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Morning pages

Good morning, good morning. I’ve been sleeping in till the luxurious time of 7AM here the past couple nights, which is the first time in many weeks that my body has settled into a rhythm. I’ve been taking a 5mg melatonin tablet at ten and reading until eleven. No dreams that I can remember. It seems if I want to get up at five and still be rested, I’ll need to start going to bed earlier.

I can’t believe it’s Friday already. The week has been a blur. I think I closed more deals at work than I have in a long time, and I’ve got enough project work that I should be good for the next three months. I just need to make sure we don’t have any more firefighting episodes like we did yesterday.

I spent most of last night fretting over my WordPress client. I have an issue with setting up a staging site in Infinite WordPress that has been causing me no end of problems, and is keeping me from delivering on the promise I made to get a membership module installed by the end of the week. I had briefly considered deploying S2Member on the live site (because it’s free,) and even installed it before becoming overwhelmed by the options and quickly uninstalling it. I’m going shell out the $150 for Memberpress instead, as the reviews said that it’s easier to use. I just have to get a proper staging site setup and figure out a way to push changes to the live site. IWP is supposed to be able to manage this, and the same company has a WPMerge module as well, but given the tenuous relationship I have with the client right now, I’m hesitant to put any money toward this. But it’s probably the right thing to do.

This project is literally consuming all of my time in the evenings for the past few days, and with work kicking up a notch, and personal responsibilities piling up, I’m not sure if I’m making any progress toward my goals. I just got back from vacation, and I already feel like I need another break.

Life isn’t all work, as much as it seems. I’ve been reading Ron Chernow’s Hamilton biography at lunch and in the evening. It’s the book that inspired Lin Manuel’s broadway play, and after watching it over the weekend I decided to read it. I’m about seventy pages in and enjoying it.

I’m going to go ahead and get cracking this morning, and open a ticket with IWP about this staging issue I’m having, and communicate to the client what I’m planning to do with Memberpress. Then maybe I can have a light day for Zombie, LLC. I’ve got some purchasing stuff to attend to. Maybe I can give myself some slack today to recharge a bit and work on my other tasks, and give the kids a bit more attention today.

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My process isn’t perfect, it’s progress

two people drawing on whiteboard

Work comes in, hopefully it comes out at some point

For the second night, I’ve had strange dreams. This time, I went back to work at my old enterprise job, where I worked in the late Aughts. I was fired from this job, so a lot of people were surprised to see me. There’s not a lot else to say besides some vivid imagery, but it’s interesting since Missus has been having strange dreams lately as well. Is this normal when coming back from vacation?

The last twenty four hours has been intense. I had a rough meeting with my WordPress consulting client last night, and he told me via text that he wanted to terminate our contract. We had another call this morning, and I basically refused to let him fire me, since I need to finish this project just to have one under my belt. Basically, I was focusing on getting a redesign done, and spending most of my time trying to figure out frameworks, while they mostly wanted me to restore some functionality to the site, and cared nothing for a redesign. So basically I’m going to wind up pulling this thing to some sort of completion by the end of the month.

And to compound measures, I got a text last night about an outage at Zombie, LLC’s current cornerstone client. I ignored it, thinking it was just another intermittent internet outage, and by the time I signed on (early) this morning they were in the midst of a tier 1 outage. Turned out that the battery backup failed and the servers had no power. It only took me a few minutes to restore service, but it added to an ongoing loss of confidence in the outsource helpdesk that we’re using, and, by extension, us.

I wound up getting a lot done today, all things considering, moving tasks around on my work Kanban, getting several things done. I can definitely see a difference in my focus. I’m spending longer on tasks and driving them further to completion, instead of just dropping them at the first opportunity. instead of doing the requisite tasks that passes for progress on a task, I’m thinking whether something is done, or whether there’s something else that is going to require follow up in the next month, and found myself driving things as far as I could to prevent further work down the line.

It’s the second day using Kanban at home. I managed to find some more Post-Its this morning and even put together one for Younger with the letters of the alphabet on them. Choosing tasks for WIP is a bit of negotiation with the girls, since we’ve only got space for three of them, and one gets taken up by DAY JOB, when Missus and I are working.

She’s been really vocal about sending the kids back to day care. They’re especially difficult to handle since we got back from vacation and our quarantine family down the street has gone off on theirs. They were at each other’s throats several times today, and I haven’t been able to spend as much time with them this week, as busy as I’ve been. Thankfully Missus’s schedule has been somewhat light. I told her that the past few months I’ve finally felt like I was back on track financially for the first time since we moved into this house. I’ve got my bills budgeted out a month in advance now, and actually made a contribution to my IRA for the first time in a couple years, with along with a small Bitcoin surge yesterday brought me over six figures for the first time ever.

She’s right though, I don’t know how much of this is sustainable. We’ve got two months left of summer, and still no official word from the state as to what school is going to look like for Elder. If she goes, her sister will have to. There’s absolutely no way that we can both work from home and keep her occupied and out of trouble. We’ll have to wait and see, but getting her on the waitlist at day care for the fall might not be a bad idea.

It’s dusk now, the kids are in bed, and I’m sitting here on my deck, which is literally falling apart following several years of neglected maintenance. Who knew you were supposed to seal your wood every year? And there goes another large project that is going to take considerable time or money to resolve. Another Post-It on the wall, another project to go over this weekend.

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Casa kanban-a

two blue and red Sharpie pens

Getting ready to decorate the walls

Forgive the horrible pun, my head is already swimming with things I have to do, and this morning I’m already trying to remember where the Post-Its are so I can convert my dining room wall into a operations board. I even had an idea to put the letters of the alphabet in lanes to track which ones my four-year old knows. That might not be a bad idea, actually. There’s a chair guard running across the middle of the wall, I could put Elder’s above the guard and Younger’s below, household stuff on the other wall. If anything, it would allow the kids to visualize not just their work but all of ours as well. Maybe it would help them realize just how much work there is to be done around here. We’ll give it a try.

I went to bed a quarter after ten last night, slept well for the most part as Missus and Younger were in the other room. I woke up just after four this morning from a dream where I had sold my car to an ex-girlfriend that I haven’t seen in near twenty years. I’m not even going to try and analyze that one… Four is just too early for me at this point, so I went back to sleep and got up an hour later.

A lot of things came up in my head during meditation. I’ve got a lot on my plate today, including an important client meeting for Zombie. I had a call yesterday with the head of what is now Zombie’s current cornerstone client, and it went pretty well, but I’m not ready to rename them quite yet. We had some conversations about doing some WordPress SEO work yesterday, so that was interesting. Keeping work and side work separate is becoming a bit more difficult.

Besides work work, I’ve got weekly work meeting with my current WordPress development client tonight, and a hard date to get the new deployment up by the end of the month. It’s doable, but I have to get them to understand that launching isn’t the end of the process, it’s the beginning. I’ve been struggling to find some good resources for “web design” that aren’t just about the how-to technical process, but about the higher level stuff where I’m lacking. Most books and courses that I’ve been coming across are tech tutorials, but I’m looking for something different at this point. I suppose it falls more along UI/UX design than anything else at this point. Hopefully we’ll be able to start converting some of the traffic that the current design is getting after relaunch.

I’m way overdue with my Substack, so I need to spend another hour on that. I’ve got a couple ideas to add to my review of The Phoenix Project so that it’s more newsletter-y. Yes, one of them is about kanbans, and I might add a response to an email that I got from the last issue that went out. And I’ve got to figure out a pipeline for them so that I’m not always behind. Since I can’t add capacity, I’m going to have to reduce the frequency (bi-monthly?) or the amount of content. I had the thought or releasing one issue publicly on LinkedIn, and making the second for email subscribers only? We’ll play around with it.

Anyways, Elder is up early, so that means I’m done here for today. Off to find the Post-Its.

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Exhaustion!

grayscale photo of girl doing face palm

When getting things done turns into getting things done

I’m not sure what did it today, but I am B-E-A-T. I woke up at five AM and went back to sleep before finally getting up and starting my day. I worked on my Substack instead of writing here, writing a short review of The Phoenix Project. I’ve got more to write, this week’s (or is it last week’s?) post will likely be three shorter segments instead of one long one like I’ve been doing. I just got to keep writing.

Work really kicked my ass. I had clients texting me near the end of the day yesterday, so I got an early start. It didn’t end until almost three. Missus is still on leave from work, so she managed the kids, so managed to get a lot done. A LOT. I started reading Personal Kanban last night, so I decided to give Microsoft Planner another shot, and started by creating three lanes: to do, in progress, and done. I limited my work in progress to four items, and started cracking. It helped me stay focused, and I managed to move four tasks to the done lane. I’m going to leave them there till next week, so I can see what kind of progress I’m making.

I’m going to have to create another board for my work outside of Zombie, LLC. I’ve been using Trello to try and keep track of things that Missus and I are dealing with, but it’s devolved into a bit of a mess. When I heard that Personal Kanban is a bit of an evolution over Getting Things Done I became really interested as I’ve never been able to really make GTD click. I started really trying to give it a go a few months back, and kept writing things down on index cards, going over them once a week at our review. I tried sorting the cards in a small recipe box, but they just got too many and I couldn’t keep them sorted. Our current system involves writing new tasks on cards, then processing the cards into Trello during the weekly review. I tried to have lanes for the various tasks based on category, and one lane for doing/to do, but this lane soon became populated with things that we just want to put off further and further down the road, like replacing the deck, or other expensive projects. It has been successful in getting some of our recurring duties on a calendar, like balancing the house accounts, or weed eating the yard.

I also really like Nirvana. It’s a great app, and seems to be geared well toward the GTD methodology, but when it came time to choose something to manage the house, I went with Trello instead. I think it’s time to go back to using a wallboard. Take the tech out of the equation completely until we get into a rhythm and have something that works. Having it in Trello means that I’m the only one that’ll do it, and looking at it once a week isn’t really helping us keep on top of things.

If today is any indication, it looks like I may wind up with a board for work, a board for family stuff, and a board for consult clients. I’m using Basecamp right now, and I’m not happy with the way my todo lists develop on there. I do love it for communication and client management though. If only my clients would use it more… I think that’s going to give me about twelve tasks for my work in progress across the board. That may be too much, but we’ll see how things go. Four for Zombie seems like a good number, but it already looks like blogging and the Substack are going to take up two of the slots for the consulting lane, so I’ll have to figure out a way to break the larger projects into smaller chunks if I’m going to be able to keep my capacity to a manageable level. Having FINISH PROJECT as a card isn’t really going to do it.

For today though, I’m going to turn in early, read a bit more and see what time I wake up tomorrow. I’ve not been very consistent at all, so I really have to make sure to turn in on time if I’m going to get up early enough to get things started. And tomorrow’s the last day that Missus is off work, so after that the kids are on me again. Missus is really pushing about having them go back to daycare, and I’m not really happy about that. I finally feel like I’m making progress, financially, and not looking forward to losing that money again. Part of me likes having the kids around, however there’s no denying that they distract me from work. Missus is concerned they’re missing out, especially that Younger isn’t going to have the educational head start that her sister did. I’m not as worried about that, but she’s the one with a background in early childhood development.

I think it’s more important to have them nearby and be able to bond with them, but that means that I’ve got to make sure that our interactions are positive. There’s just too much strife in the house. I don’t think it was any better when they were at school, to be honest, but taking breaks from work to talk, play, and care for them is probably better for my stress in the long run than just spending six or seven hours a day focused on work tasks. I’d say it gets easier, but I know it doesn’t. It just gets different.

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Vacation over

Time to soothe my sore muscles and get back in gear

I’m writing this morning from my father in law’s house up in the mountains. Yesterday we took the family on a seven mile canoe ride. It took us over five hours. The water level was pretty low in several places and our canoes kept hitting the bottom of the small rapids, so there was a lot of pushing and walking in places. Plus it seems we had to stop every half hour to feed the kids.

I dumped our small three-person kayak at stop, along with Missus and Younger. I was getting out to enjoy the water and threw her off balance. I jumped off between our kayak and the larger canoe, Missus was holding on to it in the front and my lunge simultanousley rocked her toward the other boat, which she was holding onto, and pushed her away from it, and it unbalanced her and tipped the whole thing over. Whoops.

We got out of the river just in time, we exited at a ramp under a bridge just as a heavy thunderstorm came over us. There was hail as well. We all piled into my car, which we had dropped off earlier in the day, wet as dogs, and drove back up river to retrieve the truck so we could come back and get the boats.

We spent the rest of the evening watching Hamilton, – it really is quite good – and slathering aloe vera on the spots on our bodies we had failed to cover with sunscreen. I passed out early and immediately after going to bed, and now the whole family save Elder is up, puttering about for breakfast.

Yesterday broke my writing streak. I forgot a plug for my laptop charger, so I have an excuse, but I still haven’t decided what to write for today’s Substack, and we have a three or four hour drive home ahead of us. I don’t know whether it’s better to write a short post and publish on time, or just start writing and publish it when it’s done. Quantity or quality, I suppose.

My FIL has a rental cabin that they manage through a third party site. He mentioned that they’re taking seven percent of his bookings, so I now have a third web development project in the hopper. I had better get cracking when we get back home.

First I have to get there, so I had best start getting things together: bags and cooler packed, car loaded, then get these kids fed and in the car. Then it’s back to the hustle and grind.

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Forth of July

black semi automatic pistol with pistol

Prepping for a road trip, and thinking about guns

Today we’re leaving on our trip. It’s only for two days, but making sure the house is ready and that we have everything we need is always an endeavor. Yesterday I tended to our plants, cut the grass, edged, and sprayed some weeds while the girls cleaned the house. Then I managed the girls investments and wrote up a brief for them on our home intranet. Then we had our quarantine family over. The kids watched TV and the four adults played a game of Settlers of Catan. It was the first time our neighbors had played, and it must have had the least amount of trading in a game that I’ve ever seen. By the ninety minute mark we just wanted it to be over as it was getting too late for the kids, and in the end D. won. Turns out it was his birthday too!

We’ve got a four hour drive ahead of us, and while the girls are finally old enough that we don’t need to take the drive while they’re sleeping, taking rest stops during the age of COVID is still stressful. The number of new cases in our state continues to trend in the low numbers, and has opened up to “Phase 3” reopening, which means things are ok, I guess. We continue to wear masks whenever we go indoors, and are still avoiding crowds. The library has reopened, and Missus took Younger there a few days ago.

I’m hoping that we can get out on the water and do some canoeing. I don’t think white water rafting is in store, but I don’t think any lakes are near where we’re going, so maybe a lazy river is in store. We’ll see. I plan on taking the girls hiking to explore some trails that we found off the road last time we were out there. So that should be fun.

Missus dad also invited us to go target shooting, so that Missus can use the .380 that he bought her. That’s got me thinking about the girls. They don’t even know we have a gun in the house. I’ve got it stored away with a chamber lock, the bullets and key are stored elsewhere in the house. But if we’re going to travel with it then I want to have a conversation with the girls about guns and gun safety. Whether or not to bring the girls to any live fire activities is a conversation I need to have with Missus.

When I was growing up, my dad brought me to so-called “turkey shoots”, which is called such not because you actually shoot at turkeys, but because the winner takes home a frozen bird. There’s usually several rounds with varying prizes, contestants buy in per round, are given a single shotgun birdshot round, then step up one at a time to take a shot at one of several targets in a lane. At the end of the round, the targets are collected and whoever has a pellet hole closest to the center of the target wins. Crap shoot would be a more apt term, since the winner is usually based on luck, not skill.

My girls have never even seen a real gun, as far as I know, except maybe holstered on law enforcement. The only thing I’m sure Elder knows about them is what they told her during the active shooter drills in her elementary school. It still pains me to think that is a thing.

My FIL brought Missus the gun after he returned from a two-year stint working overseas. He barely managed to make it home, as the pandemic was taking off. No one was sure how bad things were going to get, so he wanted her to have something to defend herself with if things got really rough. I’d like to think that we’ve avoided that possibility, but given that the number of cases in the US continues to break records, I’m not so sure. Winter is coming, I guess.

For this weekend at least, we’ll just focus on getting out of town for a few days up in the mountains and having a good time. I’ve already got a checklist building in my head of things to pack. I hear the girls rousing upstairs, and I’ve got plenty to do to prep: reset the security cameras, pack food, clothes, and gear that we’ll need for the trip. And now Elder’s downstairs, already complaining that I let her little sister watch TV while I wrote. Sigh.

I usually pack my laptop, iPad, and a couple of books to read. Now Elder has a laptop as well, although I’m not sure I’m going to let her bring it. We literally cannot keep enough books around the house though, as she races through whatever we get her from the library in a few days. The last thing I want though is for her to get to my FIL’s house and then try to park herself in front of the TV there. It’s a challenge.

Well, time for me to get a move on. To my fellow Americans, please enjoy your Fourth of July. And remember, Hamilton is available on Disney+. We’ve only watched a half hour of it, but it’s good.

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Vacation!

black DSLR camera near sunglasses and bag

Prepping for a trip, and making sure the future is secure

Tomorrow is the Fourth of July, which means today is a national holiday. Whee! To keep from going insane, my wife has taken off a few days next week. I took Monday off as well, and we will be heading out tomorrow morning to spend a few days with my father in law. Hiking, canoeing, and fireworks will ensue. We’ve got a lot of work to do to get the house ready for our departure. I’ll be cutting the grass and weed-eating, then I need to get our security cameras connected to our new ASUS ZenWiFi AC access points before we leave. We’re also hosting our quarantine family over movie and game night.

I won’t have to worry about Zombie, LLC for the next couple days, but I’ll probably be doing some work for my consulting projects. I just picked up another client yesterday, for a local political advocacy organization. I already got the wordpress site setup, and the client is going to handle the copy and content, so it should be a quick win that hopefully won’t serve as a distraction from my main project, which I’m into the third month on.

It’s Friday, which means that my cron jobs on my workstation upstairs is about to purchase twenty five dollars of BTC and transfer it to the wallet belonging to one of my daughters. All I have to do is keep the funds loaded, since there’s no way to initiate a funds transfer over API. I could do it using the exchange’s automated service, but they’d charge over a dollar for the transaction.

Since it’s the first weekend of the month, it’s probably a good time to review finances and take some optimization steps as well. I’m in the process of moving USD out of my daughter’s Lending Club accounts, converting it to BTC and dropping it in their BlockFi accounts, where it will earn a higher percentage yield. My own BlockFi account is earning a nice amount as well.

My IDEX masternode seems to be paying off now as well, after several years of middling returns. The IDEX token has doubled in price recently, and daily volume has been picking up, so I’m anxiously watching it to see how things progress. I’m currently hosting a level one node, and am hoping I’ve got enough staked that I’ll be able to run a level two node when it’s released.

I was reading something earlier this week that said that one doesn’t have to hyper optimize everything, that it’s ok to be happy knowing that you’re on the right path without worrying that you’re milking every last percentage point out of the markets. I’m currently holding positions in over three dozen publicly traded equities, and have at least a dozen cryptocurrencies in various wallets. Less than a third of them are even worth two percent of my portfolio, so I’m not getting caught up in micromanaging every one of them. Even the recent parabolic run on XHV, while placing it squarely in the top off the profitable coins that I’ve mined in the last two and a half years, hasn’t made my rig profitable.

And that’s why I turned off my mining rig, named lambo1, a few days ago. Managing it is just not worth my time right now. Finding coins to mine is a crapshoot, and keeping the blockchains current for a dozen different bags is just too cumbersome. I’m going to have to spend some time figuring out a way to not only manage what I have, but to make sure that I have documentation packed away in case something happens to me.

And that goes for all the things I’ve mentioned here today. If I was incapacitated, my wife would have to call in an expert just to retrieve my Bitcoin and Ethereum. Showing her how to use my hardwallet has been on my todo list for several weeks. Now that I’ve got a home intranet setup, I can start documenting all the various components of our finances to make sure that everyone knows where everything is. It seems like a great way to make sure that my kids know about the investments that I’m making for them and the family, and that they are crypto-natives as they grow up.

I mean, that’s why I’m into this whole blockchain thing in the first place, isn’t it?

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IT fiction:The Phoenix Project

Thoughts on the first half of the business book

I’ve been reading The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win the past couple days. It’s an interesting book that takes a fiction approach to teaching “the Three Ways”, which are some devops patterns and principles. It’s really interesting, although some of the setup seems a bit contrived, the writing is good enough that I found myself blowing through half the book in two days, and found myself reading it through past my bedtime last night.

Part one of the book is a journey into enterprise IT hell, as our hero, Bill, is promoted from his small operations group to IT director for the large automotive parts company that he works for. They’re in the midst of preparing for a huge software rollout, which is bound to fail, and Bill struggles to get a grip on things before things inevitably crash and burn. In short it it’s a trainwreck, and the authors start introducing the reader into change management devops concepts.

I think anyone who’s ever worked in an enterprise environment will have PTSD from reading this, I know I sure did. Although it’s aimed squarely at teaching workers in larger firms understand these best practices, I think it may be useful to smaller operators and teams like the one I work with. The book was written more than six years ago, which seems like a lifetime ago in IT, but it doesn’t get into the details of any actual tech tools, instead focusing on the process. In fact, the change management process they use in the book is literally postcards on a whiteboard, and the description of the rest of the environment is literally generic enough that it’s irrelevant.

Part one ends with Bill quitting after too many of his warnings are unheeded by the CEO, and part two starts with said CEO seeing the light and bringing him back in as they struggle to work together and save the company.

I’m already thinking that this will be one of those books that I recommend to all my IT colleagues. I may buy a few copies and send them to a few people I’m working with. I think it could be a valuable book for people who haven’t actually operated in a large corporate environment. It may be good for stakeholders as well. Hell, it might actually be good to give a copy out as a sales tool next time we have a big prospect.

One thing that I’ve taken away from the book so far is the breakdown of four types of work: projects, internal IT tasks, changes, and unplanned work, which I’ve always referred to as firefighting. They describe it as anti-work, which is an apt description, and I’m going to be more cognizant about the type of work that I’m doing from day to day.

The Phoenix Project falls in an interesting class of book that I haven’t run into before, business fiction. I’m curious if there are any others that are similar. I’m sure that the situation told within it is real enough, probably culled together from various real experiences, names changed to protect the innocent and all that. The first-person voice used by the authors is a style that seems familiar from many business books going all the way back to Dale Carnegie, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it deployed in quite this way, with the book as one large case study.

Besides the operational side of things, there were a couple of work-related things that struck out at me like a sore thumb. During the failed deployment of the new software product, the entire core project team is forced to pull an all-nighter trying to restore operations, and then spend many long days during the following weeks trying to shore things up. After Bill’s promotion to IT director, he seems to lose all grasp on work-life balance. He’s reading a story to his kid and means to lookup something about Thomas the Train when he gets drawn into a work email and then another call. The situation completely disrupts his family life. Another employee at the firm, Brent, the key-man with a hand in seemingly every system at the company has gone years without taking a vacation without being on call.

Apparently these two issues will somehow be resolved as Part Two progresses, but there was one detail about Bill’s circumstances that really had me shaking my head. Near the end of Part One, as he’s fretting over losing his career, he questions how they’re going to pay off their second mortgage and start saving for their kids’ college. Apparently they were just treading water, and the unexpected promotion has finally put them on the right track. This detail caught me, and I found it interesting. Perhaps to appeal to a broader base of people, or elicit sympathy, but to me it struck me as slightly incongruent with the rest of Bill’s disciplined personality.

Maybe I’m reading too much into it. If anything, The Phoenix Project has reminded me of the life that I don’t want. I spent four years working in an enterprise firm, and I came out of there in a rough way. I’m going to need to think long and hard before I think about getting back into a leadership role at a large firm where I have the type off responsibility where I’m going to be on call for emergencies in the middle of the night, or get sucked into some project deployment that’s going to require anything resembling a war room.

I’ll find out how life changes for Bill and the employees of Parts Unlimited soon, as I’ll probably wrap the book up over the next day or two. I’m looking forward to getting copies in the hands of a few more people to see how they like it, and, more importantly, to see what effect it has on our operations and service delivery.

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Waiting for the season… altseason

red vehicle

A couple altcoins are seeing action. Are they signs of things to come?

I don’t even know where to start this morning. It’s a new month, and it feels like I’ve got twenty things going on. I spent most of yesterday working on my client’s WordPress project until I was burned out, then I grabbed my iPad and started reading through the WordPress developer documentation until I was ready for bed. I woke up bright and early, and here I am.

I’ve got a lot to dig into today. For Zombie, LLC, I’ve got a remote worker who’s laptop is completely hosed that I’ve got to deal with, a Github implementation and server hardware replacement project that I’m trying to close, and I’m also trying to get onboarded with Apple Business Manager so that I can handle mobile devices for another client. That’s on top of the weekly call with my WordPress client. Plus, I’ve got several tasks for my other retainer client that I need to get on top of. Domain SSL cert renewals, end user email problems. This is the life I want, I suppose.

I turned off my mining rig for the second time in as many months. I had been trying to manage it remotely via HashR8 OS, but couldn’t figure out how to tell which mining pool it was working on. Answer: neither. HashR8 is apparently rebranding as RaveOS or something tomorrow, and I just didn’t have time for it yesterday so I just shut it off. My cards are two and a half years old 1070Ti, and I’ve just blindly been mining Arrow for some time now. I still haven’t dumped any tokens that I’ve mined since I started, and stopped tracking daily values months ago. I check it once or twice a month now, the values of the tokens have been sitting around one third of the original hardware costs for a year now. Apparently Haven has been on a tear lately, since they’re supposedly a month away from going live with their offshore features. We’ll see if they can keep this price action up for long.

XHVBTC price

The Mayer Multiple number (orange) in the bottom pane is the moving average of the current price divided by the 200-day exponential moving average. The current EMA multiple, over four, is quite significant. I went back through and look at the past couple years of the tokens that I’m tracking in my watch list, and most of the short-term parabolic runs only see about one and a half on the EMA multiple. There’s a couple exceptions though, ones that have gone higher, but my point is that those high numbers aren’t sustained for long due to the simple fact that the averages will eventually rise to meet the price level. If I was a trading man, I would probably unload some of my XHV right here and wait for a pullback till the price hits the current plot line. The price could actually be higher by then, of course, it all depends on whether this is the start of a new bull run or not. My position in XHV isn’t significant enough for me to take action at this point. We’ll see if there’s another alt season or 10-100x left for XHV.

While we’re on the subject of altcoins, I do want to note that I am having some serious FOMO around two other tokens, REN, and LINK.

RENBTC chart

REN, as you can see, had a nice run that peaked in mid February of this year, at a 1.8 EMA multiple. It then bounced off of this EMA multiple EMA, before launching again, where it’s currently just over 2x.

LINKBTC chart

LINK has been on a tear. I bought a very small amount during the ICO and really wish I had gotten more. My point to this discussion, though, is that again, is that each parabolic run is followed by a pull back, and one could have made some nice sting trades buying these dips to the EMA, and selling these peaks, around 1.8x.

In fact, my strategy for our next Bitcoin run, if and when it ever happens, will be triggered by Bitcoin’s price in relation to it’s EMA multiple. Most of the parabolic runs have peaked at about 1.5x, but the run in late 2017 that saw it go from five thousand to twenty in just forty days hit 2.88. Based on the current price, I would predict a fast, parabolic run would put us around $25,000-32,000. That said, I’m not planning on unloading all of my holdings. After holding all the way up through the last bull run and subsequent drop, I told myself that I wasn’t going to make the same mistake next time. A price value at 2.88 times the EMA multiple would likely be a local top, and I’m going to take some profits this time.

Generally speaking, I don’t have enough of any alts to worry about it at this point. I’ve got a lot of ETH locked up in BlockFi right now, along with a stake in IDEX that seems to be doing well right now. I don’t know if we’re going to see altseason again, but the action in XHV, REN and LINK are very promising. I’m just waiting for their granddaddy, BTC to show them the way first.