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Yeah, I bought an iPad

Back to blogging or so they said. It should be fun to spend some time writing. That writing should be the thing. It could be the thing. Back to a bit of blogging had to be the way to start the day. Maybe it was and I just missed the point.Throughout this last week I thought about writing a fiction book staged out of the early millennium, but written to feel present in the moment now. Instead of writing that novel or taking the time to at least sketch it out things took a turn to something else entirely. Thanks to the magic of some current discount I purchased a 9th generation iPad for about $250.00 and had it delivered to the house. It’s my first Apple purchase in the last 43 years and for the most part it was super easy to use. Honestly, my last month using a Macbook was way harder to deal with where everything is opposite in terms of closing windows or clicking on things. Oh, and on the Macbook using the trackpad was just difficult and not intuitive. I plugged in a regular mouse and keyboard and have been able to work without much disruption.

A 9th generation iPad sitting on a desk

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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All that go forward

Writing a conclusion post for the Lindahl Letter weekly newsletter series should have been bittersweet, but instead it was just another block of content. I wanted it to be more and better. It should have said so many things, but it ended up being less than 500 words and will close out a 3 year writing effort. I might pick it up again later after transitioning to the Ghost platform for the newsletter. We will see what happens. My main focus will be producing two weekly nels.ai posts, writing code, and generating some academic articles. Today was one of those all that go forward days.

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Learning the Ghost platform

All the cool kids have moved from Substack to Ghost these days. The thought of moving from one platform to another for my weekly email newsletter sounded tedious. It seemed like a good idea to go ahead and move my nelsx domain over to Ghost to get things setup in the event I wanted to make the big move. The custom domain process involved setting a CNAME record and an @ record with your host. After that you just have to click a big button within the Ghost admin screens to start the custom domain process. It was not a hard process to achieve. The waiting for the records to update as always was the hardest part of the whole process. It’s a pure mystery of how long it will take the internet to actually update a record. Seriously, the update process just takes however long it does which is generally under 24 hours, but certainly not instant. 

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A day of coding adventures

Things got off to an interesting start today. I was rocking and rolling some code development instead of writing the opening missive of the day. That means here after recording the penultimate episode of Coffee with Nels I sat down to begin the writing activity for the day. This switcheroo does have the added benefit of some extra caffeine. I’m probably going to spend some extra time today writing some more code. It is one of those days where my mind is really focused on the next steps for this particular package of code. 

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Rambling about writing

Things are moving along. Sometimes, I wonder what type of prompt it takes to start the writing process every day. At the very start of things, it takes something to spark that very first part of the writing process. Today for example things are moving along, but the process of tipping the pile of things forward really involved writing about the pile. It’s the process of typing and feeling the keys move and the words begin to flow that makes the entire process work. Writing generally begets more writing and that is the thing that needs to be sparked. Now moving from the process of just going through the motions to finding that true spark of innovation is what makes the magic happen compared to a mundane writing experience. 

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