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 the program is pretty mature at this point, most of the issues I have would have taken me too long, especially with how busy I’ve been with non-programming projects lately. So I dedicated my efforts to helping with some quality of life issues for the Prophecy Practicum (Django Version) that I’ve coded up for my friend.

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 metaphor for Satan. Satan is often referred to as Morning Star and Calamity has been shining up in space this whole time. This book makes the metaphor more explicit as Sanderson has Calamity explain that he has pushed the epics to greater paranoia in the hopes that it would exacerbate their cruelty.

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 some swim meets. I think it was around the time that I was coming to terms with the fact that my foot injury was going to keep me from competing in my first marathon this year. I looked around to join a Masters team in order to get better at swimming and they required a membership to US Masters Swimming, so I signed up. After another week or so, I realized they didn’t have a schedule that would work for me, but now that I was registered with USMS, I could compete in swim meets. Luckily for me, the first meet of the 29th Carol Chidester Memorial Swim Series was coming up. I signed up and started looking forward to it.

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 the Upstairs Bathroom. That one turned out to be my favorite. Overall, a good issue and you can’t go wrong for only $3.

Let’s Talk About Hard Things by Anna Sale

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A well-written and well-narrated book that’s just on this side of a self-help book. There is some advice, but it’s really mostly a series of vignettes that illustrate some points the author wants to make as well as showing that there are sometimes counter-examples. It made me think about a lot of assumptions I’ve been carrying around regarding the various topic areas. I’d recommend it to just about anyone.

Nightmare Magazine 49: October 2016. People of Colo(u)r Destroy Horror! Special Issue by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I got this to read together with my wife who lives horror I ended up really enjoying most of the stories.

Wish you were here - the history of a revolution and civil war overlaid on a ghost story with a set of entitled tourists. First story out of the gate meets The editor’s mission perfectly.

As I did last time, I wanted my web browser post to contain both news stories about browsers that have caught my attention and my thoughts on the newest web browser I’m trying out. Let’s start with the news.

As you probably have heard if you’re paying any attention to browsers, one of the selling points of using Brave is that they replace tracking ads on the net with their own ads and then “pay” you for viewing those ads. You can then take that money and pay it out to the creators you care about and continue to support the web while not being tracked and not just blocking all ads, keeping the creators from getting paid. Sounds too good to be true? Well, this article argues that it is. Here’s a screenshot of the new tab page on Brave on my Linux computer:

This month I wanted to practice Go outside of Advent of Code puzzles. So I decided I would port over my Dreamhost DNS updating script from Python to Go. This would have the advantage of being a compiled program. Every time I update Python on my system, the virtual environment points to the wrong Python version and my program breaks. But, boy is parsing JSON in Go (at least with the built-in JSON tools) a real pain in the butt. I have to make a struct to hold and parse the data, but it comes back from Dreamhost as a 1-key dictionary holding an array of dictionaries. After a few hours of trying to figure out how to get Go to parse the JSON I was still unable to get the struct right. I may do a little debugging to see if I can figure it out before searching for any simpler JSON libraries.

The Man Who Could Be King: A Novel by John Ripin Miller

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I got this book for free as part of the Kindle First Reads program

I like to geek out on many things and one of those is history. Thanks to books like 1776 I already knew that it was only through a series of coincidences and good luck paired with General Washington’s leadership that we won against the British. But I had no idea just how many mutinies there were or even that there was a week (the subject of this book) where things could have gone in a very different direction.

Hogfather by Terry Pratchett

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This is my second time reading this book. Rating went from 2 stars to 1 star.

I didn’t like this book all that much when I first read it and I liked it even less this time around. I don’t like The Auditors as Death’s antagonist. Susan as a Discworld Mary Poppins is a joke that isn’t quite enough to carry a whole book. Death once again not doing death stuff….meh. And the Wizard b-plot seems to mostly exist to keep the story from just being novella length.