Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Month: April 2015

  • Well Read? Seven Years Later

    So at five years later, I happened to run across a photo and blogged about the progress I had made by that point (47). I decided to go through the photo and mark all the books onto a Goodreads shelf “z-photo-reading-shelf” to better track this. Of the 77 books, it looks like 62 are marked read.…

  • Review: The Man in the High Castle

    The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick My rating: 5 of 5 stars PKD writes about my favorite topic which is how we perceive reality. What is real? Can we actually tell? I may need to read more of his books. Sensation and Perception was my favorite class doing my Psychology major.…

  • Review: Joss Whedon: The Biography

    Joss Whedon: The Biography by Amy Pascale My rating: 4 of 5 stars This biography is essentially a greatly expanded Joss Whedon IMDB.com filmography. Pascale carefully tells the behind the scenes stories about his career. I arrived late to the Whedonverse. Yes, the fandom has a name. Essentially, I saw Serenity in the movie theater,…

  • Heritage

    You can keep your Confederate flags, BUT you have to stop asking for people to give up their heritage. You have to stop asking people to only speak English. You have to stop asking for everyone to look and act American. Because, after all, if heritage is that important to you, then you understand how…

  • AMLS Rec Engine

    Now anyone can tap into the Amazon Machine Learning Service (AMLS)? I’d love to see Ellucian’s Banner product make smart recommendations based on AMLS. Students register for university classes through Banner. I could see Banner leveraging AMLS to figure out that students who like certain classes might be interested in other classes. There already is a market trying…

  • Facebook Ads

    I hide ads all the time as an attempt to improve my experience. (I also have gone through the Ad Preferences page to ensure I get what I want.) When I hide them, Facebook Ads offers a link titled “Why don’t you want to see this?” with various options clearly missing an obvious one. They…

  • Ten Sci-Fi/Fantasy Books Who Stayed With Me (Riffle)

    I posted “My Top 10 Life Changing Books” back in September. Such a list is terribly hard for me, so here is another one focused on a dear to me genre.

  • Ratings

    Salman Rushdie took a bunch of flak for giving beloved books at poor rating. Well, I don’t like the work of Kingsley Amis, there it is. I don’t have to explain or justify. It’s allowed. He was operating on Goodreads, but Rushdie has not claim his author’s page yet. And, he says he was unaware the ratings…

  • Ten Science Books Who Stayed With Me (Riffle)

    I posted “My Top 10 Life Changing Books” back in September. Such a list is terribly hard for me, so here is another one focused on a dear to me genre.