Serious Back Pain

I have had chronic but intermittent bad to serious to severe back pain for thirty years now. It returned last Sunday night. I was sitting in the easy chair (known to be dangerous for my back) for much of the day. A little after 10 PM I got up to put the laptop back on the desk and got a flash of server pain in the same place I always get the pain. It almost dropped me to the floor. In fact I would have gone down but for the expensive equipment in my hands.

I had a very difficult night, and was barely able to get out of bed in the morning. There was no way I could go to work. In fact, I was not able to go to work any day this week.

Web 2.0 and stock watching

When my dad died I received a small inheritance from his IRA. It had been all invested in (bad) index funds (see below). I let those ride for 90 days and then sold them. While I had them though, I tracked them manually with Yahoo Finance and Google Docs, by setting up a spreadsheet which calculated the net change month to month of each, and the annualized change. I had to enter the monthly prices of each for the spreadsheet to do the calculation though.

I just discovered Google's Finance blog, which appears to have code that will automate that process (and probably more). It's Web 2.0 also. So it's an opportunity for me to play with one technique to help me track and learn something else. (Not that I've replaced the sold index funds with anything else at this point.)

Better Living Through Chemistry

Last night I was able to help Chuck Goolsbee with a little advice about his home chemistry program for converting waste vegetable oil to usable oil for diesel engines. Thanks for the nice compliment!

OmniGraffle Extras

Was reading Global Guerrillas this morning and JR wrote a post saying that he thinks Omni Graffle is

...the best drawing and diagramming tool ever...

Good for the OmniCrew to get the recognition, and it's interesting to observe the ongoing development of somebody else who is discovering how much more useful OSX and its associated tools are than Windows.

But that's not my story here. I thought I'd write a comment about OG Pro and hopped over to the site to get the info. While there I saw a link to Omni Graffle Extras and realized that I've never looked for the extras for OmniGraffle. I dropped into that and found some cool stencils and scripts. Downloaded a bunch of interesting sounding extras (Maps, WorldMaps, AddressBookChart, CashFlow, Periodic Table, Walkthroughs, Origami, etc) and now have to start experimenting with them.

In fact, the first experimenting I have to do is with one of the extras that is a tutorial for how to best use and implement OG and OGP. This could be really helpful and useful, especially for this graphically-impaired word person...

Addition: Graffletopia

Surf report Saturday

Writing on Sunday about surfing Saturday morning. A colleague is here in Santa Monica from
Cambridge and wants to learn how to surf. He dropped into cubicleland on Friday and I showed him some of the important websites (e.g. CDIP) to refer to when prepping for going out. Being an analyst, I also described to him how to analyze the data - tides, swell, time of day, wind - to have a good idea of what to expect. Much of it went over his head, but at least he's not completely in the dark.

On Saturday we went out, 8 AM. He did not have a wetsuit, but the water is warm and so I took him out sans wetsuit. Also, I put him on a boogie board for his first go-out, so I could watch him handle himself in the water and start to teach him a bit about reading the incoming swell. Also, having a first-timer go out on a boogie is easier for them to feel the incoming energy and learn how to adjust to it without the extra problem of going from prone to standing up while the board is accelerating and changing angle of attack.

At about :30 minutes out I switched him over to my long board, and by the end of an hour (he was cold by then) he'd already caught and stood up on two waves. Woohoo!

From there we went back home and showered off, then down to Horizons West where we bought him a spring suit. Since he's here for the next two months on an exchange program, I decided to show him around town a bit. We walked south on Main from H.W. to Finn MacCool's Irish Pub, a block past Ocean Park Blvd., and back. I think he enjoyed the walk and the tour.

I decided to lend him my longboard for a few days while we look for a board for him to buy. (I was not able to go out Sunday morning and he wanted to.) Back to my place and we loaded up the longboard into my car and returned him to his place north of Wilshire.

Being Dutch he is also looking for a bicycle to get around town with, and I've introduced him to the Big Blue Bus as well.

So many movies, so little time...

The new Jason Bourne movie, The Bourne Ultimatum, opened at 12 AM last night locally and is playing locally. That's a must-see for me (Salon review). I plan to see the new Harry Potter movie in 3D at the local IMAX theater in Culver City. Also in the "want to see" category...

• The Simpsons Movie
• Transformers
• La Vie en Rose (fr)
  
• Goya's Ghosts
• Knocked Up
• El Cantante
• Once
• My Best Friend (fr)
• Moliere (fr)
• The Long Goodbye
• Paris, je t'aime (fr)
• Pirates of the Caribbean

Some of the above are high priority and some are low, but even the high priority titles are a long list.

Flat City

Surf check this morning and the surf is so small that it was like a lake. I was going to post a picture from the CDIP, but it seems to be down. Waah.

Summer surf

Saturday morning went surfing with Stephane. He was supposed to arrive at 8:30, but I called him at 7:30 and "appealed" to him to get down here. He arrived at 8 and we were in the water by 8:30. Stayed in the water until 10:30, by which time the meager but fun waves were few and far between. It was still great conditions, but the high tide had the waves pushed up to the beach so they were essentially shorebreak, and I was getting bored.

Lots of people out though, probably more than I've been in the water with in decades. But the crowd was having fun, and there was a camaraderie that I just don't expect. Crash was out (I don't know his real name, just know him as Crash.) And he was getting rides even in the small waves. He had several students with him, mostly advanced beginners.

The water was so warm that many people were in trunks. I wore my spring suit and actually had to splash water on my back several times to cool off. There were quite a few femmes out in the water too, which was nice. It helped that they were having fun, and generally joined in the camaraderie. (It also helped that they were good looking!)

The south swell expected from Tropical Storm Dalila hasn't yet shown up, and as the storm is degrading it's quite possible that the swell will never materialize. Oh well.

Loser stocks, loser stockbroker

Yesterday marked the end of Month 3 since the broker at Wachovia (Santa Barbara branch) informed me of the contents of the investment account I was to inherit after my father's death. I tracked the 4 funds and 1 stock for these three months to see how they performed.

Of the 5, one was flat (less than 0.1% increase in three months) and all the others had lost money. In fact, all the others had lost money at an annualized rate of more than 12%. To add insult (and further injury) to injury, they were all items that had high management fees attached. And in fact these had been losers for the entire three months that I tracked them, while the stock market itself had been on a wild increase for the same time.

It is unbelievable to me that a professional investment adviser would have initially chosen and continued to stay with things such as this. It's unconscionable and in my opinion professionally negligent. My further opinion is that the guy is incompetent, but my father stayed with him because he has a nice Irish-sounding name.

I called the guy's assistant Naomi on the exact 3-month "anniversary" day and told her to tell Brian to sell everything. That day. She asked (courteously, which is more than I can say for him) why, and I told her "Because they are all losers". I think she is his assistant because she is in training to become a broker. I hope I have illustrated for her a bit of what happens to an incompetent when a no-BS person comes along.

I got the account statement first thing the next week, and took it to my guy. He seems better, but he also seems spread far too thin by his company. So I'll have to make most of my own assessments and decisions, and just tell him what to do and when to do it. I'm still playing the unsophisticated and semi-ignorant investor-dude for all of them, just to see how I get treated. But at least I got out from under the Wachovia loser.

Beer Goggles

El Borracho sunglasses by Bolle, from REI.

Why would anybody call a product "The Drunkard" is beyond me. But for some adolescent reason I still find it quite humorous.

(Link is liable to rot at any time.)

Alienated? Who, me?

I was reading Kathryn Cramer's weblog and came across a mention of the Alienation Index, a site that purports to calculate one's level of alienation from things social. My scores:

Meaninglessness = 9
Cultural Estrangement = 21
Powerlessness = 18
Normlessness = 12
Estrangement from Work = 11
Social Isolation = 14

And the key:

Scores should range between 5 and 25.
Scores from 5 to 11 could be considered "low,"
from 12 to 18 "moderate,"
and from 19 to 25 "high."

It's odd, because I don't feel alienated.

(No) surf report

These days I have a nearly desperate need to get some waves, but there has been no surf in a couple of weeks. Went down to the beach this morning and it was so small that it was simply not worth going out even to get wet.

Argh.

Pray for surf... ;-)

real estate and living: LA vs. Paris

I found a very interesting article in the NY Times about an LA woman who has a pied-a-terre in Paris. It's not very big and not well placed in the building (lousy views) but it was affordable, is an income property (rentable to short-term expat Americans) and provides a place to land in the times she goes to Paris from LA to stay for awhile.

I look at it also as a hedge against the outrageous and out of control real estate market here in L.A. That is, LA's RE market is still vastly overpriced, and quite unstable. And the US - both the real estate market and as a place to live - is (I believe) increasingly untenable. That's not something I ever would have told my dad when he was here, but I'll say it here. (Since nobody reads this but the bots anyway, it doesn't matter. )

When M. goes back this September I'm going to have her check the prices and we'll consider buying something there as a place to go to in case we might have to go back for any reason. I'd certainly miss the climate and the geography here, but it's weird to think that Paris is a more affordable city to live than the huge city of Los Angeles.

I feel safer already

Two weeks ago I flew to San Francisco to undergo* training on the new Microsoft SharePoint 2007 (MOSS). I got into SFO, collected my luggage and took a shuttle to the hotel. When I opened my bag, I instantly noticed that things were amiss. And the "Items may shift during flight..." warning was not to blame.

As I slowly took things out of the suitcase I noticed more and more amiss, for instance the toiletries bag is a small internal bag that snaps into the top of the case, and it was detached and buried in the other stuff.

I wasn't worried about anything being stolen as I hadn't taken anything valuable. Though I was genuinely puzzled it occurred to me that maybe the cargo monkeys had chosen my bag to rifle in a search for valuables to steal.

But finally at the bottom of all the stuff, and apparently tossed in after the stuff had been extracted but before it was replaced, was this charming little card from My Government.


*If it seems like I'm unhappy about this Microsoft bundle of bits, it's because I am. Learning a Microsoft program is like getting brain surgery to rewire one's neurons so as to not think so logically or brilliantly.

hot summer, cool music

One reason I like living in Santa Monica is the free summer concerts on the Pier, the Twilight Dance Series. This summer we get some acts that I know and like: David Lindley, Queen Ida and Los Lobos (!). Also playing for the 10 night spread are some names I don't know, but the genres look fun. Every Thursday evening starting 7:30 PM.

Thou Shalt Keep Right...

The Vatican has issued the 10 Commandments for Drivers. Personally, I think it should start:
1. Thou shalt keep right except for passing.

Surf

Finally got back in the ocean yesterday after a couple of months. A colleague from the European office is here for induction training, and another mutual colleague recommended she contact me to get some surfing lessons.

No problem! It's much easier to motivate myself to go out when I'm helping someone learn to surf.

Surf was about 2-3 foot windswell, even though the CDIP shows a substantial NW swell offshore. The wind was about 5 kts. from the NW which bumped up the sea surface a bit but not too badly.

We got into the water about 5:15 PM, and there was nobody else out. This was good, as it gave me some time to teach P. some of the techniques of using a bodyboard. Within half an hour there were about 5 guys out on standup boards, but I was getting more and better rides. (The advantage of a body board in small sloppy waves...)

We'll probably go out again this afternoon, and are planning to go out again tomorrow afternoon.

Fast Food = Bad News

Following on Morgan Spurlock's movie "Super Size Me!", recent scientific research provides more evidence that fast food is bad for mammals. Report in Science News.

Polynesian chickens

Science News has an article reporting that recent research seems to show that chicken bones dug up in a Latin American site have the same DNA print as chicken DNA from Polynesia. This seems might be significant evidence that the Polynesians travelled to Latin America between 600 and 2,000 years ago.

There are some dissenting archaeologists, but this is pretty interesting if it is eventually confirmed.

Road Trip for SharePoint

I spent the past week (Sunday night 3 June to Friday night 8 June) in San Francisco doing a one-week training class in the new SharePoint 2007. I learned a fair amount, but I'm certainly not overwhelmed. Whelmed is more like it.

It is useful, but Microsoft has made it too complex for most people so I don't see it getting the kind of use they hope for. Furthermore, they've made significant parts of it compatible only with Windows and Internet Explorer. More specifically, they've built wiki and weblog functionality into it, but to use the formatting options you have to have Win/IE. It won't work with Firefox or Macintosh, unless one types in raw html.

I guess its MS' way of putting the world on notice that we are still expected to use only Windows and only Internet Explorer.