Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Author: Ezra S F

  • Goodreads Feature Request: Mentioned books

    I am reading Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes. As the authors wrote about experts, the mentioned the books of them. It would be nice to have these books noted on the page with the Want To Read button. It looks like the Kindle app does this. Well, technically, they have a buy other books…

  • The Bystander Effect

    I am seeing more and more where people are complaining about the filming of an attack and not intervening in it. People are claiming they would do something. But… I suspect many of the people who film these events without intervening think beforehand they would do something too. Why they do not intervene is pretty…

  • Trump’s best shot at reelection is false-consensus effect

    ,

    Thinking back to Obama’s campaign for reelection, I recall much talk about how incompetent, evil, and terrible a president he was from his opposition. Not Romney directly but the his likely voters on social media. To the point of Romney feeling moral obligation to defend Obama as not that bad of a person to his…

  • Just Google It

    Saw a friend ask a question about how to setup a store for WordPress on Facebook. This seemed trivial. Just look on Google for the answer. But, then I had a thought: What if my working with WordPress for years yields me better results? First, I certainly have terminology that would give me better results.…

  • Counting children’s books

    I have not been one to look favorably on counting children’s books in my Goodreads list. However, I am really behind on my reading. And my kid just had me read Oscar’s Book for the 9th time today alone. I am getting in a lot of reading that isn’t going counted. So, I may just…

  • To-do: Goodreads friends rating score browser add-on

    The primary reason I like Goodreads is for the easy tracking the books I read. The second reason is the friend reviews. Basically, bookstore website reviews are inundated with fake reviews. Maybe the author or publisher buys them or has people who have never read it review it. Maybe people are reviewing it based on…

  • Phishy Facebook ad explanations

    This past weekend, a friend invited us over to play board games. Two of the people there have been on Jeopardy. So, I found this advertisement interesting. And when I went to the feature explaining why I got the ad, I found that explanation lacking. Supposedly, it was because I live in the US and…

  • Dear Russians,

    A few years ago, I read Hacking: The Next Generation which mentioned using LinkedIn to research an organization to attack it. Pick out the CEO and send an urgent email from this person to a peon to phish them. Last week, I heard about a Russian campaign attempting to leverage LinkedIn. I just got a…

  • Windows md5 checksum

    I was sent a script to run by an analyst who advised to verify the MD5 hash. This is good advice to ensure that I receive the correct content. And happens to be the advise I gave the DBA manager before restoring backup files that was going to take hours to download. The idea is…