Caliban - Opinion and Righteous Anger

We made another conscious effort to get out into nature on at least one day this weekend. We had planned to head up to Point Reyes, but that seemed like altogether too much effort on the day, so we drove over to Castle Rock State Park instead, where we went on a 7.7km hike and totally misjudged the heat.

The forestry was lovely and the views across the valley beautiful, but we could have done with more water for the trek. With all of the photos we took, it took a good few hours before we emerged, quite dehydrated and soaking wet with perspiration. Still, at least we were able to buy a couple of bottles of water from the ranger hut on the way out.

Castle Rock State Park lies in the Santa Cruz mountains, up behind Saratoga. It's very scenic and I highly recommend it if you're ever in the area.

Ruby/Finance is finally available for public consumption. I released version 0.1.0 yesterday evening to a deafening roar of silence.

Currently, it handles basic Yahoo Finance stuff, such as currency conversions and stock data retrieval from the American, Australian, Asian and European markets. As such, it replicates some of the functionality of Perl's Finance::Quote and is somewhat based on its design. In fact, whilst running unit tests, I was amused to find that I had even managed to faithfully port one of Finance::Quote's bugs.

For the foreseeable future, I'll be adding more of Finance::Quote's functionality to provide Ruby users with the same range of features that the Perl crowd enjoy. After that, who knows?

The next module I'll be implementing is one to retrieve stock data from Amsterdam's AEX exchange.

A family member sent me this article, which once again raises the spectre of conscription in the US.

The American government once again claims that no such move is being considered and that this simply constitutes a routine recruitment drive for the draft boards, whose job positions are currently 80% vacant.

This gives rise to the following thoughts in my head:

• Why were those positions allowed to become 80% vacant? I have to assume they were not needed, or else they would never have been cut in a country that has never shown any aversion to adequately budgetting for so-called defence.
• Why are they being filled now if no draft is forthcoming? Is it simply an oversight that these jobs were vacated and then not filled? I doubt it.

As usual, read the article, consider the facts and make up your own mind.

I was lucky enough to be able to attend a talk today by Burton Malkiel, esteemed author of The Random Walk Guide To Investing and A Random Walk Down Wall Street.

With an IPO on the horizon, my employer has taken the amazing step of inviting companies and speakers to come in and educate us, the humble workforce, about the shark-infested world known as the financial investment market.

Slowly but surely, I'm learning what index and mutual funds are, as well as small vs. large cap stocks, actively vs. passively managed funds, etc. I now know what an 83b election is; I even largely understand AMT tax and grasp when I would pay short term capital gains tax vs. long term.

Of course, for all the education, my attitude hasn't changed very much: I don't actually want to know any of this. It's just plain bloody boring. Things were a lot simpler when I had neither a pot to piss in, nor a window to throw it through, as the saying goes.

The rush of advisors and investors, all eager to get me on the hook as a customer, serves to remind me that some people are taking the IPO very seriously, indeed. It's a useful reminder that behind all the hype, something quite unique is coming to pass. And true enough, it could turn out to be a life-changing event.

We'll see what happens. I come from a very modest background, so it's hard to imagine ever really transcending that, especially by way of something as patently silly as a stock market floatation. My parents taught me that if I worked hard, I would be rewarded. At the same time, they worked hard and died poor.

IPOs really go against the work ethic. Roll into work around noon, lazily tap some things into a computer and you stand to make a fortune. Meanwhile, ambulance drivers, firemen and teachers struggle to make a living. It's strange what society values and decides to reward, don't you think?

And to think that the only reason I went into this business was that I liked playing with computers. I could just as easily have been turned on by sociology, and where would that have put me now?

Work hard, my arse. It's all about luck. You make your own decisions in this life, but you need a fair amount of luck as well, to get ahead. I hope mine holds out a little longer.

It's another media feeding frenzy today.

As I left work to go to lunch around noon today, I noticed the van of a news team parked on the verge of Amphitheatre Parkway. They were setting up cameras and erecting a satellite dish on top of the van's roof, but I couldn't tell which radio or television station they represented.

Anyway, one of the news men overheard me telling a colleague how to walk to our lunch destination. He tapped me on the shoulder and asked me, "Do millionaires still walk?"

Not being a lawyer or a sportsman or a spokesman or some other public functionary, I'm not used to being approached by the media. Given that I administer Linux computers and Internet services, I consider this incident yet another amusing anecdote with which to regale my future children a few years from now.

Whether or not any money is generated by this whole escapade is, in some ways, secondary to the whole experience of having been party to the rise and continued rise of Google. The last few years have represented a unique period in the history of Silicon Valley. I consider myself very fortunate to have been a part of it all, regardless of how things pan out. I don't expect there to be another phenomenon to match the Internet boom in my lifetime.

My reply to the reporter, by the way, was, "I can't even be seen to smile at you, or they'll cut off my head."