Feel free to tell what you plan on doing this weekend and even ask for help or feedback.
Please keep in mind it’s more than OK to do nothing at all too!
Feel free to tell what you plan on doing this weekend and even ask for help or feedback.
Please keep in mind it’s more than OK to do nothing at all too!
Death Stranding
Death Stranding gang!
How are you liking it?
It’s game of the year. I’m thinking about writing a longer blogpost.
Most games try to make sense out of the gate so people can understand them. Death Stranding does not and it’s a huge breath of fresh air. You are the post-apocalyptic UPS man trying to rebuild America, one package at a time. And there’s monsters that try to kill you sometimes. But you can’t see the monsters, but you can detect them thanks to the baby strapped to your chest. You get this chest baby after cremating the president of the United States of America. The rain accelerates the passage of time for everything it touches. Except for raincoats???
Oh also the main player character can’t die when he’s killed, he just respawns back in his body with a CREEPY cutscene of a baby within his blood vessels. There’s also some philosophical musing about the afterlife. Your canteen is apparently stocked with MONSTER ENERGY DRINK and you can drink whole giant cans of it in your safe room.
While showering you get an intrusive phone call. You are told that you only have privacy while using the toilet and showering. Not to mention this guy’s back muscles.
Overall, I wanted a confusing mess of a game and I got exactly what I wanted. 10/10 would play again.
https://barcelona.rustfest.eu
RustFest number 6 \o/
Ah shit, and it’s in my city. How did I miss this?
You might be able to get a leftover ticket or at least drop by the impl days on Monday.
I paid off all of my loans and have some savings for emergency. So, I’m going to look into investing in some stocks. I am a total newbie when it comes to investment. So, I don’t want to start it without knowing what I am getting into.
On technical side, I am going to try Google’s Sentiment Analysis APIs for one of my private projects.
I work in finance, and most people who actively manage portfolios buy passive stuff (like ETFs or low-fee funds) for themselves with their “important” money.
With then some amount of play money they often invest in the latest fad like cannabis stocks or some other bullshit, and they usually lose as much as they gain on average.
Point is, keep it boring, with fees <70 basis points if you just want to leave your money alone for a decade or two. Don’t stock pick unless you would be willing drop the same amount on blackjack or poker.
Robo-advisors (like Schwab or Betterment) offer a compelling solution, investing your moneys in index funds (passive stuff), rebalancing automatically and in certain situations, ‘tax-harvesting’ on losses.
Still not an excuse to not understand what’s going on, but reduces labor (and potential mistakes).
My problem with robo advisors for taxable investment accounts is that they have a certain amount of lock in - transferring shares out in kind creates a mess that’s fairly difficult to manage by hand. TLH/rebalancing is also quite easy to do manually once or twice a year on a small ETF or mutual fund portfolio.
I like the idea of keeping it boring. Like I said, I am really new to investment. So, stocks might not be the only options I want to pursue. Also, I am not making a lot of money right now but I though it would be a good idea to do some study when I have time. Thanks for you suggestions.
One piece of advice that got my attention was to contribute to your employer 401k program - specifically contribute as much as your employer would match. That way you know you’re getting a 100% return on that money, which is basically unmatched anywhere else. The catch is that contributing more than what your employer matches actually brings that % return down.
The idea that marginal returns are what matters was particularly powerful to me - basically paying down your credit card debt at 18% interest rate is equivalent to investing in a stock with 18% return. So unless you can guarantee that you can get an 18%+ return on your investment, you may as well just “invest” in paying off your credit card.
I am contributing to my 401k as much as my employer matches right now. I plan to increase my contribution in future though.
Some books I recommend
I agree with the no stock picking / buy an index advice even though these are about stock picking :) I’ve heard Mastering the Market Cycle book is a good introduction to investing.
Congratulations!
This is a ~16 page book that I recommend for new investors. It packs a bunch of useful advice in a very short volume: https://www.etf.com/docs/IfYouCan.pdf
Past that, the Boglegeads wiki and forum has a wealth of information and people who can help if you want to learn more or ask about your specific situation.
As a novice myself I found A Random Walk Down Wall Street refreshing.
Thanks for the recommendation. I will definitely check it out.
Good work getting to debt free!
Thanks. I did not have huge debt. It was mostly student loan and my car installment. Still, it was a huge relief.
Congrats on paying off your loans! One piece of advice (among the hundreds of unsolicited pieces of advice you’ll get when talking about investment online) is to only buy risky¹ investments with money that you don’t need to survive with. If you imagine that pile of money disappearing, would you still be able to pay for food, rent, and other daily expenses? It’s also prudent to plan for the occasional emergency expense such as last-minute travel for a funeral. You obviously can’t plan for everything (nor should you), but you don’t want to be put in a position where you have to sell stocks at a loss to pay for a plane ticket.
¹ “risky” in this context means anything that only makes sense as a long-term multi-year investment, such as stocks
Congrats on paying off all your loans!
On the off-chance that you end up looking at peer-to-peer investment sites like LendingClub and Prosper, be aware that your money stays locked up for years in those loans. With LendingClub you may be able to sell some of your loan investments on a third party site (FolioFN) but Prosper does not have this. You won’t be able to get your money out easily (or at all) if you need it - you’ll get it back (hopefully with a profit) in a trickle as loans are (hopefully) repaid. I see these platforms now as essentially a medium term bet on economic stability, and I am personally not a sophisticated enough investor (or maybe I’m just too risk averse) to make that bet. I’m gradually withdrawing my investments as they’re repaid (that’s not intended as investment advice 😀)
Exploring Austin, TX! 🇺🇸 First time here and it’s my birthday this weekend too, so going to rock round and explore the place.
You should visit my friend’s small vintage clothing shop: Passport Vintage. Totally outrageous prices! BUT…super hip and happening.
Working on a Rust REPL for exploring music theory, with an associated library that lets you describe music using code. Right now, it’s essentially Google for chords! The target audience is musicians who find it difficult to work with harmony on their main instrument (drummers, bassists, guitarists to an extent, bowed instruments, woodwind & brass…)
I’m hoping to open-source the code this weekend. Let me know if this sounds interesting :)
Sounds interesting!
After a brutal three weeks of on-call, I’m going to play on bikes in the woods.
Enjoy ! That’s the kind of activity that make you feel alive :)
Trying to study for my university finals starting next week, ugh. I might write a blog post if time permits, but nothing fun in the near future. :(
Last weekend I started a chair making class. This will be the second weekend of the class.
Last weekend we started with a log, split it into quarters, rived out stock into leg blanks, spindle blanks, etc, and finally shaped them all with a drawknife at the shave horse. This weekend I’ll wrap up shaping the spindles and stretchers and either just flatten, or flatten and shape the seat. Hopefully, we’ll have time to glue up the under carriage, but we’ll see!
If anyone is interested, the chair I’m building is the Democractic* Chair, which was designed by a famous chair maker, Curtis Buchanan, to be built with a minimal set of tools.
*Democratic as in relating to, appealing to, or available to the broad masses of the people, not the political party
I’ll taxi around a bit for offspring extracurriculars, food, and possibly random things needed for part 2:
Prepping room for kid #4 and kid #5 to cohabit, thus finalizing a room shuffle made so we could optimize our use of space in the house so that:
We reclaim the complete basement as a grownup space, which will require me to put away and/or donate a vast quantity of toys and useless doodads.
The remaining time will be allocated to, in order of urgency: quality time with my significant other, that contract I need to continue/finish, chores, entertainment, and rest.
Learn about IPFS or maybe write a crypto trading bot. Might be going to Disrupt Berlin so shopping for flights and hostels
This week was busy, so I’d like to relax this weekend.
I’ll probably ski Saturday and go for a long-ish bike ride Sunday. Also hoping to go to lunch with a friend on Sunday.
Also have a new project idea that I’d like to start on. I’m tired of riding the same routes around town, so I want to identify all of the bikeable roads and paths through Boulder, find the subset I haven’t ridden, and then go ride them. Good chance to combine GIS with biking.
I just got my accordion project working on a breadboard. (It’s currently a 4-bass and the buttons are crappy.) Next up will be learning to design circuit boards for the key switches. I’m thinking I’ll need to do a funky double-decker design with some kind of rod going to each key switch to get the buttons close enough together.
Finishing my slog through Daniel Jackson’s Software Abstractions book on Alloy. Next month starting on Z3 or TLA+/PLUSCAL.
Attending one of the biggest security conference in Italy: https://www.hackinbo.it/
NaNoGenMo!!!! Working on my next great American (generative) novel! As is now the tradition, I’m also updating the tool I use to create Tracery grammars pos2tracery
Jellies! I’ve won NaNoWriMo before and have been meaning to get into NaNoGenMo.
Learning argparse Python library in detail and making a command line tool using GitHub’s API.
Working on my visual novel (in Ren’Py), playing Outer Worlds, and relaxing before traveling to Maryland.
Eating Fondue at a friend’s mountain hut, making a website for a coworker’s mom who sells 45 different species of tomato plants. Maybe reading “The Dream Machine”.
Can I just say, I love reading what everybody’s up to, such a wholesome and broad range of activities!
Some breathing workshop.
Eloop.org
Writing some software (still just trying to make my system nice)
Enjoying an extended weekend with my family in Bordeaux. The weather will be shit but at least we will enjoy wine and meals.
By the way Bordeaux wine are overrated, try some Bourgogne or Côte-du-Rhône instead ;)
I will also take time to read, do some exercices and write down ideas on how to implement dynamic routing in the web framework I build.
Have a nice day !
Prepping for KubeCon
Today’s my last day here, so this weekend is going to be weird; I haven’t taken a bunch of time off in ages, aside from paternity leave a couple of years ago, which isn’t really taking time off, per se.
Flying to Belgrade for our first company offsite.
We have people flying all the way from Canada and Siberia! This will be a really fun week. It’ll be the first time I meet most of my team in person.
Watching The Irishman and continue to read The Three-Body Problem, which I’m really enjoying and excited to read the rest of the series.
Attending BarCamp Omaha 2019. I’m going to make a 23 minute presentation about the Tildeverse. (Assuming I can grab a presentation slot.. The signup is a FIFO that opens tomorrow at 8am.. ugh!)