Getting older

I feel like I got hit by a bus.

I spent nearly all day yesterday ripping up my back patio deck and laying down new boards. My breaker bar was too short, so I started using the other deck boards as levers, popping them up one at a time. Then I had to clean the old screws up. I tried knocking them back and forth with the break bar, like a golf club, then went back on my butt and popped them off with a hammer and pry bar. Then came time to lay the new ones down.

I only had one good battery for my drill, so it took me three sessions to get it done. I took a break to cook lunch and watch a documentary about Space X, and a second one to balance the house accounts and do some work on my trade planning. Then a last session laying boards.

By that time, Missus was feeling unwell and was in bed, I still had to cut the grass. I threw a meatloaf in the oven, took a much-needed shower, and spent the rest of the evening battling with the girls to get them ready for bed and sleep. I went to bed at the normal time and slept like a tank.

I woke up this morning aching everywhere. I’m not sure the last time I worked so hard.

We’ve got a small get-together for Elder’s “Better Late Than Never” birthday celebration, but I am already beat. I just want to relax.


I opened a position in PolkaDot yesterday

I don’t really have a target price on this one. The Bittrex listing spiked pretty high, so I set the OCO orders just in case.

I’m really interested in this project. There’s a lot of activity, and it seems interesting from a development standpoint. I signed up for the Substrate Developer Conference later this month, and I’m really looking forward to checking it out.

I still remain very bullish on Ethereum as well. There’s a EthOnline hackathon going on this month and I’m going to be watching the talks there as well. I’m taking a break from the Ethernaut challenges though right now as I’m reading through the Rust book before I take a dive into Substrate.

I haven’t been doing much programming lately. I’ve been mucking about with spreadsheets, still trying to refine my trade planning. I want something that will let me plan out my trade and position sizing using the Two Percent Rule, and track the performance of open and closed orders. Trying to do this on a spreadsheet is proving difficult, but I’m picking some tricks up from others that I’m incorporating.

One thing I did figure out is that I can use the symbol as a currency indicator in Google sheets. I also started listing everything in Satoshis instead of as a fraction of a bitcoin. Obviously it doesn’t affect the math in the sheet, but it seems to have a bit of a psychological effect, seeing a price represented as ₿63,000 instead of 0.0006300.

Technically I should probably represent sats as s₿ or something to differentiate. There’s been discussion in the past about creating a Satoshi symbol, but people have pointed out that there already is one: $! This is of course the endgame for Bitcoin, the day when one sat is worth one dollar.

Today was rough

I’ve been having trouble falling asleep and the past couple nights, probably either due to too much caffeine or alcohol withdrawal. And I’ve been waking, or being woken up, rather, several times throughout the night, so the past few days I’ve been in a mood.

The kids haven’t helped. Both of them are trying their best to test the limits, and it’s been a battle. Elder seems to have fallen behind on her homework and has been boycotting it. I let her deal with the ramifications yesterday, but today I put my foot down and wouldn’t let her watch TV or play outside with her friends. Missus managed to get her to sit down this afternoon. It takes a village. I’ve been trying to drill the last few letters of the alphabet with Younger. She’s been getting caught up with lowercase b, d, g, p and q. So I thought up a mnemonic to help her remember: big dogs go poop quickly. Mature, I know, but she won’t forget it. I’ve promised her an ice cream party once she gets her letters down, and these will be the last of them.

I spent some time today exploring homeschool options. Unschooling, actually, but I have to start somewhere. I’m not really sure how we’d pull it off.

I’ve got an appointment scheduled Friday to sell my car. It’ll be a big change. It’s a sellers market, in cars and real estate. One of our neighbors sold their house the day it was listed, and I’m wondering if we could figure out a way to move back in with family and sell ours also, while the going is good. I’d be able to pay of student loan debt in four years.

I spent the rest of the day working. I had a few tasks throughout the day, they were spread out enough that I was able to spend enough time researching market opportunities and reading up on the “debate” from last night.

Voyager CEO Says Revenue Growth Accelerates 8-Fold as DeFi Trading Surges: I’d never heard of these guys before, but bitcoin mining companies and exchanges seem to be my thing right now, so I pulled the trigger on an order for these guys without too much thought. I did my calculations on risk management and put in a lowball order.

Last Night’s Debate

I’m not going to say anything about it, but I’m actually somewhat optimistic given what happened. I take it as a sign that Trump thinks that he’s losing and knows that he’s going to jail broke if he loses. Sure, it makes him dangerous, but it was all on display for everyone to see last night.


I’m going to spend the rest of the evening working through the Rust book. I saw a posting for a Rust/Solidity engineer, and that seems right up my alley. There seems to be a lot of stuff going on with Polkadot that looks really interesting, so I want to get in on the action as soon as possible.

I’m so over my current job.

Evening pages

First day back to work post-vacation, and I was kept busy by a few fires that were waiting for me when I got back. A router configuration to support some VOIP equipment; a user account breach due to a phishing failure; and and urgent server maintenance due to an actual failure on my part. Nothing critical.

I spent most of the day reading The Bitcoin Standard, “researching” finance stuff on Twitter and checking charts. I didn’t change any positions or make any decisions on anything. The Bitcoin Standard is making me very, very bullish on Bitcoin, especially given what I’m seeing and hearing online in the news.

Our plans to keep the kids isolated for the next couple weeks have already failed. We decided to let them play with one friend earlier today, and they were outside for so long that our other neighbors came by, and next thing I knew I had five kids jumping in a trampoline. I think the kids will be alright. One of my neighbors, who works at the local hospital seemed a bit nonchalant when I asked him about COVID numbers at the hospital. He said most of the cases are milder than what they were seeing months ago.

I did have a bit of tense conversation with my other neighbor, who described himself as a “Trump fan”, regarding the upcoming election. He seems more optimistic than I am about Trump leaving office if he loses, but thinks that things will be worse if he wins. I don’t even know what to say to him about it, but thankfully we were able to steer the conversation to other things. While the kids were playing in the back I grabbed my skill saw and started cutting down old deck screws, but he knocked a couple over with a hammer so easily that I grabbed my crowbar and knocked out several dozen in a few minutes. He saved me a lot of time.

Only two more days left in September, then it’s time to move some money. I’ll be pulling BTC out of BlockFi and onto the exchange so I have some capital to deploy. I really wanted to have some to deploy during this last week that might have done well, but I can’t back that up with any hard numbers. I’m two for four this month, so I’m not in a hurry to do anything else at the moment.

For the rest of the night I think I’ll work on Rustlings. I’m more bullish on leaning some of these new chains like PolkaDot and Cosmos after listening to Olaf Carlson-Wee hype on Unchained from earlier this month. I’ve got a lot of work to do on those, and I’ve got some thoughts on how to restructure my trade planning notebooks/programs after seeing some spreadsheet porn on Reddit.

No alcohol since coming back from vacation. My body doesn’t hurt, so we’re back in Atomic Habit mode.

Home, Sweet Home

Today was our first full day home following a week-long vacation with the fam. It was our first beach rental with my father-in-law in several years, and had quite a different tenor to it than past ones.

First off this was an off-season rental, Elder had school during the afternoon — poor thing — and we didn’t really go anywhere. No restaurants, or touristy excursions. We took the girls out one day to the candy store, and the rest of the trip was spent at the house, either on the beach, or watching television.

And we didn’t get as much of the beach as we wanted to. Tropical storm Beta was off the coast, stirring up solid winds with thirty five mile and hour winds. We felt like we were getting sand blasted when we arrived, and the lifeguards didn’t even take down the red flags until Thursday. Still, the girls enjoyed digging and playing in the sand. The house was right on the beach, perched on stilts and surrounded by large dunes.

The house itself was a dump. The owners were obviously hoping for it to be taken out by a hurricane instead of doing any repairs on it. The upstairs felt like it was on a slope, there were signs of water damage everywhere. Handles missing from one of the patio doors, visible mold and peeling everywhere. It really needed to be bulldozed.

And it was just us, my father in law and his wife. My wife’s nephew joined us a couple of days in. The girls enjoyed spending time with him. He’s a realtor, so he, my FIL and myself spent a lot of time talking money: equities and property markets, and me with my crypto.

I spent a good deal of time reading and learning Rust. Cooking, eating and drinking. It was actually one of the better trips given that it was just the seven of us, instead of the bigger family trips that we take with my sister and brother and law and their family. Next year will probably be different.

We left a day early to get get home. We usually tire of being away from home for so long. We were all so glad to be back in our own beds last night. And I missed my piano.

This morning I finally got started on my deck project. I picked up some furniture dollies, ripped up some boards, then jacked up the hot tub with a breaker bar and scrap boards till I could fit the dollies underneath it then slid it across the deck and got to work. It’s going to be a miserable project, but I need the physical exercise. I have to rip the boards to pieces with a circular or skill saw, then cut the old screws off at the joice. Then I can start putting more boards down. I can do it, it’s just dragging on, and it’s a matter of personal pride at this point that I finish it.

Tomorrow it’s back to work. Usually I would feel energized to be going back to work, but at this point I feel absolutely no joy in going back on Monday. At this point it’s just taking time away from focusing on the things I really enjoy doing. Sure, it pays the bills, but I have really got to figure out a way to make a move to something different. Waiting for bitcoin to moon is getting tiring.

I got a mailer from my car dealership while I was out. They want to offer me “top dollar” for my car, which is five years old and has three years left on the payments. Seems I have equity in the car, so they want to put me in a brand new one with a nice discount and zero APR. I’m going to call them tomorrow and see if they’ll take the car off my hands just so I’ll be free of it. It’s costing me $225 in car payments each month, not to mention some $1200 annually in insurance costs. I will need that extra cash when student loans come due in January.

For now, I just got to focus on these kids. We told them that we want to resume social distancing again, and that they can’t play with their friends down the street for at least a week. People have been getting really sloppy, and things are just getting too crazy around here. Trump was in town while we were gone — three thousand people showed up, and you know they weren’t wearing masks. We’ll see if we can make it.

Last note, this election is going to be nuts. The wife and I have been talking about getting the family’s passports issued or renewed. If Trump does get re-elected, or refuses to accept a loss, we’re not sure we want to hang around the states. The uncertainty is already playing hell with the markets, and RGB’s death has already made it more apparent what’s at risk here. I’m not sure what to do. My focus is on finance and crypto assets right now, so I think I just keep eyes on that for now.

Decisions, decisions

This week has not been very productive. I’ve been learning the Rust programming language. I don’t have much to say about it quite yet; I’ve been reading over documentation and trying to follow along with the Rustlings tutorials. I was spurred to do this following the release of the new Cosmos developer environment, Parity.

I finally decided what to do with my Uniswap airdrop: I sold half of it and staked it in the Uni-Eth pool, and I’ll let it sit for now.

I read Infinite Detail in a day earlier this week. The author’s name came up in my feed and I was interested, so I found a copy and blazed through it. It’s good. A more dystopian version of Rainbows End, I suppose. Given the backlash to all of the tech companies, it’s also a bit of wish fulfillment as well, to see “the network” get shut down.

Still reading The Bitcoin Standard. I wonder how it’s affecting my politics. Ammous does not hold back his disgust for leftists. There’s a lengthy note about Harry Dexter White, a senior US treasury official, who dominated the Bretton Woods conference. Apparently White was performing some sort of espionage with the Russians, and Ammous goes into this long rant about progressives. He also has zero respect for Keynes, who he said had no academic or professional insight into economics.

The markets are very volatile right now, and it’s probably only going to get worse as we approach the election. I’m still sitting on cash, and am considering buying gold, or maybe some put options on SPY if I can figure out how to do that. Now’s probably not the time to be taking huge risks like that.

I had a dream two nights ago that I pulled cash out of my IRA so that I could quit my job and focus on my own business, building masternodes or validators for various blockchains. Probably not a great idea either, but maybe it deserves more thought. I was listening to an Invest Like The Best podcast with one of the Y Combinator judges, so he had some interesting advice.

I think part of my problem is my lack of a network; I don’t have others who I could trust with a venture of this type. Que Sera.

I’m reminded of another quote from The Bitcoin Standard, something about the capital flight from unsound to sound money systems. It reaches a point where it’s more lucrative for people to gamble, or speculate, than it is to actually build things. I sort of feel like that’s what’s happening, in a way. There was a scene in infinite Detail as well, when one of the main characters has an interaction with a tech bro. They’re watching a BLM protest from the vantage on top of an NYC skyscraper, and the bro admits that no one knows what’s happening, the algos are just running things and no one knows how they work.

It made me think of all these Vaults and AMMs.

There’s a scene later in the book, where the bro runs into the same protagonist a few days later. The finance bro has made a killing on a short following their earlier conversation, and the social hacker is disgusted, ready to burn it all down.

Tuesday notes

Of course my BNB position got stopped out while I slept. Of course.

I’m going to feel bad if this moons again, but I had too much of my trading stack bottled up in his one position. Most all of it is in BTC now, about eight percent is in $ALGO, $SOL, $ZEN and $ZRX.

Haven Protocol ($XHV) is up again, marking an eight on the TD Sequential. I got my node synced up again, and am probably going to convert funds to the “offshore” XUSD vault if things take off again tomorrow.

The only thing in my screeners that are forming a buy right now is $CELO

The project came up on my radar a few days ago, although I haven’t done much research. They’re centered around providing banking services to anyone with a smartphone, which is admirable and they’re still in testnet, which seems like an interesting opportunity to run a validator node on the cheap. There doesn’t seem to be much information about how much stake is required, and there seems to be some sort of validator election that occurs to promote full nodes to validators.

The only thing stopping me from putting in an order right now is the fact that the only exchange I have access to is Bittrex, and I’m not trying to move any funds right now. If I did, I’d probably move them into the Yearn sBTC vault.

Speaking of which, I am expecting my BlockFi withdrawals today and tomorrow, which will be going in the vault.

Adulting

It’s been a remarkably productive day today at the homestead.

We allowed the girls to stay up a bit last night, I wound up going to bed a bit earlier than usual on a Friday as I had my bender Thursday night. We all woke up and were out of bed by seven. Even Missus gave up on trying to go back to sleep as she normally does.

We were expecting rain this weekend and most of next week due to the hurricane that’s been moving through the gulf coast, so I went out as soon as was neighborly and did my monthly weed-eating. Missus tended to her flower beds, and even I wound up pulling some weeds and laying some mulch myself. I also downed some limbs in the backyard as well. All of this before eleven in the morning.

Missus had me hang a new shelf over the bathtub, and I don’t know what was getting into me at that point but I must have felt motivated, cause I started cleaning out old piles of computer junk. My downstairs office almost looks empty.

I’ve got about a dozen or so hard drives that have just been laying in boxes, ones I’ve pulled out of clients machines out over the years, lots of five hundred gigs and under. I actually recabled one of my machines so I can start inventorying them and cleaning them out so I get rid of them. So now my upstairs office is a mess, but I have a plan to get rid of a lot of old equipment, routers and access points, all kinds of stuff that’s just been laying around the house. The reorganization is long overdue, and it’s helpful to see how things are developing. Calming, almost.

I’ve done enough for today, so now I’m going to spend some time working on my programming projects, restoring some blockchain wallets, and doing some research on LINK and ETH 2.0 nodes. You know, the kind of things one does on a Saturday night.

Afternoon slump

I’m forcing myself to bang out this post while I have some time to myself this afternoon. The girls are at their grandmothers for a few hours this afternoon, but I’m not really motivated to do much today. Younger had a bit of a reaction to a vaccine she got yesterday, with a fever and aches, so I spent half the night in bed with her, and I’ve been dragging ass all day.

I managed to wrap up my latest Substack newsletter last night, a three thousand word post about reinventing oneself and which covered three book reviews: ChooseFI, Digital Minimalism, and Atomic Habits. It went out this morning and I’ve already gotten two responses from friends about it. One of them told me she was selling her house and moving into a sailboat!

Getting the piece finished was a challenge. I spent over a month actually getting it done, and wound up cutting a lot from it, including a partial review of the Alexander Hamilton biography. I didn’t want to include any books that I hadn’t finished. My time tracking indicates I spent about ten hours on it, which is probably very conservative, accuracy wise. I don’t think I’m going to take as long for the next one; I’ve already got a theme brewing for the next.

In addition to the Substack, I’m still cross-posting on Medium (tomorrow) as well as LinkedIn on Friday. I’m trying to figure out which one will be the most lucrative, so for now the extra effort is just an experiment. So far my last cross-post on Medium garnered a whopping two views, so I won’t be retiring anytime soon.

Work continues to be a slog, with most of my time spent managing a subcontracted printer service program. It’s a mess, and even if it does manage to be profitable, it’s the kind of hourly-rate limited opportunity that I’m trying to get my Boss to get away from. That is, even if it becomes sustainable, it’s not going to be the type of scalable work that we’ll need in the future.

I spent some time yesterday working on building a C++ development pipeline for a client that builds embedded systems using Texas Instruments ARM and DSP systems. It’s the challenging, and exhausting when I’m not able to get into an uninterrupted flow state that I need. I hope to get a couple of more hours on that this week, and work toward building a full CI/CD pipeline for the client’s new project, and have a nice accomplishment to put on my resume.

Speaking of which, I’m still musing over some job applications that have been coming through LinkedIn, and one came through my alma mater today that I need to look at later. I can’t let my fear hold me back. I fear that I’m not going to find a job that’s better than what I have now. By better I mean that offers me a higher paying salary, and the type of freedom that I have now. Even thinking about it, I feel a bit of anxiousness.

Also, I’m working through the AWS introductory training. I’m not sure if I’m going to go for the certification (it is cheap,) but it’s mainly for my own knowledge and to help me build out some systems that I’m mulling over for my cryptocurrency-related projects.

Time for a reset and a fresh week

My mood has been low lately. We’ve been stuck in the house for the past several days due to rain, so everyone has been a bit on edge. The girls have been acting like wild creatures most of the time, and have been very difficult to manage. We should be done with the rain for a few days, but it’s expected to pick back up midweek. The yard is in severe need of a mowing.

Several months ago, near the start of the lockdown, we had promised the girls a trampoline as a reward. We put off the purchase as long as we could, and finally ordered one a month ago. There were delays, likely due to demand and supply issues in Asia, but we expect it to arrive today. Hopefully this will keep the kids from using the living room couches as part of their obstacle courses.

I don’t feel like I got much done this weekend. I got bored with The Outer Worlds Friday and wound up purchasing Detroit: Become Human a game about AI from Quantic Dream, which has made narrative-heavy games like Heavy Rain, which press the boundaries of graphical fidelity and story. I really enjoy them, and hadn’t realized that this one was out. Plus, it was only forty dollars, which is a good price for a triple-A title.

I would up staying up till after three in the morning, and slept in till almost eleven, so I didn’t get anything done. I didn’t write, I even skipped meditation for the first time in forever.

My unfinished Substack article is weighing like an albatross over my head. I just need to sit down and copy/paste my previous review of ChooseFI and give it another edit. I don’t know why I’m procrastinating on it.

I’ve also been struggling with this damn Mobile Device Management project I’m working on. I’ve become convinced that managing devices that aren’t enrolled in a Volume Purchase Program through Apple or the carrier is unmanageable. Enrolling the devices through managed IDs just doesn’t work quite the way it should. I’ll be writing this one up for sure, but it’s probably going to take some time for me to get my client enrolled in the program.

Even though I’m feeling this malaise, it’s important to get back on track. Missing a day or two is ok, as long as I don’t let it fall into a bad habit. Time to get back on that horse.

Advice of the elders

It is the blessed end to a long, rough week, I have cracked open what promises to be the first of several El Guapo IPAs this evening, and I am doing the last thing on my to-do list before I begin an evening of letting my hair down. My plans to “take the day off”, didn’t quite work out as planned, as I got a late afternoon call with some urgency that requires completion before noon Monday. For now, I have made no promises to myself other than to complete this daily ritual of writing, and then I will release myself to my whims.

We have finally allowed our new cats, Bodie and Utah, reign of the house. I am mildly anxious about the effect of cat dander on my various computers. So far that have stayed off the table where my mining equipment sits. At night we keep them locked in the master bedroom or bathroom, rather, lest they scamper over the bed at 3AM and wake Missus up, as they did last night. I have been sleeping in Younger’s bed, like a babe.

Besides the sleep deprivation, litter boxes and vomit that we’ve found on the bathroom floor for the past few days, the cats have been a wonderful addition to the family. The girls love them, and Elder actually did the chore of cleaning the litter box today on her own. Wonderful. I myself have flashbacks to a cat-crowded apartment that I stayed in during my twenties whenever I smell cat litter, and have told Missus that she needs to come up with a plan for me to have my shower, where a litter box is sitting, returned to operation.

The girls are doing well. Their TV consumption has come down quite a bit, and we’ve been making progress with their academics, as I’ve called it. I’m especially proud of some progress that Elder made with her piano today. She’s been stuck on a Playground Sessions bootcamp lesson for the Game of Thrones theme that she’s been stuck on for several weeks it seems. It’s not the first two-hand lesson that she’s done, so I’m not sure why she’s having such trouble. The app itself is actually causing her some stress, since playing with the real-time accompaniment and feedback is too much when she’s struggling to play. She wants to rush through them instead of giving herself time to grow, so I’ve been trying to coax her into playing it half-speed or from sheet music, but she resists.

I’ve found that starting each session by backtracking to the individual hands-separate lessons as a warmup before going into the harder one has been working well. And today I had her just look at the music and practice the problem bars over and over until she could put the longer sections together. And she started to get it. I think she’ll need a few more practice session on her own before she does the test again. And hopefully she’ll listen to her old man when he offers advice!