For the past several years I’ve found it VERY important to keep a good credit score. Not only for the obvious of being able to buy something on credit, but I’ve found that potential employers might look at that information too, as well as other establishment, housing, etc. With identity theft so rampant these days, and your credit score being so important for more aspects of our lives than most people know… I do highly recommend you keep tabs on it on a regular basis. I am set up with a site that allows me access to my score and report at any time.

This month, it looks like this:

Your Current Equifax Score is: 777

Over time, your score has changed as shown:

738   743   746   777   Apr ‘07 Jul ‘07 Oct ‘07 Jan ‘08

Another interesting idea is the NON RECIPROCAL Links Exchange System.

You might want to read more about it at the link above.

I just talked to a friend of mine over at MyTVmusings.com who has recently found an interesting new “game” to play which is suppose to help increase your blog ranking over at Technorati.com. So far (2 days) it seems to be working a little for her, but it also means she (and all others) will need to be posting a HUGE list of links every 30-60 days as a blog post.  Something I am sure any normal readers/subscribers of their blogs will not really care for.  So, I’ve come up with a little experiment that might just do the trick for her…. keeping the unsightly post away from her readers while still bringing the bonus of a higher ranking.

My little test starts with THIS blog post and I’ll keep you updated with how things turn out. (in the comment section here)

If this DOES work, I’ll have a new, spiffy way to increase blog traffic. :)

Yes, folks, that’s right.  Not even *I* would have believed THAT many.  I spent not quite 3 more hours today picking up more than 1,200 additional Decollate Snails in really just a small patch of the yard.  That brings my total to now 1,600 snails !

You might think I stopped because it was getting harder and slower to find them, but you’d be dead wrong.  After each 100 collected, I’d come back to the porch, dump them in the terrarium, and head back out in to the yard finding even as many as 10 more right at the same first small patch of ground I started at LAST dump, just a 10-15 minutes earlier!

No, kids… the reason I stopped is because, quite honestly… I just got tired of counting snails!  After 3 hours and 1,600 snails I bet you would too.

I took some pictures, and some video, and will have them posted soon. Time to just RELAX a little for now.

Some of you might know that I keep my yard… well… “natural” to say the least.  Even though I live in a well established city neighborhood I have not mowed my lawn for about 3 years.  (More about the yard in another post).  The main point here is that I’ve been putting out my new garden plants, and have discovered some of them totally “missing” just 2 days later!  — Like someone came by and kicked them down and ground level, flinging the top of the plant some distance away (never to be seen again)!  The next day the same thing to ANOTHER new little pepper plant!  Finally I caught the villain(s).  Decollate Snails!  Normally these little guys are suppose to be a positive thing in controlling Garden Snail population, which can be very destructive to your garden.  They love to munch on other snails, but will eat decaying organic matter, and even small garden plants when their main prey is not found.  Since I seem to have exactly the right breeding ground for them, I have obtained an OUTRAGEOUS population!

After the raping and murder of several of my new baby Habanero Pepper plants and reading some general pages spewing “snails are pests”, I started to round them up.  Not wanting to just outright squash their tender little bodies, I decided to throw them in a terarrium I have, toss in my vegitable food waste and some handfulls of pulled weeds, and hope they will turn it all in to good mulch.  We shall see.

For the SHOCK value, I took some pictures of just how many I collected for a few minutes.   This first picture is about a cup size of decollate snails I rounded up in about 15-20 minutes… AFTER I had already rounded up probably more than 100.  It wasn’t until this point I thought “HOLY SMOKES there are a lot of snails in my yard!  I oughtta take a picture of this!”

This next picture is what I rounded up the next morning.  The same cup size, but it only took my about 7 minutes before heading off to work.  I’ll also note it had rained that night, and could be another reason I got SO many SO fast!

I’ll have new pictures of the terrarium this weekend.

I bought some new plants for my vegetable garden (and yard) this weekend, including some onion sets. I was (am) hoping to plant them in various places around the yard and let them grow wild, however, I did a little research today and it seems that might not happen on its own. There’s good indication that I’ll have to buy seeds again each year. I DID run across something that sounds much better. Egyptian Walking Onions are perennial, easy to grow, self-seeding and I found a cool forum and people from Spicewood and San Antonio TX have been very pleased with them! The online seed shops seem to only ship these guys in late fall, so I’ll either have to wait until then, or find someone else.

According to Gary Robert’s page, it seems like the Catawissa strain might be the best of the Egyptian Walking Onion modifications as they are taller, produce slightly larger top-sets, and the top-sets are spicy.

Egyptian Walking Onions are much smaller bulbs than most other onions, and they offer the double bonus of forming smaller bulblets on top of their stems in clusters, a kind of strange flower head. You can eat either end, but usually you eat the bulbs from the ground and plant the bulblets for more onions. They get the moniker Walking because if you don’t harvest the bulbs, these perennial plants will walk their way across your garden.

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.