The Relic Master by Christopher Buckley. A caper set in the sixteenth century as various parties pursue the Shroud of Turin. Protagonist is memorable, humour level is good, overall a fun read.

Lots of blather about this. Two salient observations by Charles and Eric below. As Eric notes, it is impossible to think about launching a startup today without technology from Seattle.

@trengriffin Next time you hear the rhetoric ask the person on the other side to launch their company with no tech from Seattle

— Eric Fleischman (@efleis) August 6, 2016

An update to our geographic analysis of the Gartner IaaS Magic Quadrant.

Cloud City indeed. pic.twitter.com/bpbqMDkJbH

— Charles Fitzgerald (@charlesfitz) August 5, 2016

This seems pretty cool – Cold Casting. I don’t really want to work with hot metals, the last time I did that in college metallurgy lab a millions years ago, it was a near disaster. No scars but I remember the day well.

I was asked this recently. I draw from:

• The NYTimes Sunday Book Reviews. I especially enjoy the “By The Book” column, in which a living author talks about what they have read and are reading. Always some things off the beaten path there.
• The LA Times book reviews are useful as well.
• Various prize lists – Hugo, Nebula, Man Booker, Pulitzer, Nobel, Edgar. Tho I have found the Nobel prize winners to be rough rough going.
• Goodreads reviews and Amazon reviews. If a book doesn’t get great consensus reviews (or at least a strong positive rating from a subset of readers), I probably won’t read.
• I have a couple coworkers/friends who are big readers and I listen to their recos, and my college roommate is a voracious and critical reader, and I listen to him. And then anything that a family member recommends, I will consider.

I will read just about any genre with a couple limitations. I find most popular business books to be horrible – 1 or 2 good ideas that are worthy of an article, but nothing worthy of a book. And I do not enjoy farce in any genre, just not my thing.

Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky. 50 islands you will probably never visit, and a little bit of their story. Not your regular atlas, each entry is a little historical vignette about the island – shipwrecks, nuclear tests, settlement, abandonment, hope, loss. Tristan da Cunha really grabbed me for some reason.

Too much fuss to install today but want to try – https://github.com/shagabutdinov/sublime-enhanced/blob/master/readme-installation.md

• Unruly Places by Alastair Bonnett. The stories behind some of the most unusual and unlikely places on the globe – places belonging to no nation, to many nations, floating, underground, in the sky – and an understanding of the meaning and importance of place.  Enjoyable.  
• The Rook and Stiletto by Daniel O’Malley. Great suspenseful adventure in a world filled with magic –  kind of a grown-up Harry Potter milieu.  The first page grabs you – the protagonist awakens with no memory, in a park surrounded by bodies, and in her pocket is a note that says “Read Me”. Stiletto isn’t quite as strong but still a fund read.  
• Dispatches From Pluto by Richard Grant. An English adventure writer decides to settle in the Mississippi Delta. Interesting look at the culture and issues of a part of the country that seems almost foreign to me.  
• The Dog Stars by Peter Heller. A different kind of post-apocalyptic novel, the world has largely been emptied out, a very few people try to find their way and remain human.  
• A Strangeness In My Mind by Orhan Pamuk. Tried to lift my literary sights, but as always, “Nobel Prize Winning” does not equal “interesting”.  
• Niceville by Carsten Stroud. Not a nice place. Solid horror/mystery.

Particle – https://console.particle.io/login, AWS – https://aws.amazon.com/iot/, Resin – https://resin.io/ – wonder which of these are most cost effective.

• The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemison. A small set of related characters finding their way on a far-future(?) Earth peopled by humans and human derivatives, littered with the artifacts of past civilizations, undergoing yet another seismic/volcanic reshaping. Of course there is some conspiracy at work. Good tale, characters dealing with painful issues.
• Connectography by Parag Khanna. How the world is moving beyond nation-states to clusters driven by interconnectivity. Well written and a lot of maps, and I am a sucker for maps.
• The Ruins of Gorlan by John A. Flanagan. Pretty standard YA fantasy, but fun nevertheless. I’d read more.
• The Call by Yannick Murphy. Eh, what started out as a clever structural gadget became tiring. I am a little curious to know what happens to the family but I gave up.
• Life After Life by Kate Atkinson. I like Atkinson, but this book also became tiresome, tho I managed to finish. But I’d recommend a different Atkinson.
• Farthing by Jo Walton. How did I miss this? Conspiracy, murder in the English countryside in an alternative history where Britain made peace with the Nazis. Excellent.
• Those Who Wish Me Dead by Michael Koryta. A boy witnesses a murder, and, well, shit happens. Fun but not memorable.

• Spill Simmer Falter Wither by Sara Baume. Highly praised, but it felt to me like the author was trying very hard to be literary. I stuck with it, but it didn’t really move me.
• Uprooted by Naomi Novik. A captivating tale of a young witch coming of age and getting drawn into an existential threat for her homeland. Really loved it, deserves the accolades.
• Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty. Completely fun story of conflicts between parents at a preschool, hilarious but serious. Apparently coming to HBO, this will be fun
• A Burglar’s Guide To The City by Geoff Manaugh. A look at how burglars use urban design and building design to achieve their goals. Would have been even better with more anecdotes, but still interesting

• High-Rise by J. G. Ballard. The community in a modern high-rise starts to fall apart in “Lord of the Flies” fashion…actually “Lord of the Flies” seems pretty tame after this.
• The Travelers by Chris Pavone. A travel writer is coopted and stumbles into a job as a spy, and slowly learns that nothing is as it seems in his life. Fun.
• The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory by John Seabrook. No surprise here, pop music is largely a manufactured product.
• The Whites by Richard Price. Couldn’t finish. Supposedly a gritty police drama but kind of dull.
• Electric Barracuda by Tim Dorsey. I generally don’t like farce, but there is something endearing about this character – a wise-cracking serial killer with a heart of gold.

• I Am Not A Serial Killer by John Cleaver. A teenager obsessed with his own psychoses discovers that there are much worse things going on in his town.
• The Rosie Project by Graeme Simpson. Very engaging tale of a man with Asperger’s who fights to build a life for himself. Very enjoyable.
• Time Will Darken It by William Maxwell. A pleasant family visit by out-of-town cousins results in darker turns and secrets unearthed. Quite good.
• Orphan X by Gregg Hurtwitz. An orphan is raised by a secret agency to be a ruthless operative. Just like me.
• Shaker by Scott Frank. A hitman arrives in a post-quake LA to take care of business, and things go south. Not really sure why the quake mattered to the story.
• Great Topics of the World by Albert Goldbarth. Wow this is a meaty meaty book, very demanding, but fascinating. The first essay alone is worth it.

• A Doubter’s Almanac by Ethan Canin. Fantastic story of a misanthropic obsessive genius and how he impacted family and friends around him. An incredibly unlikeable and yet sympathetic main character. Very good.
• Dragon Day by Lisa Brackmann. Solid detective tale set in modern day China, where it seems everyone is out for their own advantage, and justice is a hard thing to find.
• The Alchemist of Souls by Anne Lyle. Fantasy set in the early days of the New World exploration, with a New World quite different than ours, peopled by a non-human race. Entertaining, not sure I am driven to keep up with the series tho.
• All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders. It’s the end of the world, maybe, and two childhood friends come together to save it, one with a deep science background, one with a deep mystical background. Good characters but I felt it kind of dissolved into mystical goo.
• Chimera by Mira Grant. The last in a 3 book series about semi-intelligent and autonomous tapeworms invading human beings. OK it was fun at times but probably 1 book too long.
• The Victoria Vanishes by Christopher Fowler. Fun tale of two aging detectives investigating a very very strange set of murders. I’ve read another in series, solid characters.

I needed some escapism.

• Vanishing Games by Roger Hobbs. Pirates, Macau, Diamonds, Counterfeiting, high bodycount. Fun but not distinctive.
• Hades by Candice Fox. Cops with dark pasts taking the law into their own hands. Also a high body count.
• Forty Thieves by Thomas Perry. Now this was more fun, a husband/wife PI team run into a husband/wife assassin team, both trying to resolve a cold case. Bullets fly.
• Planetfall by Emma Newman. Ok this started out slow, a group of colonists on a new planet, but it went very strange, with a strange alien experience, and twisted humans.

https://github.com/jhludwig/aws-swf-boto3. There are a number of pre-boto3 examples and this is just a rewrite. The decider is simplistic and will fail if multiple requests are queued up in one poll, but it is a start.