🤠 Rodeo Roundup 2018 Week #4

🎂 Casper's Birthday

The week's biggest event was Casper's birthday on Wednesday. Our boy turned 12! 🎉 He and Tatyanna had a great day out on the town:

• Breakfast at Silver Spur, a favorite haunt, where Linda —the owner, gave Casper a T-Shirt for his birthday:
• Roaming the Capitola Mall where Casper found miniature remote-controlled car Fury:
• And where they also tried a massage chair, to great reviews and inside jokes.

We ended the day with Casper's classic birthday dinner: 🍣 at Mobo's. Look at this fabulous Rainbow Dragon Roll. 😋

Casper's birthday party started Friday night with a sleepover with his best friend Kadin and Victor. They watched The Dark Night^[1] at Casper's request.

Saturday morning more friends joined to play Magic The Gathering, have Twice Baked Potatoes for lunch with Molten Lava Cake for dessert. Also at Casper's request. It was fun to have a boy filled house for a day.

🎧 Google Audiobooks Launches

Google Play Books added Audiobook to their eBooks offerings. I've been enjoying Google Audiobooks for a while now as a dogfooder.

What sets Google Audiobooks apart is that you can buy audiobooks as you go. No auto-renewing monthly subscription. You can start listening to your book on your phone and tell Google Home to continue the story. Then pick up the story on your phone again. Google Audiobooks is full of clever touches:

• Stop playback and when you resume, playback will start at the beginning of the sentence.
• The index of the audiobook will list section and chapter titles where most other services simply list part X of Y. This makes it much easier to jump to a specific location in the audiobook.

To promote the new service you can get 50% of your first title. One title you might be interested in is Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. With a 50% discount, there is no reason not to decide for yourself whether it is any good.

🧙 Ursula le Guin died

Ursula le Guin died at the start of the week on Jan 22, 2018. While I haven't read any of her work in decades, I still remember the feeling of reading the Earthsea books.

I can't recall the plot or the storyline of the books, but I do remember what the Earthsea world felt like. I got lost in it that magical world. Time to revisit those books! Thank you for creating Earthsea, Ursula.

✋ Putting a Stop to Subscriber Spam

You can subscribe to this blog via email or Feedly. It turns out that script kiddies visit The Code Mill and subscribe (random) email addresses to this blog. While the rising number of subscribers is nice, having fake subscribers does more harm than good.

I could tell the fake subscribers from real subscribers because a) this blog is so small that I know every real subscriber in person and b) the fake subscribers lacked some metadata that real subscribers do possess.

I've modified the sign-up form a little to reject the fakes and I'm working to have this change merged into Ghost —the open source software that powers this site.