Category Archives: Business and Technology

Book review: The Maxwell Daily Reader

Book cover for The Maxwell Daily Reader by John C. Maxwell

In addition to reading a daily spiritual devotional, one of my other morning routines involves a daily reader that is more “secular” in nature. By secular, it means the reader contains inspirational notes around personal development, character, business, mindfulness, and/or leadership. Besides the inspirational notes, I’ll often use the reader as a jumping of point for my daily journaling exercise. Examples of daily readers I’ve used in the past are The Daily Stoic and The Mindfulness Journal.

Last year, my daily reader was written by renowned business leadership and management consultant John C. Maxwell and appropriately named The Maxwell Daily Reader: 365 Days of Insight to Develop the Leader Within You and Influence Those Around You.

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Book Review: The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche – A Book for Disruptors

Book cover for The Entrepreneur's Weekly Nietzsche: A Book for Disruptors by Brad Feld and Dave Jilk

Part of my daily morning routine involves devotionals and daily readers. Last year, one of those books was a little different. It was a weekly read.

The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche: A Book for Disruptors by Brad Feld and Dave Jilk is a collection of 52 essays on various entrepreneurial topics. The essays are grouped into five sections – Strategy, Culture, Free Spirits, Leadership, and Tactics. Each essay starts with a Nietzsche quote that is used as the starting point for that week’s topic. The majority of the essays also include a narrative by an entrepreneur that reinforces the message in the essay by way of personal experience.

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Is the Metaverse the Future?

Read science fiction books, which I do a lot of, or watch science fiction movies, and the metaverse is the future. Ready Player One, both the book and the movie, certainly make it feel like it will be an incredible experience.



The way it’s portrayed in science fiction, the metaverse appears to be a foregone conclusion. The movies certainly make it look interesting and pretty cool. I get the attraction. It’s a digital playground where you get to be anything you want and do anything you want (for a price). As a software developer, the metaverse would be so much to fun to build. It would be a great project to be a part of.

Well, regardless of how cool it looks or how much fun it would be to build, if the metaverse is the future, then count me out. I don’t want to join it nor do I want to engage in it.

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In the Office or Work from Home: One Size Does Not Fit All

I’ve previously made my opinions known regarding remote work, or as I like to call it, WFH (Work from Home). I didn’t envision wanting, or needing, to address the issue again, but a recent post that showed up in my blog feed caught my attention and caused me to revisit the topic. I just couldn’t help myself.

This may be a good time to get up, take a break, stretch your legs, refill your coffee, and settle in for my latest rant.

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One week with the Pixel 6a

The back cover of the Google Pixel 6a

After almost four years using the Pixel 3, I decided to pull the trigger and upgrade to the Pixel 6a. It was a tough decision. I’ve really liked the Pixel 3. It has been, by far, the best phone that I’ve ever owned. Unfortunately, it’s not scheduled to get any more Android updates, so I figured it was time to move on.

Here are my thoughts after one week with the Pixel 6a. Given how much I liked my Pixel 3, the new phone has some big shoes to fill.

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Optimizing Apache and php-fpm settings for EC2 micro and nano instances serving WordPress websites

After upgrading an Amazon EC2 instance from PHP 7.2 to PHP 7.4, I ran into a problem – the server would regularly hang. Sometimes it would happen after a few days. Sometimes it would take a month. In either case, websites served by the instance became unresponsive. The only way to get things back online was through a hard reboot, which a few times had to be done at the Amazon console level. It was not a good situation.

Through lots of research and reading, I finally feel like I have things under control. If you’re struggling with a similar problem, here’s what I did to fix it. The server has went over 4 months without requiring a hard reboot since making the changes.

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Sustainable Energy, Self-Driving Cars, Robots, Starships, and AI-Augmented Humans

One of my guiding philosophies is that ideas are cheap. Ideas don’t lead to success. Successful people are those who take ideas and follow-through. They implement them. They make them happen. The bigger the idea, the bigger the success.

If you agree with my philosophy, then Elon Musk’s success should not surprise you. He has taken big ideas like mass-market electric vehicles and reusable rockets and turned them into a reality. Therefore, when he starts talking about his vision of the future, I listen.

Earlier this month, he sat down with the head of TED, Chris Anderson, for an interview that covered a wide range of topics. Musk talked about his vision for sustainable energy by 2050, when autonomous vehicles would be a reality, household robots, armadas of starships taking people to Mars, and his plan to augment humans with AI and why it needs to happen.

It’s a rather long interview at just over an hour, but worth your time if you have any interest in how the future may unfold. Usually I would discount this kind of “crazy” talk, but Musk has a track record of making it happen. I’ve included additional interviews of Musk below that date back to 2013 if you want to see how his past predictions have panned out. Spoiler alert: they were pretty spot on, especially when you consider how big the vision is.

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Fixing ‘Invalid argument supplied for foreach()’ PHP Warning in WordPress

I ran into a problem recently on a WordPress site that I manage where I was unable to disable and uninstall numerous plug-ins. After looking through the error logs on the web server, I found the following warning showing up repeatedly in the PHP error log:

PHP Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /var/www/html/example.com/wp-cron.php on line 117

Here’s what I did to identify and fix the problem.

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Book review: Trampled By Unicorns

Book cover Trampled By Unicorns: Big Tech's Empathy Problem And How To Fix It by Maëlle Gavet

In case you haven’t noticed, the big tech companies continue to grow in power. That growth is allowing them to not only generate massive amounts of wealth for investors but also shape society. When I say big tech, I’m not just referring to the public companies that make up what is known as the FAANG group of stocks that includes Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, and of which I would also include Microsoft. My definition of big tech also includes privately held companies known as “unicorns”, companies that have rapidly went from zero to $1,000,000,000 valuations such as Nextdoor, Udemy, Instacart, SpaceX, Stripe, and the like.

As someone who works in technology, it’s great to see companies in this space have success. However, that success has not come without controversy. The more we learn about how these companies operate, how they make money, and how they exploit their users, the more we should be concerned about the impact they have on the world around us. It’s a multi-faceted problem that Maëlle Gavet explores in her book Trampled by Unicorns: Big Tech’s Empathy Problem And How To Fix It.

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Ruthless efficiency

Efficiency, for lack of a better word, is good. Efficiency allows a business to optimize resources. Optimizing resources leads to lower costs and higher profits, which are the foundations of a market economy. Therefore, pursuing efficiency should be a goal of business.

Pursuing efficiency is all well and good until the drive to optimize crosses a line. That line where the benefits of efficiency are no longer distributed equally, resulting in higher levels of inequality between the have’s and have-not’s. At that point, we’ve entered the realm of ‘ruthless efficiency.’ The point where there is a lack of empathy and compassion regarding the effects optimizing has on others.

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