2018: Day 70 the one where I pondered my Margaritaville shirt
Word count 156,652 + 2,077 or 158,729 of 1,000,000
Dear Reader,
Every now and again I spend some time looking for new Margaritaville button down shirts. I picked up my favorite shirt back in Los Vegas at some random store. It says Margaritaville on the tag and is made of 70% silk 30% cotton. The tag does say, “Washed in the ocean. Dried in the sun.” I checked the Margaritaville website and spent some time surfing on eBay. One shirt was purchased on eBay it had the exact same tag as my current favorite shirt. That seemed like a good option to expand my wardrobe for summer. Searching on eBay for sweet Margaritaville shirts seems like an ok thing to do from time to time. A couple years back I did manage to find another backup shirt, but it got damaged during some type of tragic even in the garage. Somehow I managed to get a bunch of grease on it and that pretty much sealed the fate of that backup favorite shirt. I guess my preference is for almost Hawaiian style button down shirts with a bit of an interesting pattern.
Getting more shirts I’m sure is on the extended roadmap for summer fun. Something that may not be very fun is the looming change to my music consumption pattern. It looks like my Amazon Music Unlimited subscription will be ending tomorrow. That is good news in terms of getting another subscription removed from my monthly routine. It will be interesting in terms of figuring out how it impacts my ability to listen to music. The bulk of my digital music purchases have been through Amazon over the years. Mostly that holds true thanks to the autorip feature associated with purchasing albums. I bought a copy of the metal cover of the song Africa by Leo last year. Otherwise I do not really buy digital singles. In fairness to the whole single track buying scenario, I did not really buy singles on vinyl or compact disc either. I guess my subscription will still have access to Amazon Prime Music, but not the Amazon Music Unlimited set of songs. Stay tuned for an update on that ends going throughout the next week. My other set of digital music is on the Google Play Music service. It has a few songs on it. I’m not entirely sure how that ended up happening, but it has a few things on it.
Topic 1: Oh NiceHash you are confusing
This whole NiceHash mining plan has been working out well enough. I have for the most part recouped the costs of buying another graphics card. Tomorrow I’m going to drop in a 3rd graphics card and use that card for just my monitor. That should allow me to get just a little more mining power out of my main graphics card. You can tell very quickly from looking at my NiceHash wallet mining payments below that they have been getting further and further spread out. That is problematic in terms of achieving a good return on investment. Both of my graphics cards are earning about 2 USD per day. Things were working much better during January and February. My ability to earn 3 USD or more per day seemed to be the way of things in the mining world. I have read a bunch about why that is happening. People generally believe that mining will keep getting more and more difficult. Alternatively, people have built out a complex explanation of how alternative cryptocurrency coins are recovering from the correction at a much slower rate than bitcoin (BTC). Those two facts in combination pretty much mean that my ability to selling mining power to NiceHash is going to be reduced by about 1 USD per day.
NiceHash wallet payments in reverse order:
17. 2018-03-11 Mining payment → 0.00115447 BTC
16. 2018-03-05 Mining payment → 0.00109993 BTC
15. 2018-02-28 Mining payment → 0.00112356 BTC
14. 2018-02-23 Mining payment → 0.00106113 BTC
13. 2018-02-19 Mining payment → 0.00119364 BTC
12. 2018-02-15 Mining payment → 0.00102799 BTC
11. 2018-02-12 Mining payment → 0.00102953 BTC
10. 2018-02-09 Mining payment → 0.00102322 BTC
9. 2018-02-06 Mining payment → 0.00101337 BTC
8. 2018-02-03 Mining payment → 0.00135065 BTC
7. 2018-01-30 Mining payment → 0.00102840 BTC
6. 2018-01-27 Mining payment → 0.00120973 BTC
5. 2018-01-24 Mining payment → 0.00125795 BTC
4. 2018-01-21 Mining payment → 0.00133244 BTC
3. 2018-01-18 Mining payment → 0.00119401 BTC
2. 2018-01-15 Mining payment → 0.00105970 BTC
1. 2018-01-13 Mining payment → 0.00118327 BTC
At the end of my 100 day mining extravaganza I’m probably going to point my mining capacity at some other type of opportunity to earn some extra funds outside of NiceHash. Sure my exciting run of mining Turtle coins was an adventure. It sure felt like a lot more fun than watching my cards just generate heat from selling hashing power to the NiceHash community. Overall I think it was a good adventure to start to learn how to mine cryptocurrency and to really get hands on with the technology.
Topic 2: NCAA Tournament Selection Shows
I’m just going to go on record and say that the format for this years NCAA tournament selection show was forced and just unfullfing to watch. Instead of simply running down the brackets this year Greg, Kenny, Charles, and Ernie walked through horrible graphics on large television screens that illustrated the teams who were automatically qualified into the tournament. They then in a weird 6 team at a pop hand off in alphabetical order explained what other teams made it into the NCAA tournament field this year. It was just forced and weird in terms of being informative entertainment television. After that series of strange back and forth handoffs the team then went down the regular bracket announcements of who would be playing who. That part as ok, but it lacked the live cut in moments to teams as they found out they were in the tournament. They had a few of them during that weird opening sequence, but they just did not manage to make the moments relatable and human.
They really need to work on a rock solid cadence for how they want to present the bracket and walk through the matchups and moments of excitement in a way that works with a television broadcast. You would think that since this only happens one time per year they would have enough time to deliver something special. It could be that moment of world class television deliver that elevates broadcasting. This time around that did not happen. It did not happen at all. The format was highly contrived and lacked any real excitement. All of the banter about the last 4 teams in and last 4 teams out was a little bit of inside baseball that probably did not help anybody. Being the last team out probably does not make anybody feel better about the season they had. It probably just creates a degree of frustration for the players and teams that within the arbitrary and judgement based game of thrones that is NCAA tournament basketball they were a slight bit of preference outside the field vs. being included.
Topic 3: The thumbnail for this blog post
I took that photograph on a trail inside Eldorado Canyon State Park. You might have guessed that is in Eldorado Springs, Colorado. It seemed like a pretty interesting park. We had a picnic lunch at the part. A ton of technical climbers walked by us and people walking a wide assortment of dogs. It seems like those were the two buckets of people who frequent that part. People with dogs and people who want to climb the pretty vertical rock faces in that park. I’m generally opposed to technical rock climbing. The last time I did anything like that was in Boy Scouts and that was about 20 years ago. I’m not in good enough shape to engage in that type of climbing activity. However, being out of shape is not the reason I avoid that type of climbing. It just does not appeal to me. I’m sure for some folks it is just amazing, but within my view of things it is something that I’m going to avoid.
Sure that thumbnail could have been much better from the accent of that rock face. It probably would have been a much better picture. That may be something that you will have to surf Instagram feeds to locate. You are more than welcome to look for those types of Eldorado Canyon State Park pictures. I’m sure they are beautiful. We will probably drive up and hike in Rocky Mountain National Park this summer. That is really the type of activity that I enjoy. We sort of walk along at a reasonable pace and enjoy nature. The only climbing that is going to happen during that hike is on to a rock to rest for a few minutes. Today I kind of wanted to drive up to Estes Park and visit the Stanley Hotel. That sounded like fun. Maybe that will end up being part of our summer vacation planning. Assuming a little bit of traffic the Stanley Hotel is only about an hour from our house, but it feels like an entirely different world. That might just be my imagination or how I perceive things.
It would be fun to stay at the Stanley Hotel and knock out a few blog posts or a write a few short stories. Based on what I remember of sitting at the bar and ordering a scotch it was a great place to sit down and write. That location has inspired more than a few people to write some memorable words. I’m sure it could be a great place to write a couple of short stories. Maybe this summer could be the summer for that type of adventure. It looks like Colorado residents get some type of discount before May this year. Maybe that will be enough of a spark to push my planning into execution for a trip to Estes Park. Living in Denver opens the door to a ton of short trips to pretty cool places. That is the joy of vacations that do not require a ton of driving time, but still feel like you are in a new place experiencing new things. Our trip to Breckenridge last summer was a great example of that type of adventure.
Topic 4: Rounding out the night
Maybe tonight will be a night that my writing output gets back on track. I know that throughout the rest of the year that my writing productivity will have highs and lows. That is just the way things go. Sure at some point people will build out writing bots that just publish words based on an established pattern. My writing does not work that way. It is entirely based on my thoughts and emotions at the time. I probably have enough words published that a reasonable bot could be built that sucked in some of the days news and wrote in my style. Maybe that presumes that I have a distinct writing style. Sure that might be more of an assumption that anything else published on this blog this year. I like to think that my writing style is unique enough to be my own. It has been built out out throughout all of my life experiences that brought us to this moment right here right now. Sure you can search for unique phrasing and sentences from my blog entries against the whole of the internet. I do produce sentences that have not otherwise occurred out in the wild. Is that a ton of hubris on display or something that could be proven out. You can test it out and you will find out the same thing that I have noticed over the years. My writing style is somewhat unique based on phrasing and word choice.
I thought this post was a lot closer to 3,000 words than it is right now. Maybe I should not have spent the better part of 30 minutes searching for Colorado vacation adventures. All right some of those searches were related to visiting Disney World. It does appear that traveling is on my mind for some reason. Sure that happens from time to time and a good vacation seems like a healthy part of the human experience. Maybe the search for a good vacation is something that entertains me and keeps me searching. It could be like my constant searches for the best computer build. It is something that I just like to do with my time. I’m not sure it helps my writing productivity in any way. It probably detracts from my general level of writing productivity.
Dr. Nels Lindahl
Broomfield, Colorado
Written on my Storm Stryker PC and or my ASUS C101P using Google Docs
