Breaking the TV Habit (VIDEO)

Here’s an 8 minute video of a talk I gave in 2015 about quitting TV.

Quantified Self global conference, 2015.

2019 update: I started watching movies again at home a couple of years ago. I still don’t watch normal TV or anything episodic that can suck me in, so all those great series that you love, I haven’t seen them. I don’t know how Game of Thrones ended. I’m aiming to go at least another 2 years without watching TV, before revisiting that decision. In my free time, I read a lot, cycle a lot, and listen to a lot of podcasts.

row of books

Building a Company Culture of Learning

If you want to develop your employees in a way that gives back to your company, build a company culture of learning. Investing in employees helps to retain and attract them, while the ongoing benefits of refreshing the knowledge pool keep your company current and drive innovation.

Here are some great ways to cultivate a culture of learning in your workplace. The more of these you use, the better.

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Downgrade RDS from m3 classic to t2 small VPC

The AWS console does not directly allow you to downgrade RDS from m3 to t2 sizing.

Here’s how to resize a db.m3.medium RDS classic instance to a db.t2.small VPC instance in a few AWS console steps.


This article assumes the following:
* Your RDS instance is still running on the older “EC2-Classic” platform
* You already have an EC2 VPC set up (your EC2 instances are running in a VPC).
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Resize m3 to t2 EC2 Instances on AWS

If you run a server on AWS, you may be unpleasantly surprised to discover you don’t have the option to automatically resize between all instance types. I decided to resize m3 to t2 instance types (m3.large => t2.small) when my reserved instance lease expired & my needs had changed from those of running a commercial web business to running a small blog.

Turns out, AWS has made numerous network and architecture changes since my machine image was created in 2014. What should have been a small change turned into quite a bit of work. I’ve summarized the steps below should you encounter the same issue.

EC2 instances built today (called EC2-VPC) do not work interchangeably with older generation (now called EC2-Classic) instances. Here are some key differences I encountered: Read More