The curse of freedom

Unbounded freedom, infinite possibilities, and illusive empowerment can make the best prison. What do I mean by that? One example: The things I’m currently insecure about are things I think I can change: thinning hair, protruding belly, and verbal communication skill, to name a few. While my flat-bridged nose or square jaw feel more “it…

Scaling: The Third Challenge in Web Data Acquisition Project

Sometimes you find that your current setup doesn’t give you the sufficient data to achieve your business goals. You might feel the need to increase the frequency, add the breadth of the data collection parameters for example keywords, zipcodes, categories, or add new data sources. You need to scale the project. What do you need…

Banning: The Second Challenge in Web Data Acquisition Project

The second most popular question people ask when they learn that I work in the web data collection / acquisition space is “how do you go about banning?”. Could you guess what the first question is? And no, it’s not related to the first challenge we looked at last week: Setup. One hint: if this…

I’m retired (for now) – Part 1: Mindset shifts

Hello friend, I’m reporting back 7 weeks into this mini retirement and I just want to say that I finally begun to feel more rested. I resigned mid May, interestingly one year since I published the “I can retire but I don’t” post. I survived the excruciating 2.5 months of extended notice period till the…

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