Name That Landmark: Reprise

Here's a game I haven't played for a long time. The idea is that I'll post a series of pictures starting from a satellite view and getting progressively closer. If you're interested, you can try to guess the landmark I'm zooming in on. The last time I played this, I chose landmarks that I had already visited. This time around I'll be using locations that I haven't visited yet, but would like to see someday.

This first one is more of a location that I'd like to visit rather than a specific landmark. Here's a satellite view. Click on the picture for a wider view if you need it.

It's been a while since I've posted regularly on this blog, so I'll wait a day or two for any potential readers to notice the post before I put up the next view.

The Top of Europe

A few posts back I mentioned I was going to be doing some travelling while on sabbatical this fall. I hinted at  three destinations. I've since added a fourth. Sometimes there are places you know you've always wanted to see. My wife always wanted to visit Japan. I always thought I'd like to see Tahiti. We've been fortunate enough to accomplish both of those.

Sometimes you don't even know about a place, but when you learn of it, you know you want to go there. This is one of those. It's called the Jungfraujoch and sits over 11,000 feet amidst the peaks of the Eiger, Mönch, and Jungfrau in the Swiss Alps.

Matt Lauer went there in 2011:


Contestants of the Amazing Race went there in 2012:

And I'm planning to go there in 2013. As part of my 3rd planned trip this fall, I will spend a couple of days in the Swiss mountain town of Grindelwald, and if the weather cooperates I will fulfill my desire to visit the Top of Europe.

Take a look at this zoomable Gigapixel view:

http://gigapan.com/gigapans/35930/snapshots/115697

McMillionaire

I recently heard this factoid: 100 shares of McDonald's stock purchased when McDonalds went public in 1965 would have split 12 times and now equal 74,360 shares. The current value at yesterday's closing price would be over 7 million dollars.

Of course, it's never that simple. First at 22.50/share, a 100 share investment in McDonalds stock would have cost $2250. That doesn't seem like that much today, but in 1965 you could almost pay cash for a new Mustang. The median family income was around $7000. Not many people could afford such an investment. And even if you could, putting that many eggs in one hamburger basket would probably have been ill advised.

But let's say you were in a position to invest a couple of grand in a fast food chain. You'd make your first million in 1993. Assuming you didn't sell then, or when you made your 3rd million in 1999, the next challenge would have been having the guts to hang on to your shares as they steadily lost you over 2.6 million dollars between November of 1999 and March of 2003. And finally, it would surely be difficult to keep from cashing out when MCD's price recovered to an all time high in 2007 or anywhere else along the steady climb for the last 10 years.

So could I have held on to an investment long enough to become a millionaire? I don't know. Ask my bitcoin heirs in 30 years. :)

50 Big Macs

That's how many I haven't eaten since April of this year. I actually haven't eaten any, but given my previous lunch habits I might have consumed that many, substituted by an occasional Quarter Pounder or maybe a Crispy Chicken Classic. Instead I have resolutely followed the Isagenix program with few exceptions, and seen resulting measurable reductions in my weight and waist.

I've made other changes to my daily diet as well, but eliminating the calorie packed lunches probably had the most impact. So much impact in fact that I've achieved another milestone along my path to a healthier weight. I now tip the scales at under 200 pounds for the first time since probably the 1990's. This actually happened last week, but I again waited for the achievement to survive the weekend intact before claiming it.

Trading For Dummies

How to get more bitcoin? Mining didn't pan out as I would have liked, and I'm not really willing to risk investing more cash at this point. Still, I was interested in growing my bitcoin holdings so I thought I might give bitcoin day trading a try. Initially, I hoped to trade using my Bitfloor account which had some really favorable trading rules. Unfortunately, the Bitfloor exchange ceased operations before I had a chance to start trading there. Fortunately, the Bitfloor exchange ceased operations before I had any significant funds in an account there. Instead, I opened an account on Mt Gox, the largest bitcoin exchange in the world. Hoping to take advantage of the volatility of bitcoin prices, I transferred 1 BTC into my account.

The golden rule for any kind of trading is "buy low, sell high". This rule applied to my bitcoin trades as well, except that since my goal was to increase my bitcoin, I needed to apply the rule in reverse: Sell high, buy low. By selling bitcoin at a high price and then waiting for the price to come down, I could buy more bitcoin than I sold for the same dollars. There are two things that make this difficult.

The first is the trading fees. Mt Gox charges a 0.6% fee for every buy or sell transaction. That means I needed to make a 1.2% profit on my trades just to break even. I hoped to earn 1-2% on my trades which means I needed a price spread in the neighborhood of 4 dollars to hit my target. Bitcoin often has price swings of this magnitude and more, but catching the top and bottom of them is challenging.

And that brings me to the 2nd, and most important difficulty of profitable bitcoin trading. It turns out that trying to predict the direction of bitcoin prices using technical analysis like dojis and trendlines is just plain silly. Buying low and selling high is more a guessing game of chance than anything else. I'd probably do as well playing red and black at roulette.

My results? I executed 20 trades over about a 1 month period resulting in a net loss of about 0.14 bitcoin. I guess I'll consider that the cost of tuition for my bitcoin day trading education.

Around the World in 80 Days

I'm fortunate to work for a company with a policy that says after 10 years of service you are entitled to a 2 month paid sabbatical in addition to your regular paid vacation that year. I begin my sabbatical in 80 days. I have a number of trips planned during that time, and while I'm not actually going to travel around the world, my total miles travelled will exceed the circumference of the globe.

Actually, travelling the circumference of the earth is not particularly unusual in my case. I have travelled the equivalent of twice around the world each year for several years now. I try to maintain frequent flyer gold status with my airline of choice, and to do so requires flying a minimum of 50,000 miles a year. The trips planned during my sabbatical are in part intended to help me reach that goal this year.

I'll leave discussion of my destinations for some future posts, but here are a few clues: Seine, Isar, Parramatta.

BMI

Isagenix update:

Following the Isagenix program continues to be effective. I achieved a new milestone when, according to the National Institutes of Health BMI calculator my BMI is no longer in the 'obese' range but only considered overweight. Tinkering with the values on the BMI calculator, I came to the realization that I'm not really overweight. I'm just under tall. I'd have a normal BMI if I was only 6 inches taller. ;)

I actually passed this milestone last week, but my scale has a tendency to fluctuate from day to day, especially over a holiday weekend, so I waited for 6 confirmations before reporting the news.

Cash and Coins(Bitcoins episode 3)

The image to the left is apparently an actual bitcoin ATM that currently exists in San Diego. If such devices become prolific it may soon be easy for the average person to exchange their cash for bitcoin or vice versa. My first experience with acquiring bitcoin on my own was somewhat more complicated.

Bitcoins are typically bought through a bitcoin exchange. A bitcoin exchange is like a stock exchange. People with bitcoin to sell list their asking price, and people with dollars list the price they are willing to pay. When there is a match on both sides, an exchange is made. I created an account on a U.S. based exchange called Bitfloor. To buy bitcoins I needed to fund my account. There are a variety of ways to get funds into your account, but many of them involve multi-day delays. I was hoping to take advantage of the recent bitcoin price drop and pick up some cheap before the price went back up, so I wanted a more immediate funding solution. I opted to use a service called LocalTill that allows you to deposit cash at any Bank of America location and promises the deposit (minus a service fee) will appear in your Bitfloor account in 30 minutes. It was a little unnerving anonymously depositing cash into an unknown bank account, but by the time I returned from the bank my Bitfloor account was indeed credited with my deposit.

Bitcoin prices were still falling when I decided to place a buy order at about $92, thinking they wouldn't stay under $100 long. My order was filled and I nearly doubled my bitcoin holdings. I could have done better however, as bitcoin prices continued to fall to a low of $50. But within a few days the price bounced back and I was happy with my hasty purchase.

Now that I had a bitcoin exchange account, I started thinking about how I might try buying and selling bitcoin for fun and profit! I'll tell that story in a future post.

Isagenix

A month ago I decided to once again take action against my ever increasing body weight. Having personally witnessed the successful results some have achieved on the Isagenix system, I elected to give the 30 day plan a try. That consisted of replacing 2 meals a day with an Isagenix meal replacement product combined with 2 days a week of 'cleansing' on which only the Isagenix cleanse product and snacks are consumed. While on the plan adequate water intake is encouraged, and daily doses of Isagenix's Ionix, Accelerator, and Flush products round out the plan. The products are expensive, but probably comparable to other weight loss meal programs like Jenny Craig or Seattle Sutton.

I didn't much care for the taste of the meal replacement drink at first, but grew accustomed to it after a while. The meal replacement bars aren't bad, but the Ionix and Cleanse For Life products can only be described as tolerable. I don't think I've felt as hungry on this program as I have when I've tried restricting calories on my own, but I do still miss late evening snacks.

My results are encouraging. The last time I made a serious weight loss effort, I managed to lose 9 pounds the first month, and 8 pounds the second. After 30 days on the Isagenix program I have released over 18 pounds. I like the term released. I saw it used in another Isagenix success story. Usually if you talk about losing something you are referring to something valuable or useful. "I lost my keys", or "I lost my wallet". You hope to find it and get it back. That's certainly not the case with lost pounds. When you release something you are hoping it will not come back. You release a prisoner or you release a captured animal. It sounds more permanent to release extra pounds.

When I began the Isagenix program I didn't know if I would like it but I said "I can do anything for a month". I don't expect I will stay with the program long term. Eventually I hope to switch over to a more conventional weight management program. But based on my results so far I have decided to give it another month. Look for an update sometime in June.

Please Sir, I Want Some More(bitcoins episode 2)

In a previous post I said I was thinking about acquiring some additional bitcoin. One way of acquiring bitcoin is through a process metaphorically called mining. Mining means running a computer program that does the work necessary to record bitcoin transactions in an ongoing ledger called the blockchain. As an incentive to do that work, new bitcoins are created and awarded to the one who successfully completes the work and adds a new block to the chain.

The amount of work necessary to add a block is intentionally manipulated by the Bitcoin protocol, such that on average only 6 blocks an hour can be added. If I am the only miner, I will 'solve' 6 blocks an hour and earn all the bitcoin rewards for those blocks. If you decide you'd like some of that booty, you can fire up your own miner. Even though twice as much computer power is now in use, the mining difficulty is automatically adjusted such that only 6 blocks will be found each hour. But the probability is that you will complete 3 and I'll complete 3. That is, until someone else fires up their miner and starts completing some blocks too. It turns out that there are so many miners competing on the bitcoin network that the chances of an individual completing a block are minuscule. Instead, mining pools have been formed where all the pool members contribute some computing power, and share the bitcoin reward proportionately to their contribution.

So I installed a mining program on my computer and joined a mining pool. The pool is a pretty big one so their block finding probability averaged around 1 per hour. However, I was only contributing a small percentage to the pool, so my reward averaged about 0.01 bitcoin per day. The miner runs on the computer's graphics processor which generates quite a bit of heat and consequently causes the cooling fans to run continuously at full speed. The noise was annoying and I had concerns about the continuous heat affecting the life of my graphics card so after about 5 days I decided it wasn't worth it and shut off the miner, earning a little over 52 millys (0.052 BTC). Not exactly increasing my bitcoin holdings at the pace I'd like. Watch for episode 3 to hear about trading cash for bitcoin.

[End of episode 2]

Bitcoins

I recently became interested in bitcoins. Bitcoin is an experimental, decentralized, digital currency. If you have bitcoins you can buy stuff with it. If you don't have any you can trade dollars for it, or you can try prospecting for it. This blog post doesn't intend to explain the how and why of Bitcoin. There are plenty of places on the web to read about it. I'd recommend starting here or here. Rather, I thought I'd share my experiences with it.

I first heard of bitcoins sometime last year, but I didn't give it much thought. Then in March of this year I heard that they were trading for about $40 which was nearly four times what they were worth when I first heard of them. Not even a month later, I learned that they were trading at around $90. This information aroused the interest of the gambler speculator venture capitalist in me. I didn't yet know where to get bitcoins, or how to keep them, but I knew I wanted some.

Fortunately my son is a bit of a bitcoin SME. He has been monitoring them for some time, and is the one who first brought them to my attention. After advising me that Bitcoin was indeed experimental and cautioning me against investing any money that I couldn't afford to lose completely, he agreed to acquire some for me and keep it safe until I learned the ins and outs of bitcoin ownership.

So on April 3rd, I became the owner of 7.78528750 bitcoins. I installed a bitcoin wallet on my computer so I could manage and secure my bitcoins. Bitcoin is like cash in a lot of ways, one of which is that if you don't take care to keep it safe, someone might just take it. I installed the Bitcoin Ticker app on my phone so I could check the value of my bitcoins every day. As I watched the trading price of a bitcoin continue to increase, I started wondering how I could get more. I'll tell you about that in episode 2.

[End of episode 1]

It's Alive!

It's been 2 1/2 years since I posted anything here. Maybe I can inject some life, although I can't imagine anyone still checks for updates.

Rumble

Just in time for Halloween, this song was the theme from "Screaming Yellow Theater" which ultimately became "Svengoolie", then "Son of Svengoolie".

Island Style

Here's my latest YouTube contribution. The sound isn't as good as usual because I only used the camera microphone to record.