Random stuff leading up to the election
News, Bad Drivers, Political, Guns, Trading ·Monday November 3, 2008 @ 16:08 EST (link)
20081010: Mowed lawn.
20081012: Went shooting at SVRC (EMP).
20081013: Accessibility class at UWa.; my project will be mathematics for blind users.
20081015: DVDSpot(.com) is no more. This is sad because my automated DVD scanning system used data from DVDSpot. There are no good potential replacements, except perhaps Mike's Movie Mayhem (which has less data and DVDs) and possibly the new DVD Crate, whenever it's up.
20081016: Voted (absentee). There are two choices, bad and horrible.
20081017: Computers went down (desktop mail machine and server); both are fine, looked like the UPS died; it smelled funny and was emitting a continual beep, even after being reset. APC's reference page has a link to the manual; verdict of a long beep with a green light is a low battery. Amazon has a replacement ("APC RBC2") for $30 with free shipping
20081018: Talking to people on bulletpointreview.com about a DVDSpot replacement. Some of them managed to grab a site-scrape which can be processed to recreate the database.
20081020: Started doing some trading this week, just MSFT, using Fidelity. In retrospect (writing this later), I was fortunate to get out with my shirt (I had no live feeds, and no understanding of either technicals or even fundamentals), but I actually ended up up a good bit for a few hours of work.
20081023: Bad drivers: WA 986 LJR, green Nissan Quest van; twit (cut me off), at about 1008.
20081027: Class was boring (socialist "activist" guest lecturer talking about disability law). New ABC battery for APC Back-UPS 500 arrived; connected it and it set the UPC on fire. Oh well, at least it didn't burn anything else.
20081028: Learned about interactivebrokers.com (IB); nice site, $10/month (waived for $30+ in commissions) for trading data, and it has a (multi-language) data feed/trading API.
20081030: Made IB-provided Windows C++ client build in Linux; had to tweak it some, but it works. The IB demo account has some limitations which I'd thought were problems with my conversion, but weren't; the paper trading account has some issues too, according to the IB forums (their own and the TWSAPI Yahoo group); there's also a wiki (which isn't updatable, which rather defeats the purpose).
20081031: Went shooting at Wade's (.40 S&W, 50 rounds, and with my Glock 34). Handled an AR-15 at the store (first time).
20081102: Why Obama is Wrong For Our Country.
20081103: Doing some reading online about trading, and specifically day trading. Really like Trader Mike: the concept of "R" to measure risk/gain and position sizing (which he in turn got from Van Tharp), the details about his setup, and his Trading 101 series. A fundamental point that helped: the money used to buy equities isn't what's being risked: the risk is the maximum that can be lost (i.e. shares x (buy price - stop loss)); good trades have good reward-to-risk profiles.
Highly recommend Laura Ingraham's books Shut up & Sing and Power to the People (links below). I've also started reading Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series again (12 books so far, all very long).
Books finished: Shut Up & Sing, The Eye of the World, Power To the People, The Enemy Within, The Great Hunt.DVDs finished: Zodiac, Liar Liar, That '70s Show: Season Six, Ultraviolet, Final Destination: Thrill-ogy.
