Month: April 2008

Yesterday afternoon, I heard news that Senators McCain and Clinton, two of the political candidates for President of the United States, supported a “vacation” from gasoline taxes from Memorial Day through Labor Day.

This is a bad idea.

1. If we simply sacrifice $10B from the highway budget, as McCain recommends, the American consumer still pay the price in vehicles damaged by under-maintained highways. Or, if we instead transfer money from the “general fund” to pay for such a holiday, we’re adding more to the national deficit. Yep, let’s borrow imaginary money together.
2. If we, as Clinton recommends, instead fund that $10B in “windfall profits” from oil companies benefiting from the enormous hike in gasoline prices over the past year, we are encouraging those companies to take a lesson from enormous defense-contractor Halliburton: De-list in the US, and list their companies in some other country with more friendly taxation policies.
3. Didn’t either of these two politicians take basic economics? Oil prices rise during the summer due to increased demand. Refineries and distributors commonly experience shortages during the summer due to this seasonal demand peak in the largest gasoline-consumption market in the world. Many families reduce their usage during peak-demand times due to the high price of gas. If the price of gasoline drops 18.5c per gallon, demand will rise considerably, resulting in a much smaller break for the taxpayer, and a considerable profit increase for the gasoline vendor.
4. The Highway Administration is already $3.4B short of what they need to keep US highways maintained. For every dollar spent by this particular administration, nearly $6 is generated in revenue by the use of the roads.
5. Such a tax break does not address the fundamental issue behind rising gas prices, that all the candidates are conveniently ignoring: the value of the dollar has gone down tremendously in the past 18 months. Contrary to some government-paid analyst announcements, I don’t believe it’s due to “rampant speculation” on the dollar. Such a large shift — half the value of our currency — represents a fundamental money-policy change. The most logical explanation is that such a devalued dollar serves our national interests at the moment: increased exports, increased jobs, and easier repayment of the national debt.

This almost makes me want to make a break from my position of studied neutrality on the Democratic front and side with Senator Obama. (I oppose McCain principally on the basis that he has publicly stated his intention to “bomb Iran” if he takes office.) Obama is the only one of the three who seems to have the backbone to oppose such political pandering on economic grounds. He alone seems to graps the economic reality of such a “tax holiday” amounting only to a bump in profits for the gasoline vendors, shifting the burden of the cost either to the very consumers the policy is trying to help

Just like he was the sole US senator to oppose going to war with Iraq.

So I upgraded my venerable Raptor 30 v1 to a Raptor 46 (approximately a six-pound helicopter with a five-foot rotor span). It has some issues with the engine when I tried to fly it recently at the field, so I took it home and fixed a few things here and there. It turns out I’d lost the two screws holding in the carburetor on my OS .46FX-H; I pillaged another set from my similar aircraft motor. I bought a brand-new high-performance muffler, got it attached, and started running it up and checking things out.

I was out in my back yard doing a few test hops, getting the mix just right so that I had good head speed, pitch-pumping to listen to the engine and hear where it bogged, you know the drill. I had it just about dialed in. Second tank of fuel, I landed, adjust my throttle curve to get my new motor running at the right RPM, stood back, and applied a little collective. It got about two feet above the ground, right where I wanted it, so I backed off just a tad… and it kept rising.

I jammed throttle hold. No response. Total radio lockout. Zero control. The helicopter looked for all intents like it was going to fly to the moon. It described a gentle arc at probably forty to fifty miles an hour, sailed right over my house, then slammed upside-down into my front yard, ricocheted into the air on a bounce that went for fifty-four horizontal feet, landed on its skids, and proceeded to spin madly on until the motor quit.

Well, all in a day’s work, right? Expensive lesson in radio lockout, but it could have been worse.

Much worse.

There were eight children playing near my front yard. Four of them were mine. This helicopter, luckily, missed all the kids and the four adults doing yard work to slam into my yard and flip end-over-end out into the cul-de-sac.

If it had struck any person on its way toward beating itself to death, I’d have been devastated. I really like my neighbors. I really love my children and my wife. This big beast could have killed any one of them a few minutes ago.

Yet I was following AMA safety guidelines. I was over 100 feet from my house, and over 200 feet from the eventual point of impact. I had kicked my kids out of the acreage behind my house, counting on distance and objects to limit the possibility of damage to anybody other than me. I’d counted on a lot of things… but not a radio lockout sending the heli sailing in a rainbow arc toward family members and neighbors.

Upon further investigation, I think I found the cause of the lockout. I have a bad cell in my NiCD Rx pack, which seemed to hold a good surface charge, but dropped voltage under load. I believe the voltage hit the magic “don’t run below 4.5v” mark for my Spektrum receiver, rendering the receiver and all servos inoperable while it spent five seconds reconnecting.

I should have cycled the pack.

I almost hit someone because I didn’t cycle my pack.

I feel like crap.

Ran across a blog entry discussing the experiences of one geek’s girlfriend trying Linux for the first time. Verdict?

The main issue with the desktop experience is that the geeky programmers and designers assume too much from the average user. They assume the user knows about the way in which programs are installed, or how the file system is set out. The average user will not go out of their way to google for help or even read the associated documentation that comes with Ubuntu and its default software. The little information pop-ups and guided wizards are critical to explaining how the user can accomplish the basic tasks they most probably are trying to do.

I’d love to see a welcome screen for the first time you open up your desktop, with little videos explaining a few key concepts to how Linux and Ubuntu work. Maybe it could ask “What do you want to do?” and then explain how they could do this.

Linux won’t truly be ready for the desktop until someone computer illiterate can sit down at a the computer and with little effort do what they want to do. Erin’s intelligent, quick to learn and is reasonably well-acquainted with modern technology. If she had as much trouble as she did, what chance to the elderly or at least the middle-aged stand?

I have to say, I basically agree with his assessment. If you want to make it really usable, you have to make it really simple — like the Author matthewPosted on April 28, 2008February 1, 2026

OK, yeah, I know, I’m talking about the weather. But this is the first beautiful weekend of the year in Salt Lake. Mid fifties, light winds, few clouds… and lots of smog.

You can’t have everything, I guess.

A lot of people will make a (virtual) fortune in Stock and Forex “demo” trading accounts, then wonder why it doesn’t pan out in their real-life accounts. Well, here are a few reasons why (from a ForEx perspective)

1. Spreads don’t mirror real-life spreads in demo accounts. Often, they’ll give you exactly what they advertise in a demo account. This ignores the fact that during news-heavy days or heavy trading the spreads increase, possibly stop-lossing or margin-calling your position right before the expected long/short run.
2. “Slippage”. This refers to the fact that in very fast-moving markets, automated trading platforms can’t actually find a buyer or seller in time to divest you of your position. This can — and will — mess up your money-management calculations.
3. Of the few who back-test their trading strategies, many don’t trade their backtest platform during the same times or from data provided by the same market-maker.

These are just a few reasons that I see for nice-performing demo accounts to fall apart in live trading. I’m still playing in the demo-world at the moment, gaining and losing thousands of virtual dollars until I get a better handle on what it is I’m doing. Even with my brief exposure to the market, though, I’m seeing how the players at the table get cleaned out again and again despite their best bullet-proof “systems”.

It pays to bet small when you’re the newbie.

My brother Jay posted a brief tutorial on the Rule of 72 on his new blog, Getting Richer Today. It’s a travelogue of sorts, with blog entries as indicators along the way for his path from middle-class to upper-class. I don’t know if he’ll make it or not — neither does he, really — but it’s fun learning new things along the way toward gaining complete control over your finances.

Recently, I’ve begun experimenting with a free foreign exchange trading account with OANDA. You might wonder about my silence on the blog lately… between several jobs, learning about financial markets, flying model airplanes, and keeping up on my reading, I just haven’t been really interested in the blog.

You know how it goes. By this fall when the weather cools off, I’ll resume my normal 5-days-a-week blogging. But in the interim, I thought I’d provide this useful link for those wishing a free, never-expiring paper-trading account for ForEx:

https://fxtrade.oanda.com/your_account/login.shtml?account=fxgame&type=trading_platform

Five reasons I like Oanda:

1. You can specify arbitrary sizes for your trades. So rather than specifying, say, 7 lots of 10,000, you can leverage one trade to 70,000 shares, or even pick an arbitrary lot size like 35,768. This is HUGE, because it means there’s really no distinction between a “mini” account or standard. You set your thresholds exactly where you want them.
2. FXGame never expires, even if you don’t put money into your OANDA account. I now want to put real money into my OANDA account, because they’ve been so friendly about letting me have a free paper-trading account for as long as I want to practice.
3. Lowest spread on EUR/USD that I’ve seen.
4. The Java client is compatible across Linux, Windows, and Mac. I had real problems with the Java client for Thinkorswim.com on Linux, which is my main comparison point. On the plus side, Thinkorswim works great on Mac as well as Windows.
5. Better implementation of Ichimoku Kinko Hyo, the main trading indicator I’m working with. It lets you specify values for trading windows A, B, and C, rather than only A and B like some other trading platforms.

Too bad it doesn’t let me set my trailing stop loss automagically. Then it would be just about perfect. As it is, if I want to adjust a trailing stop loss on FXGame, I have to do it manually. No biggie, but my co-workers might wonder what I’m doing a couple of times a day 🙂

Heard on the news today:

Your average outpatient today would have been hospitalized in the 1970s. Today’s average inpatient would have been in ICU. Today’s ICU patient in the 1970s would have been dead.

The discussion centered around the current nursing shortage in the USA. According to this woman in her sixties — I don’t remember her name — the current ratio is something like 7 or 8 patients per nurse, varying a little better during the day and a bit worse at night. California controversial law, apparently, mandates a minimum 1:5 ratio for nurses to patients in medical/surgical, and 1:2 in ICU.

Is it really true that your average ICU patient from, say, 1975 is in regular inpatient care, while those in today’s ICU would have been dead then? Is this ostensible increase in survival rates due to nurse staff increases, technology advancements, medical inventions, or something else? Or a combination of the three?

I’m interested in knowing just how true this quote is. Mortality statistics from hospitals, however, are a little difficult to quantify for your Joe-Average blogger.

For those interested in how a high-end lithium polymer pack is constructed, I ran across this video disassembly of a Kong Power Lithium Polymer battery pack.

Yeah, I know, not really interesting to a lot of us, but the useful thing is that it dispels rumors about the pack that it had cardboard to disguise puffing batteries, among other issues. I prefer packs that use PCBs rather than just soldering the poles together, as it’s easier to repair or modify the pack if necessary. I also think that I prefer packs with spacers inside, because the few batteries I’ve run to over 300 cycles all had spacers, while among those which didn’t last as long, none did.