What The Bear Taught Me About Leadership, Teamwork, and Mastery

At first glance, The Bear might seem like just another gritty kitchen drama—but beneath the loudness, noise and stress is one of the best explorations of leadership, teamwork, and the pursuit of excellence I’ve seen on screen. Whether you’re running a fine-dining restaurant or leading a tech team, the same ingredients show up: relentless attention to detail, a culture of trust, and the unglamorous but vital effort behind every great outcome. As someone who works in a …

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Why Structured Data and Data Quality Matter More Than AI Hype

The Temptation of the AI Silver Bullet AI is having its moment. Everywhere you look, companies are rushing to implement large language models (LLMs), AI agents, and other cutting-edge techniques in hopes of solving their data problems. It’s easy to get swept up in the hype—after all, who wouldn’t want an intelligent system that magically fixes business data challenges? But there’s a fundamental issue that gets overlooked in this excitement: garbage in, garbage out (GIGO). If your …

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Group Decision-Making: The Good, The Bad, and How to Do It Right

Group decision-making is a double-edged sword. When managed well, it leads to better ideas, stronger buy-in, and fewer blind spots. When done poorly, it results in endless debates, analysis paralysis, and wasted time. As more people get involved, decision quality initially improves—until a tipping point where diminishing returns and inefficiencies kick in. So how do we strike the right balance? Let’s explore the good, the bad, and the practical solutions to improve decision-making in everyday …

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Why You Shouldn’t Query Raw Data—And When It Makes Sense

I was recently asked why it’s not advisable to query raw data directly. The question caught me off guard at first, but it made me think deeply. Raw data is often viewed as the foundation of analytics, yet querying it without proper processing can lead to inefficiencies, inconsistencies, and potential misinterpretations. In this post, I’ll attempt to explain why querying raw data should generally be avoided, when it’s necessary to do so, and best practices …

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Evolving Passwords: Transitioning from Bitwarden to Apple Passwords

You can tell 2025 is shaping up to be a year of change for me—first transitioning from Quicken Desktop to Simplifi, and now moving from Bitwarden to Apple Passwords. Our family’s password management journey started over a decade ago. Back then, my wife and I used a password-protected Excel spreadsheet to store all our credentials. While rudimentary by today’s standards, it worked effectively at the time. Over time, I decided to self-host Bitwarden in my …

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From Quicken Desktop to Simplifi: My Migration Experience

I recently made the leap from Quicken Desktop to Quicken’s Simplifi app. Transitioning from a traditional desktop-based tool to a sleek, web-based app has been a BIG change. While both products are under the Quicken brand, there isn’t a built-in migration path between them. This means starting fresh, which can be daunting for longtime Quicken Desktop users. Why I Switched to Simplifi I’ve been a loyal user of Quicken Desktop’s Deluxe version for several years. …

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Create an Airplay 2 Player

Our house came with outdoor speakers installed but there wasn’t a way to play music on those because there wasn’t any audio receiver connected. These are passive speakers so would require an amplifier (or full blown audio receiver) to power them. Buying a receive is an overkill so I was looking for amps. While looking for amps, wanted to get one that has Airplay capabilities, but unfortunately those seem very pricey. Therefore, I decided to …

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Plex hardware encoding with Intel Arc A380

UPDATE: The instructions in the original post were for Ubuntu 22.04. If you already have Ubuntu 24.04, you can skip all this as long as you can see your device under /dev, it should show something like /dev/renderD2128. I do recommend installing the compute packages from Intel’s repository # Install the Intel graphics GPG public key wget -qO – https://repositories.intel.com/gpu/intel-graphics.key | \ sudo gpg –yes –dearmor –output /usr/share/keyrings/intel-graphics.gpg # Configure the repositories.intel.com package repository echo …

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Configuring NFS Share on Ubuntu

Configuring NFS is a simple but can be a frustrating experience esp. if you are trying to export an NFS root. Here’s step by step instructions that helped me. On the server where NFS is configured, path is /storage. Let’s call this server nas. This NAS runs Ubuntu. Edit the /etc/exports file on the NAS. The IP is your network and subnet mask. The magic option is fsid=0 for NFS root. This allows the /storage …

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zpool creation failing in Proxmox GUI

While trying to create a brand new zpool from Proxmox GUI, I was facing an error. This was partly solved by New SSDs not showing correct Serial# in Proxmox Disk Manager so at least in Proxmox, correct Serial#s were showing in the zpool creation screen (see below). In looking further, the by-id links are not present, and the two that are present are incorrect. The remaining work is to update udev rules so the correct …

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