Today I found out Matthew Perry died. Some media outlet was playing a clip where he was saying how important it is to help those in need, particularly those looking to get sober. That hit a nerve and I decided to break a personal rule, and AA rule, and his confidence. I met Matthew Perry at one of the worst times of his life. He was in Dallas filming (I think) Serving Sara. I say I think because that movie was released in 2002 but I would have sworn it was the late 90s. In any case, at the time…
How many times have I heard, “I have a love hate relationship with Facebook”? Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube… let’s just call them Social Media Platforms or SMPs. The ability to keep in touch with friends and family, share with a large group of people quickly, share and manage photos, find details about that friend from way back; all of that is great. Lately the list of bad is growing long and the great seems less so. The problem is the bad is worse than most people think. Suicides. Political manipulation. Extremely effective and manipulative advertising. Spying. Social engineering. The libertarian…
My Grandfather, who was a farmer until his sons went to college and then built homes, told me that a financial investor once said to him, “don’t work for your money, make your money work for you.” My grandfather started investing and when he passed away, he was a millionaire. I have become a fan of Dave Ramsey and recently took his course Financial Peace University. He has what he calls “Baby Steps”, the fundamentals which are: Save $1,000 Pay off ALL debt Build an Emergency Fund with at least 3 months of expenses (and eventually a year or more)…
One of the first books I read and one of my all time favorites is Carl Sagan’s Contact. If that name doesn’t ring a bell, think a more prolific Neil Degrasse Tyson if Neil had intellectual integrity. This book was made into a movie starring Jodie Foster and the scenes where they first get the signal had a profound affect on me. I decided if the Bible is true, it would be layers and layers like an onion. It was not for years until I realized how hard it is to uncover those little nuggets. Here is one. I will…
A few have asked so thought I would put this in one place. In a nutshell I would say there are so many free resources (610 listed there), I would exhaust some of the free or low cost resources before paying a university or bootcamp. Also, I would recommend a few easy side projects to learn with. A resume-like portfolio page. Maybe a blog using a popular open source CMS like WordPress or Drupal. Maybe a data project from Kaggle data competition. Just build stuff. Another tidbit is to help people understand different “stacks”. For a long time LAMP or…
This is one of those posts where people have asked a few times and thought I would just put this in a single post. There are two types of resources: commentary and resources. Commentary is basically someone’s exegesis, explanation, interpretation, or application of text from the Bible. My personal belief is that Jesus is strongly warning His disciples against this. But then He does it Himself. So in other words, it can be good but I think (my opinion) is that we should be reading the Bible and coming to our own conclusions. Not relying entirely on the teaching of…
Recently I started looking for my next role and I decided to apply search engine marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques to that search. It has been so effective that I have shared it with a few friends and decided to write a quick guide. In fact, so broad is this topic, I am going to break this up into a few topics. This is the covering the first topic: keyword research. You can see a few screenshots at the bottom of this post. Here are the other topics and as I complete this guide, I will update…
Went to Geneva to see my dad from July 29 to August 6th. Want to highlight a few things with pics below. Spent some time driving around with Bob and Lenny Pippen. Lenny is one of my dad’s partners on his new hotel on Plum Point, which is on Seneca Lake. Also went wine tasting, toured the Glenn Curtiss Museum, toured the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, and got to have a few beers with the Master Brewer at Genessee Brewery. Glenn Curtiss This was way cooler and more interesting than I thought it would be…
I started to write this to a newly married friend. He had asked last minute if he could have one of my Field Notes notebooks for his honeymoon. Unfortunately all I had was one I had already started, but I tore out a few pages and it was his. I have come to find journaling as an incredibly effective tool and there are some concepts I have borrowed from others wanting to journal or keep a pocket notebook should know about. I want to tell my own system, but first a quick story. I take a nice Moleskin notebook to…
One of our online retailers is Wayfair. I was looking at their Q4 2017 10K and surprised their price is going down. Couple points: Undervalued compared to Amazon (compare market cap to annual sales). Amazon’s market cap is more than 4X revenue. Wayfair is just over 1X revenue. Wayfair has posted losses, but they are investing heavily in a growing business. Getting close to top 10 online retailer and in terms of home furnishings I suspect they are actually LARGER than Amazon. Year over year, sales went UP (46% in Q4 2017) while COGS and overhead were relatively consistent or…
