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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The Consumer Price report is just out from the Labor Department.  As always, there’s some good news and some bad in it.  The BAD is that on a 12 month basis the unadjusted 12-month numbers are down – two-tenths of one percent. 

This leads fearful bureaucrats to quick, hurry up and seasonally adjust something, quick!  Of course, since April of 2014 was exactly the same season as April 2015, just adjustments smell to rational people (like us, though I’m not too sure about thee) to smell like an odiferous male cow pie.

“The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) increased 0.1 percent in April on a seasonally adjusted basis, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.

Over the last 12 months, the all items index declined 0.2 percent before seasonal adjustment.

The index for all items less food and energy rose 0.3 percent in April and led to the slight increase in the seasonally adjusted all items index.

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This morning’s column was going to be a dissertation on how Skype and other video conferencing is bleeding out travel companies.  But the research on that quickly got hip deep and will turn into a Peoplenomics™ report.  It’s interesting ground to till.

With far too much data, I was wondering what would make an interesting topic.  So I consulted the I-Ching Inbox. 

I’ve mentioned my I-Ching Inbox before:  When a reader asked a while back “Where can I buy this I-Ching Inbox software?” I hated to break the news to him:  Everybody has an I-Ching Inbox, already.  It’s abbreviated ICIB.

The way is works is simple:  You just “throw the sticks” mentally and go through your email inbox with no particular focus. 

That’s right – unlike those management geeks that say “sort with purpose, delete mercilessly, I will advise you to do exactly the opposite.  There are gems in there; but you have to keep an open (placid or still) mind to pick up on what the Universe is laying before you.

Take this morning, for example.

There I was, sleepily going through emails with nothing in mind, other than the question I wanted the ICIB to answer.

Poof!

Magically, an email from my friend Ray appeared.

Ray’s written many times – and in fact I’m terrible at not answering email.  (Elaine would tell you I get “stuck” in the space between  the ears, often as not.  She’s got questions that get asked over a three day period before I get around to answering them.)

This morning, the ICIB produced a marvelous email from Ray that sums up many of our recent discussions and ponderings. 

“This is the kind of thing readers want to read, Ure” was what it was telling me.  “Readers want representation and Ray is the kind of quality reader you want.  He’s not too liberal, not whacked conservative, bright, well learned, articulate…and he writes as well as you…”

It took a few seconds for the thought to clarify.  The ICIB was telling me, in so many words, to let Ray’s email be this morning’s column.

Bit risky, I thought.   After all, Ray’s email began with a FB/texting abbreviation some people might not get: ISTM.

“It Seems to Me = ISTM” reported the Omnipotent Browser, who’d been quietly observing my dilemma through an open window.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained:  Here’s Reader Representative Ray’s take on things:

“ISTM George, the moreder you think about Waco, the pisseder you get…
Just for funsies, I dropped in yesterday on a 2-wheeler site which tracks (and probably sponsors) a number of rallies, poker runs, and other sundry GTGs.

My one-word comment about this latest Waco incident:
Baldwin.

Baldwin, Michigan is a town of about 600 people. They host the oldest “Blessing of the Bikes” of which I’ve ever heard (started in the 1950s or early ’60s.) It is the biggest biker rally in North America that nobody has heard of (I’m assuming people have heard about Myrtle Beach…) This year’s 3-day event hosted 40,000 bikers.

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Care to guess which banks have pleaded guilty to criminal charges and are paying $5-billion in fines?

JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Barclays and the Royal Bank of Scotland.

UBS got whacked for #$203-million in fines.  And Bank of America got hit with a $205-million fine, too. 

All of which should erode your confidence in the banking and justice systems, because despite the fines, everyone (wink-wink) knows that most of these guys are too big to fail.

So it will be business (and campaign contributions) as usual.

Disgusting, but that’s how we roll when government is owned by corporate interests to the point where it doesn’t even control the money anymore.

CFNAI

That what?  Chicago Fed National Activity Index.  Out this morning and up a tad for April:

Led by gains in employment-related indicators, the Chicago Fed National Activity Index (CFNAI) moved up to –0.15 in April from –0.36 in March. Two of the four broad categories of indicators that make up the index increased from March, but only one of the four categories made a positive contribution to the index in April.

Markets are set to open down just a bit. 

Three Day Weekend Notes

I should have told you Tuesday to fill up the car.

Gas prices as of this morning are up a nickel from a week ago, according to the Triple A Fuel Gauge report.

Tomorrow morning we get the Consumer Price report, and I expect the gas increase (almost 30-cents in the past month) will be blamed for the increase. 

Has nothing to do with run-away money printing and buying our own bonds, you don’t suppose, do you?

Greeced and Ready

You did see, I trust, that Greece is supposed to go bust in June?

That’s why Germany, France, and Greece are talking about (look surprised) another bailout.

One of the bigger scams in media, when you read up on Greece debt problems, is how finance writers are all warning of oh, how terrible it would be, to see them opt out of the EU.

Are you kidding?  Living on made-up money? And being forced into national indentures run by scoundrels?

Greeks, I reckon, would find a way to care for one another.

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If I seem a little bit distracted over the next couple of months, there’s a simple reason for it:  I’ll be spending some extra time on eBay looking for the next tube type radio to repair for this coming winter DX season.

DX is ham radioese for distant or distance.  And in the winter, especially after the holidays when there’s little besides “formula” television offered in media, nothing beat a tube-type radio, a hot cup of cocoa, and a large low-band antenna set-up.

On the 75-meter band (say from 3.75 MHZ up to 4 MHZ) you can strike up a conversation almost any night after dark, but in the summer there’s a lot of atmospheric noise that screws things up a bit. 

Ingenious hams have come up with noise blankers  and such, but the underlying noise is a problem  often until close to 11 PM.

In the wintertime, however, the band can be open for DX as early as 5 to 6 PM. 

Restoring old ham  gear is something I don’t talk about much…but there is a way to actually make money restoring gear, if you know what you’re doing.

Unlike “appliance operators” those of us who know which end of the soldering iron goes where enjoy buying broken equipment and returning it to useful condition.

To do that, you need parts.  And if you enjoy restoring tube-type gear, you’ll need to buy a tube-tester (like the kind that used to be in drug stores, back when televisions and radios still had tubes) and you’ll need a couple of good sources because there aren’t many tubes being made these days.

This fascination with tube technology isn’t limited to the odd nutter-in-the-woods, like (ahem) Ures truly.

There is a who underworld of hi-fi, musicians, and audiophiles who keep the tube selling business flourishing.

My two favorite sources are Bob’s EX Shop/The Tube Meister and the K5SVC store – both of them on eBay.

Tube-type radio gear is different from what I call “squalid-state” radios.  ANYONE can write a $15,000 check and get a top of the line Icom, Yaesu, or Kenwood radio and a 60-foot (or higher) tower with a big rotatable beam antenna.

But that’s where the term “appliance operator” comes from.  Morse Code is no longer required so between  the Asian  radio makers and the absence of Morse for us fundamentalists, tube-type gear is a kind of Last Bastion of Olde School.

With my son (KF7OCD) coming down for a visit, I’ve spent a few minutes on the bench this week restoring an old Swan 350-D.  Got the receiver back to life – and since the receiver and transmitter share much of the same signal path, the transmitter part should be easy.  I’ve already put in new driver and final amplifier tubes..

The most common problem in old radios is they develop terrible hum problems.  This is invariably from dried out capacitors in power supplies.  A search for old radio capacitors in Google will generate tons of leads.  (Most of them, you can solder, lol.)

Since I imagine myself to be a “Hallicrafters Man” one of the best capacitor kit shops around is N0JMY’s Hayseed Hamfest site.  Here, you can buy a complete capacitor kit for many of the classic Hallicrafters radios.

My favorite wintertime radio is the SX-117 receiver and matching HT-44 transmitter.  They wouldn’t be complete without the legendary T.O. Keyer that automatically makes dots and dashes so you can blast through the 25 Word Per Minute Morse barrier.

Typically, my son will wander into my office/ham shack and ask an impertinent question like “Dad, why do you need all these radios?  You already have the Kenwood 590S and it’s hard to be that…why all this junk?”

He’d have a good point – how many radios can one person operate simultaneously, after all.

Fortunately, it’s not that simple.

Part of the reason may be found on Robin Sherwood’s (Sherwood Engineering) website where he’s defined the art of measuring super-high performance radios.

Scroll down to Collins 75-S3B.  Sporting a noise floor of –146 dbm this radio smokes modern equipment. 

The reason is fairly straight-forward:  Direct Digital Synthesis (DDS) and most other solid-state oscillators are not particularly “clean” when it comes to an ultra-pure sine wave to pump into a mixer stage.  There can be phase noise/jitter/and anything less than a perfect sine wave evolves these byproducts. 

That’s what even now, some of the best radios ever made were old school.  I didn’t see a listing for the SX-117, but properly updated, it should be down in that –135 or better range.

It’s a lot like an artist with a paint brush. 

Sure, the Kenwood will do everything, very well, including digital modes.  The tube gear isn’t as good for that because old radio designs may drift a tiny bit – and that’s admittedly one downfall.

But tube type gear just sounds “warmer”.  Over-drive a stage in a solid-state radio and as soon as you get there, distortion is in your face.  In a tube radio, there’s a nice predictable flattening as a tube approaches nonlinearity and it’s this predictable aspect that made classic guitar amplifiers so warm-sounding.

Beyond picking the right radio for the mission, though, there is the matter of heat.

We don’t play with tube-type gear in Texas, much, between about the end of March through November first.  No need for heat in that period.

But when the weather is down in the teens, the stars are so cold they don’t even twinkle…well, that’s when tube-type radios are amazing.

To really get an old radio whipped into shape is usually a 90-day process.  The radio needs to be shipped.  Then  an initial assessment made.  A work plan developed.

There are parts to be ordered after the first visit to the bench, including some tubes.  The library of back issues of Electric Radio must be consulted for performance tweaks.

If you are totally into it, while the tubes and other parts are on order, there’s time to sand blast the cabinet, take the Dremel buffer to the chassis, or maybe even run the radio through the dishwasher.

Send your spouse shopping first.

If you can’t afford to sent your wife shopping, there are alternatives as laid out in this Instructable over here.  The main thing is to be sure to destroy the evidence of any repurposing done in the kitchen.

Seems like an odd thing to be discussing, I’m sure.  But tube radios, other than being relatively EMP proof, are great fun to work on provided you remember the “One hand in the pocket” rule and you’re careful to avoid shock with the hand doing the work.

Didn’t mean to get off onto a radio discussion this morning, but with this being a three day weekend coming up, there are just too many cool things to do – and time off for many – so why not talk about hobbies and what turns our crank?

One of the most dangerous aspects of reading UrbanSurvival is that you may develop a sense of “quality outside of time.”

It’s the reason I like 1980’s fiberglass sailboats, 1960s and 70s aircraft, and mid 80’s Porsches.

Done all of those..but beyond fixing yet another radio, I’m thinking about a new hobby/pursuit for next year when we plan to sell the airplane.

I’m thinking about an RV since it’s one of the few hobbies I haven’t done.  And it could be interesting.  Rehabbing an older RV “classic” might be fun…but still thinking on that one.

In the meantime, though, off to spend a few minutes a day over summer.  That’s when a lot of great tube-type gear shows up.,

It’s like I learned from my motorcycling days.

Buy a motorcycle on the coldest, wettest, most miserable day of the year.  A storm in early January is perfects.  Find someone who needs money and drive a hard bargain.

Ride the bike for 6-months and sell it in July.  

I’m starting to watch RV prices to see if I can spot the “natural cycle” in that one, but the ham radio hunting season is more or less open as of this weekend.

Oh, and if you find a complete Collins S-Line (with either the 30-L1 or the 30-S1 amplifier), please feel free to donate it to the cause.

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