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)…
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…
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…
The best trick I ever saw was my freshman year of college. A card shark wanted to show how old riverboat gamblers cheated at cards. The thing was, I didn’t know the real trick until last night about 25 years later. An Austin director made a documentary on that man, Richard Turner. BUT WAIT! Don’t watch the preview just yet! It wasn’t until I watched the preview that the true magic was revealed. When I saw this man perform at Baylor, they put a picture of it in the paper with my name, so I kept it. He said he…
I have been Tweeting a lot of frustrations about Apple and a friend asked why, so here are the details…. I begged my parents for my first computer, which was an Apple. And right before I went to college I worked all summer and saved up my money for my second. Which I immediately regretted since everyone at school had PCs and it seemed all the cool pirated games were made for PC. So I converted to PC until Steve Jobs came back. Not because he came back, but he did three things that I thought were genius. One was…
I just cancelled my Lynda.com membership. I think Lynda.com is great. You can learn just about any software program, lessons are taught through video, and the lessons are far more exhustive than their competition. I have tried Codecademy and Team Tree House. Codecademy is great, but they only teach a few programming languages, which are far from exhaustive. Codecademy is free, so I can understand why they have such a limited curriculum. Team Tree House is good, but it costs $25/month and I think Lynda is better for the money. I hate how Team Tree House's videos show the teacher…
I was at a networking event last night and was telling someone that I wanted to build something similar to Yelp. His first question was, “I wonder if there is a clone script for that?” What the hell is a clone script? It basically turns a CMS like Drupal or WordPress into a popular site. Want your own Twitter? Get a Twitter Script. Want your own Facebook? There are almost a dozen Facebook clone scripts. There are sites like clonescripts.com that host hundreds of sites. It seems like if there is a popular site, there is a clone script for…
