Matt's Homepage

Lots going on.  More than the usual Christmas – that’s for sure.

1. I need a new roommate: my old roommate is moving out – so I need someone for January.  Anyone looking for a good place downtown?  Contact me (mattfife at gmail.com)!

2. Holidays: Got a bit bogged down with running the name exchange for my family.  Funny part was doing the name drawing.  Here I was thinking about writing this clever program to draw names for other folks.  We have some members in school so you want each person’s gift giver to be a mix of folks that have money and don’t have money.  Each person got two or three names depending on ability to pay, etc.  After pondering the problem I realized the fastest solution was just to write the correct number of names on paper slip, drop them (literally) into a bucket and draw.  First round produced almost perfect results.  The only conflicts and clumps were resolved by just re-drawing with only the affected names.  Took 5 minutes tops.  Sometimes you can try to out-smart yourself – and the easiest solutions are also the fastest. Thank you Jamie from Mythbusters – I took his motivation to always to do the quickest, easiest approach and not try to over-engineer something when a much simpler and faster solution is available.  As Fr. Bob would say – “Be brief, Be holy, Be done”

3.  We might get snowed on:  Oregon is funny.  It’s like they haven’t seen snow – even though the mountains have dozens of feet on them.  But everyone’s been talking ALL WEEK about the *blizzard* we might get this weekend.  If I had my bets (and I’m putting one down now) the WORST we’ll get is 2″ of snow that’ll melt off in a day or two at most.  My real guess is that it might flurry but it won’t even stick.  Oh, the mountains will get good snow, and the coast will get some bad rain storms for sure – but the “blizzards” out here don’t even beat the average snow front in the midwest.  Still, one never drives when it snows out here.  They simply can’t drive on it.  I’m parking my car in a safe spot away from traffic and intersections for the inevitable bumper cars.

Skyline GT-R madness:
My buddy Marty got his Skyline GTR reviewed by a local car group:

There are LOTS of 1600×1200 images of everything in the car – definitely take a look.

Presale ticket passwords galore:
Everyone knows the good tickets for concerts/shows/plays/etc sell out during the pre-sale.  I get updates of upcoming shows, but unless you sign up for every stupid mailing list from the bands/shows you might want to see (and live in a sea of junk email), you won’t get the pre-sale codes.  Unless you go here to Ticket Horde

Due to a once-in-50-year alignment of the moon in the right phase, Venus, and Jupiter – Australians got to see a happy face in the sky last night.

  

I love a deal.

But after going to my usual suspect sites that tracks all things deal related – and the specific Black Friday ads and the essential Black Friday tracker page – I found this year not even worth getting up for.  There was only one thing I was interested in, the Hauppauge HD TV tuner card for $19 at Circuit City (I wanted a spare).  I showed up at the store at 11am and they were predictably sold out of this door-buster deal, but after getting a sales rep over, he got one ordered for me from a stock of 30-some in his machine for the $19 price and I walked out the door.  Outside that and a $100 color laser printer that I didn’t really need – there just wasn’t much interesting to be had.  Noteably missing: hard drive and video card deals.  Not one single decent one to be found.

It was also terribly stupid to wait in line or really even go to the brick-and-morter versions of the stores this year.  All the deals had been started at their online shops at wee hours of the morning (2am/5am/6am, etc).  Some places had even started their BF sales online earlier in the week.  I also don’t understand what deals people are expecting on BF for just normal shopping.  Unless you’re going in for the specific door-buster deals (usually there are only about 20-30 of such items with limited quantities and they sell out just seconds after the doors open) the sales on BF really aren’t that any better than the regular sale prices.  Just come some other sale weekend and you’ll likely get the exact same price for those non-doorbuster items.

News reports show that BF made a good showing (which undoubtably made retailers sigh in relief) but people were buying less quantity. Let’s see how it all pans out the rest of the shopping season.

Anybody out there get something interesting?

Now this looks cool.

Guess what years and years of record trade deficits and more recently, record exports of debt have got us? I’m not a huge fan of bailing out the automakers. They’ve been entrenched in poor performance for years – and it’ll take a big shakeup to get them out of their doldrums. But this could be the beginning of socialized corporations in America – just much differently than anyone anticipated…

At current market valuations (GM is worth less than Mattel) the Chinese government can afford to buy GM with petty cash. Even a hundred billion dollars would barely dent China’s more than $2 trillion in currency reserves. For nobody in the world would buying GM and (while they are at it) Chrysler make more sense than for the Chinese. Overlap? What overlap? They would gain instant access to the world’s markets with accepted brands, and proven technology.”

– article here

Well, after receiving my free iTouch from Key Bank, I’ve had a lot of fun with the device.  What’s more interesting is that with each app I play with, I come up with a few ideas for others.  So, I decided to look into the Apple iPhone/iTouch SDK.  Well, the SDK only works on a mac.  One might try a hack-en-tosh – but I had a better plan – exploit the current economic situation.

Buy one
I posted an ad on craigslist asking for a cheap Core2Duo iMac for $350.  And within a day or two, I had two offers.  So after years of swearing I’d never buy one – I went and picked up the better of the two:

There’s a lot of hungry folks out there.  Got a Core2Duo 2.8ghz iMac, 8gb ram, 80gb hd, and 3 years of Applecare for $350.  Includes box, docs, and everything it came with.  I picked it up right next to the Apple store so we could run it over and I had them run the serial number to see if it was stolen, verify it’s capabilities, and they did a quick test on everything.  Checked out ok.

Take it home
I blew away the machine and reinstalled everything from the install disks. About the same as doing anything on windows – took about an hour or so.  Another 2 or so hours of downloading updates and rebooting after each pack.

Set up VPN
I don’t want a KVM switchbox on my desk, so I decide to set up VPN.  I download Real VNC’s free viewer – and then set up VNC on the mac.  OS X includes a VNC server by default, but there are a few tricks.  Here’s the procedure:
1. On your mac, open System Preferences
2. Under “Internet and Networking” pick the “sharing” icon
3. Turn on the “Remote Management”option/checkbox
4. Click the “Computer Settings” button
4a.  Check “Anyone may request permission to control screen”
4b. Check “VNC viewers may control screen with password:” and enter a password
4c. Click ok
5, Select ‘Allow access for All users’ or enter the names of the users that you want to give VNC to
Done with mac side.

Download realVNC and install it on the computer you want to use to connect to your mac (client).
1. When you open realVNC, you’ll need to enter the IP address for your mac in the ‘Sever’ box.
2. BEFORE you try to connect, hit the options button.
3. On the Colours & Encoding tab, select Full in the Colour Level box.  Make sure your own desktop is running at 32 bit color or the eqivalent of the mac side or you’ll get the dreaded “Connection refused: connect()” message from realVNC.
4. Enter your password specified in step 4b – and you should see your desktop

Now I can control my mac remotely from my pc desktop.  No monitor switching/extra keyboards/etc.  My headless mac is happy.

Download iPhone SDK
Go to Apple dev center and download the iPhone SDK. Watched some of the videos and realize I need to learn Objective C. Started reading some of the tutorials and they’re not bad. Now to get hello world up…

I did – have been in a drugged state of half-awareness for 3 days now.  Sigh.  Ohhhh…are those the purple flying elephants again?  Must be 10am…

Update: I got some good decongestant from the doctor – wahoo. I love Oregon. They’ve completely banned over the counter ephedrine. You simply have to have a prescription. You can no longer just present ID to a pharmacist who keeps it behind the counter. However, I can drive 15 miles up to Washington state and still buy ephedrine over the counter with a drivers license. Still, the stuff the doctor gave is working great – so no problems there. Should be back up in a day or so.

The latest Department of Labor report that shows 240,000 jobs were lost in October alone wasn’t great news.  But if you read the historical data behind these numbers, the picture sounds bleak:

-At a total jobless rate of 6.5%, we’re at a level that hasn’t been seen since March 1994.
-September’s losses of were the largest monthly job loss total since November 2001 – which as you’ll recall was the start of the dot-com bust.
-1,179,000 jobs were cut in the last 12 months – a 12-month loss window that large hasn’t been seen since 2001
-Most economic indicators signaling even more difficult times ahead, job losses will likely deepen and continue through at least the first half of 2009.
-“We may be in a severe recession, in which case these job numbers are not even big yet,” said Robert Brusca, economist at FAO Economics; suggesting monthly job loss totals could grow in excess of 300,000 an unemployment could rise to around 7%
-Interestingly, the female unemployment rate as of October was 5.8%, it was 7.1% for men.

To add more good news, Brian Dunn, president and chief operating officer of Best Buy, was quoted today saying “In 42 years of retailing, we’ve never seen such difficult times for the consumer”
-The Dept of Labor’s report echos this ominous sign indicating retailers trimmed payrolls by 38,000 workers last month – right before the holiday season that typically counts for 50% of yearly profits.

Matt’s Oct 2008 prediction hit rate:
1. Stocks will have a sharp decline, and continue to decline for rest of the year with no meaningful recovery for 2 years.  – After a little bubble in late Oct, it has gone down again and looks like I’m still on track.  Below is the dow tracked since I made the prediction.
My new concern is that we’ll see another big 1000-2000 point drop on/after the holiday as it becomes apparent how bad the retail season is going to be.  Could be another big tumble before Q2 of next year.  I don’t think people realize how bad the holiday shopping season is going to be.  People are already cutting off the credit card use, so with folks just using cash – you better believe there will be a lot less buying.

2. Downward Housing spiral is going to continue – S&P’s numbers for August indicate a continued decline for most cities; but we’ll need to get a few months under our belt to say for sure.  Still, most are seeing a month-to-month decline in value of 0.0-1.0%.  Still, Portland saw a very slight uptick between July and Aug.
3. Job losses will continue – Right on the money with this one.  My prediction to a friend was we’d be at 7% unemployment by Q2 of next year – looks like we might hit it sooner than that.
4. Depression is a real word – and we may just get one – All the indicators are pointing towards a recession in the same range as the dot-com bust a few years back.  And that was an economy without the debt-saddled home problems we have now.  This one is shaping up to be worse by about a factor of 50% by my guess.
5. Days of easy credit and easy ownership are over – well, duh.

So, tips:

1. Cut your discretionary spending as much as possible.   Cash is already king; but if you’re sitting on a pile of cash towards the end of this (whenever that will be) – you’ll be able to buy up stocks/property/etc at fire-sale prices.
2. Save up an emergency fund of at least 3-6 months.  I’d say even more if you can as this unfolds.
3. Hold off on purchases – even if you can afford it.  Right now everything is going down – and the longer you delay your purchase, the better the deal you’ll get.  At least for the next few months.  I’m already seeing this in electronics – and car dealers are likely bending over backwards right now.  Depends on the item you’re buying (houses are different than home electronics); but it’s a good rule to follow.  I predict some amazing after christmas blowouts.
4. Plan your contingencies – are you in a job area that is already teetering?  If so, they will really be getting creamed by early next year when things will be worse.  Start making those contacts with other employeers, friends, update your resume, start getting your linked-in and other networking going NOW.