thaxor

Options Trading

I started options trading a little while back. Decided to get my feet wet with something simple and inexpensive. I bought a $6.00 BAC Call in OCT that expired Dec 17. The stock price rose to $7.30 which was a 50% gain but I held on another day. In after hours trading it went back down to $7.00 so I decided to sell. Ended up with about a 30% gain. Not a lot of money because the stock price is so low but a good ratio to start with.

¶ Posted 31 October 2011 § General ‡ Comments (0) °

broken ankle

Saturday 10/22/2011
Started the day on the lower duc at about 9am. Beautiful overcast fall day with some light rain/drizzle. Not much happening for me on the Duc after ~3 hours and given the number of rigs/guide boats I saw at my first spot I decided to hit some smaller less traveled water.

About 1:30 PM I pull in my first and only fish of the weekend/

About 15 minutes later Bill Boston from Port Angeles wanders down the short trail and greets me with a thumbs up and asks if he can fish above me. Bill is a guide on the Olympic Peninsula that specializes in Fly fishing, here is his website. There’s plenty of space so we settle in and start talking about snaggers, etiquette, fishing on the OP, and his raft for a few minutes when it happens.

Walking up the bank to switch out a lure my right foot sinks an inch or 2 into the mud and my left foot gives way. I go down with the left foot up in the air, the right foot stays planted. I hear that sound, the sound you never forget after the first time. I fall back, lift up my leg my foot is dangling. As I sit up my vision starts to get fuzzy and my ears start ringing. I tell Bill I think my ankle is broken.

Bill comes over, we gather ourselves and he lets me know we’re going to get out no problem. He reels up the line that’s still in the river, gathers my gear and starts helping me up the trail. It’s too slippery so I have to drag myself. When it gets too steep I changed over to crawling on my hands and knees. When I get stuck he helps me up over the roots. Luckily it was a short trip up-hill to the road, maybe 100ft of distance and 30ft of ascent.

He kicks the rocks/limbs out of the way and sets to work moving my truck, putting my gear and coho into his rig. We take a trip to the hospital and he guides my mom back to my truck.

Fractured ankle (fibula) with unstable mortise. No weight for 4-6 weeks. Then 2-3 months of a little weight. Swelling for up to a year.

Can’t help but be thankful it happened where it did with who it did. If I had to drag myself out from some other holes I was thinking of visiting on the Sol Duc it would have been really bad.

So thanks Bill, I owe you.

Surgery Aftermath

¶ Posted 31 October 2011 § General ‡ Comments (0) °

Copalis clam dig

Didn’t limit either day but Ron got close. Friday was windy and really cold, Saturday was much better.

¶ Posted 22 February 2011 § General ‡ Comments (0) °

tiny steelhead

Most of the steelhead I’ve pulled in this year are tiny guys, all under 8lbs. Coastal rivers late in the hatchery season this is what I get I guess.

Snatched out of the Bogachiel.

¶ Posted 12 January 2011 § General ‡ Comments (0) °

coho

Finally ended my coho drought last weekend.

¶ Posted 13 November 2010 § General ‡ Comments (0) °

vbscript ping multiple hosts from windows and log in excel

We’ve been having lots of complaints about sketchy internet on the first floor. It’s always hard to quantify internet problems, is it bandwidth, poor wireless reception, bad AP/Wireless Card, someone complaining for fun, or an actual outage?

In an effort to diagnose it myself with the least amount of work possible I stumbled upon this VB Script which pings a host defined in a text document and outputs it to excel.

I hacked on it a little bit and came up with this:

Set objExcel = CreateObject("Excel.Application")
objExcel.Visible = True
objExcel.Workbooks.Add
intRow = 2

Set Fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set InputFile = fso.OpenTextFile("list.txt")

count=0

Do While Not (InputFile.atEndOfStream)
	objExcel.Cells(1, 1+count).Value = "Machine Name"
	objExcel.Cells(1, 2+count).Value = "Results"
	count=count+2
	InputFile.ReadLine
Loop
objExcel.Cells(1, 1+count).Value = "Time"
objExcel.Cells(1, 2+count).Value = "Date"

Do While 1
	Set Fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
	Set InputFile = fso.OpenTextFile("list.txt")
	count=0

	Do While Not (InputFile.atEndOfStream)
		HostName = InputFile.ReadLine
		Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
		Ping = WshShell.Run("ping -n 1 " & HostName, 0, True)
		objExcel.Cells(intRow, 1+count).Value = HostName
		Select Case Ping
		Case 0
			objExcel.Cells(intRow, 2+count).Value = "On Line"
			objExcel.Cells(intRow, 2+count).Interior.ColorIndex = 4
		Case 1
			objExcel.Cells(intRow, 2+count).Value = "Off Line"
			objExcel.Cells(intRow, 2+count).Interior.ColorIndex = 3
		End Select
		count=count+2
	Loop

	objExcel.Cells(intRow, 1+count).Value = TimeValue(Now())
	objExcel.Cells(intRow, 2+count).Value = date

	intRow = intRow + 1

	WScript.sleep 30000

	objExcel.Rows(1).Select
	objExcel.Selection.Interior.ColorIndex = 19
	objExcel.Selection.Font.ColorIndex = 11
	objExcel.Selection.Font.Bold = True
	objExcel.Cells.EntireColumn.AutoFit
Loop

All you have to do is create a text document “list.txt” in the same directory as this vb script and it will layout the excel document for you without any modifications. Only thing you may want to change is the delay/sleep I put in on this line “WScript.sleep 30000″ which tells it to wait 30 seconds before continuing.

The best part is that I could feasibly give this to a non-technical tenant use it to troubleshoot their connection problems.
The host list would include something like their AP, the Gateway, google.com and another host thats known to be reliable to ping like 4.2.2.2

¶ Posted 23 July 2010 § Work ‡ Comments (0) °

cabelas customer service is amazing

I placed an order at Cabela’s on Tuesday and after completion I didn’t receive an email. Normally I’d login to my account to check its status but since they gave me the option of not creating an account and thus not needing another password to remember I took it. (THANK YOU!)

To my amazement an actual person answered the phone after just 2 rings. In an age where EVERY company I deal with, both for work and in personal life, makes you navigate a phone menu maze it was astounding. I got my order confirmation number from the guy in under 1 minute. Just another reason Cabela’s is great and they’re earning a lifetime customer.

¶ Posted 17 June 2010 § General ‡ Comments (0) °

posterous rocks

A few weeks ago I had to setup a blog at work on short notice. Despite the fact that Drupal has pretty much all the blogging features we needed there’s some stigma around our website. The problem isn’t the website, it’s the content and its organization. However rather than try and explain that I elected to just find another solution.

The last thing I want to do is maintain another service, WordPress/Drupal/sharepoint/blah+blah all mean backups and security lists. So I advocated a hosted solution where I would only be responsible for some initial setup and training then it would be up to content people to do the content stuff. Which is really ~90% of the battle. Good content can overcome poor design, bad technology and terrible graphics.

Jason @ Pignite web design in Chehalis/Lacey/Olympia had told me about Posterous a few weeks before so I went downstairs to pay him a visit. After about 1 hour of nerd talk I was confident Posterous would be perfect. ~2 hours later and I had purchased a domain name from godaddy, setup an account and started hacking on one of the prebuilt themes to fit our red/black/white logo/website branding and we’re done. Presented it to a group the next day and people were generally satisfied. And there you have http://thefarmstand.org .

We still need some graphics done up but otherwise it’s mostly complete. A few of my coworkers also took some initiative and finished the site out by adding a list of contributors with profile pictures and bios.

¶ Posted 15 June 2010 § General ‡ Comments (0) °

SBS 2008 SQL Memory Usage

We’re having a custom app developed for us that was having some speed problems after the server had been up for a while. I downloaded Sysinternals Process Explorer http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx and started digging around for problems. (haven’t mastered performance monitor yet) Tip: if you hover over the sqlservr.exe in Process Explorer it will give you the instance name in a hover balloon so you know which one is eating up memory.

I found the SBSMonitoring instance of SQL using 1.2 GB ram. For an application that looks relatively simple that amount of ram consumption seemed too high. To fix the problem I did some digging and found these pages:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178067.aspx
Use Performance Monitor to set the “correct” ram usage on the SQL Server instance by using the SQLServer:Buffer Manager object. Or just guess randomly like me.

http://dogriley.blogspot.com/2005/08/sqlservrexe-high-memory-usage-for.html
Set the maximum ram though CMD prompt

If you’ve got SQLServer Management Studio installed you can do it though GUI instead of CMD.

Connect to the instance of SQL, in this case “ServerName\SBSMONITORING”
Right click the Database instance and select properties
Then click the Memory section and put in your “Maximum Server Memory” (I set mine to 100MB)

Since our staff uses sharepoint VERY little I decided to limit that instance to 500MB. Connecting to that with SSMS wasn’t as easy as the SBSMonitoring instance. If you type in “ServerName\MICROSOFT##SSEE” it doesn’t connect. However this text does work “\\.\pipe\mssql$microsoft##ssee\sql\query” Make sure you run SQL Management Studio as an Administrator as well.

¶ Posted 10 February 2010 § Work ‡ Comments (0) °

solar project

This is just notes for now, will turn into the real deal soon enough.

Update 2:

http://www.solarpowerrocks.com/washington/
(long winded and annoying, but has info on incentives)

http://solardat.uoregon.edu/NorthwestSolarResourceMaps.html
(PNW solar potential)

http://www.gaisma.com/en/location/lacey-washington.html
(Solar path diagram- they’re kinda hard to read, but that’s basically the path the sun follows across the sky from equinox to equinox.)

Update 1:

http://www.windsun.com/ChargeControls/ChargeCont.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tmb5MB9_TaM

Sun tracking solar panel w/ arduino
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATnnMFO60y8

Arduino solar Tracker
http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1224541956/9

http://www.batteryuniversity.com/partone-13.htm

http://www.discovercircuits.com/B/batt-chrg2.htm

Links:

How to make solar power generator

http://www.rain.org/~philfear/how2solar.html

Solar generator diagram

http://www.thefarm.org/charities/i4at/surv/solargen.htm