Minecraft is a phenomenon and it’s hard to ignore its existence. Everything from t-shirts to even Lego sets based of a popular game that came into the public purview in 2009 has been a world-wide hit selling over 200 million copies as of writing. What made it so magical to begin with?

It’s impossible to escape anywhere either mentally or physically without hearing about the Coronavirus (COVID-19). If you came to read this to escape it then unfortunately I’ve misguided you. It all started when I came across a post on Twitter from someone that believes the virus is a manufactured hoax and their proof of data was a bar graph that compared these two data points: US Population 330,000,000 and COVID-19 cases at 35,000. My goal here isn’t to convince the reader one way or the other whether the virus is deadly or not, but rather to talk about the importance of data using a case study on the subject. I’ve been in business analytical roles for over a decade, so this article will discuss data and my experience with it.

The Gone World is a book written by Tom Sweterlitsch that has many twists and turns and many readers want confirmation on the ending. I want to establish the summary on parts of the book for people to confirm what their theories are, or explain the book to those who got lost. It should be obvious without stating it: this is riddled with spoilers.

I shutdown FluxRobot about two years ago, but the software that was investing in various loans is still running. Mostly. I noticed something was odd when I hadn’t received any notifications about new investments in a few weeks. The logs I kept on my virtual private server informed me that the API I was calling was getting blocked after the first investment attempt. Then I spoke to support and they said I had a limit of one investment per second. Easy fix. After stepping away from it for a couple of years, I noticed a few flaws existed:

I’m a fan of Ecosia, but it needs a lot work. Ecosia is a search engine using Bing’s engine to generate search results. A majority of their revenue goes to reforestation. Some of the things they have done for poor communities in areas like Madagascar that were dried up and now thriving is nothing short of incredible. DuckDuckGo is a far better search engine with a lot of instantaneous feedback, similar to what you can expect from Google. DuckDuckGo uses a mix of both Bing’s engine and Google’s engine. Both search engines have a better privacy policy.

I thought to myself: What if I made a search engine combining some concepts of these two, but using the revenue for charities that users can vote on? Each month, they would be able to select a few charities where profits are donated to like cancer research, feeding the hungry, fighting climate change, etc. I named it YoFlux, and you can view this for early alpha testing at www.yoflux.com.

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A couple of years ago I created a website and an algorithm called Flux Robot that would automatically invest funds in a user’s Lending Club account to maximize their potential return of investment (ROI). In a lot of ways, I succeeded. The average ROI for the very few accounts in Flux Robot was 7.92%, which is much higher than Lending Club’s ROI, and more than most people make in any stock market. The site, however, failed and will be shut down.

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There’s a disgusting trend reoccurring lately. The most recent misuse of “AI” set me off a ledge regarding the Voynich Manuscript. For anyone unfamiliar, the Voynich Manuscript is a 270-page book that has been carbon-dated to roughly 15th century written in a language using an alphabet no one recognizes. There have been dozens of theories, and dozens of people have been dedicating their lives to deciphering this cryptic text. A computer algorithm recently tried, and failed, to solve it too.

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I got a Raspberry Pi 3 the other day and turned it into a dual-purpose server in my household. The first purpose disables ads on all websites from any device on our network. The second purpose is it acts as a media server where I can watch various movies and TV shows I have stored on my computer.

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And it was incredibly easy. Some background: I received a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet (xlsx file) from someone at my company that was struggling with incorrect numbers. The spreadsheet was password-protected. I noticed one of the formulas wasn’t calculating correctly and giving a percentage of a score that they had a 0%, which was incorrect. This was something they had to complete quarterly, and each tab represented a different quarter. I noticed that on the tabs for the first two quarters, the formula for calculating the percentage was completely different than the last two quarters. I thought that if I updated the formulas to correctly calculate their score, then everything would work fine. Unfortunately, the formulas were password-protected.

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I don’t remember what sparked the idea, but I thought it would be interesting to write a letter to my future self in five years when I was 25 years old. It’s interesting to think about what my priorities were then, and how it’s shifted to now. I’m halfway on to my next mark five year mark, but I thought I’d share the questions with answers (as of 2015). The original copy is at the bottom.

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