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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 some tabloids and newspapers very publicly exposed that he had been going to strip clubs, acting erratically, and was somewhat out of control. Then that he went to rehab. Then he showed up that the AA meeting I went to. I remember how sympathetic I was to the publicity surrounding such a difficult time. I was furious with my own family for disclosing that I had gone to rehab and then AA but I could not imagine having the level of public scrutiny he was experiencing or the possible shame that might have caused. I wanted to hug the guy. I didn’t. Partially because he had a body guard and partially I thought how hard it must be to be so famous that you would questions someones motives for being nice to you. I worried if I tried to be kind to him, maybe I would only be doing it because I had been such a huge fan of Friends. Or he would think I was only being kind to him because of Friends. So I broke my other rule: to always pay it forward to the next guy. When I got sober, I was uncomfortable in my own skin. I couldn’t sit still. I couldn’t share in meetings. When meetings were over, I bee lined it for the door. I wanted desperately to have sober friends, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask for help. One day while walking towards to door immediately following the meeting, the guy that had taken me to lunch and bought me a Big Book cornered me (literally) and said, “What? You too cool for us? What show are you running off to watch at home alone? Why don’t you get dinner with us? Why don’t you come and hang out with us?” The irony. I was too proud to ask to hang out. So he forced me. And I never needed that so much in my life as I did in that moment. I wish I had corned Matthew Perry. I wish I told him “I get it”. I wish I asked him to dinner with us, to hang out with us. Then later I wished so much to tell him I was sorry I didn’t extend my hand and pay it forward. I hated to see him struggle. Not that my ego is so unchecked as to think I would have been the one to make a difference, but that I hate that out of fear, I said nothing to him. And I am guessing many did not extend a hand for the same reason. I hate that. I hope to God I never do that again. He was not the only famous person I met in AA. Another, who I will not name, became relatively good friends. I wish I could say that made me feel better. It makes me certain that when the hand is extended or the door opened, few on pass that opportunity.

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 in me thinks they should be free to do that and I should be as free to not use it.  Yet I feel more and more that SMPs are becoming a utility that everyone needs in the way everyone needs a phone and credit card.  Technically you don’t need it, but it is pretty hard to be in this society without it.  A friend the other day cryptically hinted that he may be developing some SMP of his own.  Great!  But he is certainly not the first I have heard speak of such a thing.  SInce the now defunct Friendster launched in 2002 and Facebook IPO’d for hundreds of billions, people have been trying to break into the SMP market.  Arguably only 3 have made it.  Google, Facebook, and Twitter.  Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google or FAANG are just 5 companies with a combined value of $6 trillion dollars.  They have been insanely good at protecting that club and barring any new members.  Those that have come close have been gobbled up acquisition style.  Or destroyed.  This is a problem I have thought a lot about and I think I have devised a way to disrupt the disruptors. Microblogging and the Content Shift What is micro-blogging?  Microblogging is a term getting thrown around a bit and Twitter adopted it as their own.  The idea of microblogging seemed stupid to me at first.  Why limitations when my blog has no limits?  And why put my content on someone elses site when I have my own?  At first with many SMPs, content creators were using them just to tease their content to attract content to their own site.  This worked great.  In fact, many SMPs had APIs and allowed for 3rd party applications that would automatically post links to blog articles on SMPs as soon as you published a blog article.  Facebook disallowed this to some degree and made this difficult to do.  Which lead to two interesting developments: content started being posted on SMPs and Facebook started controlling what content their users saw. Protect The Feed At All Costs I can remember watch Apple keynotes to see new features being released, back when new features improved the user experience.  With SMPs, most new features are frustrating and unwanted by users and exist only to aid SMPs.  The first example was Facebook changing the default sort from chronological to using a blackbox algorithm.  It sounded great.  Many complained they were no longer seeing content from people like they would want.  At first you could change the sort back to chronological, then you could change it but the change would not persist between visits, then you couldn’t change the sort if you wanted to.  You have no control over the way content in your feed is ranked.  Facebook’s strategy: protect the feed at all cost.  You can’t even see the magic algorithm that controls the content you see.  Politicians have claimed they are being censored.  It is worse than that.  People can say whatever they want, but there is no guarantee anyone will see it.  Even if they want to see it.  Protect the feed at all cost.  Once they had that control, why would they give it up?  This is clearly demonstrable by looking at traffic from articles posted on Facebook.  Where they may have gotten tens of thousands at one time, now they are lucky to get ten.  SMPs have a few high priority goals: 1.  Content should be on our site, not the content creators’ sites.  2.  We want people on our site, not here just to find content that leads them away.  3.  We want to control the public dialog and if we don’t like what is being said, we can set the algorithm to bury it in obscurity. Really Simple Syndication Really Simple Syndication or RSS was a technology cut short by SMPs.  There were a few apps like Flipboard that used RSS feeds.  Basically RSS let you subscribe to a blog.  Maybe you wanted to follow a large number of blog sites, but going to each of those looking for new content was a bit daunting.  Enter feed readers or feed aggregators.  Feed readers like Flipboard let you subscribe to blogs and then it would curate articles right there in your feed reader.  It was great!  You could set up categories.  Maybe you followed a few movie bloggers so you’d set up a feed of movie blogs.  Another for political blogs.  When you opened the app it would go out and grab content and create this page like the Wall Street Journal.  Little teasers of content.  If you wanted to read more, you could click a link to go to the blog page. Decentralization Bitcoin ushered in a really interesting idea.  Digital currency?  No.  Decentralization.  When the military first developed the internet, the primary goal was decentralized information.  It protected the military from the unlikely event that the Pentagon or some other location would be bombed.  We haven’t really seen many other applications use this idea other than digital currency. A Blueprint for A Social Media Killer I think to kill social media in its current state, one must disrupt that technology with a compelling alternative.  I would suggest a site that uses RSS or a similar technology to gather information from blogs and aggregate them on a site.  Not to steal the entire blog post, mind you, just the title and main image: just a teaser.  The flaw of RSS readers is they were not a site and you had to go through the laborious task of finding blogs.  Instead the site should just aggregate all blog content and let users sift through to find things that are interesting and like them similar to Reddit, just without the need for someone to post the content.  The content would in effect be decentralized as it would not exist on the social media platform but on the content creators site, the aggregator would just be a discovery gateway.

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) Invest 15% of your household income Save for your children’s college fund Pay off your home early Build wealth and GIVE The thing is…I knew this! I had been told the wisdom of this myself and I am mad at myself for robbing me of what I could have had for what I wanted right then. Don’t rob yourself like I did. Invest in yourself and in your family instead of squandering your money on food, drink, toys, and trinkets that will only satisfy you for a moment. I wanted to give a quick primer on some investing concepts. First, what are some investing options? The most common are (from the most risky to the most conservative: Mutual Funds Publicly Traded Stocks & Bonds Private Businesses There are obviously more, but to keep this short, I will start with these. The most risky is a private business. I think investing in private business is great and have invested my own money in my own business, but I would only do that now with a small portion of my total investments. No more than 20%. Public Companies issue shares of stock during their Initial Public Offering. You can multiply the number of shares of stock times the currently stock price to get what is called a Market Cap or what the company is worth. For example, Dallas based oil company Exxon Mobile has 4.22 billion shares that are each worth $32.40 making the market cap $136.8 billion. You can buy one share of Exxon for $32.40, which would make you a shareholder or essentially an owner or a very small portion of that company. How do you make money from stock? There are two ways. First, public companies’ goal is to make a profit. They take this profit or earnings and divide it buy the number of shares and that is the Earning Per Share or Dividend. Exxon paid 4 quarterly dividends in 2020 of $0.87 each. So if you bought a share for $32.40, you would have made $3.48 or almost 11%. Second, you make money when you sell the share. As the company grows, the stock price should increase. So if you buy the share for $32.40, you are expecting it to be higher when you sell it. How much money do you make from stock? The best way to answer this is to explain Mutual Funds. The best investment strategy is to invest in several stocks. There are companies that do this and these are called funds. Mutual Funds typically invest in stock and usually invest with some type. There might be funds that focus on large companies or Large Cap or Large Market Capital (we talked about market cap above as being the number of shares times the stock price). Another fund might invest in different retail stores. Another health care. And so on. Usually they focus on an industry, business size, or region. Some funds are what they call index funds. Index funds invest in pretty much everything. One example is the S&P 500. This is an index fund of 500 different companies and is used as a benchmark. The S&P 500 average return for the last 100 years is about 11%. So what is that worth over time? Let’s say you invest 15% (as Dave Ramsey suggests) and you make $50,000 a year paid monthly. That is $7,500 a year or $625 a month. If you did that from age 25 to 65, you would retire with $5.37 million! Keep in mind, you have only paid $625 a month, $7,500 a year, or a total of $300,000, but you end up with almost 20 times that much! If you just invested $100 a month but made a return of 17% instead of 11%, you would have $6 million. In short, being disciplined and investing each month and getting a good return on your investment is what leads to building real wealth. How do I get started? First, open a brokerage account. There are several, but I personally use Vangaurd and TD Ameritrade. Once you open an account, you need to make a trade to trade your money for stock. You can set this up automatically and I would recommend putting more than half your investments in a mutual fund. Maybe all of it. You should have your paycheck automatically deposited into your bank and if you do that you can set up an automatically transfer to your brokerage. I get paid every other week and my tythe to my church and my transfer to my brokerage account happen immediately.

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 tell this as I discovered it.  Psalm 60.  While reading Psalm 60, one verse in particular stood out as nonsensical.  Odd at least.  “Gilead is mine; Manasseh is mine; Ephraim is my helmet; Judah is my scepter; Moab is my washbasin; upon Edom I cast my shoe; over Philistia I shout in triump.”  So I guess this is good if you are Ephraim or Judah with the military and royal iconography.  But Moab is a washbasin?  That seems almost as bad as being a toilette.  Two stories for a little context into Moab.  Israel the nation passes through Moab and God doesn’t like how Moab treats Israel, so God tells Israel to stay away from them.  The critical story to understand this passage, I think, is the book of Ruth.  Basically, Ruth is a Moabite woman who, after her husband dies, comes to Israel with her mother-in-law after her mother-in-law tells Ruth that going to Israel means certain poverty and difficulty.   Why?  Presumably she believes the God of her mother-in-law.  But instead of becoming poor, she marries a rich man.  They have a son.  And that son is the grandfather to the first Kind of Israel: David.  And it is David that is writing this Psalm.  That is why I thought it nonsense.  David is calling his great grandmother a toilette (basically)?  What?!?!  Why?  I would suggest the answer lies in the New Testament.  Stay tuned. Eventually I got to Psalm 89 and read another seemingly nonsense verse: “You crushed Rahab like a carcass; you scattered your enemies with your mighty arm.”  So to read that, it sounds like Rahab is an enemy.  And God crushes Rahab because….she is an enemy.  What!?!?!  Quick contextual story to read here is Joshua chapter 2.  To boil it down for you, Joshua sends spies to look at Jericho before they attempt to conquer the city.  Rahab is a prostitute that hides the spies and saves their life.  Like Ruth, she does this because she believes the God of Israel and she begs the spies to spare her life to which they reply, “our life for yours even to death!”  This is the city that Israel conquers by blowing horns…yes, horns as in a musical instrument.  The entire city is crushed.  Well, except for Rahab and her family.  Rahab was literally one of the only people in the city not crushed.  So why say she was crushed?  I would suggest the answer lies in the New Testament.  Stay tuned. OK.  Stay with me, about to tie this all together.  When I read this, I decide to look up Rahab to see where else she is discussed in the Bible.  You see, not only did Rahab save the spies, after Israel saves her, she is married to a guy named Salmon.  So she is the great, great grandmother of Kind David.  In fact, her son Boaz marries Ruth.  And then comes David and down a long line of descendants you get to Jesus.  In other words, Jesus is a descendant of a prostitute.  But wait, it gets better.  Rahab is mentioned in Mathew chapter 1 where the complete lineage of Jesus is given.  There is something odd about this particular lineage of which in the Bible there are many.  This one mentions 5 women: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary.  But only 5.  Out of all those men, only 5 wives are mentioned.  And they all seem to have one thing in common: sexual sin.  Tamar plays a prostitute to trick Judah into sleeping with her, which he was legally obligated to do through a bit of Torah law called Levirate Marriage as explained in Deuteronomy 25:5-10.  Rahab is a prostitute.  Ruth seduces Boaz so he would fulfill Levirate Marriage.  Bathsheba seduces David.  And Mary was probably seen as a woman that had sex with some man out of marriage and then concocts some nonsense story about being made pregnant by God. As I thought about it, all of these women are victims of sexual impropriety.  I suspect all dealt with a great deal of humiliation.  And many were actually innocent.  In fact, all but Bathsheba were probably innocent, which may explain why she is the only one not named directly in Matthew 1.  So perhaps when Psalms is saying Rahab is crushed, it is not saying by the walls of the city but rather by sin.  She has been crushed by sin.  Crushed.  The weight of sin is so devastating that it is crushing.  This woman, maybe forced into a life of sexual slavery, is given this sliver of hope.  She hears how these slaves in Egypt are saved and coming their way and she hopes that maybe this God will save her too.  Save her from this daily crushing.  It makes me think of the woman washing Jesus feet with her tears in Luke 7:36 where Jesus says, “Do you see this woman?  I entered your house; you gave me no water for my feet but she has wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair.  You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not ceased to kiss my feet.  You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has not ceased to kiss my feet.  You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment.  Therefore I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven – for she loved much.  But he who is forgiven little, loves little.”  She was also crushed.  Crushed by sin.  And she, like Moab, became a washbasin for God.  These women were not shamed.  They glorified God through faith and hope in salvation that might save them from this dark, miserable, and crushing sin. The beauty of this, for me, is that it shows the level of commitment God has at grafting in and adopting the lost.  The other things all the women in Mathew 1 have in common: most are gentiles.  They come from the nations, Gods enemies.  He doesn’t just forgive them.  Not enough.  He doesn’t just graft them in to His family.  Not enough.  He makes them the wives and mothers of kings.  Ultimately leading to Jesus.  Somehow out of the profane comes the Most Holy.

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 Linux Apache MySQL and PHP was the big stack.  Pretty much every website was built on that stack.  Lately there has been a migration to JavaScript.  But to explain the stack, you are going to need 1) a database / backend like some SQL / structured variant (MySQL, Microsoft SQL, Oracle, etc) or NoSQL / unstructured (Mongo) 2) a hosting environment that may also handle routing and 3) a scripting language like PHP, JavaScript, Python, or Ruby.  Now many scripting languages have “frameworks”.  For JavaScript the popular ones are Angular (a Google project), React (a Facebook project), or Vue.  Django is popular for Python and Rails is popular for Ruby.  So when people say they are building on the MEAN stack they mean Mongo (database), Express (routing), Angular (JS framework), and Node (hosting environment). freeCodeCamp The best advice I could give is start here.  Most coding bootcamps and universities are going to be $10k or more.  If you follow freeCodeCamp on Twitter or their weekly email, you hear about people getting jobs after finishing their course.  They have 7 modules that all have easy exercises and more difficult final projects that you can put on your resume.  They have a huge community, probably one of the largest. edX Many top tier universities like Baylor and Harvard have some great courses on edX and you can get credit or certifications from most of them for $100 or so.  CS50 is a really, really great program that lets you sit in on Harvard’s most popular intro to Computer Science course.  They have a cool teaser video here.  Very hard, but who wouldn’t look like a Ninja with a Harvard class credit? YouTube Videos Seriously, there are so, so, so many free tutorials.  Pick fun projects that interest you.  A Python script that gets you followers.  A data crunching project to help you compete on Kaggle.  Your own personal website.  A movie review site.  Whatever.  Here are some YouTube projects or channels: Traversy Media – also has several courses on Udemy and you can dip your toes in on most of those for free on YouTube. freeCodeCamp – 1.7 million subscribers and over 1k videos.  Nuff said. Mosh – I like Traversy better, but many people like Mosh better.  But both doing the same thing. Companies that have free courses Google – you can get certified for pretty much any Google product for free. Mongo – same as Google, company with free course and certification. Salesforce Trailhead – same as Mongo, company with free courses and certification from the #1 sales CRM (customer relationship management) tool Hubspot – another CRM with a free course and certification  

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 someone else.  The second group is resources that may be like the Strong’s Concordance (a Bible dictionary) or translations or interlinear text, etc. The Bible Project These are great for any age.  I have heard a PhD in Theology say many Bible scholars are pretty impressed by their ability to simplify super complicated ideas.  For the most part, these videos (almost 200 now) are animated and cover a range of Biblical topics. The Naked Bible & Unseen Realm The Naked Bible is Michael Heiser’s podcast where he has in depth discussions on various books of the Bible.  This is technical and not for the faint of heart.  But if you like to nerd out on anything, try nerding out on the Bible.  The Unseen Realm is a book published in 2015 and covers a supernatural worldview that can help us grow in our understanding of God and explains some difficult passages and translations and in many ways challenges how some words in the Bible are translated that have a huge implication on this Unseen Realm. Chuck Missler & Koinonia House Chuck Missler is actually a business man that studied the Bible and then later went on to teach on a number of topics.  I am not sure to the degree that he knows Hebrew, but he clearly is not only reading the Bible but looking at and studying the original language.  He shows some of the fascinating hidden ciphers, codes, and symbolism in the Bible. Miico Shaffier & Learn to Read Hebrew in 6 Weeks If you want to learn Hebrew, start here!  Check out her site.  She has free classes online that cover the Alephbet in 6 weeks.  She is super patient.  She keeps the class open to as many as want to learn and is pretty good about kicking people out that are just trolling.  In fact, I think her husband does that while she teaches.  They also give tours in Israel. Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance for King James Version If you do not have a Concordance, think of it as a dictionary.  For each English word in the Bible, it lists each occurrence and the corresponding Hebrew or Greek word.  Very quickly you will see many of these translations are not nearly as straight forward as you would think.  The Bible is full of wordplay, double and triple entendres, a too many literary devices to list.  A good Concordance helps better understand much of these. Bible Hub Just a great all around resource.  Many of these resources are connected.  Bible text online, concordance, interlinear text (side by side Hebrew and English or Greek and English). Random YouTube videos on Bible topics One Minute Appologist – great apologetic topics and interviews One For Israel – the conversion story of Jews and how they found Jesus the Messiah.  Over 400 videos! Sergio & Rhoda – couple in Israel tour famous sites and discuss those sites from Bible with interesting little gems Aleph Beta – great Bible stories and commentary from a Rabbi  

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 with links: Keyword Research Resume & Portfolio Page Job Search Sites Guide Results There are really two factors I have used to gauge how well this has worked. First, I was getting about 5ish calls or emails from recruiters per month before doing this and closer to 20 calls per month after. So probably about a 4X increase in touches from recruiters. Also, LinkedIn the number of impressions your profile has received from searches on site. So this is when a recruiter is searching for a skill and you have appeared. You can find this number on your profile page just below your description in the section titled Your Dashboard. At the top there is a section that says Search Appearances (see image below…image 1 of 3). This has also increased about 3 to 4 times. In short, this is why I think this exercise is so important. It increases your exposure to recruiters that are searching for skills. And that is where we are going to start: identify the skills you have that are most relevant to the roles you are looking for. There is another benefit that is harder to quantify. I feel the roles I have been contacted about are better quality and closer to what I am looking for because I have removed a lot of skills that are no longer as relevant to what I am looking for. At one point I had several finance roles but now I am looking for marketing roles. So those skills are great, but not as relevant in what I am currently looking for. Create A List of Keywords or Skills If I was working for a brand that wanted to run some SEM campaigns, I would start by looking at keywords they are currently ranking well for and then a larger list of related keywords that they probably want to rank for. Those lists are usually have different keywords and that is why the exercise is important. If you are selling desks, you don’t want to rank for “rustic desks” if “farmhouse desks” are more frequently searched for. In the same respect, you may have skills that might be searched for in a number of ways and you want to be sure you are using the term that recruiters are searching for most often. How do you do this? The best way I have found to identify skills that recruiters are searching for is to track skills listed on roles posted on LinkedIn. I looked at over a dozen job postings on LinkedIn and copied the skills into a worksheet to see which skills were most common. Each time I applied to a role, I was sure to add that to the list which continued to grow a list of relevant keywords and skills. They are not on every job posting but on many on the right column there is a section How You Match and below that Skills and below that should be about a dozen skills that are considered most important to the role. Also, those skills will have either a blue or white check to indicate if LinkedIn believes you have that skill or not. Like me, you might be thinking, “but wait! I have that skill!” You need to make a list of those skills for about a dozen related roles that you feel are a good fit for you and identify the skills/keywords that are most common. I made a list that showed the skill, 0 for not and 1 for having that skill, the company, the title, and date posted. I then made a pivot table that showed how frequently those skills appeared. Not only does that show you the most frequently listed skills for the types or roles you are seeking, but if you are deemed to have them. The top 5 most common skills for the role I was looking for were marketing, search engine marketing (SEM), management, advertising, pay per click (PPC). More importantly, I found for I have many of the frequently listed skill but LinkedIn did not think I did. So what do you do in this case? Optimize Your Resume, Portfolio Page, and Job Profiles I will go into this in more detail in another post, but essentially you need to make sure you have those skills mentioned in the description of every role you have listed on LinkedIn with quantification when possible. The most important you are probably going to want to have the most important in your headline and main description. In fact, right now I have 6 skills in my headline on my LinkedIn profile. In my description section below the brief paragraph, I have listed another 30 skills. Most people do not even see this, but the text is there for LinkedIn to index. Then in the bullets of my prior roles, I tried to mention as many of those skills that I actually used in that role with quantification where I could. One thing I would add: do not feel you need to hit every skill listed, just the most relevant skills you actually possess. In the example below (image 3 of 3) the role listed “Social Media Optimization”. There can be several ways to list a skill and in this case it is also called “Content Optimization” or “Merchandising”. In looking at over a dozen roles, I created a list of about 70 skills 2/3rds of which were only listed on one role. I would focus on the skills used more frequently. Also, listing a skill that you have no experience with is going to come across as lying and get you eliminated quickly. So I would also be sure to not list a skill unless you can demonstrate how you have used that in a previous role. Conclusion Recruiters and job search sites are giving you some great information and making note of that is going to help you tremendously in landing your dream job. This will not only increase the number of times you appear in search results, but the number of times your profile is likely clicked on. LINKD1 Here is an example of some skills listed for a role. You can see a blue check by the skills LinkedIn thinks I possess. LINKD3 Here is a screenshot from LinkedIn showing the recruiting tool. This is just an example, but you can see recruiters can narrow the candidates by listing elements like Skills. LinkedIn is ranking these in order of candidates that are a better fit. LNKD2 Here is the dashboard on my profile. Only you see your dashboard, but you can see how often you are appearing in recruiter searches and how often they are clicking on those search results. So right now my CTR is 45%. Not bad.

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. Glenn Curtiss was one of the first people to commercially make motorcycles in the United States. And he was one of those guys that was only doing it because it was his hobby. He set several records and one several races. Shortly after the Wright Brothers first flight at Kitty Hawk, he was asked to make an engine for an aeroplane. He designed an eight cyllinder. A V8 engine design. It was the first V8 ever. He asked some of the guys what would happen if he put it on a motorcycle. “You’ll kill yourself.” So of course he put it on and took it out to the Carnival of Speed at Ormond Beach in January of 1907. They wouldn’t let him race the thing, but agreed to let him run a time trial. He ended up breaking the land speed record with 136 miles an hour. A record he held for several years. Not long after that he worked with 5 other men including Alexander Gram Bell to design 4 different aeroplanes, each improving on the last. The Wright Brothers flight at Kitty Hawk was the first flight, but they had not done much after that. Meanwhile Glenn Curtiss competed for several prizes in exibition flights including one that ended in New York City. The Wright Brothers had been the first, but Glenn Curtiss was getting much of the lime light. The Wright Brothers were invited and the events had been set up for them to show people their accomplishment. For whatever reason they never came. But Glennn Curtiss pulled stunt after stunt. The Wright Brothers ended up suing Glenn for everything he had for patent infringement. Henry Ford lent Glenn his attorney to fight the issue but when World War I started, the issue was resolved when the goverment killed the patent in an effort to stimulate development of planes for the war effort. This is a really short summary but it is a really cool story. National Baseball Hall of Fame This was very cool, but I have to admit, it wasn’t as cool as I thought it was going to be. Lots of cool stuff but it seemed like it would be epic. It was cool to see a little of the history of baseball’s early years. I got a copy of the 2017 NBHoF Almanac, which was the year Pudge was inducted into the Hall of Fame. Ivan “Pudge” Rodriguez was a catcher for the Texas Rangers from 1991 to 2002. A career batting average of .296 with 311 home runs and 2,427 games behind home plate and erasing 49% of basesteelers. Linden Street This street is just cool. It has that feeling of a little quite French street where little cafes and restaurants have tables set out in the street. During the weekend they block it off entirely. Lights cris-cross overhead and there is some graffiti on the southern wall (pictured below). Friday and Saturday night they had bands. For a little college town of 20,000, the street was pretty packed. On of the restaurants is my new Geneva favorite: Fry Bird. IMG_0156 Linden Street in Geneva is getting to be really cool. Lots of cool restaurants. They block it off on the weekend and there is usually a band out there. lunch with pippens Had lunch with Bob and Lenny Pippen. My dad is in the blue shirt and I am in back. IMG_0107 Winston. I took Winston out to the lake to chase the ball. He is a tennis ball terrorist. IMG_0124 Went to the Glenn Curtiss Museum in Hammondsport. This is a reproduction of the motorcycle Glenn Curtiss used to break the land speed record at 136 miles an hour. IMG_0139 Went to National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Copperstown. IMG_0151 My new favorite Geneva restaurant. Fry Bird on Linden Street. IMG_0152 My favorite wine: Kimmeter. The best dry Reisling you can find. IMG_0159 I don't know what this is, but I like it. IMG_0118 Love graffiti on Linden Street. IMG_0098 One of my dad's new yurts. These are at his hotel at Plum Point. IMG_0101 Six new yurts in all. He thinks "Glamping" is the next big thing.

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 meetings with me. I was meeting with a potential investor back when I was working on a startup. The potential investor had some ideas he thought I should consider. I had the notebook in front of me but it had been closed. His demeanor changed when I took the notebook, opened it, and took out a pen and jotted down some of his ideas. He sat up and excitedly elaborated on his ideas. And they were really good ideas. And I could tell he appreciated that I was listening enough to realize they were good and I was thoughtful enough to make note of them. That is part of the power of the notebook and journaling. It is a physical indication that this idea is important enough to write down. Others notice that. But more importantly I notice that. It is a small way of cementing the importance of an idea. Or the first small step towards getting something done. Getting Things Done This book has become something of a cult classic. I say cult classic because it is definitely not as well known as other books like 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, but still it is #3 on Amazon’s Time Management category. Basically you need a system that captures 4 categories of “things”. David Allen points out that people are burried in todo lists, emails, letters, bills, notices, requests, and our own barrage of ideas. David suggests putting everything in one of 4 categories: Things I need to get done today or this week Things I’d like to do one day maybe Information I might need at some future date Ideas The last one is why I keep a Field Notes journal on me at all times. Ideas are distractions. Maybe they are potentially the winning lottery ticket of an idea. Maybe a future best selling novel. Or maybe just something you need to consider. But if you do not get them down, they will be in the back of your mind nagging at you. Getting them down tells the mind you are on it. It won’t be lost or forgotten. But most importantly you’ll be able to get work done or sleep where had you not jotted it down, it may have kept you up all night. Bullet Journal This is a popular topic on YouTube. There are dozens of videos on this with over one million views. This video was what turned me onto the concept. Others have taken that concept and made it their own with their own little tweaks. The thing I liked about it is it is a system of keeping your To Do list organized. It sounds like it would be easy, but it isn’t. With any day’s to do list you may have personal and work items. Events that need to be added to a calendar. Items that need to be elaborated on later. Uncompleted items that need to be carried over to the next day’s to do list. And you will find to do’s that are really, like David Allen suggested, a “one day maybe” task. The thing that I liked most was 1) having an index to quickly find meeting notes or some idea you jotted down and 2) the bullet list itself. My Own System I have found this so useful I have 3 notebooks. My large Moleskin notebook for work notes. And a medium notebook for personal journalism and ideas. It is very Zen. I feel a lightness to having that out of my head and on paper. So for the most point, the Field Notes is for ideas. Sometimes people will tell me of a book or something I will want to check out later. With all the notebooks, having an index in the first few pages ala Bullet Journal has been really helpful. I tried the calendar a few times, but I have found using Google Calendar works better. I have also found that putting “someday maybe” items into Evernote works great. But other than Google Calendar and Evernote, I have found paper and pen easier than a digital solution.

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 decreased Stock price DOWN 30% from this year’s high despite strong performance Today they are launching Way Day, their answer to Amazon’s Prime Day. One customer has sold more in the last few hours than an average day. Search trends way up. CONCLUSION: once Way Day performance is announced, stock price will see an immediate rebound. Even then I think it will be a great buy and think they will soon be getting press to push them into top 10 online retailer.

In 2016, Facebook announced they would shut down the BaaS company Parse, which they acquired less than 3 years earlier for $85 million. At the time that just did not make sense. In light of Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony to Congress, that decision seems obvious. It was the death blow to our app right at the time of finalizing development. Mark stated that they do not share user data with app developers. This was absolutely not the case in the days of Parse, when they had an API to do just that. To be clear, not aggregate data, but rather specific user data. Interestingly, Zuckerberg made a comment suggesting that he still feels that there are situations where users would want Facebook to share data between apps or sites while adamantly insisting they did not do that. And though he may have exonerated himself from that issue, Facebook does get user data beyond what users are volunteering to the site. I wanted to write this to quickly explain what a BaaS does, why they flew too close to the sun, and hit on a few security issues that I think everyone should think about. I think people generally understand there is an issue, but are not entirely clear what the issue is and I want to elaborate on the issue as I see it. All Your BaaS Belong To Us BaaS is a database hosting service or Backend As A Service. I have asked a number of developers to explain why a BaaS is better than just rolling your own. Parse was using a NoSQL database called Mongo, which is open source. So like MySQL, you can install and run Mongo for free without paying any kind of software license. So why Parse? It manages permissions and is made to work very easily with Javascript frameworks like React. It does other things, but as I understand it, the user permissions were the primary reason we wanted to use it. Facebook also had an API so you could let (and to some degree this still is happening) users log into an app with their Facebook account and thereby skipping filling out the form that comes with creating an account. It is super easy for users, but app developers were also getting access to user data. You had to give some notice of what data you were getting access to, but if people don’t read terms of service agreements, they likely wouldn’t notice this either. It would have been beautiful But wait! There’s more! Google is developing a JavaScript framework called Angular. And Facebook is developing a very similar JavaScript framework called React. Like Facebook’s Parse, Google has a BaaS called Firebase. And these tools make it really easy to write code for any device in 1 single language. Before that, you had to write one set of code for the iPhone and one for Android and one for desktop…these frameworks made it simple to develop in one language…JavaScript. Otherwise, you would need developers for each device you wanted your app to work on. And Google and Facebook were in an arms race to get developers on their frameworks and/or BaaS. The developers on my team sold the concept to me like this, “they could be developing a platform where the framework, BaaS, and the user data API all work together and that cuts our development time substantially.” You see, ultimately we wanted to build artificial intelligence tools that make recommendations. User data is key to that. Such a platform would be a shortcut to all the data we could possibly want. It was the data holy grail. “I think the mistake we made is viewing our responsibility as just building tools…” Shutting down Parse now makes total sense. It was the Silicon Vally version of shredding documents. All these app companies had evidence of Facebook user data on databases hosted by Facebook. If sharing user data is seen as an invasion of privacy, shutting down the database that had evidence of that was and is a no-brainer. Mark said multiple times that “…we do not share user data with anyone.” That statement is only true in the present tense. I also want to explain why other statements were incredibly misleading, especially to a non-technical Senator. Mark said he thinks about user data in two buckets: user data on your profile like name, age, favorite bands, and images that users gave Facebook. The other is anything you post to be seen by others in the feed. But there is another bucket! The dark bucket! Mark alluded to a conspiracy theory (which Reply All has a fantastic episode on titled Is Facebook Spying On You?) that posit they are using mobile phones to record personal conversations to better target ads. He unequivocally denied that. As the Reply All episode pointed out, it would probably be too much data anyway. But then, how does Facebook know that you want Charcoal Toothpaste after only just hearing about it at a random marketing conference? I didn’t search that! Or browse to a page selling it! Answer: the data trinity: location data, browsing/search history, and knowing how you are connected with people around you. I was at a marketing conference and Facebook saw several people also at that conference searching for Charcoal Toothpaste and maybe one even bought some (which is actually pretty awesome after all) so they put all that together and now you see those f*&^ing ads all over the internet until you get you some. See, Facebook has data that extends beyond what you give that site and they get it from cookies on your browser when you search on Google or shop on Amazon. It’s like a venereal disease. That little detail was left out. Facebook has given us the internet equivalent of herpes simplex 10.

Last night I watched a movie that I find myself still thinking about it a day later. Shot Caller. Two compelling aspects of this movie. One, the device used of non-linear storytelling. Second, is the metamorphosis of the main character who has a drastic Dr Jekyll / Mr Hyde while maintaining who he really is throughout. The Non Linear Story I am sure a lot of people would try to correct me and say non-linear storytelling is pretty common. Make a list. But exclude time travel movies. That is something else. And exclude movies that bookend another time or event. In those cases, 90% or more of the story is actually completely linear. And exclude two totally different stories told at the same time. The Godfather 2 is probably the only other non-linear story I could come up with, but those are two different stories in my opinion: one the story of Michael and one his father Vito. I am not saying you have a list, it is just pretty short by now. Memento is probably on there. I get why that was held in such high regard, but I always felt the story was a little to complex to enjoy. Watching Memento is enough work you might expect to get paid after. In the case of Shot Caller, it is just good storytelling. There is no confusion as to where you are in the story timeline due to the drastic changes that transform Money throughout. You might make the mistake of judging money as a man that goes from a good man to an evil man. Or maybe overly privileged (as his nickname “Money” suggests) to something less than human that has had everything taken away. It is this jumping back and forth that prevents such a mistake. From Jacob to Money Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, best known as Jamie Lannister in Game of Thrones, shines in this movie. The emotional scenes with his wife, facing his fears, the anger he unleashes on his foes, losing everything, and ultimately achieving his goal. Nikolaj has shown a range in one movie that many actors never hit in a career. Amazing. The real transformation of Money is not from good to evil but from a life with no clear goal or purpose to a life with only one purpose that matters. This is what I thought made this movie so compelling. Money’s objective is the same at the end as it was in the beginning. The only difference is his determination and heart and the method used to accomplish those goals. Jacob chooses a life to provide for his family that many choose. Money sees only one way to accomplish a goal and it means going to a dark place and drawing water from a well he did not know was there. As the story jumps between Jacob and Money you realize Jacob’s goal was so assured that he took it for granted and lost it. Money reaches deep down and does the unthinkable to do the impossible. The goal of Jacob and Money is the same: protect his family. That is the irony of tragedy. It seems that one never appreciates a gift until it is gone. Or until you come to that point that no price is too high. It is that paradox that Money faces at the end. He will never see his family again, but he knows how much they mean to him because he gave up any hope of seeing them again to ensure their safety. The movie ends with him in a cell alone with nothing but that thought and a few books given to him by a man he killed that solidify their safety and his imprisonment. It’s your turn, Moneyman. I know you’re shitting bricks right about now. Trying to rationalize the morality. What would your family think of you? How will they judge you? All of that went through my head, too, when I first broke my cherry. Then I realized none of that matters. The only thing that matters is getting home to your family in one piece. The fact is we all started out as someone’s little angel. Then a place like this forces us to become warriors or victims. Nothing in between can exist here. And you’ve chosen to be a warrior. Now it’s up to you to remain one.

I just finished listening to episode 63, “Through The Valley: My Captivity in Vietnam” with Colonel William Reeder on The Jocko Podcast. Not ashamed to say that is not the first of Jocko’s podcasts that made me cry. These podcasts have become increasingly more important to me and I wanted to say why. In part as a thank you. In part to share with friends and family why I think they are worth listening to. And in part to hear myself say it to strengthen the resolve to make changes in my life that seem to be reiterated time and again on this podcast. These podcasts have had a tremendous effect on me. Initially, I was interested in a form of entertainment and to hear discussion on leadership from a special forces officer. That turned into something more important. Gratitude. Every Memorial Day you hear people talk about “the ultimate sacrifice” or of the risks men and women in the armed forces take. Not to belittle that, but it doesn’t have nearly the same effect of hearing first-hand accounts of true evil and the horrors of war. Or real loss or sacrifice or suffering or tragedy directly from the people that have really seen some truly terrible and evil things. So to hear those accounts first hand creates in me (and I am sure everyone that hears them) a tremendous sense of gratitude. I think that is important for me to hear and for those that have served to share. I was sober and active in AA for 9 years and have seen the life-saving power when one person shares those things with another. It can be life-saving for both. This last episode made these podcasts even more important to me. Hope. I know conceptually I understand hope. But I know that I do not know hope the way Colonel Reeder knows hope. 1 Corinthians talks of faith, hope, and love. The definition I found for hope is lacking in that it does not mention a critical component: despair and suffering and pain and the real possibility that there is no way out of them ever. Otherwise it would just be synonymous with want or desire. So I feel now I do not want to know hope the way Colonel Reeder knows hope. The price is high and I am so grateful he paid it because it was not for nothing. It mattered. “Every day is a gift.” I think the last bit of the podcast was the hardest to hear. I imagine everyone has the feeling that they are not truly hitting their complete potential. And it has become so cliche that I feel stupid for even saying it, but I really do not think any of us really appreciate how much we are capable of. Colonel Reeder breaks it down in 8 Steps of Survival. 1. Eat. 2. Personal Hygiene. 3. Exercise. 4. Do not give up the fight to stay alive. Take that chance. Fight for it. 5. Establish communication with others. 6. Follow code of conduct. 7. Keep the faith. In family. And God. 8. Maintain a sense of humor. I love that he ended that with a call to action. I am grateful but the real test will come when I treat every day like the gift it is. I feel now that I got to a point where I worked through my demons and thought I was done. And in being done I haven’t done anything. Like I said when I started, I did want to say thank you to Colonel Reeder for his story and his sacrifice and also to Jocko for taking the time to share those these stories on his podcast. As I said, it has become so important to me. I also wanted to write this to strengthen my resolve to get after it again.

Below is my response to this letter from Pete Sessions. Keep in mind, he is up for re-election next March. Thank you for your response. Although you made some good points, I do not agree with the direction you and other members of congress are taking in regard to Net Neutrality and protecting the FCC. Furthermore, I am extremely unhappy with the service AT&T and other Internet Service Providers (ISPs) provide and wanted to elaborate on that. Additionally, Ajit Pai’s recommendation is one sided and is beneficial only to ISPs, not the consumer. I feel it is your duty, as our representative, to ensure our interests and rights our protected. As you emphasized, not just small business, but all business has thrived off of an open Internet that is definitely not free. I feel that currently the FCC protects three basic rights and protections: no blocking, no throttling, and no paid prioritization. I have no doubt given many of Ajit Pai’s comments, that his priority is to undo those protections. These protections stopped Comcast from denying access to p2p services without notifying customers, AT&T blocking Voice Over IPs (VOIPs) services like Skyle, MetroPCS blocking sites like YouTube, multiple ISPs blocking products like Google Wallet, Verizon attempting to block tethering apps, and more. Clearly the reason these ISPs have taken such action, more than bandwidth concerns, are concerns that they would lose revenue from competing products. Additionally, I think fundamentally “the press”, that is protected by our Constitution and fundamental to free speech has changed as has the public forum. If you take away protections and rights established by the FCC, you undermine free speech itself. This issue is greater than just the economy, it is fundamental to our underlining freedoms that have made this country so great. Your vote can either protect or jeopardize that freedom. I also want to respond to your comment on innovation. The level of innovation resulting from the internet is staggering. Little of that innovation has come from ISPs. Additionally, they are using little to none of the proceeds of their ISP business to invest in new internet infrastructure. The majority of people in your district only have one choice for ISP. It is that monopolistic behavior that was fundamentally behind the creation of the FCC and the Telecommunication Act of 1996. Furthermore, I suspect AT&T has become a greater monopoly than Bell Telephone itself, which is ironic.

Thank you for taking the time to contact me regarding net neutrality. I appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts with me on this important issue. The Internet has revolutionized how we learn, shop, communicate, innovate, and do business. Small businesses across Texas thrive off a free and open Internet. But since the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) took a drastic step during the closing days of the Obama Administration to apply a 1930s-era ‘Title II’ regulation to the Internet, costs for consumers skyrocketed, innovation was hindered and broadband deployment decreased significantly, particularly in rural America. Simply put, these rules would have given the federal government unchecked authority over the Internet and destroyed the light-touch framework that has protected a free and open Internet for the past 20 years. Claims that Congress and the Trump Administration are disabling long-standing privacy regulations are simply inaccurate, given the Obama Administration’s decision was nothing less than a federal takeover of the Internet. Americans’ data is regulated under Section 222 of Title 47 of the U.S. Code. The recent proposal unveiled by the new FCC Chairman, Ajit Pai, would end political uncertainty of internet regulation, restore the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) jurisdiction over privacy practices and unite privacy law under a single, clear framework. In case you were not aware, the FTC has previous experience overseeing consumer online-privacy rights and has been able to enhance innovation and jobs in its prior competitive state. Please know that the new privacy protections have not yet been finalized, but my colleagues and I are working to ensure that any possible regulatory or legislative solution ultimately protects the principles of a free and open Internet. Most importantly, I believe it is imperative for the federal government to encourage marketplace consistency to ensure that the Internet is open, available, fast, and reliable for all Americans. Again, thank you for taking the time to contact me and share your views on such an important issue. Should you have any additional questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me at 202.225.2231 or Sessions.LegStaff@mail.house.gov. I look forward to hearing from you in the future. Sincerely, Pete Sessions Member of Congress

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 wanted people to see how old riverboat gamblers and professional cheats did it. He said he could tell what the cards were by weight. He said he could feel the difference in weight between an 8 of clubs and an 8 of spades. I figured there must be more to it than that, but I could not see it. Maybe there was a slight difference in weight from ink, but it would have to be so minuscule as to be impossible for the human hand to detect. As a kid, I had a magic set and thought I might catch him with misdirection. He did some other tricks where he asked if people had business cards and would count them and get a feel for them, hand them to another, and ask yet another to remove some cards and by weight would say how many he had left. There were a number of variations of that, but it just didn’t seem like a trick of misdirection or typical card tricks. I found a YouTube video of Richard doing a card routine. See if you see anything strange. Don’t try to solve the trick, just see if you can spot anything odd or a little different about the man himself. Did you spot it? I was right in front of the guy and I never spotted the best part. It is far more amazing than the card tricks he was able to do. The real trick is how he is actually doing them. I did not see the premiere of but heard about it. On the site, you can see a little about the real magic. Go check out the preview at the Dealt movie site. Truly unbelievable. Just more proof that our disabilities make us greater and greater still. I have dyslexia and though not as challenging as blindness, it did have a huge impact on my life and I feel I have adjusted to those challenges and those adjustments have made me stronger. I think Richard is a great example of how people can do amazing and unbelievable things with their disables.

My grandfather, Paul Bunnell, passed away last in February of last year. A few of his effects were passed on to me including this old pocket watch. The watch does not seem to work, but I have been told it is fixable. You can see details about this and other pocket watches on this site. It seems to have a cool history and I wish he told me how it came into his possession. The watch was model 1857 and estimated to be produced in 1859 or 1860. So about 160 years old. The total production of this particular watch was about 800 units. The movement contains 11 jewels, which is named after Royal E Robin who I discuss below. It is not considered to be “railroad grade“, which is a type of chronometers pocket watch that keep extremely accurate time despite changes in climate. In fact, there is a fantastic book about the development of the chronometer to solve the mariners problem of longitude in the book Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, which I read in 2015. The American Waltham Watch Company was based in Waltham, Massachusetts and produced watches from 1852 to 1957. So this watch was definitely one of their earlier watches. Waltham is about 10 miles west of Boston. Of course the factory has been converted to lofts, but cool enough, the building still stands.  American Horologe Company, who went bankrupt and was sold at auction to Royal E Robin, merged with Waltham in 1857. Horologe was started by 3 men who wanted to make less expensive but still high quality watches by making interchangable parts. This was the same strategy employed by Henry Ford in 1903 to make a better automobile and his legacy needs no commentary. This watch was designed around the time of the merger and the movement was named after Royal E Robin, who was also the company’s treasurer until his death in 1902. At the time the watch sold for about $12, which was a pretty good sum. If you assume that $1 dollar was equal to one ounce of silver (because the US dollar used to be tied to gold and silver), then this would be about a $300 watch. That company went through some hard times as the Civil War broke out in 1860. Interestingly Abraham Lincoln owned a similar watch made by Waltham Watch Company of the same size and number of movements that was made in 1863, just 3 years after the one I have. You can see a more complete history here.

I just finished the book Moonwalking With Einstein – The Art And Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer. I enjoyed the book, but would only give it 3 out of 5 stars. Unlike other non-fiction books like The Code Book, I felt this book did little to actually show you how to do a lot of the things discussed in the book, which was what I really wanted. This was really little more than a man talking about his experience with learning how to improve memory. I wanted to briefly describe the methods mentioned in the book but also comment on a few concepts that I thought particularly interesting. Methods The Method of Loci basically uses rooms you are familiar with and furniture in those rooms, and simply placing the items you want to memorize on these items of furniture. It is also called the Memory Palace Technique. A great video shows a two time US Memory Champ Ron White teaching a 6 year old this method to memorize all the US presidents in an hour. Ron White, the man from the linked video was also on Stan Lee’s Superhuman show on the History Channel. He also has a fantastic YouTube channel that teaches several memory techniques. What is interesting is that everyone that has learned memory systems like the Loci Method insist a person of average intelligence could do it in a few minutes of practice. In fact, Ed Cooke, who first taught the author the Loci Method, says he thought someone could win the US Memory Championship with just a few hours of practice a day. And that is exactly what the author does. Another application of this same technique was by Dr Chooi where he used is own body as the Loci to memorize a dictionary! “Dr. Yip Chooi, the effervescent Malaysian memory champ, used his own body parts as loci to help him memorize the entire 56,000-word, 1,774-page Oxford Chinese-English dictionary.” Another method described is the Person Action Object or PAO method. This method is used to memorize numbers. For each digit from 0 to 9, one would have some person that is very memorable. And it is best not to use close friends or family. Santa Claus is a better option than your mom unless you want to picture your mom doing unspeakable acts in order to memorize a number. In addition to having 10 people for each digit, you would do the same for actions and objects. Lewd, silly, or gross is better than normal because they are more memorable. So maybe you choose Santa Clause to represent 7 because Christmas is on the 25th and 2 + 5 = 7. Farting (the action) is a 4 for no particular reason. And the object for 9 is your dream car: a cherry red 911 Porsche Turbo. So if you needed to memorize a phone number starting in 749, you would picture Santa Clause farting on a cherry red Porsche INSIDE your mailbox (or whatever is your #1 position in your Loci). Then perhaps Marvin the Martian is puking on your laptop right on your driveway (your second Loci position). And so on. I am not sure the last method was really given a name, but ironically it was to remember names. But the idea was to have a picture associated with the most common names. If you sign up for an email, you can get a list of the top most 100 male and female names with great images for each from Ron White, the link is in the notes of this video. So if for the name Jason, Ron’s picture is a jaybird in the son. If you think my most memorable facial feature is my nose, then you would picture a jaybird pooping on my nose with the sun burning the poop or something. So the next time you see my, you would likely laugh remembering a jaybird pooping on my nose with the sun burning it but then instantly you would go….”Jason!” Trade Off of Genius One of the topics the author talks about extensively are cases where people have amazing memories with no method. Every single time, the person with the amazing memory has some issue with the brain. Sometimes it is head trauma or it may be a “defect” the person is born with. I have heard the basic idea before. You hear the same thing with people that can calculate big numbers. They usually also happen to have some corresponding deficiency. Rosie O’Donnell had a great line in a crappy movie called Beautiful Girls where she said, “You’re both fucking insane. You want to know what your problem is? MTV, Playboy, and Madison fucking Avenue. Yes. Let me explain something to you, ok? Girls with big tits have big asses. Girls with little tits have little asses. That’s the way it goes. God doesn’t fuck around. He’s a fair guy. He gave the fatties big, beautiful tits and the skinnies little tiny niddlers. It’s not my rule. If you don’t like it, call him.” Apparently intelligence works the same way. Einstein probably didn’t understand simple social etiquette. Mozart probably couldn’t count without using his fingers. And that guy from high school that aced the SAT probably thought Moby Dick was about a big fish that got away. God’s doesn’t fuck around. He’s a fair guy. Natural vs Learned There was one person he interviewed multiple times. It was someone that claimed and had been diagnosed as a savant, but the author suspected had actually learned many memory methods. Ultimately he questions if it matters. Then he asks which is more impressive: if he was a savant or if he taught himself these techniques. I think learning those techniques is very impressive, but, obviously, lying about how it is done is wrong. I imagine the only reason people study savants is to try to understand if we can induce, recreate, or learn to improve memory in some way and someone that lies about how he accomplishes his memory feats is the fly in the ointment of research. Memorizing the Bible The book reminded me of a documentary called Koran by Heart where young students memorize the entire Koran by heart. That would be 77,439 words to the entire Koran. To put that in perspective, that would be very close to the 79,976 words in the Torah, or the first five books of the bible. Like the Koran, many Jews have memorized the Torah. From the book: One of the last places where this tradition of recitation still survives is in the reading of the Torah, an ancient handwritten scroll that can take upward of a year to inscribe. The Torah is written without vowels or punctuation (although it does have spaces, an innovation that came to Hebrew before Greek), which means it’s extremely difficult to read. Though Jews are specifically commanded not to recite the Torah from memory, there’s no way to read a section of the Torah without having invested a lot of time familiarizing yourself with it, as any once bar-mitzvahed boy can tell you. I like the idea of trying to memorize the Torah. It is clearly possible as many people have done it already. Foer cites 18th century Dutch poet Jan Luyken, “one book printed in the heart’s own wax / Is worth a thousand in the stacks.” Who doesn’t want to write the bible on the heart’s own wax? Some books mentioned: The Art of Memory – Frances Yates Born on a Blue Day – Daniel Tammet – written by a “savant” Rhetorica Ad Herennium – anonymous – one of the first books on memory written circa 86 BC.

A few years ago I saw a really interesting documentary on Netflix called Who Killed The Electric Car that discussed General Motor’s fully electric car called EV1, the fanatical owners that owned them, and how GM quickly forced the owners to return them. It is one of those stories that makes you shake your head in disbelief. The California Air Resource Board mandated in 1990s that the big car manufactures make an electric car or lose the right to continue selling gas cars in California. It is one of those mandates Texas hates. It is anti-business. It is a tree-hugging hippie move that only those wack-jobs in Cali would think up. But here’s the thing…GM made a 100% electric car. And it was so popular and the demand so high that only famous people could get them. But you couldn’t buy them. They only leased them. And decided to recall them. Why? Who the fuck knows, but most can guess that oil companies have somehow incentivized the big auto manufacturers to continue making gas cars. Elon the billionaire gambler My dad came to visit a few weeks ago and gave me the book Elon Musk. He is a fascinating guy. He sounds like a Howard Hughes if Howard had made his own fortune. Elon starts off with a home run at PayPal, which he personally pocketed $165 million. So that is a huge sum of money. But not Facebook money. Instead putting that in bonds and safe securities, he makes some more big bets. And he says some crazy stuff. Sometimes ridiculous. But he has some really interesting ideas. And some ideas that I think really, really need to happen. He starts making his own rockets. Then an electric car company. He has also talked about bullet trains. China has made a mag-lev train that goes 300 MPH. Elon’s Hyperloop train cruises at 600 MPH making it faster than a commercial airline. So Elon has some big aspirations, but I want to talk about the economics of electric cars and why I think Detroit and the old school gas car is dead standing. A lot of people have told me electric cars just won’t happen. They either don’t understand physics or finance or either. Efficiency of electric When I was young, I loved making things. It started with Legos. Then I started making model rockets. Then I started making remote controlled electric cars. The thing I found interesting about the electric cars was how fast they were. They accelerated much faster than their gas equivalent. I am not really a car guy, though. But I later became friends with a car guy. I mean he was a nut for cars like some guys are nuts for baseball. There is this interesting dilemma gas cars have. To go faster, you have to have a bigger engine. The bigger the engine, the slower you go. There’s the rub. There is a ratio that is often used to quantify a car’s efficiency that directly deals with this very thing: power to weight. This is key to understand why Tesla is such a threat to the current auto world. Just like the remote controlled cars I played with, the full sized electric cars are much more efficient. They aren’t dealing with the weight of a 6 or 8 cylinder engine. If you look at the fastest production cars by acceleration, you will notice that Tesla is #2 (WHAT!?!?) and just the engines of the gas cars on that list weight more than the entire Tesla car. Collectively the engines for those five cars average over 2,500 pounds, which is more than the ENTIRE Tesla Model S85D. The single biggest metric car geeks are looking for is acceleration. How fast can the car speed up from dead still? The Model S85D goes from 0 to 60 miles per hour in under 2.3 seconds. There are only five street legal cars made that accelerate faster than that and only one under $1 million. Keep in mind, those guys have been making cars a long time. The model S (which includes the insanely fast S85D) was their second line and came out two years after the conception of the company. The car is the only car to ever get a perfect 5 from Car and Driver. Tesla’s biggest problem is keeping up with demand, which is the kicker. Finance and car volume So to put that in production I created a table that show the top US car manufacturer, their current market cap as of today (Aug 3, 2016), and the number of cars they produced last year. Let me explain that quickly. Generally speaking market cap is the market value of a public company that is calculated by taking stock price times volume of stock. That is typically driven by many factors, but probably most importantly earnings. How much they net from revenue, in other words. So I am taking the current market value of these companies and dividing it by the volume that drives that value. Why not revenue? Because the price of electric cars versus gas cars is not really apples to apples. Electric cars get about 90 MPG equivalent. And there are no moving parts to replace. The cost of ownership is lower but the sale price does not reflect that. Revenue has two components: volume and rate. I am just taking the important one. That is giving me per car value, which is the market cap divided by the volume of cars. In other words, the value the market puts on these companies based on the volume they produced last year. And keep in mind, Tesla just announced plans to push that to 500,000 in two years. Company volume market cap per car value Tesla 55,000 $32,500,000,000 $590,909 General Motors 9,800,000 $45,080,000,000 $4,600 Ford 6,635,000 $46,170,000,000 $6,959 Toyota 10,150,000 $183,560,000,000 $18,085 Conclusion I think there are a few things keeping people from buying electric cars. Mainly battery life or an electric car range. The other is charging stations. The later is becoming less and less of an issue for two reasons. One, many companies want to look edgy and/or green and one way to do that is to have an electric car charging station. I talked to someone building office space last week and he was super proud of the fact that they had an electric car charging station. Secondly, Tesla is building them. With regards to their batteries, they have made their technology public. Why? They want to invest in battery technology and want to be clear they will share. It is a genius strategy because if it pushes other car manufactures to do the same, they will not only increase total electric car production, they may get great research insight from other battery research being done worldwide. Here is the final point I want to make and what prompted me to write this. As I said, Tesla’s biggest problem is keeping up with demand. And you can see in the chart above, in terms of volume, they are not really even on the map. Today Elon Musk announced a new “Gigafactory”. This factory will increase their volume from their current 55,000 to 500,000 in 2018 and ultimately to 1,500,000. So if you take the market value per car and multiply it by their projected future volume…. even if you take one fifth of their per car value and multiply it by the 2018 volume goal, it makes them significantly more valuable than the other two US auto makers. In other words less than a 40% increase in their current stock price puts would put them over Ford or GM. With a projected ten fold increase in car production in a year an a half, that is very probable.

From time to time, there is an incredibly tragic accident where people are killed with guns and this always tends to lead to a gun control debate. I understand and agree with the sentiment. If we could save one life, wouldn’t giving up guns be worth it? Do we really need guns? So let’s legislate away gun violence! Thinking you can control deaths by gun control is as unrealistic as saying you can legislate away depression. Or legislate away violence. Or legislate away stupidity. I think when you consider gun deaths by segment, understanding the flaw in gun control becomes more clear. Suicide The biggest category of gun related deaths are currently suicide. 60% of gun related deaths are suicide related according to Wikipedia. In this Freakonomics podcast on suicide, they mention guns are the primary method of suicide among men. More than 50% is what I think they suggested. I think even if you could magically remove every gun from the planet overnight, you would not also eliminate suicide. Or even significantly reduce suicide. Those suicide victims would likely just use another method. Accidents It is heartbreaking that anyone would lose their life from a gun accidentally. Worse still is that the victims are usually children. Statistically, it is a small number to the point of being statistically insignificant. A more significant cause of accidental deaths is from automobiles. The solution was seat belts and car seats. Steven Levitt (the economist behind the Freakonomics book) gave a TED talk suggesting car seats are practically useless. Further, he suggested car seat manufacturers were lobbying to push for legislation for car seats, not unbiased research. Fatalities from automobiles and guns are roughly similar, unless you adjust for suicide. The difference is we have made an incredibly amount of legislation in an effort to curb accidental automobile related fatalities. If you have ever wondered why cars aren’t as cool as they were back in the day, automobile safety related regulations are the culprit. Rearview mirrors, blinking lights, break lights, break light placement, frame manufacturing and design, tire manufacturing and design, air bags, seat belts, audible indicators to indicate you should use a seat belt, breaks, and I am sure anyone in the car industry would be happy to add to this list ad nausea. They would also probably say in a hushed voice that they don’t do shit, either. Or at least, not enough to matter. I am sure these safety features lower auto related death rates, but I think there are many other factors that have a much, much greater impact. Drunk driving, texting while driving, distraction from other passengers, and weather conditions are a few obvious culprits. Murder I think when people hear “gun fatalities”, they immediately think of murder. And who doesn’t want to end murder. Problem #1: a lot of gun violence is being done by criminals who didn’t get guns through a legal channel anyway. Problem #2: killing people is easy. Just ask the ants. Ants can kill other ants! For that matter, ants can kill people! If an insect can kill without guns, people can probably figure it out as well. Problem #3: making guns is easy. I am pretty sure I could make a gun in an afternoon with a visit to Home Depot. I have never made gun powder from fertilizer, but there is probably a 5 minute YouTube video that shows you how to do it. A gun is basically a pipe with one end capped, a combustive agent, and some projectile. Trying to lower deaths is noble. It is something I can get behind. And if guns were just used for hunting, I would be the first to get behind gun control. But that is not why it is #2 in the constitution. It is also telling how many police and military people think guns are a good thing. It is counter-intuitive for sure. Gun control is not going to stop suicide. And adjusted for suicide, gun fatalities are not nearly as significant as auto related deaths. If we really want to lower deaths, our time is better spent by building high speed rails. Or taking cell phones away from drivers. You may prevent some deaths with gun control, but it would be offset by an increase in violent crime. In the last few weeks I have heard of a young man getting accidentally shot by his father. But far more common is an intruder getting shot by a gun owning home owner. And I know in today’s world, the idea of revolting against our government sounds crazy. But think how crazy some of our nations leaders have sounded (or sound). Those that forget history are doomed to repeat it. Because if you give up one right, you might end up all of them. And here is my post-Independence-day-thought: I love the idea that this country was founded by farmers that stood up to the greatest military might of the time. They couldn’t have done that without guns.