Ted's Blog

Buy Low Buy High

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 19:24:53 -0500

Some of the best money I ever lost was when I sold Suntrust last year. I had bought it after Dad said it was probably ripe for a takeover that might increase its price. It had gone down lately, so I bought as many shares as I could with the money I had sitting around in my brokerage account: 19 shares at $77.06. That was in May 2006. It went up slowly but steadily and by the following year was at $90. My goal was to make 20%, so I wouldn't sell until it got to $93.28. Then it started going down. By October I was losing money. In November I decided to sell at a loss, $71.20. I say it was the best money I ever lost because it really started going down after that and every dollar it went down was a dollar I didn't lose.

Q2 Report

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:29:54 -0500

After horrible results in the first quarter of 2008, things got a lot better. A big part of this had to be going back and putting up my web pages on Speedfactory again. This caused some growth in traffic (still off from last year but holding steady at about 200 visitors a day), got most of my page rank back from Google, brought back my advertising deal, and seemed to cause a general increase in Amazon sales. For the quarter I had $2,700 in sales for commissions of $121.73. This is way off, but I didn't re-post at Speedfactory until the end of May. The most popular thing is still the Maxell battery pack, with 19 sold. I also sold 7 Griffin TuneJuice 2's, 7 PAC Sony-iPod adapters, and 5 Turbo Charge chargers. The most expensive thing sold were some Bose noise-canceling headphones. Other than a very weird book about exercise, the most unusual thing sold was a Magnum pepper mill for $31.

AdSense remained pretty anemic at less than $15 per month. Even though I deleted all of their ads off of the iPod battery pages in lieu of the new ads, revenue in June was still up a little bit from Dejumbler and iPod-Sony ads alone, perhaps because the higher page rank boosted the price of those ads.

New Office

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:06:38 -0500

Our office was located near the Capitol since the 1930's. For unknown motivations, a decision was made to rent some space in Atlanta. After looking at several spots, an office building in Midtown was picked and I am on the 24th floor. My office (actually a cubicle) has a south facing window that lets me see all of downtown. I used the camera to take multi-part panorama and then some Canon software to stitch the 3 separate photos together on my computer. The picture below represents my view looking South down West Peachtree Street. In real life there is more detail. For instance, to the right of the Westin Peachtree Plaza there is a building with a V shape on it. Just to the left of that building there is a tiny spec in the picture on the horizon. That spec is the Hartsfield-Jackson Airport control tower.

From Nicole to Ted

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 00:28:53 -0500

I got my first letter from Nicole yesterday. Unfortunately it was just after I had mailed my fifth letter to her (every Saturday so far!), so our communications are substantially crossed. In the letter she included my name in Armenian letters and signed it with her name in Armenian letters. Since I type my letters on the computer and I know that there are fonts built in to Windows with Armenian (unicode fonts like Arial), I started trying to figure out how to incorporate some Armenian letters in my letters.

Nicole

Նիկոլ

To create these letters on the web you have to know the 4-digit unicode number of each letter. Nicole's letters are: 1350, 1387, 1391, 1400, 1388. Each number has to start with an ampersand and pound and then end with a semicolon. It helps if you increase the size of the font.

Ted (1359-1383-1380)

Տէդ

To do the same thing in Word 2007, you have to use the hexadecimal version of the number. You just type it in, then you highlight the 4 letters and press ALT+X. The hex codes for Nicole are 0546-056B-056F-0578-056C. For Ted it is 054F-0567-0564. In previous versions of Word I was able to hold down ALT and then type in the 4-digit decimal number. When I let go of ALT the character appeared. Using Character Map is practically useless for this exercise.

It was helpful to refer to this page which lists all of the letters and codes as well as this page which includes the sounds each letter makes.

Now I need the word for "uncle."

Nice Picture

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 17:20:32 -0500

I was leaving the house today and there was a really neat butterfly on my purple cone flowers. In fact there were two of them. So I went back in the house and got the new camera, set it to macro, and tried it out. I don't think the butterflies liked the infrared autofocus, but they hung around long enough for me to get this one.

It seems to be an American painted lady, Vanessa virginiensis, in the family of brushfooted butterflies. It looks very different on top than on the underside of its wings which you see here.

I liked the picture so much that I cropped it and added it to my banner pictures at the top of the page. The pattern of the red-tipped flower spines is pretty dramatic up close along with the butterfly's pattern.

Signal Loops

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 22:22:20 -0500

We've been packing up stuff for our move at work this week. As part of that I've been going through trade magazines and catching up before throwing them out. One kind of interesting article concerned research into traffic detection loops in roads. As someone who rode scooters for years, I can attest that traffic signals that use detection loops can be very frustrating because the motorcycle doesn't always have enough iron in it to trigger the loop that sits in grooves cut in the pavement (even worse for bicycles). Therefore you get stuck at a red light that won't change until someone else drives up behind you (or you run the red light under the "malfunctioning traffic light" justification).

This article talked about changing the sensitivity of the loops, but it also pointed out that the best chance you have of being detected is to be right on top of the wire, whereas I guess I believed you should be in the center of the loop itself. Being in the center is actually one of the worst spots because it puts you the maximum distance from both sides of the wire loop.

Some signals use some kind of radar on the signal head itself that is pointed at the lane and therefore "sees" traffic waiting. The advantage there is that when you repave (every 5-10 years) you don't have to reinstall loops that typically get torn up or buried in a paving opeartion. I think those would be better at detecting motorcycles and bicycles too.

. . . and into the recycling bin it goes!

Light Bulbs

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 22:17:31 -0500

Tonight I went to Home Depot to get some 60 watt compact fluorescent bulbs and some 25 watt bulbs for my ceiling fan (which takes 3 lights and was down to 1 that worked). They had a special on the fluorescents: a 4-pack for $4.88. And they weren't even encased in a hermetically sealed consumer-proof plastic clamshell, nothing but cardboard. They're actually 14 watts and give off 60 watts of light (I wanted 75-watt equivalents but it was either 100 or 60). The stupid little fan lights use 25 watts and won't last nearly as long. And they cost almost as much: 4 bulbs for $3.68.

Your Mileage May Vary

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 19:00:35 -0500

Before filling the Mazda with gas, I figured I should have a range of about 360 miles on a tank of gas. That's 30 mpg times 12 gallons of gas. But as the fuel gauge sunk down, it looked like I wasn't going to hit 360. In fact I hit about 300 miles before the low fuel light came on. It took about 12 gallons to fill it which meant that I had only gotten 25 miles per gallon. I thought maybe the first tank wouldn't get good mileage or maybe the dealer hadn't really topped off the tank. But realistically I should have gotten much better mileage since a lot of the miles were on the highway between the dealer and on a trip to Athens for Michael's birthday.

So I was antsy as I watched the progress of the second tank. When the tank was half empty I had gone less than 150 miles. Some fuel gauges are off. As I got to a quarter tank and with gas prices expected to spike soon, I went ahead and filled up. With 197 miles on the trip odometer, I was hoping for about 7 gallons of gas to fill the tank. But soon it reached 8 gallons (down to 25 mpg) and then didn't stop until 8.8. I entered the numbers into my calculator right away and was disgusted: 22 miles per gallon.

Obviously from my posts on car shopping, mileage was very important to me. Based on user comments on internet forums, I was expecting 28 mpg and hoping to get 30 (the number Consumer Reports gave as the overall expected mileage), well above the EPA city estimate of 24. 22 is simply not acceptable (20% less than the 28 I expected), but I'm pretty much stuck with the car.

I think I will take it in for service and see if the dealership can find something wrong with it. Maybe one of the tires isn't spinning or the brakes are stuck or they left the oil out.

Text Message Spam

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 17:17:47 -0500

This weekend I got a series of text messages from 678-315-xxxx. It started with "Hey what's up?" Then I got two copies of the picture below (do you know this girl?). Then I got a longer message "Hey wesley its kirstin on ericas phone...im at the lake hizouse with her, and I don't get service down here...sorry..iloveyou"

I have no idea who this person or this number is, so I can only assume it is some kind of spam. There may be a chance that it is not since it is a local number. I don't know what Verizon charges for a text message (used to be 10 cents, now may be 25), but this spam has cost me (actually Jeb) from 40 cents to a dollar already.

New Camera

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 23:12:19 -0500

I wanted to get a digital camera before my trip to Ireland this Summer. Susan has a compact camera, so I was wanting something with a powerful zoom. I narrowed my choices down to two cameras: the Canon SX100IS and the Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ4K, both around $230. Neither has a viewfinder and instead rely on the LCD screen on the back. Both use SD cards. Both are 8 megapixel cameras with optical image stabilization and 10x zoom lenses. The Panasonic's lens varies from 28mm to 280mm while the Canon was 36 mm to 360 mm. That means the Panasonic can take wide angle shots, but the Canon can zoom things in closer. I liked the wide angle feature because sometimes you can't back up far enough to fit something in the frame. From reviews I found, both cameras were ranked pretty highly and people on Amazon liked them.

Back to Speedfactory

Tue, 27 May 2008 21:47:36 -0500

Last week I was doing an overdue update to my iPod battery pack page. Traffic has trickled off lately to 150 visits per day whereas before I moved everything to iGirder I was getting about 300. Part of the reason may have been that I hadn't updated the pages in a while, but the page just doesn't rank very high (I did get a payoff almost immediately when someone bought one of the new iPhone battery packs I wrote about for $50 yielding $3 in commissions). Overall revenue from AdSense and Amazon is down to about a third of what it used to be.

Zoom Zoom

Thu, 22 May 2008 21:29:08 -0500

I'm back from the dealer and am the proud owner of a Mazda 3! Everything went pretty smoothly. I got there at 7:00 and was out by 8:30. They didn't push warranties real hard or even explain a whole lot. The only glitches were the price was wrong, but we tracked that down to the car they were originally going to get that had the spoiler on it. Another glitch in the price was that $500 of the discount was a rebate, so they had to charge me a price $500 higher than I thought. While they would take the $500 off at the end (the dealer will actually receive the rebate), it meant I had to pay 7% sales tax on the $500. So that cost me $35. The last glitch was I wrote the check for the full amount I had to pay, forgetting about the $1000 I had already put down. The finance guy said I wrote the check for $1000 too much and I thought he was kidding. Eventually he said "No, really, this check is for the wrong amount." They said they could put a credit on my credit card, but I said I could just write a new check.

Car Clay

Wed, 21 May 2008 20:52:50 -0500

When I bought my car in 1998 the salesman said that I should make sure I put a good coat of wax on it. I waited a while and then I got sap on it and the paint job was never the same. Even when I did wax it, there were bumps and rough spots. With a new car on the way (probably tomorrow) I wanted to see what I needed to do to keep the finish in good shape even though the car will be in the sun all the time.

The internet is full of people who are insane about taking care of their cars. There are all kinds of different products out there, but one new thing to me was the idea of claying a car. It consists of applying some kind of liquid to the car and then rubbing clay on it. The clay isn't abrasive, but picks up specs of dirt that give a rough finish. It only picks up things that stick above the surface, so it isn't intended to fix scratches. It seemed pretty extreme, but as I read about it, it started to intrigue me. There are How-To clay videos about how to do it on You Tube. Meguiar's, a reputable "over the counter" car wax maker (as opposed to online only), sells a Smooth Surface Clay Kit that includes two blocks of clay (like modeling clay), the liquid, a buffing towel (it's all microfiber these days, no chamois), and some cleaner wax. I wound up visiting AutoZone last night and picked up a kit for $18.

Car Shopping Part 2

Thu, 15 May 2008 16:07:57 -0500

After looking closely at the Toyota Prius and Honda Civics in Part 1 I started looking very closely at the Mazda 3. The 3 comes in too many varieties to keep track of, but got good reviews in Consumer Reports with very good expected reliability. The mileage was just a mile per gallon or two less than the Civic, but it has more horsepower and therefore better acceleration. By choosing a manual transmission, the mileage should still be very good, around 27 mpg to the Civic's 28. While the Civics were running around invoice price, the 3 is selling below invoice due to some dealer incentives. The guy at the dealer said via e-mail that his offer was for me to build any type of Mazda3 I wanted and he would take $2,000 off the MSRP, putting it below invoice. For about the same price as the Civic LX without a sunroof, I could get the 3 with a sunroof and a stereo that holds 6 CD's (including MP3-encoded CD's). Like with Honda, I could get 1.9% financing for up to 36 months. So I can finance $11,000 and pay about $320 a month. Then I only have to come up with $7,000 in cash.

Bluejay Babies

Wed, 14 May 2008 19:03:25 -0500

In the last couple of weeks, any time I would let the dogs out in the backyard, a robin would start yelling at me. Also I saw a broken eggshell where a baby robin had hatched. So I was on the lookout for a nest. This morning I found one in the branches of my maple tree in the back. But the bird sitting on the nest was gray, not a robin. This afternoon I noticed the mother bird was gone so I got the camera and ladder and went up to check out what was there. The babies (3 or 4) opened their mouths when I came up. But before I could snap their pictures, their parents came around yelling at me. Bluejays! The father actually smacked into my head a couple of times. With them yelling the babies crouched down in the nest. I still got a picture:

Here's another one taken May 23, getting feathers:

By May 29, the nest was empty but the parents were still hanging around and protective. I found a fledgling under the tree hidden in the ivy: