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Review: One of Us Is Dead
One of Us Is Dead by Jeneva Rose My rating: 3 of 5 stars The wife wanted something we could listen to while doing a bunch of driving last weekend. I don’t remember how we found this particular book, but she said it sounded fun. And she was right! The book centers around a bunch […]
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Review: Jingo
Jingo by Terry Pratchett My rating: 2 of 5 stars This is my second time reading this book. Rating dropped from 4/5 to 2/5 stars For a City Watch novel, this one is a bit of a weak procedural. Pratchett somewhat goes back to meandering storytelling as we go back and forth between Vimes’ storyline […]
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Review: Stay Crazy
Stay Crazy by Erica L. Satifka My rating: 3 of 5 stars This book definitely sticks to its title. Our protagonist is suffering from a few mental ailments and they play into the story in all sorts of ways. Sometimes it leaves us with an unreliable narrator. Other times it appears to give the narrator […]
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Review: Data Visualization with Python and JavaScript: Scrape, Clean, Explore & Transform Your Data
Data Visualization with Python and JavaScript: Scrape, Clean, Explore & Transform Your Data by Kyran Dale My rating: 4 of 5 stars While a book about web technologies is undoubtablely going to get out of date (especially when Javascript is involved), I would definitely recommend this book if you want to do some data visualization […]
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Review: Flask Web Development: Developing Web Applications with Python
Flask Web Development: Developing Web Applications with Python by Miguel Grinberg My rating: 5 of 5 stars I read the second edition of the book I’ve read lots of books covering web frameworks or GUI programming (both involve UI design and a different workflow where you’re often waiting for user input), but this one is […]
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Review: The Cage of Zeus
The Cage of Zeus by Sayuri Ueda My rating: 3 of 5 stars This book is 1 of 2 books I was reading at the same time heavily using Science Fiction as a metaphor for modern issues. (The other is The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer) The Cage of Zeus is written […]
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Review: High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out
High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out by Amanda Ripley My rating: 4 of 5 stars In some ways, the information here is not too different from some of the lessons I’ve been taught in managerial training or reading books by people like Steven Covey or Tony Robbins. But the main […]
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Review: Trafalgar and Boone in the Drowned Necropolis
Trafalgar and Boone in the Drowned Necropolis by Geonn Cannon My rating: 3 of 5 stars This book continues on from the last one, but the author does a good job of catching readers up. If you like a Victorian era archaeological adventure story, you can do much worse than this. It works well and […]
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Review: Nona The Ninth
Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir My rating: 4 of 5 stars Well, that was certainly something. Tamsyn Muir seems to have created, with this series, a true experiment in making a genre book more about the journey than the destination. This is the second book in which almost nothing happens for most of the […]
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Review: Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast
Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast by Robin McKinley My rating: 4 of 5 stars My utter enjoyment of this book is inexplicable to me. The subtitle says that it’s a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, but McKinley doesn’t change too much from the original tale. Mostly she makes […]
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Programming Update: October 2022
As October came around, it was time to get ready for Hacktoberfest. I’ve been participating for the past few years and I love the fact that DigitalOcean supports this project which gets more people to contribute to free and open source software. In the past, I’ve often contributed to my Extra Life Donation Tracker. Since […]
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Review: Calamity
Calamity by Brandon Sanderson My rating: 3 of 5 stars This is a perfect conclusion to the trilogy. Sanderson does a good job extending out everyone’s character growth and the natural progression of the story. I don’t remember if, while reading the earlier books in the trilogy, I made the leap of Calamity as a […]
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My First USMS Swim Meet (Oct 2022)
On 15 October this year I competed at my first swim meet since high school, some 20ish years ago. Although I’d had various folks encourage me to join US Masters Swimming for almost as long, I’d always found a reason to put it off. Sometime in August or September I decided I wanted to do […]
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Review: Nightmare Magazine Issue 120
Nightmare Magazine, issue 120 by John Joseph Adams My rating: 4 of 5 stars Once again I bought an issue of Nightmare Magazine to share the stories with my wife. The descriptions on the site seemed interesting and, indeed, they were. The description that got me to buy it was for the short story Concerning […]