I finished 25 books in 2017. Not bad. I got the number up from last year but I think it’s mostly because I read lots of “fun” books. Lots of fantasy. Another factor is that now with 2 children I have less time for things like movies and TV shows, audiobooks and podcasts are what I have time and energy for these days.

Non-Fiction

Politics: The Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce Bueno De Mesquita and Alastair Smith it great. I read it early in the year and the ideas in the book really have stuck with me and I’ve thought about them a lot.

This is the 7th year for the Christmas playlist and at this point I was expecting to be scraping the bottom of the Christmas music barrel. Good news though, I’m quite happy with this years playlist. I found a couple of great compilation albums including one from a couple years ago. Maybe I’m not as good at searching the Internet for stuff as I thought.

If you need more good Christmas music here are the links to past playlists.

According to what I tracked on Good Reads, I finished 20 books is 2017. I feel OK about that. I wish I had a done a bit more “serious” reading, there was a lot of entertainment in there, but it was all fun (at least most of the time) and even in the fluff there were some interesting ideas.

Non-Fiction

Politics: The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt is one of my favorite books of all time and one of the most important books I’ve read. So far I’ve been able to talk at least 3 other people into reading it and they’ve loved it too.

This year got our act together before the 1st of December so you can enjoy a whole month of hand picked Christmas music.

If you need more good Christmas music here are the links to past playlists. (2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010).

My goal is make it to 10 of these. That should be close to 12 hours of better than average Christmas music, then reassess. We’ll probably keep doing a Christmas playlast but we might lighten up our rules. For instance, so far we haven’t allowed any repeats.

I’ve had my eye on OpenBazaar for quite a while now and at the start of April of this year (2016) it went live.

You should check it out, but a short summary would be that it’s a distributed on-line marketplace. It uses bitcoin for it’s currency. Anyone can join the network and sell their products on-line for free. The software is free, setting up a shop is free, accepting payments are free. All you need is an Internet connection and a computer.

First off while, I was writing this article, I had Robot Parade by They Might be Giants stuck in my head the whole time.

I’ve been reading a lot of economists deriding a higher minimum wage and they’ve got me a bit riled up (here’s a very small selection).

• An Open Letter to Arindrajit Dube
• If Government Can Work Miracles…
• Alex Tabarrok on Price Floors and the Minimum Wage

Where I live in Minneapolis there is an annual May Day Parade. After the parade they have a free speech section. Every year I’ve watched the parade the group Fight for $15 has marched.

At this point I’ve bought lots of things on-line with Bitcoin, but I have not been able to buy anything locally (in Minneapolis MN) until now. I was surprised to find one of my “go to” Thai restaurants Krungthep got a new (to me) website, that accepts Bitcoin.

It looks like they use Menufy and it looks like there are several restaurants in the area I can also order from using Bitcoin.

How to Setup a Soundboard

This article will show you how to map a set of sound effects (I’ll show you how to do 10) to keyboard shortcuts that will be ready any time you need a rim shot, or sad horns or whatever else.

You need to be running OS X. I’ve set this up on a 10.10 and 10.11. I do not know how far back into older versions of OS X this will work (or how far forward).

The bad news is I only read 17 books in 2015. However I feel pretty good about that because I read all 10 of The Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson, which are all massive. All 10 averaged well over 40 hours a piece. It’s kinda scary to think I spent so much time listening to those books. Recording them must have been a massive undertaking.

The Malazan books were good books, an absolutely massive world with lots of interesting stuff going on, however I may have over done it. At the end I felt like I had been put through a lot, given it a lot of my time and the end just didn’t quite satisfy as much as I had hopped. Maybe I’ll feel differently about it in a few years. Mostly I blame my self. If I had stretched it out a little bit longer, read some more different kinds of books in the gaps (like what would have happened if I read them as they were published), I suspect I would have enjoyed the experience a lot more and would be raving about how good they were right now.

After 8+ years of faithful-ish service I’m ditching WordPress for the great static site generator Pelican, written in my very favorite language, Python.

If you’re a “feed subscriber” sort of a person, you will probably need to updated/re-subscribe to this site, I think the feed’s URL is different now.

The migration has been rocky and still is not done yet. If you are reading this shortly after I’ve published it, and you were to go back through my archives you would find a lot of broken images. Hopefully those will be fixed soon.