Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Month: April 2017

  • Why You Should Read Books You Hate

    But reading what you hate helps you refine what it is you value, whether it’s a style, a story line or an argument. Because books are long-form, they require more of the writer and the reader than a talk show or Facebook link. You can finish watching a movie in two hours and forget about…

  • Review: Between the World and Me

    Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates My rating: 5 of 5 stars This book is a couple hundred pounds of chains bearing down on the reader. A father who writes about the race in America in the time just before #BlackLivesMatter attempts to put into words what it means. This stands out as…

  • Automatic For the People

    This program and I are at odds over what “automatically” means. It says that the dataset is updated automatically, which is fine. Except they produce new data multiple times a day at the most frequent and every couple days at the least. The agent software is supposed to update every day. My dataset was 202 days…

  • I know Kung Fu!

    (No, not really.) What If We Could Upload Books to Our Brains?: At this point [Neil deGrasse] Tyson interjected: Are you saying we could just upload “War and Peace”? Yes, Kurzweil answered: “We will connect to neocortical hierarchies in cloud with pre-loaded knowledge.” There is a scene in The Matrix where the program for Kung…

  • WIRED and Ad Blockers

    I get it,  the site makes its money off the ads. I rarely read their articles anymore. When I see something interesting, it surprises me that I do not read it anymore, so I click the link. Then they interrupt me reading to complain about having the ad blocker enabled. Trying to be a good…

  • Unwritten Rules

    A while ago, a baseball player coworker and I had a conversation about the unwritten rules of baseball. These are expected sportsmanship behaviors. When players are perceived to violate these moral guidelines, the other team may result in retaliation. Teams can end up in brawls on the field over the escalations started by someone violating an unwritten rule.…

  • WP Jetpack Publicize Expiration

    WordPress.com makes the Jetpack. They strongly push self-hosted sites to use it, especially the Publicize feature. Publicize is how my blog posts show up on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Google+. WP.com also strongly pushes using the composition on their site rather than the one on the self-hosted site. It is cleaner and easier to use.…

  • Patriots’ Day

    I watched the movie the other day. It made me realize that I know next to nothing about what the title is referencing. The synopsis I read about the movie made clear it was about the Boston Marathon Bombing, so it made it seem that the movie was about the heroic efforts of the Boston…

  • Rote Loading

    With this specific application, we can import data, but there are limitations due to its 2000-era handling of XML files. HTML forms uploading files have to… Have all the packets be received by the server. Process the file with the browser connection still open. The server has to tell the browser everything was received and…