The Writer's Strike

Here's my take on the Hollywood writer's strike.

I fully support the right of organized labor to strike, and I sympathize with the economic hardship associated with people being put out of work.

However, could there be something less important to the overall functioning of the economy? These jobs are not going anywhere; so the flow of product will be interrupted for a while, so what? There are billions of dollars worth of productivity going to China that will never return to this country.

Striking writers are not going to force the producers to get Chinese writers to scab for them.

So people don't get to see fresh episodes of CSI or Desperate Housewives for a while, and they have to watch something that is slightly crappier than normal.

Entertainment is an important industry to the USA, one of our leading exports. Strikes are just another one of the economic checks and balances that help the marketplace adjust.

Don't worry, it will all be over eventually and we can get back to watching our normal stupid crap.

Queen Elizabeth

Queen Elizabeth today became the longest lived monarch in British history, surpassing Queen Victoria.

She is not yet the longest reigning monarch, still 8 years short of Victoria's 64 year reign.

I think last years movie "The Queen" did a lot to improve the popular image of Queen Elizabeth. It was really a great film and effectively brought out the difficulties of being in such a publicly scrutinized position for your entire life.

Central banks cooperate

The central banks of several leading economies have agreed to cooperate to reduce the affects of the current ongoing credit crisis.

How much better would the world be if the elected governments could decide to cooperate so easily, instead of filtering everything through the lense of national pride and electoral politics.

Led Zeppelin reunion

Another popular culture event that I should relate to, at least based on my age (49). In fact I find the current Led Zep reunion tour entirely uninteresting, much like the fact that the Eagles have a hit album right now.

So what, am I supposed to get all excited about some fat old millionaires playing 30 year old songs to a crowd of fat middle-class, middle-aged hippie-never-were's desperate to latch on to a long passed image of their own youth?

Now, if they could actually make me 18 again, that would be worth paying for...

Christmas Shopping

Shopping for Xmas presents always gets me down. Most gifts for kids end up getting forgotten after a few weeks, and gifts for adults tend be obligatory gifts.

I much prefer giving and receiving birthday gifts. It always seems more personal and genuine.

I'm tired of being told endlessly that the fate of the U.S. economy depends on me spending gobs of money on useless junk that noone needs or wants.

Little kids are the ones that deserve and appreciate Christmas presents

Media MVP

I bought a little box (Hauppage MediaMVP) that hooks up to your TV and your home network that allows you to stream video and music from your computer to your TV and stereo.

I bought the hardwired version. There is a wireless version, but my router is close to my TV and had an open port, and I thought it would work better running wired, based on some reviews (also it requires 802.11G and I have 802.11B).

The server software that comes with the MediaMVP is really awful, constantly froze up, so I ended up buying a copy of SageTv with support for MediaMVP, which works like a champ. SageTv is a bit of overkill, since it supports PVR cards with scheduling and full DVR functionality. For me I am just using it to play downloaded AVI files. I used to download AVI's and burn them to DVD's, which was time consuming (4 hours to convert a 2 hour movie), and wasted a disk.

You need a decently fast computer as your video file server, but the MediaMVP box does the decoding onboard. It has a CPU and starts a version of Linux internally. I think the SageTv software replaces the Linux it comes with, though. You can do all of what SageTv does using open-source software and a lot of time, but I just wanted to watch my TV, not play with software.

This is a really good solution if you want to watch AVI files on your TV, not on your computer screen, but don't even bother to try to get the MediaMVP software to work.

CEO resignation season

Lots of CEO's seem to be jumping or being pushed from their jobs lately. Hopefully they won't find themseleves too short of cash. Most seem to be getting decent severance packages, far in excess of the 2 weeks pay for every year of service that most of us get.

Republican YouTube Debate

Just exactly what makes these YouTube debates so revolutionary continues to elude me.

Thousands of questions are screened by the debate organizers, so they may as well have just written them all anyway.

Seems like just another expression of the personalization of everything.

Is the YouTube generation incapable of understanding (or paying attention to) a political debate without having to be amused by some jackass asking the question while performing for the camera?

Are the questions not interesting unless the viewer can relate personally to the asker?

Stem Cells

Today I saw an article about a new breakthrough in stem cell research. Scientists have been successful at making skin cells act like embryonic stem cells. They anticipate working out all of the remaining problems pretty quickly.

I find this topic to be extraordinarily interesting. It seems like it could be one day possible for injured people to regrow their skin, spines, eyes or livers. Maybe even a lost foot could be regrown. Truly amazing, and I hope I live long enough to see some of the incredible things that will develop from this technology.

Out of the action

Been a while since I posted. I haven't had much to say lately and work has been hectic.

We watched the movie "The Hoax" at home this weekend. It is about a writer in the early '70's who forged a biography of the crazed billionaire Howard Hughes. It was based on the antics of writer Clifford Irving, and a lot of it was fictionalized, but the core story was true. He did this while Hughes was alive, and managed to get away with it long enough to get a million dollar advance from his publisher. There was a lot of intrigue and the book had a role to play in the Watergate scandals that took down Richard Nixon. Irving, along with his wife and his co-writer, eventually went to jail for fraud. He is still a published author today.

Richard Gere was the star. I really like him when he is not playing a simplistic good-looking guy. He is a great actor and was particularly good in this role.

New treatment for Schizophrenia

A new drug that attacks schizophrenia in a completely novel manner seems to be safe for patients. There is an added benefit of reduced side effects compared to established drugs used to treat the disease, researchers reported on Monday.

Eli Lilly compared the older drug Zyprexa with the new compound (not yet named) and found it did not alleviate the symptoms of schizophrenia quite so well, but also did not produce a lot of the side effects. Older drugs produced side effects such as hormonal fluctuations, weight gain and cholesterol increases.

Presumably testing and development will continue, with the goal of increasing the effectiveness while retaining the diminished side effects.

Fires in Greece

I was sad to see the forest fires happening in Greece this last week. In all of my travels I really enjoyed Greece. It is exotic without being overwhelming, laid back without being boring, and best of all, inexpensive.

My wife and I spent about 6 weeks in Greece, a few days in Athens, then to the islands of Hydra and Aegina. After that we visited the Peloponesian peninsula, mostly the pretty town of Nafplion. Nafplion is an old Venetian city and the architecture looks more Italian than Greek - lots of red tiled roofs.

After that we took an overnight ship to Crete, where we stayed at the really cool old city of Hania. It is an old town with winding narrow alleys and a perfect little port with a great waterfront. There is a great wide sandy beach.

Then we travelled by bus through the picturesque mountains of central Crete to the South coast, to some rocky little beach towns with hidden nude beaches strung along the coast. We spent the next 2 weeks like this, moving to a new little town every few days.

Finally we left for Santorini, where we spent 4-5 days, and celebrated Linda's 40th birthday. Santorini is one of the most spectacular settings in the world, and a great place to finish our Greek vacation.

Credit Crisis

Watching the stock market meltdown over the last few weeks has been interesting but too not too disturbing (as long as I don't check my 401-k balances).

I did hear a good analysis of how it happens that over-rated mortgage backed securities can cause such a drop in the DOW. Banks lend to each other over night, and the collateral they use can include large bundles of mortgages that have been sold on the market. Since everyone knows they have been historically overvalued due to mortgage credit being extended to subprime borrowers, as the housing market softens the lending banks start to get nervous about loaning to other banks with such collateral. Not being able to borrow overnight means banks cannot lend as much, putting upward pressure on interest rates, and making businesses nervous.

Many European banks have invested in these mortgage backed securities, which spreads the fun internationally. Eventually these securities will become properly valued and credit will return to the markets. However there will be spasms of overreaction, both market level and regulatory, causing continuing upheaval and inefficiencies in the markets.

Construction Project

They finally laid blacktop on my street yesterday after a six month project. They replaced water lines, storm sewers, sanitary sewers, cement roadway, sidewalks and driveway aprons. What a mess that was! We had to park on the next street over and walk for a few weeks while they were tearing it up in front of our house.
It was noisy and very dusty but now it is a brand new street. We really had needed new sidewalks. Next year the city is going to plant trees along the tree lawn. They had to rip out a couple of old trees to do the work.
My daughter was endlessly fascinated by the huge machinery and giant holes in the road.

Glad this is over!

Things I don't care about

American Idol (or any amateur hour type show)
I-Phones
Harry Potter
The Simpsons Movie
YouTube (and the YouTube debate nonsense)
Text Messsaging
MySpace

How to Earn $1 Million by Not Watching TV

I saw this article on Yahoo finance. The headline touted "How to Earn $1 million by Not Watching TV". Intriguing enough, so I read it.

What a bunch of BS. After several paragraphs of dubious arithmetic, you have to read almost the whole article to find out that that 80% of the money you will "save" is the money you would have spent due to the influence of TV commercials.

This article was from thestreet.com, a site supposedly dedicated to financial education.

There are a lot of good reasons to limit TV watching, but not the expectation that you are going to end up with $1 million in your pocket.

The Seven Wonders of The World

The seven new wonders of the world were chosen by popular vote recently and, having visited several of the nominees, it is clear the vote was one of popularity, not an objective ranking of the sites. The final 7 chosen are:
Chichén Itzá, Mexico
Christ the Redeemer, Brazil
The Great Wall, China
Machu Picchu, Peru
Petra, Jordan
The Roman Colloseum, Italy
The Taj Mahal, India.

Of these, I have visited Chichen Itza, Christ the Redeemer, The Great Wall, Macchu Picchu and the Taj Mahal.

My first observation is that any list of wonders that does not include the temples at Angkor Wat is fatally flawed. I consider Angkor to be the #1 wonder of the world I have seen (never saw the pyramids of Egypt). Angkor far surpasses Chichen Itza and Christ The Redeemer in its powerful beauty and scale. Clearly the Brazilians and Mexicans cast more votes than the people of Cambodia.

Next, I cannot understand why the manmade rice terraces of China and Central Bali would not be considered a great wonder of the world. It is a truly awe inspiring sight. Not a monument to the greatness of a regime like the others, but an active work of communal architecture that supports the lives of millions of people.

Lastly, the Great Wall: I am fully in agreement with this one.

Scooter Libby

It makes perfect sense for George Bush to commute the sentence of Scooter Libby.

There really isn't anything Bush could do to diminish his reputation even further, so why not do something to shore up the hard core conservative base of the Republican Party? What's the downside: Democrats and moderates will lose respect for Bush? They already have no respect for him.

Bush could pose nude with Ann Coulter and a penguin and the conservative base would praise him for it. On the other hand he could personally behead Osama Bin Laden and the Democrats would find fault.

iPhone

Ho hum, another electronic gizmo is on the market. Forgive me for failing to get excited about the latest toy that encourages already self-obsessed Gen-Z'ers to identify themslves through the crap they own.

I want Steve Jobs to stop making toys and figure out how to get the marketplace to provide universal health coverage to all Americans.

That I will get excited about...

Dead goldfish

One of our goldfish died yesterday. It was 2.5 years old, and part of a small aquarium I bought with my daughter a couple christmasses ago. They had been doing really well and this was a real surprise to find him just resting on the bottom of the tank.

My daughter is 5 and she is not really too concerned about death yet. When our dog died last year, I mustered up all my courage to tell her that our doggie had gone to heaven and she looked up at me and said "Does that mean we can get a kitten?".

Anyway, gotta go to the pet store and buy some fish antibiotics and clean up the fish tank tonight. Might have ben a bacterial or fungal infection.

Metabolic analysis

A few weeks ago I had a metabolic analysis at the gym where I work out.

They hooked up an oxygen sensor mask and heart rate monitor and had me ride a bike for 30 minutes at increasing resistance rates.

The idea is to try to determine at what heart rate your body crosses over into non-aerobic exercise, and you are no longer burning fat, but rather stored glycogen.

They pretty much told me I was exercising too hard and put me on a program of 4 days per week of exercise (instead of 5). Each day is different and pegged to a different combination of heart rates. One day is ure interval training, alternating between 120 HR and 160 HR. Other days are 20 minutes at 120, 20 at 130 and 20 at 140.

The theory is that you can increase the heart rate at which you are still burning fat. I go back in August for the same test and we will see if I have moved my numbers.

Work Stuff

I'm getting close to finishing a big project at work. We are adding a whole new line of insurance coverage to the company website.

I have been working on this for about 3 months full time and 3 months part time before that. The programming part is almost done and we are about to begin a long period of testing. It's good to see the new functions coming online and testing is a necessary part of it. The testing phase can get really stressful, especially as the deadline gets nearer.

The company is going to get a good return on investment for the effort though, the payback will be under a year. Not sure what my next project will be, probably a continuation of this one.

Sopranos Finale - my 2 cents

My opinion on the Sopranos finale is about as worthless as everyone else's.

I liked it. It wasn't what I expected or even wanted but I have to see it as a piece of art.

When I go to the art museum and look at Monet paintings I go to appreciate what the artist did, not to try to figure how he could have done it better. I can only say that I like this painting and don't like this other one. They make me feel a certain way and that is all. The one thing I can't do is say "I really would have liked this painting better if Monet had just done..."

A professional filmmaker has standing to criticize technique or form, as a trained artist might with Monet's work, but that is an altogether different arena of criticism. My only place to stand is "have you entertained or surprised or enlightened me?"

I do think it is interesting/funny all of the symbolism and metaphor that people have been pasting onto the series finale. On NPR Daniel Schorr used the blackout imagery as a metaphor for something or other in modern culture.

My only (so far) unique observation is that maybe people are pissed off about the finale not being what they wanted because the new media technology has been able more and more to give them exactly what they want when they want it. Isn't that the whole point of iPod's, DVR's, streaming video, pay-per-view and YouTube? If you feel like watching a video of a guy performing the national anthem using hand farts, there are at least 25 of them on YouTube at any given time.

I hope that the on-demand world is not reducing our desire or ability to be surprised. If the media stream is flexible and rich enough to only ever give us what we want then what does that do to our ability and willingness to be exposed to new ideas?

I've been bothered by the reduction of the shared cultural experience resulting from the on demand world. I think in many ways the country became a unified society because of the shared experience of popular culture, starting with silent films and newsreels, early radio, the golden age of Hollywood and the glory days of network TV prior to cable. I hate to single out a particular moment in time, but in the 1960's everyone had TV, cable was in its infancy, so everyone watched the same small set of programs. Not to say this was quality entertainment (Gilligan's Island was a number one show), but the point is that everyone from Florida to Oregon had at least some shared cultural experience that was uniquely American.

Many have decried this as homogenization of culture, and I can't argue against that. It does seem however that we have lost something. We still do have the shared experience of "American Idol" and such things, but the fractionalization of the media stream has greatly reduced the number of people sharing any particular event at any given time.

I can't believe I am here defending the bad old days of network TV. I feel like my grandparents lamenting the golden days of radio. It sucks getting old.

Beadies Site Redesign

I am currently working on redesigning Beadies Beadwork

I am updating the fonts, colors and backgrounds and standardizing the look and feel of the site. Over the years I got lazy creating some of the pages. I use the Smalltalk programming language to generate most the pages, so I bit the bullet and pulled all of the pages into Smalltalk, so I can change the fonts and colors with one method.

I also added context sensitive side links to every page. We really like the new look and feel. Hopefully we will have the changes published in the next 2 weeks.

Sopranos

I watched the latest episode of "The Sopranos" last night. Probably the best episode ever of the best TV show ever made. AJ made a lame attempt at suicide and Tony almost killed a creep who harassed his daughter. The feud with Phil Leotardo is about to boil over.

Tony's interludes with his psychiatrist are what makes this more than just another mob drama. The show would be good without that circumspective aspect, but it is truly great with it.

It is clear that the series is coming to an explosive end. I think they have dropped a number of hints about what will happen to Tony Soprano in the next 2 final episodes. I think the obvious outcomes are Tony's death or his imprisonment. There is one other possibility that I haven't heard anyone mention, so I won't do it here. It has been alluded to in the show, though.

If you haven't watched this show, get the DVD's or download the torrents. This is some outstanding TV.

Covered calls

Every month I buy stocks to sell covered calls on them.

Last month I made a couple hundred dollars writing calls on a steel company called Steel Dynamics (STLD) . I sold an in-the-money call at the beginning of the option cycle for May, bought it back once when it dipped (netting $150). A few days later on the upswing I sold it again for the original price. I let that one run to expiration and got called out over the weekend, netting another $200.
This morning I bought 300 shares of AK Steel holdings (AK) for 33.75 and sold 3 June 32.50 calls for 2.75 each. This will net $450 (3x150) if I get called out as planned, maybe a little more if I get the chance to buy it back on a dip and re-sell it.

This works out to about 4.0% a on $10,125 in play for the month, less transaction fees (about $35 total). Not bad for a moderate risk.

I have had the best returns in the last year or so on steel product companies, and the copper company Souther Peru (PCU). Not sexy or cutting edge, but for some reason, steel companies have had good, predictable returns on covered calls.

I am basically playing the time-decay game, using selling in-the-money near options and planning to get called out. I have lost a few times, mostly when I go against my general guidelines, but I average 2-3% per month, and never a catastrophic loss (almost though!). I set up these trades at the beginning of the monthly cycle (the Monday following the 3rd Friday of the month). Then I monitor them to see if there is a buy back opportunity. It takes discipline to keep from buying back prematurely.
If my options close out of the money, then I decide whether to write a call for the next month or liquidate the position and try something else. In these cases I usually break even.

I avoid high tech, pharma, companies that depend on interest rates (like lenders of any kind), companies that depend on government contracts, companies that are announcing earning before the options I want to write will expire, and companies with a PE over 35 or so. I also look at the 6 month Bollinger bands and 120 day moving averages. I am not a technical trading expert, but I look at these indicators to get a general view. If an otherwise great stock is bumping up against its upper band then I am very wary.

The times I have lost money have been when I violated one of these basics.

Santa Amulet bag

This image is a great example of a Chris Manes Amulet bag

Harry Shearer

I really like "Le Show" by Harry Shearer, which is broadcast by KCRW public radio and downloadable from their site. He presents an hour long monolog with musical interludes, and very acutely skewers the current political scene, with particular sarcasm towards republicans.

A regular feature is the "Apologies of The Week" where he recounts the various public apologies made by public figures and institutions over the previous week.

Definitely a cut above the Colbert Report and the Nightly Show, both of which I find too hip and ironic for my taste. Shearer is more Bill Maher than Jon Stewart (and that's a good thing IMO).

The KCRW podcast page is www.kcrw.com/podcasts

Also, links to past and current shows for download can be found at Harry's site:
www.harryshearer.com/index_2.html. Click on the "Le Show" link.

Seed Beads

Seed beads have been selling more and more lately. We get almost as many orders for seed beads as we do for Delicas. The seed beads we sell are high quality Miyukis, in 4 sizes. They are much better than Matsunos (more uniform shapes and more vibrant colors), and far better than cheap Chinese imitations.
We will continue to add more colors as time goes on
Click here for Seed Beads

Resignations?

Isn't it time for both Paul Wolfowitz and Alberto Gonzales to resign?
Perhaps they could form a consulting group in Washington and advise clients on how to ethically manage personnel issues.

Boris Yelstin

Boris Yeltsin died Monday.

I remember back to the end of the Reagan years when all the neocons thought that the end of the Soviet Union heralded "the end of history"; there wouldn't be anything more to get excited about. The cold war was ending and the world was entering a period of democratic capitalist utopia.

Yeltsin to me was emblematic of that naivete. He tore down the Soviet system and replaced with a free-wheeling (and free-drinking) openness. The childlike belief was that destruction of the old world was all that was necessary to create a new world. (Sound familiar Mr Rumsfeld?)

What actually occurred in Russia was the dawn of a chaos that fostered a environment of criminality and corruption.

So twenty-odd years on from the Reagan era and where are we?
Russia has veered off into semi-authoritarianism; the radicalized Muslim world is making us nostalgic for an enemy we could understand; China hasn't exactly eaten our lunch yet, but they are setting the table...

Beadie's Beadwork just added a selection of 3mm and 4mm Miyuki cubes this weekend.
These are great quality cube beads with a small diameter hole, perfect for stringing and bracelet making.

Check it out at: www.beadiesbeadwork.com/miyukicubes1.shtml

Dell just announced they would resume offering Windows XP as an operating system for new computer buyers. Previously they were offering Vista only.

Apparently consumer response was less than enthusiastic.

I had some experience with this. My mother recently bought her first laptop from Dell. She didn't ask for my help in picking it out. I was surprised when the laptop arrived with Vista pre-installed. She lives far away and helping her out over the phone has been difficult, as I do not have any machines with Vista installed.

I really wish they had done this a few months ago. It's probably too late to install XP on her computer now. Too bad (for me).

Delica charts

Beadie's Beadwork has some great high quality Delica Charts. They have ultra high quality images of all 800 plus Delica colors, and are printed on HP Premium plus Photo glossy paper.
Size 8 charts available too!
http://www.beadiesbeadwork.com/delicaChart.htm

Welcome

This is the introductory posting to the Beadie's Blog, hosted on blogger.com

I will be posting all sorts of stuff here, some related to the world of seed beads and delica beads, some not.