Personal Posts
Personal Posts about myJourney
Thoughts, Stories & Learnings
Lots of thoughts, ramblings and stories / Many topics on my mind over the years!
A while back I wrote I am the sum of my parts which explains my many dimensions.
You can also view myWork Related Posts here
KDP Advertising Blueprint (2026)
Launching High-Margin “Short Reads” In the current KDP market, AI-assisted “Short Reads” (25–50 pages) are a high-efficiency play. However, because these books are shorter, your advertising strategy must be mathematically perfect to ensure the cost of the click doesn’t swallow your profit. This guide outlines a 19-day “Launch & Learn” phase designed to find your…
Managing IT Services in the AI Era
You’ve probably sat through the pitch. Every IT services vendor you work with — or are evaluating — now leads with AI. Faster delivery. Smarter automation. Outcome-based everything. Some of it is real. A lot of it is repackaging. And as the person responsible for making these relationships actually work, the pressure is on you…
Lean AI Agent Server from an old computer
A few weeks ago, I stared at my old, underutilized mini-PC. It sports a modest Quad-Core 2.0GHz Intel CPU (Family 6, Model 9c) paired with 8GB of RAM. Under Windows 11, the machine was usable but slow. The operating overhead were choking the hardware before I could even launch an application. I wanted to repurpose…
Streamlining Agent Zero: Skill Errors Back to Basics
When I first started experimenting with Agent Zero, I wanted to keep things totally “temporary” and isolated from my own data. My mindset was simple: I didn’t want the Docker container saving any clutter to my computer. I wanted it to start fresh every time. For a few days, this worked well. Agent Zero was…
LinkedIn vs Substack: Where Should You Publish Your Content?
If you’re creating content online, one question shows up almost immediately: should you publish on LinkedIn or Substack? It sounds like a simple choice—but it isn’t. These platforms serve fundamentally different purposes, and understanding that difference can completely change how your content performs. The Core Difference At a glance, the distinction is straightforward: LinkedIn is…
WordPress Maintenance: Fleet Management Update 2026
f you’ve been following my journey for a while, you might remember my original post about managing multiple WordPress sites. Back then, having three or four sites felt like a lot. Fast forward to today, and if you’re a developer, agency owner, or even a serial hobbyist, that number has likely tripled. The problem remains…
Top-Performing Stocks: Historical Total Return Comparison
5-Year, 10-Year & 20-Year top Performing Stocks. Historical Total Return Comparison (As of March 2026) Data Note: Sourced from financecharts.com, YCharts, Visual Capitalist, and U.S. News. Returns include reinvested dividends. Exact figures vary slightly by source and measurement date. An update to my previous posts about Stock Performance Great addition. Comparing individual stock “moonshots” to…
My Journey to a Self-Hosted Web Search
For months, I’ve been refining my local AI lab. I had the hardware dialed in—my AMD Ryzen AI processor, 128GB of RAM, running Ollama and Open WebUI like a dream. But I kept hitting the “invisible wall.” Every time I asked my local agents for the morning’s technical headlines or a deep dive into a…
Starting a New Year — A Little Less Invincible
Originally posted on my JorgeDiaries Substack | This is a continuation of the journal of my recovery process, since my previous blog, “Doing Embarrassingly Well”. I sit here finally getting down to write about something I’ve been thinking about for a few days now — the start of a new year in my life. As…
How to Enable Email Sending in Agent Zero (Gmail Setup Guide)
Let your AI assistant send emails on your behalf — in minutes. Agent Zero is a powerful AI framework that can automate tasks, run code, browse the web, and much more. But one capability many users overlook is email sending — and it’s surprisingly easy to set up. This guide walks you through enabling Gmail-based…
Tonto National Forest Off Roading
We went to the Forest Service Tonto National Forest Cave Creek Ranger Station today to find out what we needed to discover the area’s off-road “amenities” So much to explore! Looking forward to it!
Don’t Mess with the Monkeys
A Childhood Memory from a Costa Rica That No Longer Exists Originally Published on my JorgeDiaries Substack here I know this is progress, but on a recent vacation to Costa Rica, I was shocked by how little of the old country remains. You can still catch glimpses of it here and there, but so much…
Who Owns Greenland?
The Surprising Truth About Land, Homes, and Money on the World’s Largest Island I’ve been following the news about Greenland lately and honestly; it’s been wild to watch. I wanted to speak more clearly about what’s actually happening, so I did a little deep dive into the facts. The results of my research were so…
How I Installed Agent Zero After My 2-Week Test
When I first started experimenting with Agent Zero, my goal was to keep everything temporary and isolated. I did not want the container leaving clutter on my computer, and I wanted a setup that could start fresh every time. For the first few days, that worked perfectly. Agent Zero was still new to me, and…
Balancing One-Click Access with Data Privacy
This is part of my continuous learning on my DevLog topic. When managing a private community directory—containing sensitive member details like names, home addresses, and personal emails—the biggest hurdle is access friction. You want your group members (whether they are on Facebook, WhatsApp, or Slack) to click a link and get in instantly. However, standard…
Getting to Know Your AgentZero Setup (After Installation)
You have AgentZero installed and running. Now what? Before you start delegating tasks and building automated workflows, it helps to understand what you actually installed and where everything lives. This guide walks through the file structure, explains how projects work, and shows you where to find the documentation you will inevitably need. What You Actually…
How to Get Amazon Book Reviews in 2026
Amazon reviews are one of the most important parts of book marketing for indie authors. They provide social proof, help readers decide whether to buy, and can improve your book’s visibility on Amazon. But in 2026, Amazon’s anti-manipulation systems are stricter than ever. That means the old shortcuts no longer work, and the wrong move…
Christmas Songs Are Way Younger Than You Think
Every December, it happens like clockwork. You turn on the radio, pour a cup of hot chocolate, and suddenly you’re surrounded by Christmas songs that feel… ancient. Timeless. Like they’ve always existed. Surely these songs must be hundreds of years old, passed down through generations like holiday folklore. Right? Well—surprise —many of the most beloved…
What the Wright Brothers Can Teach Us About AI’s Future
I also wrote a shorter version on my Substack Newsletter From Kitty Hawk to Silicon Valley The departure board at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson flickers with destinations: Seoul, Amsterdam, São Paulo. I’m wedged into a terminal restaurant booth, laptop open, working on an application while my flight boards in forty minutes. On my screen, a local AI…
Moving to GitHub Container Registry (GHCR)
If you’re a developer working with containers, chances are Docker Hub has been your go-to for years. It’s the default, the familiar, and for many, the “it just works” solution for storing and distributing Docker images. But if you’re like me, and vibe coding, Coding Assistants has moved to doing and deploying so many of…
Cave Creek Arizona Business Licensing
Originally posted on 35sites.com -Guide to Cave Creek,AZ Business Licensing Starting a small business can be exciting, but local and state licensing rules can be confusing, especially if you work from home or sell online. If your business is based in Cave Creek, Arizona, this guide explains exactly what licenses you may need, why they are…
What If You Invested $1,000 in the Right Stocks 20 Years Ago?
When he was 11 years old (he is now 34), my son came from an afternoon’s playdate at a friend’s house af, and told us over dinner to invest in Google. That was when way back when google was just a search engine and I was helping companies trying to keep the internet out of…
Updating Docker Containers
You can manage many devices using docker remotely with Portainer. However Portainer does not have the ability to check if there are updates and actually update containers within Docker. Up until a few months ago, there was a script which I have used for years to do this called: watchtower. Unfortunately, watchtower is not being…
Taming Your Knowledge: Choosing the Right Tool
In an era of information overload, finding the right home for your thoughts is more important than ever. Whether you are building a Second Brain, managing complex projects, or simply looking to organize your digital life, the market is flooded with options. I have been trying to organize information since the dawn of time, testing…
The Two Worlds of Search: Web Results vs. Vector Databases
To understand how to build a truly effective AI agent, you must first acknowledge the core constraint of the Large Language Model (LLM) itself. “LLMs are ‘frozen’ in time as of their training data (The Training Cut-off).” Think of an LLM as a massive, read-only database. During its “training” phase, it reads a significant portion…
The Day Payroll Almost Didn’t Happen
“Are we getting paid today?” Originally Published on my JorgeDiaries Substack here In my early 20s, I worked for a company that delivered “timeshare computing.” This was long before Software as a Service (SaaS) was a buzzword. We installed physical terminals at client sites and connected them back to our servers via modems. It was…
Understanding LLM Mixture of Experts (MoE)
When you hear about the latest large language models (LLMs)—like GPT-4, Claude, or Gemini—it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by their sheer scale. These models contain billions, sometimes trillions, of parameters. This incredible size is what gives them their broad capabilities—from writing code and summarizing texts to answering complex questions and creating poetry. But that scale…
The Thinking Power of Claude Sonnet 4.5
A while ago, I was working on a tool to get my personal WordPress sites to backup to HTM. Learning the limits of Vibe Coding and specifically the capabilities of different LLMs. It started as a simple project, but with all of the things to consider (WordPress, templates, and everything that WordPress thoughts at the…