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Showing posts from May, 2014

Getting your significant other's attention in a large house

The physics of sound in our house lend well to Stacy being able to shout up to me from downstairs, but not so well for me shouting back downstairs.  It makes communication inefficient, and often times she's not exactly watching for messages on GChat either.  I don't like going halfway downstairs when I'm trying to hold very skinny wires in a special arrangement when poking around for defects in LEDgoes, much less just to get a Yes/No answer on a simple question. Recently, we picked up a Yamaha HTR-4065 stereo receiver for our living room.  Stacy was not happy with the sound quality of the original receiver, and hearing how the Yamaha can fill up the room while not vibrating every tiny appendage on your body with obnoxious bass, it was definitely money well-spent.  Hopefully it will add some more years to our natural hearing capability before we have to get hearing aids or whatever magical, mystical implant they develop by the time we're that old.  However, there is s

The one-dollar.us Options Scalper

The one-dollar.us Options Scalper was another project that had a lot of potential during its time, but would have required some startup capital (VC attention) and more care and nurturing in order to really get off the ground.  Now I feel like the guys at Quantopian are quite on the right track, but they too have recognized that designing an intuitive interface for stock options analysis will be difficult... plus there's just so much data!!!  Nevertheless, Dan Dunn at Quantopian seemed to like the interface I provided, but they're designing the interface I ultimately wanted to provide so I'm just going to let them finish it up. ;)  (Plus, they know a little more Python than I do, which seems a great programming language choice for this task.) The scalper was designed as a means to learn and study option decay in a graphical manner.  As weekly options were relatively new back in 2011, I decided those would be a great target because there's not a lot of data you need t

Three Obscure Pricing Games On "The Price Is Right"

Everyone has their favorite pricing game on The Price Is Right, whether it be Plinko, Lucky $even, Hole In One, Clock Game, or whatever the case may be.  Some may fancy retired games such as Hurdles (1976-83) or Super Ball!!! (1981-98).  Long-time producer Roger Dobkowitz once said "every pricing game is somebody's favorite," and with over 100 pricing games played over the show's long history, it's been sufficient to keep millions of viewers still watching loyally every morning. For as many memorable games as the show has, they have certainly had some, shall we say, "experiments" that did not go so well.  Some games were dull; others simply did not mesh well with the spirit of Price is Right (like Professor Price or Double Bullseye).  Still others have grown old (like Barker's Bargain Bar), were killed off due to inflation (like Walk of Fame), were plagued with mechanical issues (like Hurdles), or became too confusing for today's contestants to