April 27, 2020

Yesteryear
One year ago today: April 27, 2019, touring Bartow.
Five years ago today: April 27, 2015, DIY chair hooks.
Nine years ago today: April 27, 2011, "resources are building again”.
Random years ago today: April 27, 2018, the paper towel attack.

           How’s your loss tolerance? The Forex trading account is deep in loss mode. Sunday trading began okay, almost reaching the goal of 3%, then plunging to a -2.77% loss, where it has hovered since. Am I in a panic. Nope, because I’ve learned to read the trading charts and so far there have been nothing but buy orders. Yes, you buy cyclical stocks when they are dropping. I would have a hard time accepting that many of the users actually use these charts. There are no bid listings and most relevant information has to be mentally calculated from the chart elements. Right this moment, I’m “down” $197.10. I recognize that as due to dropping prices on what’s been bought so far. The expectation is they will bounce back even higher. If one is afraid of negative numbers, stay out of this business.

           Here’s a photo of the original 1995(?) Taurus taken on this day in 2008. I would have owned the car around five years by then, and notice the damage to the right side quarter panel. So I’ve owned two similar cars with damage to the same part of the vehicle. No explanation, and I have another mystery. Something has disappeared, my oven mitt. I keep it on top of the fridge, where it is handy. Gone. Nope, didn’t fall behind anything. I have a theory. You know how rats will gnaw at the tips of oven mitts that accidentally have any sauce soaked into the fiber? Well sometimes when I zip out into the yard, the door doesn’t close all the way. And that black cat that sleeps on the lawn furniture, he’s a smart one.

           I’ve completed plumbing all the available dollar figures and percentages. This unfamiliar term is what I call going over a chart to match up any given set of numbers to how if they are used to derive ratios. There are lots on Auvoria, though may have obscure meanings. For instance, the “margin level”, I’ll tell you what I think it is. This is the amount of cash in your account that the broker retains to make sure any leveraged losses you incur are covered by your own money. If so, this is one of a dozen terms that are not made clear to the user.
           Why is it relevant? Because I’ve noticed the average margin level never goes below 500, meaning only 20% of your money is working at any given time. The rest is the other guy’s safety net. Other items of curiosity to me are how the commissions are higher when buying yen and this week’s lack of sell orders. I have noticed there are some trade orders and how they don’t seem to appear in the transaction listings. And the limit I set for lot size, 0.16, has been regularly exceeding on those transactions approved in Tennessee by telephone. A lot of shop talk, but this is Monday morning. It’s daylight in the swamp.

           This is a compound photo of the back yard lean-to poles. The first shows the poles, bright new lumber with a brace between them at the three foot level. The second picture shows roughly the same scene camouflaged from the drone. What a pity in America these days anyone should have to take such measures. I’ve seen the country go from free to this in my own lifetime. The liberal Democrat leftists who caused it are going to get their comeuppance in November—if Trump begins to name names of which of his own Republicans have been stalling and foot-dragging.
           If the majority turns out as I expect, Congress had better start cleaning up its act as well. They have resisted changes from both parties, they are the true proponents of business as usual. I wonder when the fray will begin. These Democrats and their minions would rather see the country fail as a whole than let Trump succeed a second time. I wonder if they’ll waste another hundred million on the pollsters and consultants again. The ones who told them Trump would never win and that even talking about the border was too touchy a subject that would alienate the voters. Well, leftards, border jumping down 73% overall, and 99% where the wall is built. Talk your way out of that one.

Picture of the day.
“Taiwanese goddess”, current viral post.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.

           Not the greatest color contrast but there’s that orange-like soil that seems to underlay my entire yard at around 30” down. You can see a bit of the regular grey sandy soil, quite different than this material. It reminds me of Georgia, but this is sand with no component of clay. Just a bit of dirt and another oddball occurrence is around half of the post holes I’ve dug have hit some sort of man-made material, usually one or two feet down. Wait for photos.

           I have a digital scale that cannot be fooled. I eat a regimented diet and fast at least twelve hours daily. I have a leather punch to ensure the latest perforation tells me if I regain any fraction of an inch. Yet in the past week I’ve gained 9.9 pounds. This equates to over 30,000 extra calories. For the food I eat, that is two carloads of groceries. Except, I only shop on the scooter and have only been out twice.
           This, folks, is a warning signal, one of a set of events that led to my first heart attack. Unexplained weight gain. I’m still in the safe zone but there has never been a satisfactory explanation. This means I’m going out in the yard to work. Pics to follow if things get going. I’m building a different bird house, longer and narrower, but slightly higher.

           The real afternoon was in the back yard. The new shed, the activity needed to keep moving things along. I promise better pictures of the shed progress. I ran the numbers for shed cooling and insulation. It has to be nice back there, which means another $59 bale of insulation. In turn, that means the planned 2x3”s don’t make the grade.
           Should I take a day off and drive to Ft. Meyers?

ADDENDUM
           This section concerns the Forex trading software. Skip it if you are not interested. The software we are using, called Alexander, is the beginner’s version of AuvoriaPrime’s offerings. And it suffers all of the defects of object-oriented code. It would seem to me that anyone who uses this code would be aware of these problems and strive to avoid them. But no, the code is just cranked out in the classic MicroSoft format—as long as the simple things appear to work, nobody really gets past “chapter three” of the manual. I reported how the RESET WEEKLY GOAL button now displays on screen. Fine, but it does nothing. It has no code attached behind it.
           You see, one of the easiest things to do in OOPs coding is to drop a button on-screen. It appears to work, because of “inherited” properties or I think they call that a class or some equally meaningless bullshit. But I hope they don’t think it would ever fool someone like myself. Fortunately, I learned enough about the system already that I was able to go in and make the changes manually. You see, information is linear, intelligence is exponential.

           I found a report of the broker transactions for the previous week, it shows information I’m interested in, such as which transactions remained open after we stopped trading. The report itself is a mess, with non-field information crammed into data fields, a kind of poor-man’s titling effort. I downloaded one report and delete the titles, keeping only the column headings. Then attempted to line up the fields, but they use at least two different delimiters. Another duh! I tried opening the files with Notepad, then saving the text versions to open with Wordpad, which I am now trying to remove the wraparound that is splitting the data fields into two lines. I may have to do this the tedious way.
           However, until the records are lined up one row each, I cannot sort and insert control breaks, making it difficult to follow the individual transaction record. Keep patient, I may settle for isolating a single transaction of each type. If you are not real computer programmer, the control breaks are the signals for the computer to stop processing a related batch of records and print a subtotal. I need several layers, for buy, sell, and results. It’s in there, I just have to figure out how the idiot who created it was thinking—and it is very difficult for me to dumb down to that level.

           Once the raw data is in columns, it still must be exported to a spreadsheet for this processing. So it is back to trusty (but still finicky) Windows XP, since I would never use a cloud-based system for personal financial records. This took hours, during which time I approved three transaction notices. Nothing apparently happened for another hour, when suddenly they appeared. But where was that fourth transaction I approved before I reset the system? I know by now somebody is watching our account like a hawk and the lag time here was plenty for somebody to go in there, notice I had to set the parameters manually, and enable the system hoping I would not notice. Hmmmm. I’m just sayin’.
           I've also noticed the software gets unstable during periods of high trading or rapid price changes. Hmmm, unscalable . . .

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