Cooking For One

I’ve been busy the last week moving my self publishing 2.0 blog to its new location. I’ve also been doing some cleaning up, which is what brought my first self publishing experience to mind. It wasn’t fiction, but it wasn’t exactly non-fiction either. It was the Master’s Thesis for my Electrical Engineering degree.

There are two basic paths through a Master’s program in engineering. I believe the more popular path is to take two extra electives and a course in which one gives a short presentation on some subject or another. The other is to write a traditional thesis. I spent around eight months in the lab trying to grow diamond thin films with radio frequency plasma assisted chemical vapor deposition at low temperatures. Believe it or not, that’s pretty close to the title of the thing, which shows I understood the value of keywords before Al Gore invented the Internet.

The film above barely has any substance to it, I’m guessing it ran for less than a half hour. These photos of my old samples a couple days ago and didn’t check them against the appendix in the thesis so I’m just guessing. The next film shown looks like a full run, grown on a water cooled substrate. The whole CVD process is done in a vacuum chamber, and since I needed to pump in hydrogen to strike the plasma with a slower flow of methane, I really should have ballasted the vacuum pump with nitrogen – but nobody mentioned that until the vacuum oil was hopelessly hydrogenated.

It took me about a month of solid effort to write up the results on an old Wang wordprocessor (hardware) that emulated a PC XP running early DOS. I think I was able to get Word 2.0 to run on it. In any case,  part of the requirement was producing several copies on archival bond paper, one of which was sent of to the monopoly agency that “publishes” dissertations and scans to microfiche for posterity. I’d call that self publishing of the expensive variety. I didn’t bother ordering a bound copy for myself, and I never looked at any of it again for 20 years. The final film was grown on a heated substrate that I borrowed from the plastics department. By that time I’d lost interest in my adviser’s advice and just wanted to succeed.

I received the degree after the tradition grilling by a panel of three professors, in large part, I assume, because I remembered to bring donuts. The department didn’t have any funding so I didn’t have access to X-ray equipment, which is really the way to characterize a diamond thin film. A guy tried Laser Raman Spectroscopy for me, got one peak in the right place, but couldn’t repeat it. The SEM (Scanning Electron Microscope) showed some crystallization, but that could have been anything, and I don’t remember the results from the optical diffractometer. My favorite tool was an old Zeiss PhotoPhot microscope, that could do 1600X optical magnification, around the limit you can get with glass lenses, and 2500X if you projected it to the Polaroid photo head. I could see and photograph films, but so what?

I guess it kept me out of trouble for a year, and that’s about all I have to say about graduate school.

I was pulling up my channel on YouTube this morning to check the stats, when Internet Explorer loaded one of these false search engine pages called MyFreeze. I was pretty ticked, my immediate assumption was that one of the Trojan virus downloaders I was fighting off the other day while investigating eBook copyright infringements had broken through my firewall and virus software. It’s always dicey business to go after infringements on file sharing sites because you have to download files, which gives the malware a chance to enter. But neither my AVG nor MalwareBytes picked up on the MyFreeze as harmful software, so I checked the Internet Explorer setting under Tools>Options>Programs, and sure enough, it showed up when I clicked the “Manage Add-Ons” button.

It wasn’t listed directly as MyFreeze, but as NetAssistant, and it had been installed such that it hijacked 404 errors. A 404 error is a page not found error, and I just happened to get one after mistyping my channel name on YouTube. It’s possible that it was intended to operate as a full-time browser hijack, but that other settings prevent my default home page from being changed without explicit permission. In any case, I assume that I got stuck with this MalWare just yesterday, because I would have noticed otherwise, and after disabling it through “Manage Add Ons”, I also used System Restore to simply set my registry back to last week, after which NetAssistant no longer showed up in the Add-Ons list.

Because nether AVG nor MalwareBytes turned anything else up, my guess is that this version of MyFreeze was a straightforward hijack with no Trojan or other malware components that would trigger users to seek help in removing it. I’ll run a full AVG scan after posting this as a backup, but I don’t plan to run around changing all of my passwords.

I recently noticed that Google Image Search returns a row of pictures above the fold if anybody searches on Morris Rosenthal. Strangely enough, according to the Adwords Keyword Tool, 590 people last month did search on Morris Rosenthal, a reasonable chunk of which were looking for pirated copies of my eBooks. The problem with the Google Image results is they tended to show cover images from my books, and lead people to piracy sites.

So the point of this post is to give Google a new Morris Rosenthal image that they can really get their teeth into, and see if it makes those results.

The cat in the picture is a young Tigre (pronounced Tea-ger) which my friends Lewis and Yael adopted from the street in Jerusalem. Although they took Tigre in while he was fairly young, he had already developed some feral cat mannerisms, like attacking people. Once, when I was house sitting for them, they warned me about leaving my feet exposed at night since Tigre had a thing for attacking toes. Tigre also liked hanging out on top of the refrigerator, and swiping at people’s faces with a paw as they walked by. That inch between us was about as close as I wanted to approach.

However, age did with Tigre what it does with most males in the end, turns us into milk-sops. These days, you can stroke Tigre and he won’t even bite, and he’s been known to curl up with the dog as well. And that’s the truth, or my names not Morris Rosenthal (a little ISEO there at the end – the “I” is for Image).

Long term stock investing is full of old wives tales about the intelligent way to proceed. Given the fact that all stock investing is gambling (unless you are trading on illegal inside information), seeking an intelligent system for stock investing is a suckers game. Buy and hold for the long term? Sure, if you buy at the right time and hold until the right time you can do really well. It helps a great deal being born at the right time, so you can reach the point in life where you have money to gamble on stocks at the right time. Anybody who bought stocks in the world’s second largest economy of the last three decades (Japan) is still waiting for the market to get back to one third of the level it reached over 20 years ago.

How about buying stock in a company you understand, one where you have special insight into their products, giving you a competitive edge over other investors? Doesn’t work that way. You’re better off buying stock in a company where millions of people think they have special insight into the products, like Apple, because the only thing that drives stock prices is the enthusiasm of stock buyers.  How about cost averaging? Sorry, cost averaging isn’t an investment strategy, it’s a sales strategy, one used to convince nervous Nellie’s that it’s safe to buy stocks as long as you do it right. My favorite rule of all is “Never put all of your eggs in one basket.”

I felt a I knew a great deal about AMD products around ten years ago. The company had issues, including heavy investments in chip foundries which they believed were necessary to compete with Intel and some questionable joint ventures, but their new line of chips looked likely to outperform the Intel processors of the time. I had around $25K in my IRA, and conveniently, the AMD share price at the time was around $25 (down from nearly $50), so I jumped in with both feet. The analysis I did at the time indicated that either AMD was way under-priced or Intel was way overpriced, by a factor of four.

Well, I turned out to be right and wrong on all accounts. With the usual bouncing around, the share price continued to fall, I think it bottomed out around $5, meaning I was out around ten years of $2,000 IRA contributions. But I believed in the products and I held, and after a couple years, the as the stock passed through $25 on its way to nearly $50 again, I cashed out at break even. Intel did turn out to be overpriced by a factor of four, though lot of good it did me. And then AMD fell again, until earlier last year it bottomed out around $2 a share. And I, who had by this time bet against the market and was coming through the Great Recession with flying colors, ignored it. I didn’t fear they would go out of business, I literally feared I wouldn’t buy enough. Who cares about 1,000 shares in a $2 stock if it doubles, but who wants to hold 20,000 shares of a $2 stock if it goes to 50 cents?

I finally got out of my short positions a couple weeks ago (at break even) and started buying some stocks at what I believe is a market peak. Why? Because while my assessment of the underlying economy has been pretty accurate over the years, I’ve noticed that the stock market tends to ignore the economy and overshoots badly in either direction. So I’m hoping the 1,000 shares of AMD I picked up at around $9.50 will pop after the quarterly report, and I’ll be able to get in a stop loss order with enough of an error band to make it worth while.

I have no illusions about this being “investing” or making any money in the long term, I mainly trade these days to keep a hand in. I see the US stock market doing a Japan over the next decade, where selling out of losses and stopping out of profits is the only way to inch forward. For all of my mistakes, I’m still a little ahead of the game in one of the most turbulent decades the markets have seen. If there was something else reasonable to do with the money, I wouldn’t bother, but we’re all hostage to the NYC/Washington DC corridor.

I just mailed off my 2009 tax returns, in which I reported all of my unreported earnings. I know my usage doesn’t meet the typical definition of unreported earnings, which is money a person or business earns and doesn’t report for tax purposes. In my case, I think of unreported earnings as income that doesn’t generate a 1099, such as my book sales through a UK printer and my eBook sales, which are handled by PayPal. These sales amounted to around 20% of my earnings in 2009, could go as high as 25% next year, and obviously, I report those earnings and pay the taxes or I don’t suppose I’d be writing about it.

Many small businesses treat any income that doesn’t draw a 1099 as free money, and don’t report it on their taxes. Since I have income in the 28% Federal tax bracket, the 6.5% Massachusetts tax bracket (think medical insurance penalty) and pay 15.3% self employment tax on the whole, that income is taxed at roughly 49%. But I pay my taxes religiously, most Americans do when it comes down to it, and that included my spending time to correctGoogle this year who under-reported my income by around $2400 on the 1099 they did send. I noticed because I figure my taxes based on my actual income, all of which is channeled through my business bank account, whatever the source.

On my way back from the Post Office, I stopped into the local Liberty Mutual Insurance office to complain, or point out, that they were applying a 25% discount for Air Bag / Automatic Seat Belts to my 1986 Dodge Omni. That’s a mistake, the Omni has neither, I don’t believe they were even available as options. But the woman who wrote the policy in the first place assured me that Liberty Mutual automatically applies these discounts based on the VIN (Vehichle Identification Number), by which she was implying that I was somehow wrong. Trust me on this one – I’ve had the steering wheel off, no air bag, and I wouldn’t have noticed automatic seatbelts at some point in the last 24 years.

Which poses an ethical question. How much trouble am I obliged to go to to correct an error that is not of my making and that I’ve already showed up in person to address? I did check the VIN number against the actual tag in the car when I got home, they match, and I’ve had the car on the road for years without the discount being applied, so either they’ve changed their underwriting guidelines, or my representative simply doesn’t understand how their system works.

From the “fairness” standpoint, it doesn’t really matter. I don’t ever take passengers in the Omni, and I always wear the seat belt so it may as well be equipped with automatic seat belts. But I suspect I’ll find time in the next couple days to call their main office and see what the deal is, without mentioning the fact I’ve already been into the branch office since there’s no point getting my rep in trouble. As a prize for honesty, my insurance bill for the next eight months will go up around $80.

Only in America.