Year: 2015

In this morning’s orthographic misadventures, we find the hulk of an old man staring at the clock and  calendar, lost as to what’s going on with the world. Are we becoming digital do-do’s?

Such introspection is common just before the arrival of one of the kids.  This is the awkward age, when the kids take their payback.

“Son, pick up your room” of 20-years ago is now likely to morph into “Dad, pick up your room…focus on just a very few projects and do them well…and let the other stuff pass by…”  I can hear it all now.

To be sure, there is a generation gap.

Until yesterday, I didn’t know there even was a alt-J (?) – Fitzpleasure (Official Music Video) –on YouTube. 

To some, who are going post-trance, post rap, there really is some interesting cross-into music coming along and this isn’t bad…just different.

Seems like everything about today’s youth is distorted or carried to some extreme, or other.  And, they seem to suffer the effects of  time compression, as well.  A hobby like free-falling (skydiving) may eat up some clock hours, but the actual “rush” is seldom longer than 3-5 minutes.

That compares with the old adventures (like going fishing in Alaska) which could be three weeks of pretty much non-stop new.

Part of the problem is no one has any time, anymore.  The deadlines are tighter, the work more intense, the problems of flow and and coordination are up many-fold, too, from our early days on a much emptier world.

I was born  in 1949.  At that time, world population was a measly 2.5 billion.  Today, we are stuffed with 7 billion people.  Put another way, compared to 1949, nearly three times as many people are vying over…everything.

There’s no urgency to couple or marry, perhaps partly as a response to this.  The problem is not that everyone looks at child- bearing as a somber and reasoned decision.  There are several religions in the world that are (to put it frankly) screwing their way toward world dominance.

And that’s quite worrisome.

Whatever…this afternoon I pick up my son in Dallas for a week and we will have (since the rain has stopped) a couple of days of dad time and I expect to see my truck go down the road to Skydive Space Land, or I will get suckered into running Ure Air Cargo’s little single engine down to the drop zone.

“Dad, we have two GoPros…we should be able to do some real quality movies!”

Another symptom of the future.  Technology – the problem we got into over on the Peoplenomics™ side of things this weekend.

In 1949 the idea of a personal movie was vastly different.  If people shot movies, it was 8 MM and usually shot-edited onto the camera.  Maybe a touch-up splice, or three.  No sound track.

By 1965, as our age group was wandering through high school, the media of the day was Super 8 Movie film – introduced by Kodak.

Which gets me to this morning’s first neuron firing:

Kodak’s remnants are still around today…but except for specialized applications, the world has passed them by.  Oh, sure, they are in the digital camera space, but with a different attitude toward the future, the company could have been a mega-giant, even today.

It’s not.

Rather than reaching into the future and pulling it forward – serving up massive innovations to a tech-hungry public, the company managed to “steal defeat from the jaws of victory.”

I expect that if Kodak had invented better/cheaper film, Fuji would not have gotten so big.  Or, if they had rolled on with the idealization of the camera, outfits like Pentax and Canon would have been hard-pressed.

There’s a genius to dominating market share – and Kodak didn’t understand it.  For a long while, they rested on their laurels, optimized film profits, and then when film went away (mostly), they were left like new kids adrift in the world of technology.

The “Brownie” camera is in everyone’s phone, 60% of phones can probably shoot a better resolution movie that Super-8 and those cumbersome hand-blocked video film cutters…Well, not much of a market for them anymore.

A couple of weeks back, I pulled Elaine’s camera out of the storage room and this whole revolution in photography ran  me over like a train.

She had a Minolta XG-7 with an assortment of lenses, auto-winder, and so on.  Since we have been trying to eliminate unused (old) tech, I quickly hit eBay to look up the price.

About $35 bucks, is what it looks like.  Not a very good return on investment, I’d say.  Especially because neither one of us is big movie or picture collectors.  Those great images in life are carried around between  the ears.

When we get around to making a couple of video’s this week, it will be Corel video editing software, a custom voice-track from the studio, and whatever else comes to mind. 

Television is another area where compression of technology has taken its toll:  Things like Time Code are quickly going the route of quantization error in sound recording.  In other words, the problems are going away.

Automatic reformatting and sample conversion software ends the time code issue and in audio, trhe quantization nightmares of 8-bit audio disappear above 32-bit A-to-Ds.  Oh, sure the problems may still technically exist, but their impact on humans is gone. The human neurons are only so refined, and after that, all you can do is keep whacking away are resolution which is why 4K is coming and 16K will be here one of these days.

All of which is changing the nature of the arts.  I don’t mean just Fitzpleasure, or any other piece of music to drift out of a studio.

I mean film, as well.  When we were watching Alfred Hitchcock black and white movies, the director was an incredibly important part of the mix.

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Ah, sorry to disappoint, but the topic this morning has nothing to do with the 19670’s Rock & Roll band by that name (Ten Years After video here).  With apologies to Alvin Lee.

Nevertheless, in terms of economics, I’d still “like to change the world” (which makes sense only if you lived the 70s) and to do so, it takes a certain ability to “be hard on self.”

So this morning, we roll back the time machine and go through some of the views proposed in 2005 and see how our track was doing back then and whether our calls then were really any good, or not.

Should be an interesting adventure…

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For the next three days, I don’t have to do anything.

Or, more correctly, I will be doing a zillion things – a sort of “George-like impression of a Chinese Great Leap Forward” and it’s all made possible by what I call the tri-level checklist approach.

Let’s start at the beginning, though.

First thing to mention is that checklists are invaluable.  We use them in flying all the time.  There’s a pre-flight checklist, a pre-start checklist, a run-up checklist (CIGARS – controls, instruments, gas, attitude set, run-up and check the mags and carb heat, and a safety check), a take-off checklist, a cursing cruising check-list, a descent checklist, and a landing set-up checklist.

Oh…and followed by the shut-down check list.

Boring flying stuff?  No.  While I suppose every has the idea that pilots (and nuclear materials workers and HAZMAT personnel) use checklists, there are very few people that run around with a dog-eared notepad in their shirt pocket like I do when peak performance is desired.

Checklists are also one of the most obvious – yet under-appreciated – parts of being a high performance executive.  I’m not saying it is impossible to succeed without a checklist.  There are always exceptions to every rule.

But if your life begins to get even the least bit complicated, there will be a time and place that you will skip the check list and pay the price.

When flying, mistakes from the use of checklists range from a mild inconvenience (like an unplanned fuel stop) to disastrous:  Forgot to top off (or measure) the fuel and ran out of gas.  Something which (*rather amazingly) accounts for something like 80% of small airplane accidents.

Pilots – like most folks – believe they can ‘work the problem in their head” and yet, even when you’re a really good, safety conscious pilot, if you don’t use a checklist, you may notice after a half hour at cruise at say 6-thousand 500 feet, that you left the engine boost pump on.

No harm, no foul, except that it’s a mistake and mistakes can what a person?

Successful people, too, use checklists.

The effective executive knows each of the major points that must be covered in a sales presentation in order to make a sale, for example.  Leave one of the points out, and your odds of making a sale drop significantly.

This is also why (even though it is mind-numbing work) why telemarketing outfits almost universally keep people “on a script” when talking to people.  It makes sure that none of the points are missed.

When you are “growing the business” there’s nothing like building up the “secret sauce” collection of checklists that ensure you cover everything the customer wants – and by doing this consistently, your batting average (in whatever field) remains exceptionally high.

When the batting average is high, there’s more word of mouth and the business grows.

But despite their provable benefit, most people don’t use a checklist – for reasons that may range from thinking there are too smart to need one, to not being willing to use a “paper brain” to help insure success.

Since I did most of the work on this weekend’s Peoplenomics™ report on Thursday, today will be what my buddy Gaye (at www.backdoorsurvival.com) and I have over the years come to call a “M.S.H. Day”  (As in “make sh*t happen day.)

The first level of the list ( Master) is a list of the important things to be accomplished for the day.

On today’s Master List are a number of projects that I need to get knocked off.

Let’s say it includes:

• Airplane maintenance projects
• Office work for client
• Office work for Peoplenomics
• Yard Project
• Supplies for Saturday project
• Peoplenomics chart prep.

OK, simple enough – and short – which a good, focused Master List should be.a  Just a word of three.

Under each of these projects is a “details” list where the specific actions take place.  So under the airplane maintenance projects, the details list for that include:

• Blow out hangar (last of June bugs)
• Check tire pressures
• Add AvBlend to oil (*fresh oil change just done at annual)
• Paint a small spot on cowling
• Clear-coat the new prop spinner
• Unmask nose gear, apply guard covering
• Vacuum interior carpets and Lysol
• Wash wing-walk (antiskid near door)
• Spray spider killer on black widow’s webs

As you can see, the work order has been penciled out in the details list.  Cleaning out the dirt and dust and then wheeling the plane outside makes sense before painting.  And the last project is where a few shots of black widow spray go on and then I close the door and go home to the next list.

The third level of the list is the Time and Materials list.

This drops down from each of those tasks I will get done today.

• Leaf blower  (10 min)
• Air compressor, tire gauge, screwdriver (7 min)
• AvBlend, oil funnel, rag  (3 min)
• Paint, masking tape, masking paper, Scrub-it  (7 min)
• Clear-coat spray…(8 min)

As you can see, in this time and materials part, you go through every step of what you will be touching to get a certain task done and next thing you know (since travel time is always the same) I can tell you I should be returning phone calls, and such, back in the office by 11:30 AM. 

Or, if the weather doesn’t improve, I can flip projects on the master list to move things around.

I don’t go into useless levels of detail – usually single words, except for the materials.

But the nice thing about checklists is they allow a person to offload a whole bunch of what would otherwise be stress inducers, put them on paper, and then simply execute what’s on the checklist and any idiot can  do that.

Ure’s truly being a prime example of one of them.

But if you want to get the most done, in the shortest time without errors, there is only one thing that works – and that’s a checklist. 

The 10-minutes a day, or so, that it takes will keep you marvelously on task and you’ll become amazed at how much you can actually accomplish.

The Master List and the Details List are what get rolled into work manuals like the typical Policy and Procedure Manuals that make it possible for companies to plug and play employees.

And then the detail level lets business process engineering types (ahem…) take the processes, add checklists (as in edit lists) and turn everything into a highly functional business flow software system to eliminate as many…oh let’s not go there….

About that Internet Outage

Turns out, says my hosting service, that UrbanSurvival had two service outages on Thursday.  Both related to a hypervisor failure.

What’s a hypervisor?  (You apparently don’t build a lot of virtual machine servers…).  the answer is over here.

hypervisor or virtual machine monitor (VMM) is a piece of computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines.

A computer on which a hypervisor is running one or more virtual machines is defined as a host machine.

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Confession time.  I bought long in the stock market yesterday.  And even though the market is set to open 50 points lower and all the technical signs in the world point to a lower market in coming weeks, I have weaned myself of wild-eyed options trading and am now doing a dividend play.

Why?

Well, for one thing, if you look at the 10-year Treasury chart, there’s an a-b-c counter trend rally that could run out of steam any minute.  Lower interest rates would chill prospects of a Fed rate hike.  Stocks paying dividends will glisten.

When rates return to the downside, the stock market could go down, but I think stocks that are paying pretty good dividends, have unassailable market positions, and dominance in their sector may still be a good deal.

As you also might remember, I continue to look at the 1921-1929 charts and see that while there may be the risk of a decline to the 1,740 S&P level, there is also a strong historical rhyme that suggests the market could be pressing S&P 3,000 in 2016 and that would be where the blow-off top rhyme with the 1920s could wind up.

This is NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE – just saying that although our trading model may scoot down to the sell line, unless war breaks out (sooner than later) there is still a statistically significant chance that we could rally on for the balance of the year and well into next.

Consider the global picture here, for a minute:  Everyone is “making up money” and pretending like it’s real.  And – it is….at least insofar as people believing the fairytale is concerned.  Economic growth is likely to be strong, at least on paper, because there is so much money sloshing around the system.

The Fed can read history as well as anyone, and printing so much money (and giving as much zero interest rate bailouts through the back door to banks and such) can only go on so long.  But if they don’t print fast enough to keep the wider public recognition of deflation from sinking in, they ultimate deflationary collapse will be upon us.

On the other hand, if they keep stepping on the financial gas too long, then we get into a hyperinflationary blow-off a-la the Weimar Republic.  Except the reparations would be going to China which doesn’t plan to be stiffed on those bonds we have been selling them to make all this work.

So even if the market drops a couple of hundred this week, it would be roughly in line with the end of month beat-down in the price of gold.  In the longer term, I’m expecting a huge blow-off top to come, then I will load up on shorts, and when those pay off, then we will flip back into equities at prices that might be as low as 10-cents on the dollar.

In the meantime, I think it’s possible that the S&P could pull back to the 2,040 range in coming weeks, but with so much money sloshing, it has to go somewhere looking for more than gambling returns.

But we shall see. 

However, when we do get the blow off next year, my lone gold coin and the lone silver coin will go down the road,. as gold and silver might pop to the $2,500 and $75 levels when the Big Inflation Scare of 2016 comes along and the equities bubble as one of the few things left that can be leveraged and won’t leave you homeless.

So Ures truly is nibbling now and big names and familiar brands – like present day real estate – look really cheap.  The dividend paid by my pick is a kind of insurance policy.  And long term capital gains are a much smaller bite than short-term.

Stupid Distractions – Soccer To Yah

Who gives a crap about the soccer corruption case?  Mass media is selling us crap instead about getting into real news about who’s doing who and who’s doing us.

Are you a fish?  If you read more than a single headline and first paragraph on this, the hook of mind control is set.  You is “on the line” suckah.

Stay in the game, please.  This is a no-matter distraction like that god-awful South African murder trial a while back.  Useless, brain-numbing sh*t.  WTFU.

Weather Attack On Texas Continues

With video over at CNN.

I could take a picture of a cranky septic system here, if you’d like….

Ukraine Attack by Russia?

While NATO continues piling arms into Ukraine, here’s a story that wonders whether Russia will be about to launch an invasion.  Though, I don’t expect it until the 30th.

And then, only if you believe the mystical rabbi who got the World Trade Center and Gulf War right…still, we never discount views…

Which Gets Us to China

Absent a compelling reason to buy anything from America – despite the traitorous secret Trade Bill (never seen anything so crooked as a Secret Law on trade or the sell-out of Mitch McConnell of small transparent government principles) – we still have the China Problem on the desk.

The simple matter is the USA owes more money than its gross domestic product, which makes us more or less technically bankrupt.  (It will be a huge deal when rates begin to rise.)

So who can we use to prod China are our behest?  Warhammer has that angle:

George,

Classic ‘proxy’ competition is officially on the menu in the S. China Sea.

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We consider (between the rain and power blinks here in Texas) how soon we start seeing some real declines in things like hotel, rental cars, and travel as business is moving more and more to video conferencing in lieu of travel?

And, we take a look at what our Trading Model is doing in the wake of the sell-off yesterday that closed the S&P below short-term support.

So grab the coffee….here comes a data dump…

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We have to interrupt what would otherwise be a day of research and office work to congratulate the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals which has upheld a Texas Federal Court which says the Obama administration can’t just unilaterally make up its own set of rules (as opposed to laws passed by Congress and duly funded) to essentially tear down the border.  The FedGov wanted to implement immediately which was challenged by:

STATE OF TEXAS; STATE OF ALABAMA; STATE OF GEORGIA;
STATE OF IDAHO; STATE OF INDIANA; STATE OF KANSAS;
STATE OF LOUISIANA; STATE OF MONTANA; STATE OF NEBRASKA;
STATE OF SOUTH CAROLINA; STATE OF SOUTH DAKOTA;
STATE OF UTAH; STATE OF WEST VIRGINIA; STATE OF WISCONSIN;
PAUL R. LEPAGE, Governor, State of Maine;
PATRICK L. MCCRORY, Governor, State of North Carolina;
C.

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I mentioned in the Monday report that we have begun to see some very modest results from our grounded half-sheet experiment.

As you’ll remember, we picked up the Earthing Half Sheet Kit  ($140) not on the expectation of making huge headway on personal health (we’re still healthy as horses anyway), but to see if it would help with the minor aches and pains that come from being on the wrong side of 66 and tending our own 30-acres in the Outback of East Texas.

As mentioned, Elaine is feeling some of the effects of the experiment (and is pleased with the results, subtle though they are) and our experiments will continue.

The one point of departure I have with the proponents of the grounded sheets is this idea that you can use the ground that is build into house wiring to achieve the effect.  This is one of those “sort of” answers…

To be sure, this is what we are using right now, grounding to an outlet ground,  and yes, there seems to be something there, but I have been stymied by “the Boss” who doesn’t want me to put in a “real deal” grounding system.

“I don’t want a hole put through the wall into the house…” she explained, as her foot came down on Mr. Wizard’s latest flash.  “We have enough bugs around here, already!”

Try though I did, she wasn’t buying my plan:  I picked up some copper threated rod (3/8” diameter) and was going to drill a hole though the wall, apply a good coat of caulking on both sides, then some copper washers and finally double nuts.  I wasn’t going to chainsaw the hole…figuring a 3/8ths in drive would work fine…I have some that are long shaft, so a single pass would do it. Easy, right?

No sale.

My back-up plan today?  I’ll be suggesting that we open the window a 16th of an inch, put the short grounding rod  (comes with the kit although it’s only about 12 long, or so” and put tape on the window to keep the (damn) bugs out.  Not sure how that will fly, but I’ll keep you posted.  The ground is total saturated, so even a foot of ground stake would be fine.

My reason for being suspicious of grounding to house wiring is very simple.  A.C.

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