What I’m Reading – 5/16

With a big move coming up my time is pretty much split between work and wrangling together things like kitchen supplies and furniture. Scifiguys has a new video coming out this week, so keep your eyes on YouTube for that to be posted. I also just realized that this post marks one-month since I started putting these together. I like this format as it allows me to share content I’m reading without making some awkward post on Facebook or a lengthy recap video on YouTube. If you enjoy these, make sure to leave a comment on the blog post itself. Feel free to suggest topics you’d be interested in reading more about as well.

In other news, it looks like North Korea will continue its missile testing program. I have a feeling this will eventually lead to some sort of definitive conclusion or compromise. China has increasingly little interest in keeping North Korea around as regional dominance becomes more and more a realistic possibility. Anyway, here are the links:

5/16

What I’m Reading – 5/15

My productivity tool is coming along nicely and I’ll have a working version by the end of the week. I’m excited to put together an article covering what I did; working with APIs for services you commonly use can be very rewarding and useful for your day-to-day life. I can’t say I’ve loved working with the Google APIs (the Python package is a little clumsy to use at times and the resource naming isn’t the best), but I love Google apps and use them in all parts of my professional and personal life so it’s worth putting in the effort to learn.

In other news, I spent the weekend in Sacramento relaxing and didn’t get a chance to put this article together until this morning. I missed some big headlines, like the ransomware attacko n Friday, but I’ve included it here for anyone that missed that story. Anyway here are the articles:

5/10 – 5/15

What I’m Reading – 5/9

I’ve been off the map a bit since the weekend, but I’m back and hopefully will have a developer post later this week. I’ve been working on my event tracking system and it’s coming along nicely. I had to spend a few friendly hours with Google’s API documentation, but it’s relatively intuitive enough to get the hang of once you come to terms with the API wrapper package. I’m planning on having something written up by the weekend.

In other news, the latest Mac Demarco album just came out and I attended the “How Weird” festival in San Francisco. “How Weird” was alright, but a bit flat if you ask me. It has a strong hippie presence so that might be why the atmosphere was low-key. New Mac Demarco is great and I strongly suggest giving it a listen. Anyway, here are the links:

5/5 – 5/9

What I’m Reading – 5/5

Something interesting I’ve started noticing is that Facebook ads are actually useful to me. I don’t know what Facebook’s approach is versus Google’s (this is probably worth finding out), but whatever the difference, it seems to be sending me content I’m interested in. I’ve found a number of clothing-related posts that I’ve bought into because they actually found items that fit my style. Likewise, last night I found out that one of my favorite beat artists, Flamingosis, will be in San Francisco tomorrow doing a DJ set with a couple other artists. Obviously, I’ll be there. Hopefully I’ll have some pictures good enough to put up a post sometime during the weekend.

5/4 – 5/5

What I’m Reading – 5/3

Having put more thought into my scheduling automation idea, I decided to forgo the Android front end for now and just stick with something more resembling a cron job until I get the time to slap the front end on it. I’m a big believer in the strength of gamifying activities to make them more desirable. If I can gamify hitting my scheduling metrics, I’ll be way more loyal to my schedule and be able to use it more effectively as a prioritization tool. At some point I’ll start putting together my time management ideas into a series of articles, but that won’t be for another month or so at best.

Also one last announcement: I’ve been very lazy in setting up the links on this page to open in new tabs, but as you can see now, I have fixed this. From now on links will now open in a new tab.

Anyway, here are the links:

5/2 – 5/3

What I’m Reading – 5/1

I took the weekend off from reading this time around to instead put more time into a YouTube video I needed to finish. Time management is an art and I definitely need to continue working on coming up with a system to fit all of these projects in. I have an idea involving some integration between Google Sheets and Calendar, but it’s probably going to require dusting off the Android book I have on my bookshelf. The plus side is that it’ll make a good weekend project post.

In other news it looks like the world hasn’t ended yet although North Korea seems hell-bent on making that a reality. Apparently Bill Nye launched some self-aggrandizing Netflix series as well that I won’t be watching. That’s all I’ve got for now, so here are the links:

5/1/17

What I’m Reading – 4/23

Another busy week, including a night with Sydney to celebrate 6 months together. In putting together this week’s list, I found that I already had enough interesting links after just 2 days of collecting to make a complete, so I decided to publish today, 4/25/17. Going forward, this series will no longer be weekly, but more of a “whenever, wherever” approach once I hit a number of links I feel is appropriate. You can bet on this being multiple times a week.

 

In other blog-related news, something I’m hoping to do more of in the future is to include some posts about the books I’m reading and now that I’ve restructured my time at home to open up another hour or so, I’ll most likely be doing just that.

 

What I’m Reading – 4/16

4/16 – 4/22

Hey all! While I’ve been busy with my day job and my nascent YouTube channel, I’ve been continuing to read constantly throughout my day. I always like to remind myself of the example set by Theodore Roosevelt who made it well-known how much time he invested in reading on topics of any kind. He could be in-between presidential meetings addressing the breakup of a monopoly and the Venezuelan crisis and still find time to read a few pages of a treatise on North American bird populations or the like.

I think many of us with active minds find ourselves sneaking in articles or books here and there throughout our working day and personal life and this gave me the inspiration to start putting together a weekly list of things I’ve been reading. This list is by no means exhaustive, nor will it be in any sort of ordering, but I hope it can serve as a launching point into the different topics I read about on a weekly basis. Without any further preamble, I bring you “What I’m Reading” for the week of 4/16/2017: