I’m beat

Here I am at six-thirty in the evening, still doing my morning routine. That should tell you about how my day’s been going. I stayed up last night talking to my old friend on Discord, trying to get them hooked up on Solana so they can play Star Atlas. We didn’t quite make it, so I just wound up watching them play Cyberpunk instead.

My dad came over today. As did my friend C, who sold me an old Oculus Go unit that I’m giving to Missus for Christmas. My dad phrased it perfectly when he said I wanted her to be the bad guy. I’m giving it to her because the kids will like it, and I don’t want them fighting over who gets to use it.

I paid the neighbor kid and his friends to finish raking and bagging my yard, but they were so slow and didn’t know what they were doing, so I wound up out there doing most of it while they opened bags and hauled them to the curve.

Missus made a yummy chicken pasta dish for lunch, but I didn’t get a chance to finish my plate. We had some leftover chicken for dinner with asparagus and cauliflower. I made two trips to the grocery store. The first was to get some ribeye for some homemade Philly cheese steak. The butcher said ain’t nobody ask him for some prime rib for cheese steaks, not in thirty-four years of work. He gave me a really good deal. Four pounds of prime rib for thirty dollars. When I got home, Missus asked me where the sour cream was at. The store didn’t have it, so I had bought heavy cream and a lime to make our own, but it has to set overnight. So I went back to the store, this time the other, fancier store. I bought a turducken breast for Christmas day, and picked up some ready-made steak meat. I’ll serve the prime rib Christmas eve, and leftovers when we have guests.

I’m going to finish my routine, and play some more video games tonight.

Game life

My schedule got out of whack today. I was online all day for the launch of SCORE, and I was dragging ass all morning trying to get caught up. I didn’t meditate until after lunch, and her I am at ten at night writing my daily post.

It’s been a whirlwind. I think I’ve talked enough about work lately, but last night felt like being in the ground-control team during the Apollo moon missions. It was amazing. Today was way more low-key, and very fun. I spent most of the day working on automation scripts for SCORE, so we can build out some sort of auto-compounding program. The meta-ness of everything going on is unreal. Also, I’m going to be producing the POLIS dao. For real.

I brought Elder to her rehearsal this evening. The school is doing a Disney Jr. musical. The school was a hubbub of activity. She’s not really putting any effort into it.

I have been completely fucking Zen today. Like I can’t even describe. Focused, and chill. I had some slight anxiety yesterday about coming off too strong during the launch, but I left it behind and today was fantastic.

I got back from Elder’s rehearsal a bit late for our post-wrap/pre-holiday party, and I could even go so far as to say that I was actually moved by some of the things that were said.

Then it was off to Girl Scouts. Tonight I learned that Younger’s squad leader had a secret marriage. In her late 20’s, she was married to someone for three months. Apparently her mother found out through Ancestry.com. I thought it was so batshit crazy and perfect.

I just played my first live round of Kartov earlier. I was a scav, and I launched into a map that I was unfamiliar with. I knew I had no chance of finding an evac, so I just ran around with my knife pulled out. I ran into another player and used the side-to-side wiggle that my coworker showed me was the non-combat dance, and we ran around the map for a few minutes before I lost them.

I wanted to complete my daily ritual before I go back for more.

Launch Day

Well today is the day of the Star Atlas SCORE program launch. It’s been amazing being on this team the last two weeks and watching everything come together, between the art designers, the web developers, and the blockchain and infrastructure teams. It’s so refreshing to be a part of a growing, thriving team of smart people after so long toiling at my last job. It’s such a breath of fresh air.

I managed to do my part and help start the process of bridging Rebirth posters on OpenSea over to Solana. I’m not sure what the status is but I can say that I did my best to help squeeze some people in before the airdrop snapshot yesterday. That’s one of my follow up items for today.

Oh yea, and I got my first paycheck yesterday. It was a surprize. I was expecting them to do like most corporate jobs that I’ve been a part of, and hold the first paycheck, but no, I had my direct deposit notification in my email yesterday. And since I wasn’t expecting in until the 31st, it’s a bit like an early Christmas present. To me.

I’m going to have to think a lot about what I do with this newfound income. Even after taxes, it’s still more than double my compensation at my last job. And that’s after I pay off my bills. So I’m probably going to split the remainder into thirds: one into USD @ 9% on BlockFi, another third into my FTX account where it will go to various cryptos, and the remainder will go toward home improvement projects. We’ve got a lot to do around the house.

One thing that I haven’t figured out is my student loans, the first payment for which comes due at the end of January. Like my mortgage, I have no intention of paying it off early, other than maybe some extra principle. The interest rates are just too low to do so when I have high yield investment opportunities available. The only exception I might make for that is by using Alchemix. The interest rate for DAI and ETH are 2.7 and 5.2 percent, respectively, so I could use Alchemix to payoff my loans. I’d have to put 2x the value of the loan in the protocol, but I’d get that all back (assuming no hacks or contract failures) in a couple years — or decades. It’s the equivalent of a mortgage loan. It’s very tempting.

Given my recent losses on CREAM finance though, I should probably build my nest egg back up. No funny business. I’ll save 2/3 of it, build up my nest egg again, do some home improvements and (ahem!) equipment upgrades, and re-evaluate in ninety days.

I need a new budget.

More anticipation

We are going to plow through Humpday like we’re doing 40 mph over a speedbump… like it was nothing at all. Yesterday was a pretty good day, and the rest of the week is going to be very interesting as we get ready for airdrops and SCORE launch.

I pushed forward with the OpenSea poster transition last night, if for nothing more than getting a few people their assets in time for the snapshot later today. People are just starting to realize how valuable these posters are, and they’ve been flying off the market. I’m going to be personally handling the people who get to me by noon today, and then I’ll let the team deal with it from there.

SCORE is going code-locked today. It’s down to the wire but everyone is very excited.

And the Wave 5 ship drop went off yesterday. SAIAdao scored our C11! I also used what was left of our ATLAS to purchase additional ships, including several PF4s, R8s, and Ambwes. We are ready to go. I also bought an Ambwe for my personal collection.

I’ve got a lot to do: get these OS transfers ready to go, (and transfer my own,) then start working on my farming script. I’m really not looking forward to having to maintain the fleet every day so getting a script up and running will be crucial. As a project, I could get an on-chain program running to do this, but I’m not sure how complicated the logic for that will have to be. Maybe I’ll make a video today to go over things and have it ready for launch.

Shipmas

Today is the day that Star Atlas releases the C11, the first of the commander-class ships to be released. SAIAdao has had our eyes on this baby since the GAO launch brochure was released, and it will represent the flagship of our holdings. In anticipation, we have secured $100,000 of ATLAS tokens. Our thoughts here is that inventory will be split between the USDC and ATLAS markets, and the ATLAS market has a bit less traffic, so I assume the price action will be a bit easier to deal with over there.

In addition to this last ATLAS/USDC trade for the dao, I’ve already finished my personal trades for today. I will probably focus on building out my Serum scripts. It might help me snag this ship, and I’ll also need it for my arb bot.

So a couple guys on the team are playing Escape from Tarkov, a combat simulator MMO game. I bought a copy last night, and am going to buy one for my brother for Christmas. It’s a gorgeous, bleak game, and could almost be described as a horror game. I spent a good chunk of last night reading through the patch notes and wiki entries while I was waiting for it to download. I went to bed before if finished, but couldn’t sleep, so I got up and ran through a bot match (I died) before going back to sleep.

Missus is out, getting the car inspected, she’s got to pick her mom up from a hospital across state — she had heart surgery. Girls are at school, and I’ve got about two hours and change before the C11 drops.

Routine

I don’t want to spend much time on today’s update because it’s almost ten and I’ve got a lot to do today. SAIAdao needs an update, and there’s a lot of things going on with Star Atlas that I need to take care of. I want to start the process of bridging over the assets from OpenSea, we’ve got ship drops on Tuesday, and the mini-game launches Thursday.

I’ve got a lot of stuff to do, and have already wasted half the day. I had a bit too much fun last night, and had to bring the girls into school this morning. Well, I brought Elder to her Momo’s, but no one told me that Momo was getting surgery, so I had to go back and pick her up so she wouldn’t be at the house by herself.

Younger starts after-school care today. So that’s one less thing for me to worry about. An extra two hours a day.

Time to do the routine.

Late bloomer

It’s Sunday, which is normally the day that I rotate my Perp positions, but it was also time for me to do the house accounts and update my net worth. It’s when I review all of my various bank accounts, crypto wallets, and positions across the board.

I usually do monthly reconciliations on the joint account I share with Missus for rent, insurance and so on, but I was a week late. I’d done my credit card payments and necessary transfers to make sure that was taken care of last week.

I also have a number of accounts for my daughters. I’d been doing LendingClub, but I’ve been winding it down and sending the cash to BlockFi. It’s a bit cumbersome. I’ve got to login to each set of accounts, make the various transfers and update the numbers in my spreadsheet. Let me just say that these girls are going to be set. I’ve really been spoiling them, giving them a pretty big allowance as well as saving this money up for them. I’m not sure when exactly I started with Elder, but basically I’m buying $50 of BTC for them every week. By the time they’re thirteen…

The final numbers were down significantly since the last time I checked. BTC was near ATHs, so I was pretty happy with it. So things are down about a third. Not to mention the money I lost in the CREAM hack. Zapper.Fi has finally removed that from my balance sheet. (Note for the CPA.)

I did decide on a New Years resolution. I want to increase my BTC holdings by 150%. I’m going to be very aggressive.

I did a bit of programming this weekend, messing around with the serum-arb program. I’ve really got to rethink the project. I started out with serum-vial, then added serum-ts to it, but dealing with the wallet provider without anchor is just too much, so I stopped to get that setup. That meant dealing with rust errors.

One interesting note is that my friend T. is now learning Javascript. It’s never too late, I suppose.

Timber

Yesterday was pretty good. It was sprint retrospective at Star Atlas, and the dev team got to present the mini-game to Mike Wagner, and then he was able to confirm the minigame date to the general public. ATLAS is up over ten points today.

I wrote a small script this morning to make my FTX purchases easier. I was testing in prod and made a couple mistakes, but it’s working now, I just need to run it once a day to stack BTC, ETH and SOL.

Things are going to be a bit more difficult on-chain. I worked on getting Serum to work via a script, but had some issues trying to import my secret keys into the script. Anchor makes it a bit easier to import the json file directly, so I think I’m going to refactor it later. My arbitrage bot is picking up some good deals and I think there’s some money to be made there if I can automate it.

My friend T. came over today to help me cut down the tree in the front yard. He used to work for a tree cutting service, and we got things knocked down and cleaned up rather quickly. I was pleasantly surprised that we got it taken care of so quickly. We had a big lunch and got to hang out a bit.

I took the girls out to get haircuts earlier this evening. Elder is throwing a fit because the stylist — following my instructions — cut off too much of her hair. She’s calmed down now, but I’m pretty sure she stayed up too late in her room watching YT on her school tablet.

I’m pretty tired myself, although I’m not quite sure why. I went to bed at a decent hour and got a pretty decent sleep. Maybe it’s yesterday’s workout coupled with today’s activity. I don’t know.

Going to watch a show with the kids, put them to bed early, then play some video games. I’ve been rather obsessed with X4 lately, but I might put it away tonight and play DSP or Cyperpunk.

The next most important thing

Yesterday flowed pretty well. I got my morning routine done and got to work. The Club struck again, unleashing another leak of the wave five ship drops. They were watching the pubkey that the team uses for minting the ships, and must have got some sort of alert when the new wave was created. The NFT metadata contains the ship components as well as the drop date and prices, so they used all that information to put out a video with the information.

Now that the information is out there I’m effectively cleared to speak on it. I’m not trying to test my luck or anything and hype things too much outside of official channels, but at least I can do certain things without feeling like I’m taking advantage over other players.

I don’t have my notes in front of me, but we know there will be around 150 of the Pearce C11’s minted. The first batch will be released on USDC and ATLAS markets simultaneously, and will be about $81,000. The second batch will be released one minute later for just under $100,000.

SAIAdao will have one. I started liquidating cash yesterday, pulling our ATLAS LP and initiating a DCA protocol over the next six days. That should give us enough to purchase the C11 and leave us with more to try and scalp some of the smaller ships. We’ll see how things play out on Tuesday.

I’m getting up to speed quickly at work. I’ve got my local environment setup and am helping hunt bugs in the minigame on devnet.

I’m still buying more crypto for myself. I figured out I can buy about fifty bucks a day of BTC, ETH, and SOL, and how much I can spend on ATLAS, POLIS, and IN as well. I think I summed it up properly so that I’ll be able to get paid, and re-up my exchange account to keep it going. I’ll need to write a script to keep it going.

Also yesterday, Santa visited our neighbor’s house. There’s an older couple that lives there, and for the past forty-three years they’ve have a family friend dress up and visit them. So they invited us and some other neighbors over. We exchanged some gifts, and the kids go to sit on Santa’s lap. It was cute.

I guess my most important thing today is to buy some crypto, then check in with work. I have an important task that I want to see if I have approval for. Time to go.

Not the smartest

The week is going well. The cold has settled in, meaning I’ve added scraping the car windshield of frost to my morning schedule. Younger’s school bus has been running late — the school system has been struggling to keep drivers — and it makes no sense to stand outside in thirty degree weather when it’s less than a mile from the school. Missus is work from home today.

We decided, given my new position, that we could hire back the housekeepers that we let go following the start of the pandemic. Today is their first day back, and Missus has spent the last week decluttering the house and cleaning things up. We almost don’t need to them to clean, it’s just the threat of them coming which is enough to trigger Missus’s OCD and get the job done.

I kid, they’ll do the sweeping and mopping and scrubbing in all the corners that we’ve missed.

So far I’ve managed a modicum of self control and haven’t gone crazy with the spending. I did finally buy a Discord Nitro subscription after I was trying to send a PDF to someone and it was too large, but that’s the only thing I’ve done. I’ve got too much business to handle, I can’t afford to be distracted by a bunch of BS purchases.

Christmas gifts are piling up around the house. I have yet to wrap anything, so I’ve been stacking Amazon packages in my closet and under my desk.

I’ve got a small arbitrage bot running that is tracking Star Atlas markets. It’s turning up very small opportunities, a few cents here and there. There was one for seventy cents yesterday. It’s too much trouble for me to have to buy, settle, sell, settle and then make the ATLAS/USDC swap at the end of it all. I may give a crack at writing a Serum script that will do the job, but it’s not like I don’t have other things to do.

The SA dev team gave the go-ahead for the minigame release on the 16th. Early yesterday morning, the team updated the Google bucket with a bunch of ship images, and The Club was watching it and had a video out a few hours later with all of the info. There was a bit of panic internally as some people suspected a leak, but their monitoring was just better than the team’s opsec. All is fair in this game…

I finally started looking at the team’s code, getting the new portal up so I can keep up with the rest of the changes the dev team are doing. There’s a lot to unpack, tons of scripts, and I’m looking through those to compare to what I’ve been doing. It’s nice to be somewhere with people who are smarter than me. It keeps my hubris down and motivates me to learn.

My priorities for today include stacking some sats. BTC was below $50k and I want to load up. I’m trying to maintain a pace that won’t run my reserves dry before my first paycheck, but I’m running a bit hot. I really need to focus on the CPA stuff and get that turned in or else I’m going to be in a world of hurt later on.