Items of Interest

Podcasts in 2019

Motherfoclóir I binge listened to all the Motherfoclóir episodes this year and it was a joy to listen to. The podcast covers a wide range of topics related to Ireland and Irish in their own hilaroius and informative manner. It inspired me to start relearning Irish. Motherfoclóir Abú! The Blindboy Podcast

Movies in 2019

Bumblebee Bumblebee is the Transformers movie every child of the 80's has been wanting since the cartoon. Watching the opening Cybertron battle scene in the cinema was the best and most enjoyable cinema experience I've had in thirty years. I was transported back to my Saturday mornings as an eight year old and I nearly lost my mind when Soundwave proclaimed "Decepticons, Attack!". The original design Transformers coupled with an ET-type storyline makes this a great and enjoyable film.  

NYTimes on Location Tracking

The New York Times published a fantastic exposé and data visualistion site about the scale of gathering and selling of location data. They obtained a file with 50 billion location pings of 12 million Americans and sifted through the data in horror. The data can be bought from data aggregation companies that offer data collected from apps on your smartphone, like news or coupons apps, not from telecom companies or the big tech companies.

Spec Writing

Working in software, I sometimes run into problems convincing project stakeholders about the purpose and limitations of project specs. This blog post from Seth Godin about defining the problem first and aiming to solve it, rather than aiming to write a spec for it, is absolute gold.

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