Morning pages

Lambo1, my six-GPU cryptocurrency mining rig, is operational again, fans running incessantly across the room. After a false start with RaveOS, I was able to get it up and running with SimpleMiner yesterday, finally getting it up and running mining BEAM, which is a new one for me. Getting it up and running was a bit of a challenge, both the node and the wallet. Apparently the wallet has to be online to receive a transaction, which is an issue with mining pool payouts. I’m not happy with my setup, running the node on my downstairs server with it’s old five hundred gigabyte SATA drives. I’m tempted to stand up a new cloud server to run all these blockchains, and I very may well do that since I have some Visual Studio Azure credits that I can put to use.

Bitcoin finally broke out a bit this week, ostensibly because off stimulus packages in Asia and the US. It’s a modest breakout, but we’ll have to wait and see if we threaten $10K again anytime soon. Patience.

Last night I combed through seven years of brokerage statements, making a spreadsheet of transactions that didn’t carry over from the Scottrade/TDAmeritrade merger. I want to add the activity to my total realized gains, so I can gauge my performance. My post-merger activity has outperformed the SPY by a significant margin since 2018, but carries a lot of purchases from before the merger, and I want to incorporate the gains and losses that I took before then. I haven’t finished calculating the numbers, however just looking through the transactions brought back a lot of memories, some good, some bad. There were a couple sales of some strong positions that I used to finance some other purchases that haven’t worked out well, so I might need to add some opportunity cost calculations to my spreadsheet. Also missing, dividends. There were just too many to go through, but I will likely need to incorporate it somehow. I’m wondering if there’s a proper application that I can use to incorporate all this historical data, or if I should write some custom software. After I figure all this out I want to dig up another, closed brokerage account going back to 2003. I’m sure I’ll be embarrassed by what I find there.

I finally registered my business as an LLC yesterday. I can’t even say how long that one has been on my list, but now I’ve got to prepare some documents before I kick off any of these new projects that I have to do. Only one of them is actually for hire, but I need to spend the time developing the documents for the next one, before I get sucked into another off-scope

Now that the last WordPress project is off my list, I’m enjoying being able to spend some time pulling whatever I want from my Kanban board. After having that project on there, staring at me for several weeks, it’s exhilarating to be able to work on something that’s not urgent. Seeing my rig sit there for weeks was starting to bother me, so I’m glad it’s back to work. There’s still a lot of work to be done. Being able to pull tasks from my backlog instead of having them pushed on me is a different type of feeling, and I like it.