Category: Samuel

posts by Samuel

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Samuel Twenty Somethings

Where Does Confidence Come From

I was having a conversation with someone today about confidence, and they were asking me essentially what allows me to be confident in most situations.  Now like most people I don’t enjoy appearing over confident, or conceited in any way.  However unlike most people, I’m extremely confident in almost everything I do. In general, I feel like I can do just about anything I want to at any time (an incredibly conceited sounding sentence)…. but when you break it down, is feeling like you can do anything bad? If you stop to think about it for a few minutes, its really not bad at all.  I’m not sure where this confidence comes from (surely growing up as a white male I’ve naturally absorbed this view through all the subtle and not so subtle advantages society has given me).  But still, there are plenty of other white males I know that don’t feel confident in doing many activities (most) activities…..

Now one big thing I should mention is that if I don’t understand something or don’t feel like I know enough about something I want to do then I have no problem admitting that or asking for help, even in a very public way like in a meeting or in a group of people (having the confidence to admit you don’t know is such an important part of life, it really frees you up to be yourself).  I really am not 100% sure why I’m confident with most activities though, I’ve been that way as long as I can remember.  I’d love to figure it out though (preferably before I have kids so I can help try to instill good confidence in them).  If I were to guess right now in this moment I’d say:

-playing sports/competing against other people.  This has contributed a great deal to my confidence over the years (I’ve touched on benefits of contacts sports before)

-great/confident parents. Both of my parents are very assertive and handle themselves very confidently

-being born a male (this has to be on there unfortunately, I think in so many ways being born a male makes it easier to be confident, although hopefully this can continue to change/evolve in a positive direction)

-taking self defense/karate classes + sparring/fighting people regularly.  This is a huge one, possible the biggest one in my mind right now. Having a game plan to defend yourself and your loved ones is a very comforting feeling. Never feeling “afraid”, simply thinking “oh yea I would do xyz” is a very re-assuring feeling.

-supportive friends.  This is a real wild card, I’ve had excellent friends growing up though. Some of this was due to my good choices, dropping friends who were questionable and keeping good people around me. But there has also been some great luck in this department….

-good role models (my hockey coach growing up, my kempo instructor now, some of my dads’s close friends + my parents, my sisters ect…)

 

I’m sure there are many more reasons (probably thousands) but someday I’d like to hopefully come up with what I feel are the biggest/most influential reasons so I can hopefully pass that onto younger people in my family (aka Harv and any other little ones that we may have)

 

 

 

 

 

Categories
Laravel Samuel

Random laravel notes

kept running into this strange error for a few minutes tonight, but finally got to the bottom of it.

if you are getting “reflectionException” “controllerName does not exists” this is because you already have the controller created in your route.php file. Remove it from routes.php (or comment it out the save). Now run the command again and it will succeed.

 

how to make laravel controllers via command line:

controller:make MarketingController

when there is a conflict in tortise git:

-click on the file in conflict, hit git stash
-pull down the new code
-right click on the white space in the folder (not on the actual file) hit stash pop (this will merge your stashed file with the new one)
-commit then push

 

if php artisan migrate is not working, just run php artisan migrate:refresh and it will run the latest migrations.

if you are running DB seeders and getting an error, to find out what file the error is in run: php artisan db:seed -v this will spit out the error info of what file the seeder breaks on and what line specifically breaks it.

Categories
Fixing Stuff Julia

Excuses

There will always, always. always be an opportunity for you to make up an excuse. For any/every situation.

I placed a call today, on behalf of my dad. It was a call my body physically cringed at making when he asked – but I did it because I am trying to support him as he works to make some positive changes in his life. I had to stop making excuses for myself to get out of calling. So what if I felt like I was being thrust once again into playing the adult with adults who are much more my senior?  Underneath all that I felt like I should just pick up the phone – so I did.

It didn’t change anything. On the other end of the phone, the transactional relationship that I remember was still the same. I talk super awkwardly, they say as little as possible and then a couple minutes after we hang up my dad calls me to say they are mad about what I said/how I said it/how he involved me. But you know – I feel pretty good. I did my dad a solid, and he can’t say I didn’t try.

Hopefully excuses that are being used by that person will stop one day – but its pretty scary to just admit how you feel without placing blame. So I won’t hold my breath.

 

 

Categories
Fixing Stuff OBDII Samuel

setting up scantool.net simulator

notes from  setting up the scantool simulator:

 

1.) The drivers did not install properly by default, to fix go here: http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP.htm .  download the “available as setup executable link under windows, then run the .exe file

 
2.) open up realterm (download link http://realterm.sourceforge.net/index.html#downloads_Download)  go to the “port” page and set:
baud 115200
data bits 8
parity none
stop bits 1

*hit change then click into terminal window to type commands

*type RESET to reset the device and see if your connection is working properly

 

3.) The correct pin arrangement on the device to work with OBDII protocol is #1 set to “on” #2 set to “off” …. these are the physical switches on the actual simulator

 

 

Categories
Fixing Stuff Laravel

installing node.js on windows 7 computer

Installing node.js on my windows 7 machine  was a bit of a struggle so I wrote down the notes:

 

1.) Install node.js from their site.  Just use the big green button, download the installer

2.) Run their auto installer and then open up git bash (note open it up in the project folder you are attempting to install bower in)

3.) If your using windows you will need to install node.js then set your environment variables (start > run > environment variables > path > edit ) then add this line to the end “;C:\Program Files\nodejs”

4.) Open up git bash and type “npm install” (if you get an error you will just need to manually create the “npm” folder in (C:\Users\your-user\AppData\Roaming ).  *replace your-user with your current user, and also its possible your file path will be different, if a different file path is echo’d out in the command prompt then use that file path.

5.) you should be able to type “npm” and load the node package manager, once that loads you can type “bower install” and load bower then you should be all set to use data tables (or whatever you loaded node.js into your project to do)

 

Categories
Random News Samuel

Preventing gun sales to mentally unstable people

Stopping guns from being purchased by mentally unstable people is a pretty big topic in the news lately, and for whatever reason this idea popped into my head today so I decided to think about it for a while.  The common narrative is for the government to legislate a way to help prevent unstable people from buying guns, but seeing as how legislation that prohibits things is so rarely effective I think we would be much better served looking at a way to try and solve this on our own.

It occurred to me that a good place to start when looking for a solution to this would be to look at any company’s who have already solved the problem of weeding out crazy people from using their service. One such company came to mind instantly, AirBnB.  This company digs up so much shit on you when you sign up.  You have to give them your drivers licence and a few other details, and the amount of information they find on you is pretty amazing.  The first thing we should do is take a look at their algorithm and figure out how they are finding so much information about people and model our gun buying protection program after that.

Next when someone is purchasing a gun, an interesting approach we could take is we have the user temporarily download an APP onto their phone as part of the buying process.  This app could:

provide us their email address (which we could also scan for unstable emails)

provide us their login to twitter/facebook/whatever social network they have linked (which we could again scan for unstable messages)

provide us their text messages which we could scan for unstable messages

provide us their website browsing history which we could scan for troublesome website visits

**once the person was cleared they could could delete the app from their phone, and the app would not store any of the data it scanned

**we could incentivize gun stores to have users download and install this app (maybe a tax credit for every customer that does, maybe publicly shame the stores that don’t join the program, maybe just simply ask them to do it and see if the benefit of “doing the right thing” would be all that they need).  To get their buy in we would have to involve them in the process from the start.

Beyond the APP we could also look more into the AirBnB process of doing background checks, looking up school records, looking up a person credit ect… I think the moral of the story is if we look around advertising company’s spend countless millions of dollars data mining people and building profiles on them. All we need to do is look into a way to access this data before selling someone a gun, this type of approach will be much more effective than any kind of legislation.