Last night fun
I snapped this picture inside my favorite restaurant, Pelican Alley, last night. We spent the whole day surfing, and ended up closing out the place. This was taken right before we were leaving. John and I ate a lot of food last night after surfing all day. We ended up surfing all day today, and I missed out on a lot of market action. My spreads kept working, which is the important thing.
Surfing has been my savior as of late, allowing me to think clearly. Since I really don’t have my mental edge 100%, surfing has provided some good relief. Much better than any type of meditation, although my yoga helps considerably. I had an interesting encounter last night at Pelican Alley. I had some charts at the table that I was pouring over, and a guy came over asking what they were. We ended up talking, and I found out that he was a retired CBOT oat trader, and he knew my uncle, and a few of my cousins. Actually, we knew a lot of people in common. We had a good chat, and he told me that he was having a nice vacation, and was looking at this area to buy a house. John and I gave him the good, bad, and ugly talk about this area. After all, as nice as it seems on the surface, our area isn’t all “Palm trees and paradise.”
Tonight, I plan on cranking out some more work on the book. I’m very happy with the progress, and hope it turns out to be a quality read.
In other news, check out:
Woot is a one day, one deal store. They have great deals, and only charge $5.00 shipping. Their customer service is legendary, and they ship the product out FAST. I spend way too much money over there, and have never been unhappy. Case in point: I bought a Phillips 24″ LCD flat screen TV from them for $199+$5.00 S&H. I looked at my history of purchases, and found that I’ve bought over 24 things in the last year. For a guy like me that hates to pay retail, Woot is heaven.
Jeff
Jeff, that’s a pretty fuzzy photo. Are you sure you just “ate” a lot?
Woot. I like it. Strange business model, but it gives you something to look forward to every day. I wonder if they ship to Canada – or if its even worth it after shipping and duties.
My wife would be pretty pissed with you if she knew you put me onto them. I always keep buying all this 1-800 info-mercial crap and its drives her nuts. She’s coached the boys on how to initiate a family intervention if anyone sees me reaching for the phone while I’m watching TV. Although one worked out great – Maddie total adopted a DVD set I bought of the old live music series “The Midnight Special” from the 70’s and 80’s. She puts it on every night and goes to sleep on the couch watching it. She knows the words to many of the songs. You should have seen her face one day when of the DVDs physically broke – it was heart-wrenching. But she’s still very happy with the remaining 9.
Cheers,
George
allocator
July 26, 2008 at 1:31 am
George,
Lets just say that the photo looked clear to me when I snapped it:)
I don’t know if Woot ships to Canada or not. From what I understand, they are a bunch of hippie capitalists.
I have a bunch of those old Midnight Specials that John downloaded from one of his torrent sites. He also downloaded every episode of “The Sopranos.” While I’m not an advocate of his methods of downloading, there sure is everything that was ever published or recorded available on the internet for free.
Jeff
masteroftheuniverse
July 26, 2008 at 1:39 am
Jeff, you might want to delete the last comment. You’ve just incriminated John.
allocator
July 26, 2008 at 3:00 pm
George:
John is a big boy, and as I always told him that to do a crime at age 18, and it’s prison:)
He almost got me in trouble last year from downloading a game, and our provider sent us a “Copyright Infringement Notice.” Luckily, I never heard anything else from them. That’s also the time that I found out that John had opened up our network to a “Few” of his friends. I had to call in a professional computer guy to fix that problem. Now, we have two networks….one for my trading, and one for the house. Neither are connected in any which way, and the trading computers are all hard wired, with a N router that’s encrypted with only my laptop having the key. Our other house network has a server, a homemade TIVO system, and a bunch of computers all over the place. Seriously, we have too many computers.
Jeff
masteroftheuniverse
July 26, 2008 at 9:28 pm
Jeff- The cable company nastygrams dont seem to amount to much of anything, unless its continuous offenses. Those are automated letters than I dont think anyone looks at, outside of an end of the month ‘repeat offender’ type thing. Also, I have found that if I use a bittorrent program on a computer tied to my network that it really slows down my internet speed (I am not sure about latency, but probably that too). This is something to be aware of if you’re scalping or anything like that.
Regards,
Eric
Eric
July 28, 2008 at 2:55 am
Eric,
I have two completely separate networks(one for trading, one for general use), with two different connections. You’re 100% correct in that torrents really do slow down the speed. My son will download and upload a dozen things at the same time, which slows things considerably.
Jeff
masteroftheuniverse
July 28, 2008 at 11:12 pm
Surfing has been my savior as of late, allowing me to think clearly.
I clear my head and do my best thinking while walking my dogs. Not quite as exciting as surfing, but a few less bumps and bruises as well.
I had some charts at the table that I was pouring over, and a guy came over asking what they were. We ended up talking, and I found out that he was a retired CBOT oat trader…
Was it Jay Homan by any chance? Jay was (and maybe still is) King of the CBOT oats market for three decades or more. (Think big fish in a small pond.) And he pretty much never, ever missed a day in the pits.
We Are...Penn State email list
July 29, 2008 at 7:23 pm
His name was Jim????. I’ll have to ask my kid what his last name was. By the time we had been talking, we were all slightly lubricated. I have his e-mail address, and will try to sleuth out his last name.
In my 16 years in the pits, I only missed one day,and that was for the birth of my son. In fact, I made it a point to never leave the pit for the entire session, as whole dynamics can change in a blink of an eye. I also always had a bid and offer at all times for the entire session. Of course, I wasn’t always happy when one side or the other was hit, especially when I would narrow my spread to zero such as offering “Dec. a half, half Dec.”, but when that happened, I’d either take a quick hit, quick profit, or spread it.
Jeff
masteroftheuniverse
July 29, 2008 at 9:19 pm
In my 16 years in the pits, I only missed one day,and that was for the birth of my son.
You didn’t take a vacation for 16 years???
In fact, I made it a point to never leave the pit for the entire session, as whole dynamics can change in a blink of an eye.
Easy enough when trading the “country club” hours in the grains, but the stock market is just open too damn long. The Dow pit opened at 7:20 (an hour and ten minutes before the cash opens!) and didn’t close until 3:15. Always being there and always having a bid and offer would have been inviting burnout.
We Are...Penn State email list
July 30, 2008 at 5:05 am
I phrased that wrong. I should have said that except for vacations, I never took a day off, even when I was sick, had a car accident going in, had my ear drum blow out, was hung over. I did manage to take my vacations…..sorry for misleading.
Jeff
masteroftheuniverse
July 30, 2008 at 10:11 pm
Thanks for the heads-up on Woot. Very cool. I’ve added it to my list of daily must-visit sites.
We Are...Penn State email list
August 3, 2008 at 4:36 am