Destiny Gurus Site Launch - Your #1 Source on the Web for all Things Destiny!

I am happy to announce the official launch of the latest site that I have worked on, Destiny Gurus! 

 
The owners of Destiny Gurus are die-hard fans of the Destiny universe and have launched the site in order to help other players enjoy the game to the fullest.  Users can go on to Destiny Gurus and select many of the services that they offer in order to improve their characters and progress in the game without having to spend all that time grinding away in order to increase in levels and beat the raids and exotic quests.

I personally don't know much about the game as I have only played Destiny on my PlayStation4 a few times and never got very far so this service would be perfect for me.  I know firsthand that it is very hard to progress through the game when everyone else is so much better and has much better gear, so this services that Destiny Gurus offers would be great for someone like me in order to get into the game quicker and be able to actually stand up to the other players.

But what Destiny Gurus offers isn't just for newbie players.  Destiny Gurus is great for any level of player.  Even if you are the top of your game, you don't always want to waste time beating the exotic quests or raids and leveling up your characters all the time.  Maybe you started a new character and don't want to start from scratch, or maybe there is just one part you are having trouble with.  Or perhaps you would rather have someone else do the dirty work so you can come back and enjoy the game with your newly acquired skills and weapons.  Whatever the case is, Destiny Gurus has the top Destiny players on XBox One and PlayStation4 that can jump on your account and help you with whatever you need.  So check out Destiny Gurus.com and see what they have to offer if you want to up your Destiny game!

New Mr Robot Theories and Ideas Blog

As one of my favorite shows on TV, Mr. Robot has me on edge every single week.  I download the newest episodes as soon as they are available on the East coast just so I don't have to wait that extra few hours to watch them.  But after watching every week I was left with more questions than I had before I watched the show.  Sometimes I even wait a few weeks - even as hard as it is to go that long without my Mr. Robot fix - just so that I can watch those few episodes back to back so that I'm not so riddled with confusion.  So many episodes give you a moment in the last minute or so that just makes you go crazy having to wait another week to see the conclusion.  But then, like I said before, you are just left with more and more questions that you get answers.  Add to that but the show has so many things that you might miss the first time you watch so you end up having to watch multiple times to see and understand everything.  And even after watching all the episodes some things are not fully stated in the show and kind of left to the viewer to make their own decision as to what is really going on. 

And to add to the confusion, the main character Elliot has some mental issues and some of the things that you see in the show are how Elliot would be seeing it and some are how everyone else see it.  This just makes it super hard to really know what is happening because something you see might just be in Elliot's head and you are never really sure what is real and what is not. 

So since I love the show so much and am so obsessed with it I decided to make a blog called Mr. Robot Theories about the show to write about my thoughts and theories about what is going on with the Mr. Robot world.  I hope to be able to talk about the show and my thoughts and theories about what is going on and people will visit and comment on what I have to say.  So please if you like the show visit the site at http://mr-robot-theories.jaredconnell.com for more on my thoughts about Mr. Robot.

My New Blog

Although I really like blogger - it has many great features, it is easy to use, its run by google so it gets great search engine traffic, and best of all it is free.  But all the features in the world can't compete with your own hosted server that you can fully control.  Although I only have a shared hosting plan for now it is still very feature rich and a good stepping stone to getting my own hosted server all to myself when the need arises. In fact I will go over the pro's and con's of having a dedicated server vs. a shared hosting server in a future article but that is beyond the scope of this one.
I have decided that Blogger does not allow me enough freedom for all of the things that I need to do with my web sites, and although I will still continue to leave them live and post on them from time to time, the main focus will now be on my own sites that I host myself.  Furthermore this blog will be mostly succeeded by my new hosted blog at  blog.jaredconnell.com which will now be the new home to all my nonsensical ramblings!  Jokes aside, this new blog will allow people to keep up with most of what I am doing as I will post links on there to most of my other projects as well.  And like I stated previously I will try to continue to keep posting on this blogger blog as often as time allows.  t won't be as much as I would like but I will try and keep it alive for the years to come.  It has been my main online home for my thoughts and everything else for some time now and I don't want to just abandon it.  So although I will post most of my articles that would have gone on the blogger blog on my new hosted blog on my domain name which is located at blog.jaredconnell.com, just think of this as an extension to the blogger, not a replacement for it.  And as I explained in my previous post, my main site at the URL jaredconnell.com is a main site for listings and links to all my current and past projects as well as some basic pictures and videos of myself that document my life and have no other clear organizational scheme.  So please check out  both my blog site at blog.jaredconnell.com as well as my home page at jaredconnell.com and see all that it has to ofter and check back often as it will be updated regularly. 

Launch of My New Main Website

I have recently bought a hosting plan an a few domain names that I will be concetrating most of my efforts on.  Each domain name will have multiple subdomains so I will be hosting dozens of sites eventually.  The main site, JaredConnell.com is going to be the main site for my personal domain name, which will help link to all my personal info as well as all my other hosted sites, blogs, third party sites, social media accounts, and much more.  I will try to keep up on all my blogs, especially those hosted here on Blogger as this is currently my longest running home on the internet.  Paid hosts come and go but free services typically last forever.  So I will continue to update my blogger pages but may not spend quite as much time on them as I will my own self hosted sites.  I just like having full control and being able to add whatever I want, do whatever I want with it, choose my CMS system, or even not even use a CMS if i want to create a completely custom web application.  So for now check out JaredConnell.com for my main web site which will link you to many of my other projects that I am working on.

The IBM Article That Sparked Larry Ellison's Career

Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle got his start from a small company he and friend Bruce Scott founded in 1977.  He got the idea for the company's flagship product from an article (A Co-Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks) written by an IBM engineer about relational databases that, apparently, IBM didn't care about.  Ellison then went on to use this idea to create the company's first product for their first customer - the United States Central Intelligence Agency.  And with the CIA's need for vast amounts of data storage, relational databases were just the thing they needed.

A relational database is a way of storing data in ways that allows you to create relationships between pieces of data in order to organize and access them more easily while using minimal storage space.  For example a library's card catalog is like the old way of accessing data, each piece of data is on a card and each card is placed in line in it's drawer.  You can go right to the call number of the book you want to find based on the dewy decimal system by going to the right drawer and pulling it out.  But each book needs its own card and it isn't very practical to search through each one to find the data you need.  There is also the problem of redundant data, but this is where the relational database model shines.  Instead of having the author's data on every card, as well as the book data, in a relational database there would be two sets of data, called tables, one for the books and another for the authors.  The table with the books information contains a relationship to the authors table so that each book has a link to the corresponding data in the authors table.  In a huge library there is a good possibility that some author's have written many books. With an old card catalog system the author's data would be repeated on every single book that she has written.  With a RDB the author's data doesn't have to be repeated on each record for each book.  This saves much space as the same data doesn't have to be stored over and over again when it is the same exact information.  But this is also very powerful because if the information changes, say the author changes her name because she got married and wants to append her new name to each book's record.  With a RDB model this change only has to be made once, instead of finding and changing every single instance of that author's name

The library example is a simple one but think of how much easier and simpler this would make complex data sets, such as the CIA's foreign intelligence information.  And this is where the idea came into play for Ellison, inspiring him to start SPL in order to create the first Oracle database software version - interestingly named 'Oracle Database Version 2' although there was no version 1, because "Nobody buys version 1 of anything", Ellison stated.  Although rather primitive compared to today's standards, the first version of Oracle's database system was leaps and bounds ahead of the competition.  While IBM was content to keep the same old card catalog way of doing things, Oracle came in and changed the data storage and retrieval industry almost overnight.  Instead of investigating the intriguing concept of the relational database, IBM did what they always did and thought it was worthless because their products were already good enough.  Just like with the idea of the personal computer before that, they let someone else run with it and take the lead while they are still trying to play catch up to Oracle to this day.  It's actually pretty funny that now IBM's major competitor is Oracle when Oracle wouldn't exist if Ellison hadn't read that paper written by an IBM employee.  How different would the data storage landscape be if he never came accross it?  We would probably still be storing data on reel to reel tapes because IBM would never have innovated anything lol.


If you are interested in reading the original article that sparked Ellison's career, it is still available in its original format by following this link:  A Co-Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks.  If you are a nerd like you might enjoy perusing through it, if only for nostalgia reasons. 

Microsoft Embracing Bitcoin?

It seems like almost daily bitcoin is being mentioned in traditional media and other news outlets. Either a new company announces they will begin accepting bitcoins or some new bitcoin related product or servic is released. It seems like there is no stopping the crypto currency's momentum as more and more people become aware of what bitcoin is and start buying or mining bitcoins themselves. Some of the companies may be unknown start-ups but there are also many large, highly reputable corporations. Well now you can include Microsoft to that list. While you cannot buy a new surface tablet with bitcoins, they are promoting another bitcoin related item on the Bing search engine. Now you can actually get bitcoins from Bing, via their Bing Rewards program which awards points for doing searches or other easy tasks that can be traded in for all kinds of items. All you need to do is use the Bing search engine and you accumulate points each day. Once you save up enough points you can use them to get different rewards such as gift cards from many different retailers and access to services such as hulu plus or Xbox Live. There are also different sweepstakes and giveaways that you can enter to win various items. And now with the newest giveaway you can win $500 worth of bitcoins! Although you can't use your bitcoins to buy anything from Microsoft, I think this is a step in the right direction for the Redmond, Washington based company. Who knows, maybe in the future you will be able to shop from the Microsoft store and use bitcoins to pay. Even if this never happens maybe it will introduce bitcoin to people who have never heard of it before and make others more intrigued so they want to find out more about crypto coins, especially bitcoin. The more people who know about it and tell others about it, the more the currency will be worth because more and more people will be wanting to join in on the crypto coin revolution.

Apple Watch In-Store Preview

Apple has announced an in store preview for its upcoming new gadget, the Apple watch, to let proespective buyers get a better look at the device in person and try it on their own wrists to get a feel for it as well as to help decide what version of the watch to get and what band to get it with. Although you cannot buy the watch and take it home with you just yet, they are letting people preorder them for delivery later this month. If you are an Apple fanboy like me then you are salivating at the thought of getting another Apple branded gadget, and the Apple Watch is like no other Apple product before! You can go to most Apple stores and other stores around the world to see the Apple Watch in real life and to try it on for yourself. Get more information about the Apple Watch in-store preview here.