. A lot of things can happen in 40 minutes. Tons of words can be written in 40 minutes. I’m pretty much ready to write from this moment forward to try to get as close to the requisite 3,044 words for the day. It is an epic race at this point to see how many words will end up being written. I knew the goal. It was very clear. For some reason my execution toward that goal was not on target. It was pretty far off. Ok —- it was really far off. Like mind boggling epic failure off. This blog post right now is being powered by the new network that I just got done setting up.

We went out to our local Best Buy and got a set of 3 Google WiFi devices. They are now scattered all over the house providing a mesh network. I also took the time to setup a guest network using the same devices. Overall the setup of the devices did not take very long at all. I crawled under my desk and setup a 5 port gigabit switch to support the devices in my office and plugged in the first Google WiFi device. It took just a few seconds to download the Google WiFi application from the Play store. That app wanted me to scan the QR code on the bottom of the Google WiFi device and then we were off and running. It needed a network name and a password. A few minutes later it was off and running. Setting up the next mesh network device was as simple as plugging it into the wall and thing a few clicks on the application.

Right now all 3 of the devices are setup and running. We have about 11 devices connected to the network. All of that setup time amounted to about 15 minutes. None of that was me in a hurry. It took a couple minutes for the network to update itself and now it is just running. The best feature of the hotspot that is up in a bedroom is that the light can be turned off on the device. Some folks are really sensitive to light. I’m not one of those people, but I’m glad I could turn off the light anyway. That was a thoughtful feature to include. We have one Chromecast device in the basement connected to the TV in front of my walking treadmill that needs to be updated. For the most part every device in the house has now been updated. One of the things that I need to figure out is how to disable the wireless networks on my base router. That will help reduce the wireless footprint in the house. I’m not 100% sold on the idea of wireless internet saturation, but it makes some sense.

My thumbnail for today was uploaded using the old router. My ASUS RT-AC87U Wireless-AC2400 Dual Band Gigabit Router purchased back in 2014 is now unplugged. It does not really work all that well. Over the last few weeks it has been getting hot and having trouble. That was the major reason for going out to Best Buy today and buying the Google WiFi devices. Strangely enough it was more expensive to buy them from the Google store online than to drive to Best Buy and buy them in person. Apparently, the discount at Best Buy was just a better deal and I got them much faster vs. having to wait for shipping. They were wrapped in some pretty serious security device cables. They must be a key item to keep track of in the store. I cannot write a review of anything beyond the setup of the device. I’m using it right now to stream Pandora and my Chromebook is connected, but neither of those things is going to give me the information necessary to jump in and finish up a comprehensive review. That will probably take a few days at least to see how the devices perform.

Time is drawing short here tonight and I’m just hitting the 1,000 word mark. I may run out of time before being able to hit the 3,044 word mark. I could just extend the deadline by an hour for tonight and see where things end up, but that removes a lot of the pressure to write faster tonight. At the moment, the blog post is setup and ready to post at the correct time of 22:00 hours. That is about 25 minutes from now. The real question is how many words can be generated in that the 25 minute window. I’m guessing that a few can be created, but they may not be the best representation of my writing efforts. Today was just supposed to revolve around some words about words. I mean you can pretty much take that title in a wide variety of directions. It would not lock the writer down to any specific direction.

At the moment it looks like my writing about is not going to hit a pace of 3,000 words per hour. That does not appear to be in the cards for tonight. It was a pretty good day overall. We watching a few hours of the masters golf tournament. I’m not sure if that should have been capitalized or not. The announcers did seem really excited about the golf tournament today. I need to get out and play a little bit more golf this year. At the very least, I need to make a better effort to hit the driving range and at least get back into the rhythm of hitting quality shots and being ready to play good round of golf. For those of you who have seen my golf swing over the years you are well aware that it is an unfinished product to say the least. It has some room for improvement. That is where a good amount of practice might end up helping.

I compromised and added thirty minutes to the publishing deadline for tonight. Things are now set to publish at 22:30 hours. That is just a little bit more time to help push things close to the 3,044 word target. Getting a new home wireless network setup is pretty exciting. From the moment the Google WiFi devices were released I had considered getting them. It was just hard to justify replacing a wireless router that was working just fine. I’m not entirely sure how to get the device to factory reset before I get rid of the old hardware. That feels like something I should do before getting rid of it. I am considering adding one more Google WiFi device to the network. Right now the mesh network should provide full coverage of the house. The only part of the setup that might be questionable is the coverage of the backyard. I’m going to have to do some testing to figure out the boundaries of the mesh network.

Oops —- I was introducing the thumbnail for the blog post today and got sidetracked for a couple paragraphs. That photograph was taken of Peppercorn the dog resting on the new dog bed. For some reason that bed is a pretty good camouflage for Peppercorn the dog. I set my Ricky & Morty coffee mug down in front for the picture. Peppercorn the dog was not impressed by the coffee mug in the least. That is ok for the most part. It looks like my efforts are only going to yield 1,500 words within the original timeline for publication. That is not a bad effort for the night, but it is pretty far short of the 3,044 goal. If this blog post had not excited and a big nothing burger had been posted for the day, then the overall goal would have only increased to 3,055 from 3,044 words per day. That means that at this moment in time failure is worth somewhere under 10 words per day for the rest of the year. Impacting 267 days of writing by adding to the total word count required per day is interesting.

This writing journey to hit 1,000, 000 words in the same year is really eye opening. I have thought about a ton of different ways to try to publish 1,000,000 words in the same volumes. Anyway you elect to cut that one up it is going to be a pretty small font wit a lot of pages. Here shortly I should have a pretty decent understanding of what is going to be required to close out this writing project for the year. My goal at the moment is to push this writing effort up over 2,000 words for the day and see where things are at tomorrow. My best bet is to start writing a little bit in the morning and the afternoon to avoid the mad dash to 3,044 to 3,055 words during the last 2 hours of the day. That may not be all that reasonable to try to achieve, but it seems like a reasonable and good goal to push forward.

Tomorrow should be a pretty good day for writing. Maybe ramping up to 2,000 words today and then up to whatever the actual goal is a good enough start to keep things pushed forward. This post has been written without any type of topic header. It was written as one single post from start to finish. This is one way of presenting information and pushing things forward. That is one of the easier things to write about and one of the harder things to mange to get done. Trying to push things forward in a positive and proactive way take a little bit of effort. Closing out these last few hundred words has really got me thinking about the future and where things are going. Daydreaming is a little bit more complex than just dealing with the tactical parts of the decision making process.

I’m already thinking about what is for dinner tomorrow. That is a bad sign for things to come. Trying and being hungry can be challenging. I have a few different topics to write about and that may happen tomorrow. For the most part I’m just curious about how things are going to shake off and where things are going to end up get going faster.

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