The Sandwich List

  • November 4, 2019

I’m a sandwich guy. Ok, that’s an understatement. I’m really in to sandwiches. I love the variety, the simplicity (or occasionally the complexity), the different textures, the bread, the meat (yes, meat), and usually, the cheese! I’ve spent my nearly 40 years in existence looking for the best sandwiches and then going to great lengths to eat them again and again.

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Paywalls are OK, but Dumb Paywalls Aren’t

  • November 3, 2019

I have hacked the paywall of my hometown newspaper’s website, STLToday.com, two or three times now. The first time came with more fanfare than I expected and the subsequent times have been more quiet, but each time I get some version of this pushback: Look, I understand this point of view.

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The Top Five Highlights of Defcon 27

  • August 25, 2019

I love Defcon. For years, since I was a young script kiddie in high school, I had attending Defcon, the crazy huge hacker convention held every year in Las Vegas, on my bucket list. Now, Defcon 27 was my third Defcon and I seem to enjoy the conference more every year.

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A Mention in Variety

  • March 2, 2019

I’m late on this on the blog, but after a few years of working in entertainment and two years of living in Los Angeles, I got my first name drop in Variety. A few weeks ago, we were talking internally about the entanglement of buyers and sellers and products and platforms, when someone wondered aloud about how many different ways there are to sell branded content in the market.

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Techcrunch Gives the Finger to Journalism and Kicks Newborn Puppy While Slapping Your Mom

  • January 8, 2019

In the latest segment in the endlessly long syndicated program entitled “Every Thing is On Fire at Journalism’s House” we have Techcrunch writing an article about the new but only Wednesday mid-day level news of Amazon Web Services launching the DocumentDB service. I’ll let you guess what the title of this article, written by Federic Lardinois, is running in a (formally) respected tech news source.

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My Current Media Diet - January 2019

  • January 5, 2019

In the vein of the wonderful and prolific Jason Kottke, I’d like to start sharing my current media diet on my blog. I’m not going to keep track of everything I read, watch, or listen to, but I do think a general review of what I’m consuming would be interesting to others and myself in the future.

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Context Powers Brand Safety at Studio71

  • April 9, 2018

Have you heard about the brand safety concerns on YouTube? Maybe you’ve heard it described as the “Adpocalypse”? Even if you haven’t caught wind of the madness over the last 12 months, surely you understand that anything mixed with “apocalypse” isn’t a good thing. As is common in “whatever-pocalypse” situations there was a fair bit of freak out, but Studio71 went to work!

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I Went With the iPhone 8

  • September 18, 2017

According to the press, and especially the fawning Apple bloggers, I don’t exist. Well, maybe I exist a little but I’m cheap, or stupid, or maybe confused…and cheap and stupid. No, I didn’t leak the iOS 11 Gold Master (I’d hate to be that guy and run in to John Gruber at a well lit Philadelphia craft cocktail bar), I’m just the only person in the world that ordered an iPhone 8 (Plus)…on purpose.

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Apple Watch Series 2 - A Short Review

  • July 1, 2017

Yes, I finally got an Apple Watch as I’m currently using an iPhone 7 Plus for my daily driver phone. Yes, I got the Series 2 mid cycle because I got a good deal and I don’t really care enough about potential new features…and yes, I’m going to review it in an effort to reset the nearly year-long content gap on my blog.

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Strange Loop - Exploring Conversational Interfaces with Amazon Alexa and Go

  • September 17, 2016

Nothing hums like the Strange Loop conference machine! I just spoke at the conference yesterday in St. Louis and already the video of my talk is up and has 150+ views on YouTube! Here is the YouTube video: Here are my slides: Thanks, Strange Loop! It was an honor to be included in this year’s roster of speakers at such a great conference.

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The Nodejs CA Bug From Hell…and Mozilla

  • June 18, 2016

Can I tell you about this doozy of a bug we just resolved at Studio71? When I say doozy, I mean a total mess and the path led us down to some questionable npm package decisions and eventually to Mozilla…and thankfully nothing overly stupid that we did! Lets back up though…

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My Gopherfest Talk on go-alexa

  • May 15, 2016

I recently had the opportunity to perform a “lightening talk” at San Francisco’s Gopherfest 2016, a conference about the Go programming language, about my go-alexa library to create Amazon Alexa skills. Still no word on when the video of my talk will be released, but I’ve embedded my slides below:

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