I’m going to start this post with a big helping of gratitude. I’m so grateful to the 1000’s of readers that helped me get into the field of Data Science and Machine Learning. I was a part-time blogger that turned my passion into a full-time gig in the AI Startup world. This post is my way of paying it forward to you. My Journey I started a blog back in 2006 writing about trading stocks and foreign exchange (Forex).

We are living in crazy times. The (Stock) Market is reaching all time highs when the rest of Main Street is falling apart. Amazon is trading in the $5,000 range and people think the market doesn’t represent the majority of us. I agree. The Market is NOT for Main Street and it will never be. It’s for a small group of the population that’s seeking to reallocate your funds to their account.

My position on whether cryptocurrency is a fad or real changes from month to month. I had a hard time connecting the dots until recently. What changed? I discovered the Uphold Interledger. The Interledger is just what it sounds like, a ledger system between multiple currencies or ‘stores of value.’ It’s based on the distributed ledger that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have made famous. It allows you to easily convert between fiat and cryptocurrencies with a click of a button.

Apple just did something wonderful for your privacy in the next iOS release, it’s making Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) an ‘explicit’ opt-in function now. What the heck is IDAF and what does it mean to me? IDAF is a sinister process where apps share your data with marketers so those marketers can optimize ads and get more people to use the app. That’s all fine and good if you decide to opt-in.

I was on Twitter one day and I came across an announcement that HackerNoon had joined the micropayment world and gotten an infusion of cash from Coil.com. That’s a cool $1 million to implement a new method of web monetization. Breaking: We Raised $1M From @Coil, Will Stream Micropayments from Readers to Writers via the Browserhttps://t.co/iquXY9j2Pm pic.twitter.com/bHRfhaenna — Hacker Noon (@hackernoon) June 10, 2020 I think the current web monetizaztion model is broken and power is concentrated into too many corporate silos.

I made the switch over to Hugo a short while and love the fast builds. You can read all about me ‘crushing’ on it in my What I Learned using Hugo post. There’s one main thing I want highlight in this post and it’s how to optimize Hugo for SEO. Hugo, just like any other CMS, is pretty good out of the box but you need to optimize it. Here are my Hugo SEO tips for optimization.

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been a user of Dreamhost.com for over 13 years. It’s where I hosted my old blogs and registered my domains. I started with a basic hosting in the early days and switched over to a virtual private server (VPS) a few years ago because I need to run Cron jobs. Dreamhost has been good to me. They have great customer support and nice one-click installs for things like Wordpress and MySQL databases.

As software continues to eat the world, we’re slowly becoming slaves to subscriptions. I don’t remember when I started thinking about this but it must’ve come up when I looked at our family budget. I realized that we as a family and I, are paying so much on monthly or yearly subscriptions that it just gives me great pause. What am I paying? On the surface, it doesn’t look like much but then you dig deeper and you realize you are hooked!

If you’ve been reading this blog for some time you’d know that I like to try different CMS’s. I made some mistakes over the years and I transferred my posts between different CMS. This ended up killing a lot of my backlinks, but that’s ok. I ended up settling on using Markdown to write my posts (love it) and a static CMS generator. Originally I used Pelican and it was pretty good.

Apple was a great winner for me. Too bad I sold it on April 1st but hindsight is always 20-20. I think I went long sometime back DecemberDecember 2018 when the share price was around $160-ish. I screwed up in my brokerage account and put it on margin and when the markets sold off at the end of February and the beginning of March 2020, I decided to take my profit.

I was once told that the best time to start a business is in a recession. The reasoning behind it is that the business would get stronger once the recession is over. Essentially you’re starting at the bottom and can only go up from there. From my experience, this is true. I’ve started several businesses over my life and have closed several businesses too. Some were better than others too.

From the ‘sad news’ file, JC Penny is getting ready to file bankruptcy. That’s too bad. I remember JCP being one of those ‘stalwart’ companies I grew up with. Bradless, Woolworths, Rickles, Kmart, Sears. All of them are now dead, dying, or long gone. It’s a shame but my nostalgia doesn’t pay the bills for them and they have a lot of debt to pay back. When I think about it, why is that we operate on such an insane debt model?