Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

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

Tag: trajectory statement

  • A new graphics card arrives today

    A trajectory statement was reviewed at the start of the day. You can consider today day 1 of 7 within that challenge. I’m considering printing out the trajectory statement written on September 18, 2021 to make it easier to complete that challenge. 

    Trajectory statement:

    Tomorrow will be considered in due time. Be present in the moment and strive to make a lasting contribution to the academy today. Review your research paper progress grid and make substantial progress on a section today. Remember to unlock your potential by taking the time to focus on delivering by closing out objectives.

    Before starting the day review your core beliefs:

    1. A vibrant civil society is intrinsic to a functioning society. 
    2. The intersection of technology and modernity will fundamentally change what it means to be human. 
    3. We have to learn more than we lose to be successful. 
    4. Kindness foments civility. 
    5. We have to work to understand and consider intergenerational equity within policy decisions.

    An alert from Newegg arrived yesterday and it turns out I had won a Newegg Shuffle for popular products. Alerts from both the Newegg application on my smartphone arrived via push notification and an email of congratulations arrived in my inbox. It turns out that I won the right to buy an ASUS branded TUF gaming GeForce RTX 3070 Ti 8GB GDDR6X graphics video card. Pretty much every day I open the Newegg Shuffle website in a browser tab to watch the countdown window and enter the contest to be able to buy a graphics card. Over the course of the last few months I might have missed a few shuffle events by accident. You have a limited amount of time to enter the shuffle. Sometimes I would just miss the window. It would have been easy enough to set up an automatic entry system, but that seemed wrong given my interest in playing fair in the question for a new graphics card.

    However, this time around randomness was on my side and victory occurred. Later today this very computer right here in front of me will be powered by the latest generation of Nvidia graphics card technology. You might be wondering if I had to buy one of those horrible power supplies they were bundling with it. Fortunately, the answer to that question is a hard no. For me the bundle in question included a new ASUS ROG computer case. It looks like a nice enough computer case. I’ll probably try to sell it or just put it in the basement for my next computer build. 

    My current computer case is the award winning Dark Base Pro 900 Black rev. 2 from the “be quiet!” case building company. Obviously, based on my purchase of an award winning computer case within the last year I do not need the new case being shipped, but I have been trying to buy a new graphics card with the latest Nvidia RTX 30 series standard since they released the GeForce RTX 3090 on Thursday September 24, 2020. Which as you can tell from the date of this missive was about a year ago. To be more exact it was roughly 4 days short of an entire year of trying to get one of these graphics cards. I’m rather excited about testing out this new graphics card later today.

  • Working on that writing focus

    Yesterday I spent some time looking at the Ernie Ball Music Man St. Vincent guitar. How exactly that ended up happening is a bit of a mystery, but a bit of online window shopping did occur. It looks like a pretty fun guitar. You all might know that guitar buying season happens during the end of quarter one of the year and is strictly reserved that window. I’m also trying really hard to only buy one guitar a year given that the size of my guitar collection only seems to grow. 

    During the course of my day off yesterday I spent some time pondering trajectory statements and exactly what that could entail. The general premise was to write a statement that could be read at the start of the day every day to frame up where things need to go. For the most part I tend to sit down in front of the computer and allow my mind to wander wherever my thoughts might take me in a type of string of conconsiness type of writing effort. The only continuity to this is that the writer is always the same, but the direction could go anywhere at any time. This would be a wholesale departure from that approach and a move to really focus on something every day at the very start of the day. It is something that I might consider picking up for a week or so to see what happens. 

    My writing schedule for the most part involves writing the weekly Substack post for The Lindahl Letter every Saturday morning. Revisions and edits are made during my Sunday morning writing session. That means that my weekend morning writing sessions are pretty much devoted to that effort and whatever else gets going at that time. Working on that content is planned out pretty far in advance based on weekly topics. Getting into the flow of doing that work does not require any type of trajectory statement as that work is well planned and understood. It simply has to be done and requires time and focus to complete. Maybe it is the weekday focus in the morning where I really let my mind wander that should become a more targeted writing enterprise.