As I’m playing around with TwitterMaps more, I’ve found it does NOT seem to know where some zip codes are! Such as 78641. I’ve looked around at how to add zip codes, perhaps with a Lat/Lon value, but can’t seem to find anything. Does anyone know how to get zip codes added?

In my research, I came up with a couple very cool zip code map web pages, though! And I’ll share them here:

http://maps.huge.info/zip.htm – Google Maps mashup with colored area for zip code. (same API: http://www.usnaviguide.com/zip.htm)
http://www.city-data.com/zips/78727.html – Tons of city / zip population data, statistics, sex offenders, home sale prices, census information, etc. Notice the zip code there at the end… just put in the one you want. The main website city-data.com might be fun to check out too.

At least according to a few bloggers, including my newest Twitter friend Paul Walhus, who also lives in Austin. Paul has a recent post about Twitter’s ‘explosive growth’, which I’m not overly surprised to read about. This site/tool really does seem like it could be something VERY useful in helping friends keep in touch. It’s extremely easy to use, which is an important key factor. Just use your cell phone, IM client, or web page to send out a quick note about “what you’re doing now”, and anyone (or friends only) can get an instant update sent to THEIR phone, viewed on a web page, or through ay RSS reader. On the left side bar of this blog I have set up a live view of the Twitter feed from all of my “friends”, which is a nice and convient way for me to keep up with everyone.

I think one of the MOST interesting apps I’ve seen with Twitter so far is TwitterVision, a mashup of Google Maps and the public feed for Twitter members. Be sure to zoom out enough so that you don’t have to deal with map scrolling. It’s quite something to watch! You really get the sense of a community.

For another something interesting, you might try TwitterMap, and then punch in a search location (keyword) of something like “Austin, TX”, or “rock808″ for me. I just discovered that sending a Twitter message with “L: [location]” will put a marker on the map with my bit of text, or do the Twitter Search, and punch in “rock808″ for your search keyword.

Now THIS is getting fun!
Of course, only for those of us who don’t care about other people knowing what we’re up to, or where we’re at.
If you’d like, you can follow my Twitter feed by adding me.

LOL! Like, OMG! ICU….

Yes, I think i’ve found my new home. Stickam.com is a new site I was introduced to yesterday. I don’t know much about it yet, but so far it seems to be very much like MySpace, but even better for people with webcams! It’s extremely easy to jump in to a chat room with several other people (many of whom also have webcams), and suddenly you’re chatting away…. and with most the other bells and whistles you’d expect from a web2.0, social network site.

A few days earlier I had randomly stumbled across TokenBlackChic’s videos on YouTube, and found her to be an absolutely creative genius! Not just in her deep cutting sarcastic humor, but also her amazing marketing skills (whether she is aware of them or not). She posted a video “Bad Girls vlog II” the other day and mentions she’ll be LIVE on stickam. Well, duh… of course I’ll be there. Like which one of her 8500+ subscribers wouldn’t want to see if she is really as quick witted live as she appears in her vids.

Unfortunately, I was having some… uh… technical difficulties with my camera and windows audio settings (I had to go in to the Windows Recording properties change my recording device from “Mono Mixer” to “Mic”), also a set of headphones was important to kill the echo feedback. The bottom line? I missed her show… well… I DID see/hear a lot of it, but I was one of those lurker freaks peeping in from the outside window, unable to participate. — It wasn’t until after the show I realized clicking the magnifying glass icon was the way to get in!?

By now I was hooked! Stickam strikes me as the next BIG thing to take over MySpace (unless myspace adds the cam features which I’ll take about below). I poked around the site more. Looking for other people to join in these webcam chat rooms, and trying to learn more about the set up, and navigation, etc. I think the potential for networking and building relationships is substantially higher on a site like this where live video is involved. Everyone knows facial expressions and tone of voice play a MUCH larger role in communication than text. Yes, I think I’ve found my new home… at least until the virtual worlds take over in the next 5 years.

As for more tech specs on Stickam…. Like I said, I haven’t even been a member for 24 hours yet! So there is a lot I don’t know, but some of the features I like the best are things like the total ease of being able to get your video going live on the net. They have a way you can embed your live feed on any webpage (as shown in the left column of this blog). Unlike YouTube where you have to record and then upload your video separately, Stickam has a way for you to record a video from a link right on the site! I’ve never uploaded a personal video on YouTube . Mainly because it seems like more of a “production”. I know many people do just record and upload, but since I’m a bit more of a perfectionist, I haven’t taken the time.. blah blah… but I’ve already recorded 2 videos (very short) onStickam. Perhaps the reason for that also, is because after spending 9 hours in various webcam chatrooms, talking with people live… it did seem a lot more laid-back , personal.. and more like a COMMUNITY where I felt comfortable just putting out some non-prepared bit of video. In fact, it’s taking me a long time to write this blog post, where i could do it much faster, AND with facial expressions and tone of voice if i just recorded a short video blog (vlog).

Anyway, enough blogging for now. I’m going to try and be LIVE on Stickam as much as possible for a while (weekends excluded – as I’ll be at work), and see how I feel about it in a week or two. Feel free to watch from the cam link on the left column in this blog, or check out my stickam profile… and say HI.

I just signed up for a few new websites:

Wordpress.com – the official “hosted” site for the Wordpress blogging software. I doubt I’ll run much of a blog there, as I prefer to host my own sites – and you should too. (remind me to post WHY). Basically I NEEDED to sign up with them to get an API key for the Akismet spam blocker. I didn’t have to get my own blog on their site, but heck.. why not. Maybe I can use it to help promote / monetize my other sites.

Twitter.com – Seems to be a type of social networking site where you post (via phone, IM, or web) what you are currently doing, and your friends can then pick that up on some RSS feed…. even sent to THEIR phones… or displayed on their (or your) web pages. Looks like an interesting idea. Although might be a bit time consuming to always be posting what you’re doing. Not to mention if you post “too much”, then your friends might disown you due to spam! heh — We’ll see. For now, I’ve got a live feed showing on the left side of this blog. My page there is: http://twitter.com/rock808

Beast is suppose to be a light-weight (500 lines of code) web forum written in Rails and using gravatar.com icons.  The Beast software itself looks pretty solid.  There is an RSS feed link on (to?) every page, and I kind of like that…. option anyway.  I’m not sure if the best reason to install any software is because they are trying to keep their code under 500 lines… especially in this day and age!   But, for certain needs, and to keep things simple.. this might be just what you’re looking for.  The use of gravatar icons is another extremely interesting feature, but that’s for another post.  Perhaps I’ll look in to installing this somewhere this next week and we’ll see how it goes.  I STILL have not really done anything with PHPBB, which seems like it might have more bells and whistles… but again… much more of a BEAST to work with.  ;)

VERY short post just to point out the new post about awesome new 45 minute video I just saw on REAL business in (and of) Second Life:

Second Life – making money online

I just get SO pumped up every time I see these types of things! There’s a lot of great money to be had online. :)

Family

Every Tuesday (for now) I have tentative plans with my father and sister that we meet for lunch. Dad’s been passing it up a bit more often than I’d like, but he’s going through a lot right now. He’s moved in with HIS father, who is turning 94 in a couple months, but is deteriorating rather quickly. It seems within the last week or two my grandfather is starting to lose more bladder/bowel control… and/or maybe it’s just that he can’t get himself up to go to the restroom, and has not been asking my father for help as much as he should be? Anyway, my father was stuck cleaning up today’s “mess”. My sister also mentioned he was looking for some service to keep the house clean, and also someone to do things like bathe and groom my grandfather. I decided to offer MY help for doing some of the house work. If he’s gonna pay someone, it might as well be me… I’ve got more free time than I know what to do with right now. So, I spent 3 hours over there doing some cleaning.. WOW, did it need the work!

10k run

In other events… i’ve not done my running today (yet?), but will probably continue to post the progress on my ActiveBrain (My Little Experiments) blog. So if you’re interested, be sure to check for details there.

Stocks

During lunch I got a text message about a stock (CMED) dropping below $23.15, which was the price to sell short, but I was at lunch (and then at Grandfather’s house), so didn’t make any trades today. Possible a very good thing as the stock then proceeded to climb almost to the stop price! But, I’ll watch what it does early tomorrow, it could be an AWESOME opportunity to sell higher as long as it doesn’t break above $23.42, but I’ll post more about that on the Financial Jetstream blog.

Second Life

Today on Second Life, it looks like another L$200 from camping. Also, at lunch my father told me he was bringing in about US$100/mo from his efforts!! Also that he’s starting to experiment a little with renting out some land. Maybe there’s some way I can help him promote that. hmmm.

After 2 weeks of watching technical stock market analysis videos, Brian Shannon over at Alpha Trends has broken through my thick skull and opened my eyes to probably a much more proper way to view my trading. As more of my posts reveal (here and on my other blogs such as Financial Jetstream), I’ve been trading for a couple years now… with, I suppose more or less the idea that I should really (REALLY) try to do extensive research in to a stock before getting in. And then I would get rather frustrated with my lack of skills when the stock I’d picked went against me. I know I’m new at this, with a whole lot more to learn, but some times it just seems like no matter how much work/study I do, it will not be enough. A lot of that also comes from me watching other traders who ARE a lot more experienced continually make wrong predictions. And all these traders/analysts are saying different things about the market or even the same stock. It’s enough to make me want to pull out my hair!

However, today, it clicked… as Brian gave some insight to what he thought two stocks might do in the near future. He tossed out the idea for a stop, and also a target price, and the key words being “Here we have 17 cents of risk, for a potential gain of 90 cents”. On the next stock, the same words “Here we have 22 cents of risk, for a potential gain of $1.40″

Whoa! There it was! The idea that we don’t really know for sure which way the market will go… ever.. no matter how good you are, and perhaps picking stocks could be similar to flipping a coin (well, hopefully slightly better odds), but if the usual loss is 20% while the gains are 80% or more, the odds are WELL in your favor of coming out far ahead of the game (even on that 50/50 coin toss).

To prove this point I wrote a short little Perl script:

perl -e '@a=(10000,10000,10000,10000,10000); $t=1; while ($t<500){ foreach $a (@a){ rand()<.5 and $a*=.8 or $a*=1.3; $a<50 and $x=1} printf "%3d = %12.1f %12.1f %12.1f %12.1f %12.1f\n",$t,@a; $t++; $x==1 and exit }'

which simulates 5 accounts starting at $10,000 each, and then makes 500 trades with each of them. There is a 50% chance to lose 20% of the accounts value and a 50% chance to gain 30% of the accounts value during any trade. I ran this script 40 times to simulate 200 accounts doing this trading, and found that only 5 times in 200 did the account value drop below $50. To me, those are pretty good odds of success on a supposed 50% chance of gain/loss per trade. What makes this work is that when you do win, you win more than you’d lose… and THIS simulation is only with a win of 30%.

Just for fun I created another script:

perl -e '$loss=.0116;$win=.0496; for ($c=0;$c<100;$c++){$a[$c]=1000}; $t=1; while ($t++<1000){ foreach $a (@a){ $a==0 and next; rand()<.5 and $a*=(1-$loss) or $a*=(1+$win); $a<50 and $a=0} }; $bust=grep($_<100,@a); $loss=grep($_<=1000 && $_>100,@a); $fifty=grep($_<=1500 && $_>1000,@a); $double=grep($_<=2000 && $_>1500,@a); $more=grep($_>2000,@a); print "BUST: $bust\n","LOSS: $loss\n","FIFTY: $fifty\n","DOUBLE: $double\n","MORE: $more\n";'

Which sets up 100 accounts with $1000 each, then makes 1,000 trades in each of them. Each trade has a 50% chance of failure or success where it will lose a smaller amount than it will gain on a win.

Test #1: (the $23.15 stock with $0.27 risk (-1.16%) or $1.15 gain (+4.96%) after 1000 trades in 100 accounts are:
BUST: 0 (left with under $100)
LOSS: 0 (left with from $100 – $1000)
FIFTY: 0 (left with from $1000 – $1500)
DOUBLE: 0 (left with from $1500 – $2000)
MORE: 100 (left with more than $2000 – double the start)

Test #2 – now with only a 3% gain … after 1000 trades in 100 accounts are:
BUST: 0 (left with under $100)
LOSS: 0 (left with from $100 – $1000)
FIFTY: 0 (left with from $1000 – $1500)
DOUBLE: 0 (left with from $1500 – $2000)
MORE: 100 (left with more than $2000 – double the start)

Test #3 – now with only a 2% gain … after 1000 trades in 100 accounts are:
BUST: 0 (left with under $100)
LOSS: 0 (left with from $100 – $1000)
FIFTY: 0 (left with from $1000 – $1500)
DOUBLE: 0 (left with from $1500 – $2000)
MORE: 100 (left with more than $2000 – double the start)

Test #4 – now with only a 1.5% gain … after 1000 trades in 100 accounts are:
BUST: 0 (left with under $100)
LOSS: 0 (left with from $100 – $1000)
FIFTY: 1 (left with from $1000 – $1500)
DOUBLE: 2 (left with from $1500 – $2000)
MORE: 97 (left with more than $2000 – double the start)

Test #5 – now with only a 1.3% gain … after 1000 trades in 100 accounts are:
BUST: 0 (left with under $100)
LOSS: 6 (left with from $100 – $1000)
FIFTY: 22 (left with from $1000 – $1500)
DOUBLE: 28 (left with from $1500 – $2000)
MORE: 44 (left with more than $2000 – double the start)
…. which means you STILL only have a 6% chance of losing any of your principle and almost a 50% chance of more than doubling your money.

After these tests I can obviously see a better picture of why the risk-to-reward numbers are SO vital, and it’s not something I was taking in to account on my trades in the past.

Today I managed to run the complete 3 miles without stopping!

This last weekend I was talking to my friend Darrell (who will be running the 10k with me next month).  He’s got a bit more experience running, and so I mentioned to him that I was a bit frustrated with my lack of progress over the last month.  It’s been a long time since the last post, but for the past 2 weeks I have been running 4 out of the 5 weekdays (I’ll post more about that later), but have only been jogging the first mile, and then doing a walk/jog combination on the last 2 miles.  My total completion time is always about 31-32 minutes with VERY little variation.  The first mile is always done in about 9:30 (min:sec).  He suggested I REALLY slow down on that first mile, and then push through the next two.

So today, that’s what I did.  I completed the first mile in 10:40, the second mile by 21:02, and the third by 32:30, which means that my overall time stayed the same, but I reached the goal of running the entire course.  I was able to keep my breathing very controlled until the last half of the last mile, and then it did get just a little faster, but not as much as the previous weeks. My legs are quite a bit more sore though!  So, time to up the protein drinks.

As for the weather. It’s starting the get a little warmer.  I started the run at 16:00 again today, and did a bit more sweating than the last couple weeks.  I enjoy getting the extra sun, but might need to go back to my early morning runs before too much longer.