Adios Mi Amigos!

My Hipster PDA (pictured above) got new covers. I was very fond of the old covers but they were gradually falling apart. I've scanned in and uploaded the old covers here for posterity's sake. I'm going to miss you guys!

My Darkest Hour

When I started blogging way back in December, 2006, I knew there would be tough times. I knew it wouldn't be all fish and chips or peaches and cream or M&M's. However, my faithful readers can expect nothing but honest and full reporting of the goings on in my life from this blog. I'm going to be same person in good times and in bad. So, it's in this spirit that I report something that I'm not proud of. I lost in our Biweekly Par 3 Challenge to one CoryS. Here is the sad, sad, pathetic, cheerless, depressing, dismal, dispiriting, gloomy, and abysmal scorecard that tells the tale:


The worst part was how CoryS rubbed his victory in our faces. He said things like "Good golfing guys" and "It was fun" and "We'll have to do that again". I don't mind being beat by a gentleman. However, I didn't like the way CoryS threw a fish down that well. Apparently we're going to have to euthanize that weasel sooner than later. If this keeps up I'm going to go all weight challenged chick crazy. (This paragraph contains more inside jokes than need be and for that I apologize to those who are on the outside looking in.)

The Boxnickoff!

Cynicism

You, Cringely: What does Gartner Really Do?

From this article.

Cringely's conclusion of what Gartner does (and by extension all of Gartner-like organizations) is: "Not much of real value I'm afraid". Ouch!

Quotes from the article:

The truth is that there is no IT "profession." Most of what IT managers know about IT they learn from vendors, consultants, and folks like Gartner. Because they feel isolated, and because the IT vendor/consultant/media system encourages them to worry about such things, IT managers tend to feel they must have their important decisions validated and Gartner is the most popular place to find validation. Yes they wield a lot of power, but it is often the power of discovering the obvious.

That hurts!

Much of this comes down to the decided lack of professionalism in IT, which is after all a very new job classification. There is a huge difference, for example, between someone with an engineering degree and someone in IT who calls himself an engineer. Real engineers are often valued employees. Their opinions matter and they have real responsibilities. Good companies know engineers are important to their business and treat them accordingly. But IT workers are a commodity and are treated as such. Many IT workers are clueless about the technologies they are working with. They aspire to be project managers and are often not very good at that either.

Cringely needs to calm down. He's hitting too close to the mark. = )

I'm a Flat Out Baller?

I scored 32 points in a basketball game tonight. It's the most I've ever scored in a game with referees. However, we lost and were eliminated from the league's playoffs. We only had four players and so we didn't have a realistic chance to win. It felt good to put up a big number after not getting to play or touch the ball a whole lot this season.

(Michael wanted me to mention that he had 11 points.)

Par 3 Golf Victory

(Scorecard)

Some guys from work and I headed out Wednesday night to a lighted par 3 golf course and played 9 holes. I was victorious by one stroke. On the fourth hole I chipped in for a birdie. I also had two pars. On the last hole, I double hit a chip and almost cost myself the victory.

For the record, I'm a horrible golfer. However, I won! = P

LOL Baby

I've decided that Tess is to be trained as an LOL baby. She'll say things like "I can has cheeseburger?" and "Ohs nos!". Instead of laughing, she'll say "LOL!" or "ROFL!" or "LMAO!". I'm pretty sure this will set back her development somewhat. However, it'll be worth the price. She'll be so cute! When she starts going to school we'll teach her to talk right. I imagine she'll catch up with her classmates by 2nd grade.

Does it smell like updog in here? LOL! ROFL! OMG! Booya! Woot!

That's right, I threw a fish down that well.

ETF Picks

Today, I put about half my investment account in the market. As documented here previously, I'm not going to try to time the market or get in and out of it on a regular basis. I plan on holding these ETFs for a number of years. These are the ETFs I choose: EWZ, FXI, IGE, ILF, IVV, and SLX (EWZ got about three times the amount of money as each of the rest).

In about three months, I'll put in the other half of my account. And, maybe three or six months later I'll put in yet another round. Periodically, I'll update my blog with how I'm doing.

The ETFs are mostly emerging market funds. Emerging markets seem to outperform the US market by a wide margin. I think Brazil is the best emerging market and so I put more money in it. I picked six different ETFs to diversify and thus reduce my risk.

Using Yahoo! Finance, I can track how my portfolio is doing. There is also a play at home game under development.

You Can't Handle the Truth

John Kenneth Galbraith said:

Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof. We associate truth with convenience. We also find highly acceptable what contributes most to self esteem. Therefore we adhere, as though to a raft, to those ideas which represent our understanding.

We all just got burned. Especially you, Luis.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street

Saturday I finished A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton G. Malkiel. I liked it a lot. The author advocates a buy and hold investment strategy. Most of the book is spent comparing buy and hold with other strategies. The last few chapters of the book give concrete advice on how to setup an investment portfolio.

I think I'm going to take Malkiel's advice and buy and hold from now on. I have a modest amount of money to invest and a ShareBuilder account. I've picked several ETF's. On May 6th, Ill put half my money into the market. A few months later I'll put the other half in. By then I should have more to invest and I'll put that in a few months after putting the second half in (sort of like Dollar Cost Averaging -- I just don't want to put it all in at once in case that's the wrong time to do it) .

With a ShareBuilder account, it costs just $4 to make an "automatic investment". I think they batch up everybody's orders and execute them all at once on Tuesdays. So, if your purchase is at least $400, your cost to get into the market is 1% or less. I think it then costs $9 to sell shares. You can schedule investments to take place on a regular basis or just when you have the money. It seems like a good place to implement a buy and hold strategy with multiple purchases of the same shares over a period of time.

On or just after May 6th, I'll reveal which ETF's I picked for my portfolio. As the months go by, I'll update this blog with how I'm doing. Maybe I'll write a python script to grab stock data and produce pretty little graphs.

Random Walk is the second book in my "try to read more books program of self-improvement". The next book in the program is Freakonomics and the one after that will probably be The Tipping Point.

Each time I read a book, I'll review it here. If you see a book reviewed here that you'd like to read, let me know and I'll loan it to you. If you know of a good book that you think I should read, I'm open to suggestions. Reading good books seems to make me smarter (and we all know I need as much of that as I can get).

Things I Heard

I heard this on WOAI today:

"Wesley Snipes was sentenced to three years in prison yesterday, one year for each of his 'Blade' movies."

On TNT's coverage of the NBA playoff last night I heard Tracy McGrady say:

"It's my fault. It's my fault we missed free throws. It's my fault we lost both games. Blame me. It's my fault we fouled to tie the game up. That's my fault. It's my fault they get easy layups. It's my fault we're not executing well on the offensive end. It's my fault a couple people in the stands ordered Heinekens and they got Budweiser. It's my fault. I'm sorry."

That's awesome. Good for McGrady. = )

Mnemosyne Project

The Mnemosyne Project is a python implementation of Piotr Wozniak's ideas (see previous blog post). A couple of days ago I installed the software and imported a bunch of cards. Each day since then I've used it to memorize those cards.

I like it a lot. The system for determining the timing of repeating the display of cards is better than the Leitner card system. While using the system, you rate your recall of a card from 0 to 5. Various ratings induce various repeat schedules. A card rated 0 is repeated almost immediately. A card rated 5 is scheduled to repeat on some future day.

However, it's not clear if the ratings are the only factor considered for the timing. I need to either read through the documentation or the code to find out.

It's awesome that this is an open source project. If I continue to use the software and desire an additional feature, I can just code it up!

I wonder what features SuperMemo has that would be useful. In particular, I wonder what incremental reading is and how well it works.

Want to Remember Everything?

Wired often has some great content.

For example, this article from yesterday:

Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn?

The article describes the lifelong efforts of a Polish guy named Piotr Wozniak to learn things well and indefinitely. If the article is to be believed, his efforts have met with great success. However, his method requires extreme discipline and living life in a very structured way.

A big part of Wozniak's system is his software called SuperMemo. It's supposedly makes computer aided learning very effective.

One of my favorite all time Wired articles is The Curse of Xanadu.

Stories about people dedicating large amounts of time to pushing the edges of knowledge/technology are almost always interesting to me.

These stories remind me of the 1980's. I spent the entire decade exploring words, sounds, and meaning. It was in '87 or '88 that I invented the words "woot" and "booya". Those were heady times.

Chris Madrid's Fork Accident

This really, really hurt.

The Olympic Torch is in Danger

I heard on the radio last night that the Olympic torch was being kept at a secret location. I think that's great. It'd be horrible if the torch was assassinated.

The torch has a lovely wife who is smoking hot (she's a torch also). They have one kid who is still a match stick and another kid that just became a cigarette lighter.

I would hate to see the head of that family snuffed out by a bucket of water. That would make me very sad.

Fortune's Formula

I recently read Fortune's Formula by William Poundstone. I enjoyed it a lot. The title refers to a formula for determining how much you should risk on a gamble when the odds are in your favor. The formula determines the wager amount that will give you the maximum return over time. It's surprising to me that there even is such a formula.

The book consists of a sequence of events related to the formula. Poundstone carefully connects the dots between many disparate things to form a comprehensible story. The story has computer scientists, gangsters, casinos, Wall Street, huge corporations, investing strategies, gambling strategies, politicians, etc.

The formula from the book is described on this Wikipeida page: Gambling and Information Theory.

Some of the main characters from the book include: John Kelly, Claude Shannon, and Edward Thorp.

A lot of ideas were presented and explored in the book. One of my favorites is called "Shannon's Demon". It's a sort of theoretical method for making money off a stock with a randomly fluctuating price and no overall upward or downward movement in price. You build a portfolio that is half cash and half stock. Periodically, you rebalance the portfolio to have this ratio of cash and stock. Over time, this will result in a profit. The method is described on this page: The Shannon Method. The method is theoretical because transaction costs and taxes would eat up much of your profit. Also, you'd need a stock that fluctuated fairly wildly without losing or gaining too much over time.

Google Be Evil?

I like this blog post from fakesteve.blogpost.com.

In it, Google is described as a cult of children, children of the corn type children. That's classic!

Also, the idea of having a fake Steve Jobs blog is an awesome. There is so much comedy gold made possible with such an idea as foundation.

My Apologies

I saw No Country For Old Men for the first time this weekend.

I realized after a while that I was watching myself. I'm very much like the character Anton Chigurh (played by Javier Bardem). I'm like him in almost every way. It's pretty amazing.

Anyway, I had an ephinany. A lot of the charters in the movie are afraid of Anton Chigurh. Maybe a lot of the people in my life are afraid of me? If so (and it's very likely considering all the evidence I have), I apologize.

I don't mean anybody any harm. I'm pretty dangerous and I'm capable of all sorts of destruction. However, I'm able to keep it all that contained. It's been a long time since I've gone on a rampage. Also, I have it pretty good right now. So, the likelihood of a rampage is greatly reduced.

So, in short, sleep well my pretties.

= )

Greg Joins 21st Century

I now have a Flickr account.

You can see more Greg related photos than you really care to see at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/greg_lange/