Laracasts

I have been listening to Jeffrey Way’s Laracasts and they have been extremely helpful in improving my knowledge of OOP PHP and Laravel’s platform. I have been a happy paying subscriber to his site for a year now. I highly recommend it for anyone wanting to improve their PHP and Laravel framework abilities.

Automated Tools

I really love building automated tools! I built my Shopify autoresponder for helping customers out this weekend and it is working amazingly well so far. Very happy to have fun puzzles to work on.

Great Quote from Quora

“Lastly, I personally don’t think that power corrupts (i.e. I think the maxim is incorrect).  I think power attracts corrupt personalities, so actually more likely is not the man who builds an empire becoming corrupt, but rather after the empire is built (and I can tell you the Facebook empire has not yet been built), the late-joining senior executives or even a successor who starts out corrupt (but hides it) and then, attaining the power they have sought, reveal themselves. read more “Great Quote from Quora”

Competitor Research

A crucial business technique is to research what your competitors are doing to find good ideas you can use in your business. Sam Walton did this heavily as he built Walmart and wrote about it extensively in his autobiography. He would visit other retail stores and talk to their employees daily. The best ideas he found he would bring back to his own business.… read more “Competitor Research”

System Administration

I really had a lot of fun last night working on administering my Linux server where my recruiting site is hosted. I had been having a problem where applicants who went to upload large Youtube video files would cause the server to run out of memory then the upload would fail. I cleaned up the server and moved it to a much larger AWS instance and that has helped.… read more “System Administration”

Nginx

All weekend I have been working on a very challenging bug. I have Apache2 set up to reverse proxy my nginx server for the CT jobs site and everything seems to work okay except very large file uploads for the Youtube videos. Videos over 150 MB end up getting this weird error cast back. I have not yet figured it out.

Running

I read an interesting article in the New York Times before bed last night that said they tested lab rodents to compare neurogenesis (new brain cell creation) when you do endurance exercise vs high intensity interval training vs weight lifting vs doing nothing. They found that you generate the most new brain cells when you do endurance activities and the more you do, the more your brain grows.