Open Hatch

I moved a bunch of posts related to my (pricey education in) investing to my unofficially titled Obnoxious Profiteering Blog, updating a few links and comments as necessary. If you miss any of the posts (not likely, given my education in marketing, my loathing of marketing to anyone I know, and my traffic here), old links to the posts here redirect there (thanks to a handy WordPress plugin that handles redirects).

These children were born too long ago; it is time to release them.

I’ve created a set of Windows batch scripts that retrieve (over the internet) and cross-breed Electric Sheep genomes, which I’ll show results for here. There are two galleries – scroll further down for the second.  The batches retrieve the sheep genomes (or instructions for creating these images) either by checking against saved image names or at pure random via the random.org number service.

The first gallery is of the parent genomes, and the second is of their children, nearly 500 of them, which survive many thousands of aborted children. They are interbred by both hand-picked and randomly picked genomes.  Many of these are rendered at a very high resolution of 2560 x 1960! Altogether, rendering these took a Pentium III machine working non-stop for about a week.

It is my intent to add these into the mix of my mass-customization product picker; I need to work out credit and payment sharing with generation 242+ sourced images. Images that say .242 in them are not free to reuse; everything else is. Note the links to show any showcased image in full, huge-resolution size

Here are the parents:

[svgallery name="brood-2a-parents"]

And here are the children:

[svgallery name="brood-2a-children"]

This can alternately be watched in High Definition @ the YouTube site via this link.

A silly rhythmic clip. Game developed by NinjaBee. The critters’ voices in this game are my voice acting, and I did other sound and particle effects work.

I ran across this site, foursquare. That link is to an anonymous (to me) user who volunteers exactly when and where he is, at any and many times. Specific times and addresses, and all of this is completely public. It is creepy enough knowing the founder of Facebook makes breathless declarations about how (allegedly) outmoded privacy is, and how easily people could be burglarized as a result of tweeting about their vacation (or updating their status in any of a variety of social media).

WARNING: very foul culture exposed in the first link to follow – avoid if you’d rather not know.

[link 1 - link 2 - link 3.]

The article at the first of that group of links explains how easily you can locate any stranger’s house by connecting, as an example, geotags from a flikr account to an individual. But this foursquare service provides all that in one glance, in addition to time information in one glance, for anyone to look up. Any burglar (or worse) who wants to find a target doesn’t even need their name. Time and location is enough.

mindlesstweeter plane landed! did u see my tweets about my new expensive electronics? pls burglarize me!

goods4me @mindlesstweeter: in ur house raiding ur expensive electronics! u cannot find me my accnt is behind anonymus proxy hahaha

I am downloading so many gigabytes of abstract art animations from where someone has uploaded their repository of Electric Sheep movie files (I’m in contact with this person; I’ll be uploading the ones I have for him – and for you! – to access). As I do this, the download eventually runs into an error: out of hard drive space.

Yoink!

I’ll need to move what I’ve downloaded to an external hard drive to free up space. So I connect the drive and start doing this. The computer hangs (several high octane applications open, music playing, and many high octane data transfers will do this – if your computer is a few years old). No usual attempts to unfreeze it succeed. Finally it occurs to me it’s the data transfer that is probably the real holdup; I’ve seen this setup unfreeze before if I simply disconnect the external drive to interrupt it. I disconnect it, and the instant I do so, everything else on my computer is freed up, including my music player, which proceeds to the next song in my queue, which it happens is not a song, but a video game sound effect, and this sound effect besides:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

How appropriate.

If you have not enjoyed this happenstance, you may take reprieve in the idea that it is possible you may not be a nerd. And/or that you have never played (or fully understood, as it becomes any human beings’ divine duty to understand) EARTHBOUND, the classic among classic Super Nintendo video games from which this sound effect comes, at a moment at which a very important something (someone), a bee, dies. Like.. like.. like a failed data transfer. Oh, the poetry.

I am stunned by this.

Among the 3 million people this census variation is being (apparently) sort of tested on (hey, will they put up with this?), any one of them could be fined $5,000 for failing to answer questions like the following (I summarize):

How many people live in your home? Are any of them Hispanic? Are they citizens? How big is your home? What is your education level? Do you have difficulty making decisions or climbing stairs? Are you able to bathe, dress, or shop alone? How much do you pay for your sewage system? Are you married? What industry do you work in? What is your precise job description? What’s your rent or mortgage payment? Do you own an automobile? Are you covered by health insurance? What type? Are you on food stamps? How much money do you make?

I am not making this up. (Could I? I am not Ray Bradbury, and our world is not yet a Fahrenheit 451 world.) Here is a direct link to the publicly available .pdf form for the questionnaire, which is available from the Census web site here.

Apparently the Census Bureau “rarely” seeks fines for failing to answer. So what? What on earth caused any government official to think it is okay to compel everyday citizens to disclose such excess of private information? In regards to an everyday citizen, so much private information is not the Government’s business. (The puzzled administrative personnel respond: what is private? What exactly do you mean by this term?) Unless your government has evolved much closer to Communism than you may realize. So maybe I’ll make that statement more accurate. Evidently, as things are, precisely such information of everyday citizens is the government’s business – but it should not be.

At opentochoice, “choice matters”:

“..the Web browser has become one of the most critical and trusted relationships of our modern lives – with nearly perfect knowledge of everything we do.”

Um, no.

.. And I’m thankful for the Mozilla Foundation, and search engine optimization, and my search engine ranking, and Firefox plugins.. and please bless that Google will stop nagging me to opt-in to Google Wave..”

The ‘net is great (even arguably crucial), but this sounds like.. actual worship. Wrong god. Idol Fail.

(I actually am thankful for the Mozilla Foundation, though.)

You may find this useful as the days get warmer. Click the image for a much larger version. Here is the original Photoshop format file for you to mess with, and here’s a .pdf version for easier printing, too.

I find track 06 from this old Nintendo game uniquely interesting and cool.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

(download mp3, ~2.39 MB, 2:44)

Also track 26, though maybe it gets older faster (still, it’s really a crime against my hardcore Nintendo music roots to even suggest that any such music could be redundant).

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

(download mp3, ~2.04 MB, 2:44)

I’d pick and choose other cool tracks to post here, but I’d be uploading half the game’s music. Or all of it.

I’m far overdue posting how to rip these tracks to mp3 files for those interested

But this wouldn’t be complete without the games’ title/screen/opening.. anthem?

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

(download mp3, ~1.94 MB, 2:44)

I’ve been wanting something like this for some time and may have finally found it. This tool is great:

tag2find

After installation you can “tag” any file with a right-click, then left click “Quick Tag this..”. To “tag” a file means to associate one or more words or phrases with it. Then this tool lets you search for files you have tagged. If you copy or move the file, this background program automatically updates its database – it keeps track of the file for you. This is very useful if you move files around and otherwise have a hard time keeping track of them, or simply don’t like the dozen mouse clicks otherwise necessary to peruse your folder heirarchy

Better still, when you install it, it asks you where you want its tag database to be located. That way, when you inevitably must reformat the Windows hard drive and assuming you maintain the good (nay, crucial) practice of backing up your files to a separate hard drive, this database will still be available and usable.

Another implication of determining the database location is (blathering now) show

The advantage of using an external database is there is no fuss with the varying, incompatible, dysfunctional standards for tagging files themselves. The tag data is external to the file yet perfectly managed in reference to it. Even when you can tag a file in Windows, this often uses file system informational extensions which can get wiped out if you copy the file to another drive (or other media), or worse, if they are copied elsewhere, it may be when you don’t want them to be.

The program runs in the background, apparently does not produce any noticeable slowdown, has a minimalistic and great user interface, and it can integrate with the Windows shell right-click menu (which is what allows you to right-click a file to tag it).

My initial impressions of this tool are very positive – I think this will probably be a keeper.

Best of all, it’s free.

Google Desktop, I hear you say? Problems:

• Privacy – you may not be aware it can submit its search index of your personal files to a server. Superfluous lawsuit and subpoena? There went all your privacy. (Never mind that we have very little privacy by modern practices – unless extreme self-protection is your avocation.)
• Inefficiency; it is behemoth and sluggish because it indexes everything
• As a consequence of 2, it is mostly useless – when I have used it to search for email or file name text I know exists, it hasn’t found it – because it is still indexing the other 90% of useless information on my hard drive, and it hasn’t indexed what I’m looking for yet.
• No file tagging.
• I boycott Google when I can, for reasons I’ve blathered about here too often. Google it under this domain or search “google” in my blog’s (non-Google!) search tool.

Nope. tag2find wins hands down.

[Update 2010-01-31]

Just spotted this YouTube video about an upcoming “next generation” version of this tool. Watching this video, I’m completely baffled why an investor would drop funding for this. The project is apparently and unfortunately lagging for that reason. But watch this video.

They’re also planning an API that will allow external tools to interact with it, including, it seems implied, link tagging (like delicious.com) and web object tracking (such as individual photographs – and/or tags associated with them? – posted to Picasa)? If so, and from that video also, I think the next generation version will be very hot when it comes out.

‘Twas grace that taught my heart to grieve
And grace my heart to sing
For Him whose Death is my Rebirth;
The Everlasting Spring!

If you search, you’ll find that dozens of different versions of Amazing Grace and additional verses can be found. This verse is mine.

From here.

The green bacterial looking clusters in the final sequence before it evolves into a blur – that is one of the coolest artistic abstractions I’ve ever seen. But I think the whole sequence is breathtaking.

Here’s a shout out to the variants of my domain name I never managed to secure, openhatch.com and .org (I only secured this here .net).

Clearly the term “Gay Mechanics” in the article’s subject is a typographical error; Same Gender Attracted professional mechanics are never mentioned in the article, neither the assortment of alternately male-ended or female ended shafts any mechanic may often find himself, uh, handling, neither indeed the assortment of gruff, bear-like fellows they may find themselves among.

I know at least several gay mechanics, and I’ve learned to stop worrying and start loving them.

But oh, by dag nab, dontcha wish I’d gotten my hands on those domains now?

[If the subject in the linked article reads not "gay" but "game", it is because the poster of the article corrected the error.]

For example – in Mozilla Thunderbird, to add an RSS feed and manage reading it in a sensible, organized way, you must follow detailed steps involving figures A through P (or 1 to 16; PLUS, if you want to know that this is 16 steps (simply to measure the extent of your technical fatigue), you must count A-P on your fingers. Unless you happen to know off-hand that P is the 16th letter of the English Alphabet. I didn’t.)

[The header of the concluding section of that article says: "That Was Painless". Um, if you're used to following, say, 42-step technical processes in your everyday work, maybe, in comparison.]

This should be a three to four step process:

1. Click the RSS icon in the address bar of Firefox.

2. Select “Subscribe Using Thunderbird”, which should be available by default (if you want Thunderbird to even be in the equation – which, even if it is, Firefox doesn’t tell you in the subscription button – it assumes you just know). Since this is not available by default, you have to follow a 5 step configuration to make that available.

3. Thunderbird comes up with a window, asking “If you want to add [title of RSS feed] to your Thunderbird RSS Subscriptions, select the account and folder you’d like to add it to.” – providing drop-down menus to select the account and folder.

Theoretically, it’s possible to get it down to such a three or four step task (and that page only got me heading in the general right direction). I haven’t gotten it to work. And this is in lieu of many more hacking steps I’d really rather avoid.

I thought these two applications were kinda cuddly friends? My exploration of the idea doesn’t find any proof..

That statement is mine, and it’s a conclusion I draw (again), after reading this, from an article entitled “Reckless Myopia”:

We face two possible states of the world. One is a world in which our economic problems are largely solved, profits are on the mend, and things will soon be back to normal, except for a lot of unemployed people whose fate is, let’s face it, of no concern to Wall Street. The other is a world that has enjoyed a brief intermission prior to a terrific second act in which an even larger share of credit losses will be taken, and in which the range of policy choices will be more restricted because we’ve already issued more government liabilities than a banana republic, and will steeply debase our currency if we do it again. It is not at all clear that the recent data have removed any uncertainty as to which world we are in..

Andrew Smithers, one of the few other analysts who foresaw the credit implosion and remains a credible voice now, concurred last week in an interview with my friend Kate Welling.. “The good news so far is that the stock market got down to pretty much fair value or even, possibly, a tickle below it, at its March bottom. But now it has gone up… we probably have a market which is, roughly, 40% overpriced. In order to assess value, it is necessary [to speak financial Vulcan about two different stock market valuation methodologies].. The validity of both of these approaches can be tested and is robust under testing – and they produce results that agree. Currently, both q and CAPE are saying that the U.S. stock market is about 40% overvalued.”..

One of the fascinating aspects of the past few months is the lack of equilibrium thinking with respect to what happened to the trillions of dollars in government money that has been spent to defend the bondholders of mismanaged financial companies. Almost by definition, money given to corporations will show up most quickly as improvements in corporate earnings, and then slightly later, as executive compensation. A few pieces came across my desk last week, hailing the ability of the corporate sector to bounce back from the recent economic downturn even though revenues have continued to suffer and employment has been steeply cut. Why is this a surprise? Where else could the money have gone? Labor compensation? It is truly mind-numbing that a moment after a temporary surge of trillions of dollars, borrowed and tossed out of a helicopter (though to specific corporations and private beneficiaries), analysts would hail a subsequent improvement in corporate results as evidence of “resilience.”

Since early 2008, beginning with the provision of non-recourse funding in the Bear Stearns debacle, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury have repeatedly allocated or implicitly obligated public funds to defend the bondholders of mismanaged financial companies. This has included the outright and non-recourse purchase of nearly a trillion dollars in mortgage securities that have no explicit guarantee by the U.S. government. By purchasing these securities outright (rather than through a well-defined repurchase agreement), the Fed is effectively obligating the U.S. government to either guarantee them or to absorb any future losses.

Aside from the fraction of bailout funding that was specifically allocated by Congress through legislation, these actions represent an unconstitutional breach into enumerated spending powers that are the domain of the elected members of Congress alone. The issue here is not whether the Fed should be independent from political influence. The issue is the constitutionality of the Fed’s actions. The discretion that it has exerted over the past two years crosses the line into prerogatives reserved for Congress. That line needs to be clarified sooner rather than later.

Emphatically, the trillions of dollars spent over the past year were not in the interest of protecting bank depositors or the general public. They went to protect bank bondholders. Instead of taking appropriate losses on those bonds (which financed reckless mortgage lending), those bonds are happily priced near their face value, for the benefit of private individuals, thanks to an equivalent issuance of U.S. Treasury debt. But that’s not enough. Outside of a very narrow set of institutions that are subject to compensation limits, just watch how much of the public’s money – which benefitted several major investment banks following a very direct route – gets allocated to Wall Street bonuses in the next few weeks.

I find this simply scary.

The past few days, the Philadelphia Bank Index (which allegedly “leads” the markets) has been dramatically declining in comparison to the S&P 500 stock index, which has been making defiant yet pathetic attempts at remaining bullish. At the same time, volume is declining sharply – big money is selling out of large positions (and buying up hedges, and loading up on option puts, which profit from declines). Banks decline, prices expand, volume contracts – the whole picture is undecided – or maybe decidedly tearing apart in several directions. Something has to give – and today the S&P finally started to drop fairly quickly at closing.

I have speculations in the market turning down (even sharply). And I still think it will. Watch the TZA ticker, which goes the opposite of the S&P, times 3 (meaning UP three times as much, I’m hoping). I’m banking on it taking an upswing or spiking, to above 13.35, by Dec 19th.