Editorial Media
Goodreads Recommendations

Goodreads really sucks. We book readers deserve much more.

Hate for the book-tracking, Amazon-owned Goodreads is near-universal. Since Amazon purchased the tool on March 28, 2013, Goodreads has languished in a kind of purgatory that would have doubled over any Google moonshots (Google loves to shut down stuff). For all its pains, Goodreads is so frustrating because it has value. Any attempt to improve our experience as book readers has to transfer over this value to be a worthy replacement, but none have come along. Let me get into this a bit more though.

Editorial

The age of lies and fake news

Fibs, half-truths, lies and the liars that tell them. There’s now a clear sense in this 2020 U.S. election season that our reality is being shaped by those who craft false stories – what’s left is equally false outrage and more lies. I can’t really point to the moment all of this started, but technology […]

Reviews

Book Review: The Crash Detectives

My thoughts on The Crash Detectives: Investigating the World’s Most Mysterious Air Disasters – This is definitely not a book to read on a flight. I had just gotten to the runway on a one hour trip when picking up this book to continue post-chapter 1. That was a bad idea. I doubt a page was read before I locked it away tight in my carry-on bag. I nevertheless endured and finally finished the book., on I really enjoyed actually.

How-To
"email" by Sean MacEntee is licensed under CC BY 2.0

How to gather email addresses from mail and other data to create a list

My problem here was that a client asked needed to extract data from a few disparate sources and build a clean, usable list of email addresses. Certainly, no small feat since some of this would have to come out of an email account itself. I wasn’t even going to benefit from working from contacts either – addresses had to come from the messages themselves. I’m going to describe what I did to get there.

Reviews

10 Books I Loved in 2019

My list for last year was rather short at only three books, but I’ve managed to expand my reading. Reading is something I do as much as I can. That can be difficult at times. If I’m not reading every day, things feel off. I try to sneak a couple pages of reading in line at the supermarket.