I’ll let the reporters do the talking:
http://www.coloradoan.com/article/20090117/UPDATES01/90117008
Suffice it to say I’m pretty proud of my ma. She’s now the #7 ranked hit when searching our last name inGoogle’s search engine. She even has her own Wikipedia page now (and no, she did not make it).
First post of the new year.
2008 was kind of a lame year for me in some ways (although it did have it’s highlights)…some of my more ambitious efforts/ideas never really took off for various reasons. Work was stellar. The personal life suffered as a result.
2009 has me off to a much better start already on the flip side, and its looking like work is going to suffer a bit whether I want it to or not, due to congressional funding shortfalls.
Goals for ‘09:
This weekend was spent duning at Glamis. All you see, everywhere, is SAND. You eat sand, drink sand, pee sand, lick sand, nose dive into sand, swim in sand, get your bike unstuck from being halfway buried in sand by dragging it relentlessly down through the sand, watch other people bury their sand rails in sand and be idiots trying to get unstuck, see drunk passed out people with beer cans all over laying out in the middle of all the sand, watch sand fly as people shoot down the gecko drag strip at who knows how fast…the only things missing are the great sand worms and Muad’Dib.
Here’s a link to photos: Glamis 2008
Picassa’s video thing didn’t work, so this is the next best for videos:
Tonight, we dine on data.
The past few weeks I started playing with raw DJI data imported into Matlab (once again, thank you Google). Figured I’d post it for all to critique or (hopefully) credit.
My weapon of choice for starters: the Fast Fourier Transform. Why? I think a lot of information might be hidden in the signal spectrum that isn’t obvious when you’re just watching the price indices, and I’m tired of riding blind. I’m not a fan of moving averages…they’re low pass filters (weed the noise out, useful as it may be)…its like putting black tape over your side windows. They might make you react less and drive straight (which is probably their real intent, much to the boon of investment firms who get to hoard your money), but they blind you to the 20 ton truck coming in to T-bone you. I’d rather see ALL the data in its wondrous glory.
Back to the basics here for a sec…this data is sampled daily, so it tells you absolutely nothing about behavior within periods less than 2 days (Nyquist).
This first data set spans everything from Jan 1 2000 up to present. Why that period? Because I got tired of copying and pasting, and didn’t want to write a full blown robot to grab data from google just yet (but thats on the to-do list). Will probably expand it to cover the 80’s and 90’s when I’m motivated…as I’m learning, there are events in that period we need to consider for sake of comparison. After all, being able to make good investment choices is partly about knowing how to react (or not to react) to news.
So first, a plot with the entire decade up till now, and the signal content (third subplot). Ignore the second one (just a repeat of first in this one)…part of a mechanic I use later.
Clicky to get a full-sized version.
Some very important things here, right off. The signal plots are shown with period, not frequency (because its easier to think i periods of days than frequences of micro-Hertz). At first glance a VERY large quantity of the signal content resides in low frequency (high period) realm, but it turns out there are only a few points there, so I can’t quite trust it, although it does make some sense…lots of people doing lots of things seemingly at random for no apparent reasons, ie, paychecks getting invested into 401k’s bi-weekly.
Now, this one is a zoom on the signal spectra of the opening, closing, high, low, and volume data…this is zoomed way in on the lower left of the one in the first plot (ignoring the low freq stuff). The high frequency stuff is the most meaningful and useful to us.
First off, opening/closing/high/low…they all look the same. So…we’ll just use closing from now on. Note the strong 200 - 250 day periods evident. Whats cool about this one is that a) its rather close to the famous 250 day moving average indicator that many people use (thereby giving it some credibility), and that you immediately see some strong correlation between price and volume at that period (funny…the 250 day moving average could be a chicken vs. the egg problem…people use it because its there because people use it…you catch my drift?). 250 days is too damn long of a period to filter anyways…recessions are born and dead within 250 days. You go by that one, and you’ll miss the bus. I think the volume correlation kind of discredits it too, don’t you?!?
Now lower down there in the periods, there is a lot going on in the price spectrum, with no real rhyme or reason.
In the volume, I see another peak at 63 days…again, thats the other period used often in the famous moving average indicator so many use. Pretty crazy…people unknowingly inject crap like this into the market just by using a certain analysis technique!!! There’s another large volume peak at around 90 days. Guess what happens every 90 days? Quarterly earnings. Boom…you guess it. The 180 day earnings period is the strongest of all (and seems kind of blended with the 250 day effect).
What we can take from this so far (I think): a) moving averages are bullcrap, and b) pay the hell attention to quarterly earnings statements.
How to interpret the rest of that unknown mess from 5 to 150 days is the real question (and the real money maker). If you can do that, methinks you’re golden.
One observation: a number of the periods that pop out down in there in certain sections (ie, 50 to 150 days) are of similar magnitude…this could tell one they are somehow related, no? The important thing there too is that they are overlapped in time…one of those peaks could be resident to a small window of time…thats the hypothesis I’ll tackle next. I’m outta gas for now, and my DOW spectrum movie maker isn’t done yet (but gettin close).
More to come.
Well, in preparation of Mr. Obama getting elected (and this is really the only reason I would fear his administration, unlike all the other yahoo republicans these days…), I decided to buy a rather sporty weapon, lest he ban them from sale as many fear he would.
As a wise man once said, go big, or go home.
My weapon of choice was a Rock River Arms Elite Comp LAR-15 rifle. They were sellin like hotcakes at the show, and I was lucky enough to get the last one.
Also bought a holosight for it…quite possibly the coolest piece of gun gear ever invented. This sight is a holographically registered targeting reticule that is optically projected into the targeting plane. What does that mean? That means you can put the reticule on target looking through the HUD at any angle, and the bullet will be on target. Got mud, snow or rain blocking part of the HUD? No problem, just look to the side. Still on target. There’s a 3X flip-to-side magnifier that goes with it too…may get that at some point.
Fun times…
Insane. Unbelievable. These are the words to describe this fish, the mother of all earthly Halibut, which my Uncle Rick caught last weekend off the west coast of Oregon. The world fish population is sure to die off now that this beast has been raised from the depths…
A Letter from Afghanistan…it speaks for itself:
Hello everyone,
As you know I am not a very political person. I just
wanted to pass along that Senator Obama came to Bagram
Afghanistan for about an hour on his visit to ‘The War
Zone’. I wanted to share with you what happened.
He got off the plane and got into a bullet proof
vehicle , got to the area to meet with the Major General (2
Star) who is the commander here at Bagram.As the Soldiers where lined up to shake his hand he
blew them off and didn’t say a word as he went into the
conference room to meet the General. As he finished, the
vehicles took him to the ClamShell (pretty much a big top
tent that military personnel can play basketball or work out
in with weights) so he could take his publicity pictures
playing basketball. He again shunned the opportunity to talk
to Soldiers to thank them for their service.So really he was just here to make a showing for the
American’s back home that he is their candidate for
President. I think that if you are going to make an effort
to come all the way over here you would thank those that are
providing the freedom that they are providing for you.I swear we got more thanks from the NBA Basketball
Players or the Dallas Cowboy Cheer leaders than from one of
the Senators, who wants to be the President of the United
States. I just don’t understand how anyone would want him to
be our Commander-and-Chief. It was almost that he was scared
to be around those that provide the freedom for him and our
great country.If this is blunt and to the
point I am sorry but I wanted you all to know what kind of
caliber of person he really is. What you see in the news is
all fake.In service,
CPT Jeffrey S. Porter
Battle Captain
TF Wasatch
American Soldier
…or lack thereof. I’ve lost much of mine, and I want to know where it went. This sums it up perfectly:
I have all of these cool things I want to do, but there is something stupid in my brain keeping me from doing them. Part of it is its just so easy to get into the grind now, and just kind of go with the flow. It’s not like I don’t do anything interesting or fun…I do…its just that I don’t care as much about doing it all, and I’m not passionate about any of it. I was very passionate about a lot of things for the first year or so I was here. Then I think I just gave too much, and it sapped it all. So maybe now I’m just letting it all well up again so I can give another big burst.
It definitely comes in bursts for me. There are times that I don’t get jack done for a few hours, and then I’ll have a burst for an hour and get more done in that hour than some people can do in days. I just wish I knew how to sustain it. Gotta figure that out.
…for the moment anyways. It’s been one of those months. Time is just passing me by it seems, while I sit on the curb and wave at myself going by. Accomplishing things, but nothing great. Just existing. The motivation to achieve greatness has left me for the moment, and I haven’t really a choice in the matter. It’ll come back at some point…I know it will. It almost did this past week….almost…but not quite. I know exactly what it was that shut me down…this is what I do when I recover from over-exertion. I go into cruise control for a couple months.
I’ve got several very important things to do this summer. Somehow, I’ve gotta find the motivation to reach the destinations.
Well, I decided it’s high time I started building cool shit again, so I got busy with the ga-rage. Everything’s all spic’n’span now…tools are hung up, shelves are installed, hangers for ladders, shovels, etc. It’s nice. I won’t bore you with a pic…you’ve seen it before…just a bit different arrangement.
So…I decided a long while back that I need to have a PC, more importantly, a Linux PC, in there in my work area so I can do robot-like things again. Then the chinese house firedrill happened and I got set back on those plans. But no more…I finally got the sucker set up to the point now where I can use it in there on wireless.
I got the box set up with Ubuntu 7.10 a while back…installation was painless. Just pop a CD in from windows, click and button, and off you go….into dual-boot land.
Unfortunately, networking is not quite as painless as the fanboys would lead you to think. The nice networking setup GUI does everything BUT set up your networking. It tends to screw things up more than it helps…so I just deleted it, boned up on all the command-line networking voodoo, and got it going the hard way (it took me 3 hours of reading and struggling to recover from the ill state the stupid GUI left the machine in).
Time to build some cool stuff.
