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No spoilers. I had the opportunity to go see Deadpool and Kung Fu Panda this weekend. Both were very good and I have to admit I was surprised by Kung Fu Panda. I've come to expect good surprises from Marvel when it came to a Deadpool. Deadpool was the first rated R movie that Marvel made and I have to admit it wouldn't of been the same if they hadn't done it. The character just fits the rated R rating. There's no other way around it. But it definitely isn't for teenagers or kids.

Kung Fu Panda on the other hand was absolutely terrific. DreamWorks has come a really long way in the past five years and I can honestly say I enjoy almost every movie they released now. I've always been a sucker for animated movies and cartoons in general. That's part of growing up with them I suppose. They did a fantastic job progressing the characters in creating a great conflict. Plus I always enjoy seeing Bryan Cranston in a new role.

I also discuss bouncing ideas off of friends or coworkers in an effort to refine your thoughts. One of my favorite sayings is "You can't fix problems with the same mind that got you into them." That's why it is critical to bounce your thoughts off of other people. Now I have never been good at this… My tendency is always to bottle things up untill they frustrate me beyond what I can stand.

Obviously that is not the healthy approach to critical thinking. The best thing you can do is bounce the ideas or thoughts off of the people who are closest to you who can relate to what it is you're discussing. One of my personal favorite things to do is to bounce them off my best friends Chad and Chris. Both of those guys have lots of exposure to technology and they have very unique and creative perspectives. They're also not afraid to critique something that I'm thinking about doing in order to make me think harder about it. Now I don't know if they do this on purpose but I don't really care. It helps immensely to have that perspective.

That's all I have for today, have a great day!

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Split testing. One of the more infamous methods of testing whether or not your website changes are actually making any kind of difference. Split testing is essentially creating two varations of a webpage and splitting up how they are served to users. You can determine the effectiveness of your change by comparing the visitor's behavior of one page's variation with the other.

Split testing is pretty much an industry standard for website development. If you don't have some way of measuring whether or not a website change is effective then you'll spend alot of time shooting in the dark. Believe me, I know. It's critical that you have some method of tracking how much revenue was generated (or lost) from modifying a web page.

People would be surprised at how much of a difference a small change in a web pages design can make in overall user experience. I've read about conversion tests where simply changing the color of a button increases the number of sales by 100%. That would be pretty awesome if you ask me.

In other news, I spent a good amount of time in the field today. Unfortunately it didn't go well... but I suppose that's how it goes. When I got back the day turned out better because I got a fence weaving machine we had been working on up and running. That had been frustrating us for about a week.

That's all I have for today, everyone have a great day!

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The LOCKY Virus. Couple weeks ago we got a variant of the LOCKY virus and I was able to successfully recover the data at that time. At the time it was not called the LOCKY virus. At that time it really didn't have a name. But this time around it essentially was the exact same script that was executed from a Microsoft Word document. This script goes out and rewrite all of the primary files users have historically interacted with as well as standard files such as PDF, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, etc.… now this is not a standard rewrite, it is actually a crypto encryption. This essentially means that it has Pentagon level security that you will never be able to get through on your own unless you go to the cyber terrorist and pay them a fee.

From what I understand if you pay the fee they will actually give you the results you need. The problem is that the result cannot be shared with anyone else because it requires a unique identifier associated with your file encryption on your machine at the time of encryption. I'd be impressed at the quality of this script if I weren't so annoyed at the people who wrote it. Given that two weeks after the first time someone in our office got infected I received a variant in the form of an invoice this leads me to believe that there will be a number of variants moving forward before this script has ran it's course.

As far as I can tell the only precaution you can really take is making sure that the macro security on all of your Microsoft office Products are enabled. This is technically not a virus, is a script that is executed upon opening a office document. As a result most antivirus offer will not catch it at this time. Everyone should also be considering making a major backup of all of the critical system files. As a standard it's best to use what's called a 321 back up. Three backups total, two locally on an external Drive or some other media and one offsite on a service such as Carbonite or Amazon S3.

I would encourage anybody who got infected with the virus not to pay up unless they absolutely have no other choice. While I have confirmed that a number of people have actually recovered their data through paying, it is essentially supporting cyber terrorism. We have no idea what that money is funding. For all we know it could be a 16-year-old kid living in his mother's basement… But it could also be terrorist organizations funding military warfare.

That's all I have for today! Thanks for stopping by and don't forget to subscribe.

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Oops! It's very easy to lose track of time. Especially when you usually do something every single day. It is hard to believe that it has been almost a week since my last video. Of course this was not intentional, I simply got really busy and my truck has been needing repairs. I'm proud to say I was able to successfully make some of those repairs.

On a different note… This week was extremely stressful for me because of all of the projects and jobs we have going on. It can easily get overwhelming, especially if I don't stop and take the time necessary to take care of myself. Last night I noticed something had been significantly lacking the past few months. As it turns out I haven't been spending time in prayer like I usually do. I know I know, religion is one of the things you just simply don't talk about anywhere. But I'm not really talking about religion, nor do I really have any desire to convince you that my way is the right way. The truth is prayer simply works for me.

Prayer to me is as simple as having a conversation with God. It gives me time to reflect on where I'm at and stop taking myself so seriously. In the grand scheme of things my problems are very small and I'm not really in control of most of them. That's easy for me to think but it's not until I verbalize it and have a conversation in prayer that it starts to really sink in. It keeps me centered.

That's all for today! Hope you guys have a great day!

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Unrealistic expectations! We all have them. What I don't understand is why we continue to have them. If there's one thing that I typically always disappoint myself with, it is anticipating how I think a situation should go. A very similar thing typically happens to me when I go out to do a job that I don't like to do. I make the mistake of giving myself a pep talk. This peptalk usually consists of me convincing myself that things will go better than they probably will. Now some people would say that's just being an optimist but I would argue it's probably not a good habit in these circumstances.

When you convince yourself that something you hate to do is going to go better than it probably will then you're really only setting yourself up for disappointment. It's actually a lot healthier just to accept the reality of the situation and go into it knowing that you really don't have a lot of control over how things go. I'm not saying the expectations are always a bad thing, sometimes they are a good thing. But we can really get ourselves in trouble when we set unrealistic ones.

For example if I convince myself that I can finish an entire project in a single day, which is unrealistic, and it doesn't go that way then I'll just be angry. I may even be disappointed in myself for not living up to that unrealistic expectation. Actually that sounds a lot like me. I got myself in trouble more times than I can count with this bad habit but this week I have to say I'm very happy that I did not.

In other news. PayPal is annoying. That company absolutely refuses to let you use credit cards in an easy way. This is only gotten worse and worse over the past year. I spent 10 minutes trying to check out from multiple different transactions and still could not successfully find a way to pay with my credit card that was registered to my account.

As far as I can tell, the only way you can actually pay with your credit card through PayPal is to check out as a guest. You can't actually use your credit card in an easy way by logging in. Now of course PayPal has its reasons for this… And that primary reason is that they don't want to pay the credit cards the commission. When you use a credit card on their service the credit card company will take 3 to 5%. So naturally PayPal would prefer that not to happen.

And that's all I've got for today. Have a great day!

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Succeeding at your job! It's really easy to just do bare minimum. But the truth is many people often wonder how they can stand out to their bosses or employers. Well is a guy who has been in the workforce for over 16 years and was raised by an entrepreneur I'm going let you in on a little secret.

The truth is is employers love that you're qualified to do whatever job you were hired for. That's obvious. What's less obvious is the frustrations that employers have to deal with on a daily basis to keep people motivated and driven. Most of the people who are in the workforce as managers and bosses already have loads of responsibilities on their plate. The last thing they want to deal with is micromanaging someone who was hired for a specific job.

There is nothing more frustrating to these people than someone who does absolute bare minimum, shows no incentive, and thinks tasks they were not hired for are beneath them. So how do you stand out?

Don't do those things. Be the guy who is willing to volunteer for a job he was not hired for. Be the person who can put his pride aside and do whatever it takes to fill whatever immediate need the customer has. Or maybe it's not even for a customer. Maybe it's just something small that doesn't seem to be getting done but everyone knows it needs to be done. Simply paying attention and putting in a little extra effort goes a long way over a long period of time.

Bosses and employers love this.

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Trying new things! And streaming/ripping Blu-rays! I'm usually a creature of habit so not always a big fan of trying new things when it comes to going out and about. Although last night me and my wife tried a new restaurant that everybody's been talking about in our area called Temper Grille. I have to admit it was quite delicious. They serve something called Tapas which is an appetizer style entrée.

We got a killer deal going there because it's ordinarily a really expensive restaurant. Thanks to Groupon I got about $30 worth of food for $12 and then I got another 9% back on that $12 because of eBates. I'm kind of a fan of hunting down deals these days with my mobile phone app. So what it was all said and done we really didn't spend as much money as we normally would.

Naturally afterwards we went to Walmart and dug through the bin for Blu-ray movies. I like to dig through these Blu-ray movies and buy them for seven dollars. Then I'll rip them to my hard drive using a program called DVDFab. After ripping them I will use a program called MetaX to actually tag the movies with Album art and all of the video description information. That's actually called meta-data.

Once I've done that I can just drag my movies in to iTunes and it instantly available for streaming on all of the devices in my home. This includes both of my Apple TVs, our tablets and our phones. One of my favorite reasons to do this is that I don't need the Internet to watch these movies. But my favorite reason is that I'm no longer paying $20 for a 20-year-old movie that Apple is overcharging for One of my favorite reasons to do this is that I don't need the Internet to watch these movies. But my favorite reason is that I'm no longer paying $20 for a 20-year-old movie that Apple is overcharging for.

And that's pretty much it everybody have a great day.

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Fear mongers! These days there's nothing that drives me more crazy than an article specifically geared towards freaking people out about stuff they use. Yesterday I was given an article about Keurig coffee maker's… One of my favorite things to use every day… And how they may be hazardous to my health. No wait. How they are not only hazardous to my health but they probably are already giving me cancer…

The truth is there's a lot of money to be made in making people afraid. How do I know this? Well as a person who is always afraid I am regularly buying things or getting things done that aren't really necessary. It's really gotten to the point that it's driving me crazy when I see it. I mean, come on, the company that designed the Keurig coffee maker jump through all kinds of hoops to make sure the product is healthy and yet there are people out there intentionally trying to find a loose thread to scare people in order to sell something.

It's not just with coffeemakers of course… The entire Internet is riddled with articles that will get you worked up and afraid of your own shadow. So realistically what can we do? Well the best thing to do is to not look to the Internet when it comes to health issues if you're sensitive to health. Also the truth is after all these years of being afraid of things I can honestly tell you it has done me no good. Being afraid is an absolutely useless emotion.

So today let's do our best not to be afraid of her own shadows. Let's just try to keep moving forward and ignore all of the people in the sidelines trying to terrify us into buying something or not buy something. The truth is most of them are probably just as afraid as we are. But there's really no sense in feeding The fear. Have a great day!

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It was a pretty good weekend overall. I find if I don't keep myself in high expectations as to how I think things should go then things tend to turn out better. Pretty much this whole weekend we just all hung out… We did get to go bowling on Saturday and I got a sweet deal on Groupon. The cool thing about Groupon is I used it through the eBates site I use and got 10% cashback

I've been trying my best not to overthink everything like I usually do and this weekend is starting to work out really well. Other than bowling pretty much all we did was go to church and I shopped online for a good chunk of the weekend because I was trying to figure out what other deals I could get with cashback

One of the best deals I found was through eBay… Because eBates was giving 10% cash back plus you also get 1% cashback through eBay and you get the discounted price of the eBay item plus usually you don't have to pay sales tax. So overall you get a pretty sweet deal. I also like buying items through eBay because it helps build your positive feedback.

I've been really into couponing and discounts lately for some reason. It's really a lot of fun trying to Hunt down the best price and deal for things. Other than that nothing much happened… It was a good weekend. I hope yours was just as good.

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Running inward. It's funny how I can over dramatize what's going on in my life at any given moment. I've noticed something about myself this week… When I am put in a situation that makes me extremely uncomfortable I tend to run inside my own head. This reminds me of a saying I heard once that really made an impression on me at the time. You can't solve the problem with the same mind that got you into them.

One of the biggest mistakes we can do is run inside of ourselves. When we are struggling or frustrated it is instinctual to go into self-preservation mode. But it's at those Point in time that we need others the most. Personally I'm not a big fan of needing others… If it were possible for me to survive solely on my own I probably would make that choice. But realistically that's not what we were designed to do.

As human beings we were meant to be social creatures. Dependency on others and their dependency on us seems to create a sense of purpose. I think we were designed that way. And I can fight it all I want to but the truth is I'm always going to need other people. Maybe they'll be a point in my life where I fully accept that.

I pray that moving forward I can remember that truth. The next time I run into some kind of a crisis… No… A self perceived crisis, maybe I will turn to the person closest to me and just get honest. Because sometimes that's all we really need. A shoulder to lean on, cry on and occasionally slug.