A to Z Prep

Update on my previous whine/rant. I figured out a not-horrendously time/labor intensive way of sorting my reading options.

Step 1: I took the Synopticon Great Ideas List and cut it down to only the ones that I was interesting in. (Eliminating about  1/4 of the topics.)

Then, I created my own "Pseudopticon" by pulling out just the part of the Gateway introduction with the author/topic list. It's still ~200 pages and not well organized, but it's infinitely more searchable than full ~5K (or even the 300+ of volume 1). Shoutout to my wife for suggesting that I use the "Print to PDF" function to isolate those pages, instead of trying to wrangle all 5K pages in a PDF editor.

I can CTRL+F through that (remember, match case and complete word!) and I think the most hits I've gotten for any one Idea is ~15. Very manageable.

Those (after a minimal check for reasonable length, repeat from last year, etc.) go into this spreadsheet which is labeled with volume-page#. Surprisingly, a few of the words I picked aren't in the Gateway at all. Once I have them all compiled, I'll start checking for dupes (working first from the ones with the fewest entries so they can "keep" as many as possible) and picking the themes/entries to read. My goal is to go for a similar length to last year, which is ~10 pages a day (I think the contents of a page between the two collections are similarish). Some of the selections are only a page or two long, so I may wind up with a couple those days. Some are 50 or 60, so I'll be passing on those (for now, might go back if they looking interesting. This is partially a trail run to see how I like the GBWW selections in general.) I'm stretching to 20-25 if they looking interesting.

There's your behind the scenes blog magic.