Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Tag: backlog

  • So many writing thoughts

    My thoughts are at a crossroads at the moment. I’m trying to figure out exactly what to focus on at the moment. Normally, my Saturday morning writing schedule involves writing the next edition of the Lindahl Letter weekly publication. My backlog file has 146 items in at the moment. I should probably spend some time working on that backlog list and both pruning and sorting it based on what research notes still deserve attention. The other thing I need to spend some time working on today is a review of my 5 year writing plan. That however begets more and more writing about the process of writing and sorting, planning and review, or potentially backlog pruning. None of those things are extremely exciting or dynamic in terms of being presentable. Maybe that is ok sometimes, but being the primary element it is probably not that acceptable.  

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  • A reflective Saturday

    Right now we are sitting at a recorded and processed backlog level of 3 weeks on the Substack. That 3 weeks of backlog is scheduled to run until Friday, September 15, 2023. Based on my normal routine for the weekend I should be recording week 139 right now during my Saturday morning. This morning The WAN Show was back (no comment) and I have the content ready to record for block 139. Instead of picking up the Marantz professional sound shield live vocal reflection filter from under my desk and starting to record on my Yeti X from Blue microphone I took a step back. Blocks 139, 140, 141, and 142 are actually written and ready to record, but they could be better. This morning I’m going to read all 4 of those blocks and give them a round of editing and expansion. That will be a part of the reworking content process that is important.

    Recently, I have been way more likely to push the entire backlog back a few weeks and drop in new topics. That is in part a function of not wanting to put a new topic so far out in planning and review. Having a new topic that grabs my interest be shelved for over a year while the backlog is consumed in front of it just seems wrong. Right now that backlog goes out until block 226 which is really a problem for future Nels. Sometimes you have to be willing to mix things up and change up the backlog. It’s a healthy part of the agile process. I’m even going to create a new category for posts that is going to be about backlog management.

    Throughout the next week I’ll be working with LangChain and building some Colab notebooks related to using and understanding all the use cases currently in that space. I’m going to spend time every day working on a single block of content within the backlog as well. That should end up yielding some good content building and a lot of focus on getting things done. For the most part the process of recording the audio, video, or other elements is distinctly separate from the writing process and is normally a part of my weekend routine.

  • Some things are just routine

    Some things are just routine. Uninterrupted writing during the earliest hours on Saturday and Sunday. Walking the dog in the morning. 25 evening push ups. Drinking a glass of water with every meal. These things just become a part of a regularly scheduled plan. It’s good to have some things that are routine. I’m really trying to focus on working on delivering the items in my writing backlog. Earlier this week things became a lot less stable. My reaction to that instability was not to power through a bunch of backlog items. It’s good to understand that reaction. I’m really just sitting down now to write a little bit of content. Everything within the foundation of my writing ability was shaken a little bit. Distinctly shaken, not stirred, is how things felt for the moment part. A whirlwind of emotion and reaction beyond anything that was going to just drive some writing. It was one of those moments where you have to take a step back and consider things within a more macro context. 

    I’m actually thinking about releasing some type of poll on Twitter/X each day. That activity would be done just for my own personal amusement. I had considered doing something within the spaces (live audio). That idea never went anywhere. I have posted over 400 videos on YouTube. Apparently, I have posted as of this moment exactly 444 videos. A bunch of those happened during the time when I thought it would be fun to publish a daily vlog. Maybe going back and trying to do that again would be fun. The best way to do that would be to just commit to recording short videos on my Google Pixel 7 Pro, editing them using the PowerDirector application, and publishing them from the phone. That is pretty much how the last round of vlogging happened. I might string together a few random clips and do a test run without making it privately visible. We will see how that ends up going tomorrow.

    You might have guessed that it is now the next day and I was able to run the publishing test on YouTube. Oddly enough, the system actually uploaded the video as my very first YouTube Shorts contribution. It was a pretty easy thing to accomplish and PowerDirector was just as easy to use as I remember from the last time around. Loading content to the project, editing it up a bit, and publishing took just a few minutes. It was a very low friction activity and it was sort of interesting to see it show up as a Shorts contribution. I think that happened due to the orientation of the video. All the little snippets I grabbed happened to be shot vertically. That may be the key to triggering that type of upload category. I’m not exactly sure on that one. 

    I was able to get back into the routine of things for my Saturday morning early hour writing efforts. Two blocks of content were developed including weeks 139 and 141. I’ll have to pick back up with week 140 tomorrow and finish up editing the other two blocks of content. I may not be able to record any new podcast episodes this weekend. I did take the time to set up a podcast playlist on YouTube and I might go ahead and release the Friday August 25, 2023 edition in video format as a sort of test run of the process. Adding that type of video production to my workflow will change the publishing cost from the 10 minutes of audio creation to about 30 minutes per edition. If the video creation process becomes very involved, then things might jump up to 90 minutes per block of content. That could be worth it or it might be a thing to try out and fail faster on by adding it to the mythical stop doing list.

  • Putting in the work on that backlog

    This morning I dug into the content block that I had assigned to this weekend with reckless abandon. You may recall that recently I shifted my entire writing backlog to the right by about a year and added a new set of content to the queue instead. I’m currently working on those new blocks of content creation and it happens to be going pretty well so far. Within my current workflow I’m targeting some audio recording every Saturday Morning and working on content creation during both Saturday and Sunday. My goal of course is to complete one block of the backlog each week while considering the next 5 in the backlog. That functionally gets me ready to work on the next blocks of content by considering them before ever trying to write or research. That is an important part of the process. You sometimes have to think deeply about something before you try to write about it. 

    A few general updates… 

    • Yesterday, I did update the weblog menu to remove a couple of the social network items from the top to streamline content delivery. 
    • I may at some point just remove the GitHub link as well. That one remained, but it is possible that it may get removed here in the next 30 days. That is something that is being considered. 
    • The homepage is back to the about content instead of showing current weblog posts as well. I’m not sure if that is going to be a permanent solution to the homepage. It’s pretty easy to get to the posts section and nothing would stop somebody from reading them in order if that old school blog experience was desired. 
    • I’m considering converting my entire writing collection into a corpus for model training again. It has been a couple years since the content was converted into a corpus like file for model training. The last time was for use with GPT2 about 3 years ago.

  • All those backlog updates are happening

    I have started down a new path in terms of the backlog. I’m currently working on block 130 of 218 known blocks in the multi-year writing chain. All the things have been lined up to be committed to that path. That should end up yielding a pretty set of manuscripts and articles at the end of the newly minted 49 block journey. I’m going to go down the same format of yearly publishing a collection, but I should be able something else out of that process as well. We will see how that ends up going. 

    In any event, all those backlog updates are happening. The first two years of writing blocks were stored in a single Google Doc. Currently blocks 105 to 218 are being worked in a second Google Doc. It would probably be possible to combine the two documents, but I don’t see a reason to do that at the moment. It creates some unwieldy document problems when you start working with hundreds of pages in a browser tab. I’ll transfer the content into a Microsoft Word document for editing into something for publication as a yearly archival manuscript.

    It is interesting that my WordPress integration to Twitter no longer exists. This post could be shared out to other social media systems, but that will not be the case. No real need for that type of social media sharing exists. I’m actually curious if we will see a retreat from broader social media usage or if some other platform or communication method will spring up to fill a void that exists. Oh, immediately after writing this block of text I went out and paid for a year of Twitter paid features and then shared the post via the manual sharing option. Yes, I had to set up the manual sharing feature for every post to be able to do that and it took a couple of minutes. The only social sharing button option that I have added was for Twitter. That might change at some point, but for now that is how it is set up.

    https://twitter.com/nelslindahl/status/1665481416694456320

  • Managing the backlog of writing blocks

    A few hours of my time this weekend were devoted to seeding Substack posts from week 55 to current (124) into the blog. I’m not sure how long Substack as a platform will last so I wanted to just put the content into my backlog. That process of seeding content really did take a couple hours of working with the posts to get all that content ported over to the blog. My weekly workflow now has an extra step to stage the future content in both the Substack and the blog, but having that extra set of steps is just a couple minutes of post production work. At some point, I will need to circle back and load up the Substack content from weeks 1 to 54. However, today will not be that day of content loading. Maybe it will happen during the course of watching some playoff hockey games here in the next month or so as the playoffs progress.

    Last night, I could not make it all the way to the end of the Colorado Avalanche game last night. I made it to part of the 3rd period and fell asleep. That game simply started too late in the evening. I’m an early morning content creator and those late nights are hard to recover from these days. All the round one match-ups have been pretty exciting this year. It has been a good point in my process to consider managing the backlog of writing blocks. Right now I know what content needs to get created between now and the end of the year. All of my energy and focus needs to be put into making the best possible blocks of content. It’s important to really kick the production quality up a notch here and build blocks of research that can be packaged into research notes, literature reviews, or academic articles. At the end of 2023, I want to be able to see several completed articles. Right now I’m tracking to produce a third year end book in three years and that is good, but it could be better and that is where my focus needs to be right now.

    Increasing the velocity of my contributions to the academy is where I want to put my effort. My five year writing plan is about assuming I have that amount of time to do something with my writing efforts and trying to plan to use that time wisely. Part of that is about producing content and writing that does not end up being purely ephemeral in nature. Prose that stands the test of time is rare and impactful. Content that simply fades away is now increasingly becoming nothing more than noise or worse it cannot break through at all and is not even background noise.

    Apparently, within the posts section of WordPress I have 225 draft posts that span from 1998 to 2021 to clean up. Over the years my total collection of posts has moved from being a Microsoft FrontPage site to being over on Movable Type to finally landing on WordPress. A couple of times I have had the entire site wiped out which left a bunch of content holes including images and wholesale missing posts. Most of the time I had backups of the actual written words, but the posts that had images were not well backed up over the last twenty years. Even the Wayback Machine does not have all the content anymore.

  • Working to end some subscriptions

    Today should be a good day to really focus on things. I have been on a kick to remove subscription services recently. Certainly some household services have to remain and they bill monthly. Somehow for an ineffable reason Netflix survived the recent culling. We have been paying for Netflix since they used to send me Farscape DVDs back when we resided in Colorado Springs, Colorado. It has been a long time. We have had Disney Plus since the start of that streaming service and it has all the Marvel movies I like to watch at the end of the day. Initially I thought a limit existed to how many times I would watch the Iron Man franchise, but that apparently does not appear to be the case at all. Recently I even found the listing in Disney Plus with the entire Marvel film universe in order based on the movie chronology. Armed with that information I started watching again from the start and moving my way from left to right on that list slowly one film at a time. That started after I finished watching the entire Frasier (1993 to 2004) series again on a different streaming service. Outside of that content sometimes I get on a Top Chef watching kick and that lasts until the content runs out. It’s really the window right after dinner where I want to watch something for a bit before moving on to other things.

    All of that was prompted by my recent relentless focus on removing subscription services. Speaking of being prompted for output, my writing enterprise of starting to type in the morning is about what happens when the prompt is empty. At the moment of zerospace, where will an empty prompt go from the spark of imagination. That is really what I’m after trying to understand and trying to figure out each and every day. I sit down with no agenda or defined path forward. Within the parlance of large language models I don’t have a prompt. Instead I sit for a moment in the resplendent pleasure of reaching that zerospace before beginning to move toward a newly created spark of something. A lot of times that something is not anything spectacular or even the right path to be taken at that point in the journey. Frequently, I end up writing about the process of writing. That trajectory is not intentional. However, I do allow it to happen. Even the very process of stringing a few words together begets more writing. That is where I’m trying to get to during each writing session. I’m trying to get to the point where I have walked down the path from zerospace to productivity. Opening the door to creativity and productivity is essential for the writing project to begin in earnest. 

    Today might just be one of those super productive days where I wake up and produce two pages of weblog quality prose before jumping right into the next thing on the list to accomplish. That is one of those things you just have to appreciate. I have been considering spending some of my evening time writing a fiction series, but I’m not sure if that will end up happening. Generally speaking my academic writing backlog is so full and overwhelming that I need to just focus on that effort. Knowing that I often end up running down other tracks of effort as sometimes that just seems more fun than working within the proper work breakdown structure. 

  • Working that backlog management process

    On Friday my Substack backlog was 5 posts ahead. At that level of backlog a personal best was achieved in terms of working ahead. However, that is probably too far ahead. Part of getting to that point was making sure I was ready for a summer break where some vacationing was going to happen. That backlog will allow for continuity of publishing and for a bit of vacation. Right now the backlog is at 4 Substack posts and the last one will publish on July 8, 2022. Generally, I think the backlog should be 2-3 weeks, but it is possible that at some point it will move back to a more real time writing to publication cadence. Part of my writing focus is to build quality content that is not time specific or breaking news powered coverage. I want to examine topics within the artificial intelligence and machine learning space based on the merits of the inquiry and not based on a news reporting type of urgency. I try to begin with the final product in mind. Given that the final product of the Lindahl Letter is that it moves from a weekly Friday Substack email based delivery to a yearly volume of published prose. That focus on building something that can be packaged up for perpetuity remains an important consideration.

  • Watching that writing topic backlog grow

    I turned on my Pandora internet radio this morning and listened to some music. Next week I should be able to listen to records again. Setting up my record player again will just require a piece of furniture to be moved from the garage back to my office. Most of my records are stored in alphabetical order. It would be pretty easy to listen to them one and a time and discard any that do not make the cut. Generally speaking my record collection ballooned in the last few years. Some of the records in the collections I bought to see if that band would make the rotation. A few of them were just not something that I enjoyed listening to very much. Sometimes a band goes in a different direction between albums. 

    A pretty decent 7 day streak or so occurred where my writing was on point. Prose was produced on a daily basis with a certain degree of quality. You cannot take for granted those productive writing streaks. Part of stoking the daily habit of writing is sitting down at the keyboard and engaging in the practice of putting thoughts to paper. You have to sit down and put in the work to make things happen. I do feel that writing is something that the more you practice and refine your style the easier it becomes to produce. Yesterday was an example of running into a wall of slowly grinding progress that stunned even me after all these years. It was like a wall descended and surrounded every ounce of productivity I had. Sure it would have been the right plan to just fight through the wall and produce a page of prose. That just did not happen. Time faded away and sure enough the next day arrived. 

    That very next day was today and within that arrival was an opportunity. Today I woke up with a degree of awareness that could be really good to focus on a problem or task. Part of that will require me to focus on what article from my 5 year writing plan will be up first and should be getting consideration throughout the week when I’m not tinkering with posts from The Lindahl Letter. During the course of one of my more productive writing streaks last year I did produce a 14 paper list of upcoming research papers. To help ensure those topics get some attention I’m going to add all 14 of them to the backlog for The Lindahl Letter. Right now that publication is outlined and planned until the 2 year anniversary with 104 topics. The addition was made and now that list is up to 118 topics. Making that addition really did mark the phase 2 expansion of The Lindahl Letter to focus on academic topics that I’m interested in spending time considering. 

    Not only is keeping a solid writing topic backlog about making sure that I stay on track in terms of productivity, but it also helps keep to a research trajectory. One of the things that I have realized along this journey is that the cycle and routine of academic life helps keep things on track. You have conference due dates and other writing commitments that help keep things moving along. For me I do all of my writing on a daily basis for the explicit purpose of moving forward toward that perfect possible future. My efforts are really driven from a degree of personal motivation. I write because the act of writing is fulfilling.

  • Working out that writing plan

    Right now I’m working to figure out what is next on my writing plan. Obviously, the future content for the Substack is well planned out. My backlog goes out to post 104 and I’m currently publishing week 58 this Friday. For the most part that gives me a pretty solid cut and what will be included in the first two years of The Lindahl Letter. Eventually that will get put into a manuscript and published. It will be an expansion of the year one publication that is already out in the wild. Getting into the habit of producing machine learning or artificial intelligence related content every week was easy enough. Figuring out a solid list of academic papers to work on each week has been a little harder. Several false starts and sketches of papers exist, but none of that has really translated into the production of conference or journal papers. Throughout the rest of 2022 that is where I’m going to put a lot of my energy.

    That list of 104 topics gets stored here for posterity:
    https://www.nelslindahl.com/the-lindahl-letter/