Refactoring with the Template Toolkit
News, Technical, Guns, Trading ·Tuesday December 16, 2008 @ 15:37 EST (link)
… Government policies supporting homeownership (Fannie, Freddie, Community [Reinvestment] Act, pro-mortgage tax policies, …) caused a massive over-investment in housing. So massive that it could end up being the largest capital misallocation of our lifetimes.
—MK on the Investment Club list (MS)
20081210: All About Investing (Faerber): not very deep, nothing about analysis, but I learned a little more about futures and a lot more about bonds, since I'd hardly read anything on them yet. I'll still focus on equities, but it's good to have broad knowledge.
I'd put a few books on (artificial) neural networks on hold at the library, and Honey picked some up for me today. Baby Teacher: Nurturing Neural Networks From Birth to Age Five (Rebecca Shore, ISBN 0-8108-4284-X) sounded like a colorfully-titled book on training neural networks, but it was actually about real babies and real neurons; go figure.
20081210: McDowell's The ART of Trading is just an advertisement for his software, filled with useless bromides, lies, and cheap tricks to convince you that his program doesn't suck. Title sounds good (no wonder it has a lot of holds on it) but "ART" is actually an acronym for his system. So much for that.
20081211: Bad driver: WA 438 PBB, Blue Honda Civic (?) (late model, with silver-backed Honda logo), at around 1850: queue-jumping on Novelty Hill, and again at the WA-203 roundabout. Almost collided with the guy in front of me on the Novelty Hill attempt, so I had to let the twit in.
20081212: Gave Honey her Wii—a few days before her birthday, so she could learn it before her friends are here Saturday (turns out none of them could make it). She played until about 0300, but I hacked on my book tracking system until about 0400. Started with a plan to add topics (in a similar way as I did to my log), but ended up playing around with Template Toolkit, and using it for the book list view (existing, alphabetical by author last name) and a books read view (new, ordered chronologically by date read, internal only). All checked into Subversion and running smoothly.
20081213: Went to the gun show (Puyallup), picked up some Glock magazines (so-called "high capacity", which has as much meaning as "assault weapon"): two extended 33rd (made for the automatic G18, but fit semi-automatic standard 9mms, although they stick out, hence "extended") two standard 17rd, and 1000 rds. MagTech 115 gr. FMJ ammunition. Worked on this log (I'm still back on Alaska, August 26, which puts me almost four months behind). Imported photos on my camera (Luke Williams' goodbye party, Thanksgiving, and Honey opening her Wii from Thursday); realized I hadn't installed ImageMagick on the new machine, so went and did that, then had to fix the Gentoo USE flags (/etc/portage/package.use) so it could read JPEGs, since i'd set fairly minimal global flags. Installed ExifTool to look at image creation dates (exiftool -CreateDate <file>).
20081216: Had roast beef and champagne for Honey's birthday. Changed flat (left rear) tire on Solara. Don't know how it happened; either some reprobate slashed it in the Microsoft garage or I picked something up either in the garage or later.
