2018: Day 76 the one where Kansas won some basketball
Word count 165,014 + 1,333 or 166,347 of 1,000,000
Dear Reader,
I wanted until 19:44 hours to get going today. That was purposeful. It seemed like a good idea to just avoid writing for a bit and try to enjoy some college basketball. We elected to keep our subscription to YouTube TV until the end of basketball season. Right now a Chromecast Ultra is connected to our main family room television and it is being controlled by a Google Home Mini speaker. That configuration works out really well. I have been able to tell it to rewind, pause, and switch channels. Sure a remote control would probably do the same thing, but it is nowhere near as awesome as talking to my computer like something from Star Trek. Advances in technology like the ability to surf channels during the NCAA tournament are pretty cool. Sure they are not advancing society toward civility, but I do not think they are hurting the broader social fabric.
Today at Costco I totally meant to take a photograph for my blog post today. I’m not sure if it is the after effect of traveling or something else, but I’m rather tired right now. Maybe I am fighting off a cold of some type. That is very possible. Both today and yesterday I ended up taking an allergy pill. Either way my writing has not been living up to my expectations the last few days. The words should have been easier to come by and the quality should have been a lot better. Today I spent a few minutes thinking about some short story ideas. Part of that was thinking about just how much I enjoyed that first Camel Club book by David Baldacci. It is hard to believe that was back in 2005. A really good mash up of something like The Camel Club mixed with a space opera is probably my literary sweet spot at the moment. I’m not sure if that brand of fiction exists out in the market. It may very well exist and I have not stumbled upon it. A lot of my short story ideas are related to either spycraft or the ethical questions artificial intelligence is beginning. Sure —- the phrasing on that last sentence was a little off at the end, but it captured what I was trying to say. I think the real questions related to the ethical considerations of artificial intelligence are opening now.
Maybe a good use of an artificial intelligence algorithm would be to predict when I should go to the Oliver Garden to get dinner without running into a 45 minute wait time. Yeah I know that getting a bunch of Olive Garden breadsticks is not a required part of my existence, but they are probably as close to my own personal szechuan sauce obsession. They just bring joy to my world and for that I guess they should be a part of my dinner. Naturally, a 45 minute wait time just crushes that joy and turns my happiness into sadness with the utterance of a few previously enumerated words. That is right hearing somebody say the words 45 minute wait time is enough to just make me shake my head. The idea of waiting that long with exceedingly wild children is beyond my ability to comprehend.
Topic 1: Watching the Jayhawks
The game today was hard to watch. Things were just so close throughout the game that one good run would have taken it either way. Those are the types of games I enjoy watching in the abstract. Watching then with a truly invested passion for one team makes them somewhat stressful. Today was one of those stressful games. I kept wondering if the Seton Hall Pirates were going to go on a run of draining 3 point shots late in the second half. College basketball is very interesting during tournament time. One really hot shooting streak can push a game one way or another. Sometimes you ride that wave and it is exciting beyond measure. Other times you watch some other team find the wave and ride it with a degree of reckless abandon that you just start hoping some good defence might slow it down. It is one of those things that if defence was going to solve the problem, then the problem probably would not have existed in the first place. You can tell the problem does exist and based on that you are pretty sure that whatever defence occurred was not the answer.
We did notice that watching YouTube TV is a little bit slower than the actual real time event. The websites ended up being a little bit ahead of the game we were watching. That is something that I just ignore, but when somebody else in the room is watching a feed that is more up to date you are constantly trying to read the micro-expressions to figure out what is really happening. That process detracts from the experience of watching the game. Tonight the game went down to the last minute and the Seton Hall Pirates were draining late 3 point shots. You can only go 2 for 3 so many times before a lead evaporates. I’m sure you want to read a ton more about basketball coverage today, but I’m probably about to jump to the next topic.
Topic 2: Thumbnail for today
Most of the time my Google Pixel 2 XL smartphone takes pretty good photographs. Sometimes things get a little blurry for some reason. That mostly happens when the subject or something in the frame is moving really quickly. Today was one of those days that I was going to snap a few photographs to stock up for the week. That did not happen at all today. For some reason I had to go back to the well and grab a photograph from the beginning of my trip. That was a few days ago. It does not really have anything to do with the words being written today. It was a filler thumbnail from stock photographic images that would otherwise just take up space on a cloud drive somewhere. Explaining to the people that the cloud is a hard drive somewhere that is not here takes time. I did read about this new method of crystal based storage that could change that paradigm a little bit. I would not be able to say it was a drive somewhere else as a crystal would be a storage medium and not strictly a drive.
Topic 3: I’m thinking about returning to YouTube
My efforts to make YouTube videos last year are well document. You can watch hundreds of videos that cover that topic. This year has been different in terms of my aggressive focus on writing vs. creating videos. That may change up here a little bit as we hit the 100 day writing mark in this year long writing journey. I’m not sure abandoning all other creative outlets will help me get to 3,000 words per day of writing. Based on all available empirical evidence it does not appear that giving up making YouTube videos helps me be a more productive writer. That means maybe now is the time to get back into the routine of recording daily videos. Maybe being a little bit more busy will be enough to help kickstart a second wind for this whole writing endeavor. I think YouTube does some auto captioning of my posts. Maybe I could take that transcript and adapt it to a blog format in some way. The last time I looked at the captions that YouTube produced automatically they were pretty bad in terms of accuracy. I would say that my speaking pattern and articulation should be pretty easy to caption. My videos are normally just me talking. That should be like the ideal use case for automatic transcription. No background noise and it is pretty high quality audio.
Dr. Nels Lindahl
Broomfield, Colorado
Written on my Storm Stryker PC and or my ASUS C101P using Google Docs
