MAS o Menos

My computer started crashing last Thursday and it is in the shop until I get the all clear.  Meanwhile I drove up to Canada to visit friends.  It might be a week before my next post.

Getting closer!

Here is a music mix tape I made with some of my favorite New Wave pop hits from the very late 1970s and early 1980s.  I call this 10 song mix SKINNY TIE.  Enjoy.

1. General Public - Tenderness
2. Split Enz - I Got You
3. The Cars - Bye Bye Love
4. Madness - It must Be love
5. Nick Lowe - Cruel To Be Kind
6. Squeeze - Tempted
7. Haircut 100 - Love Plus One
8. English Beat - Mirror In The Bathroom
9. Elvis Costello - Watching The Detectives
10. The Jam - Beat Surrender

Let me know what you think.

My apartment is technically in the basement, but the side facing the street is almost the first floor.  The windows start at about the 4 foot level, so I have a decent view to look out.  Seems the people passing by also can see in at me.

When I’m doing dishes or cooking, I will occasionally make eye contact with a person walking past my street.  They are mostly women walking dogs.  I don’t think they are paying attention to me.  They probably see movement to their right and then look over at the building and see me.

Well, I didn’t think they really noticed me until the other day.  I was walking through Queen Anne and a lady was approaching from the other direction talking to her friend.  She saw me, stopped talking to her friend, looked directly at me and said hello like we were old friends.

About a block down the road it hit me that the ONLY place I’ve seen this lady was walking past my window.  If I were a young lady and she were an old man, I suppose I’d be creeped out, but it doesn’t bother me.

Does she like me or my stir fry?

This evening I was driving home thinking about what to have for dinner.  As I neared Baja Fresh, I considered how easy it would be to pull the car over and hand them $7 and change for a shrimp burrito.  Although I love their El Diablo Shrimp burrito, I drove home to prepare my own meal.

Using a packet of Hot and Spicy powder, I made an outstanding stir fry.  I’ve hit restaurant quality before.  This one was the first dish that I would call repeat restaurant quality, meaning I’d make a note to order this same dish twice.

• Bok Choy
• garlic
• mushrooms
• onion
• shrimp
• hot and spicy packet

I picked up a book recently that I thought would provide insight and tips on improving my sleep.  I should have read the reviews a little closer.

Sleep by Carlos H. Schenck covers all the oddities of sleep disorders.  If you want to learn about sleepwalking, sexomnia, night terrors or any of the host of serious sleep problems, then this book will be interesting.

If however you are looking for basic help on falling asleep earlier or staying asleep longer, this book is not for you.  The only useful information I found was in two paragraphs in the first 30 pages.  A few years I read a great book on sleep.  I can’t recall the title, but it was chock full of information and very helpful to me.

In the last few years I’ve read quite a few books that are related to finance.  Here are my favorites broken down by sub-genre.

Basic Investing

Bull’s Eye Investing: Targeting Real Returns in a Smoke and Mirrors Market by John F. Mauldin is my pick for the average person that wants to invest in the stock market.  John Mauldin makes heavy use of charts and the work of Ed Easterling and lays out probable returns based off of certain conditions.  If you are rightfully skeptical when you are told the big lie that stocks always go up in the long term, this is the book for you.

Financial History

Origins of the Crash: The Great Bubble and Its Undoing by Roger Lowenstein is my pick for the best financial history book.  Roger is the best financial historian there is and is probably better known for his book When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management.  I loved both books, but think Origins of the Crash is a more interesting time period that more people will relate to than the 1998 LTCM crisis.

Philosophy

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb explores how humans undervalue unexpected events.  I loved this book when I reviewed it back in March and plan to read it again some day.   The chapter on the Black Swan was later expanded into a full book.  Read Fooled by Randomness first, then tackle the Black Swan.

Trading Psychology

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator Illustrated (A Marketplace Book) by Edwin Lefèvreis the story of legendary trader Jesse Livermore and was written back in 1922.  If you think you want to be an active investor, I highly recommend reading this book.  This is a book that traders on Wall Street will read multiple times throughout their career.

A Little Bit of Everything

More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (Updated and Expanded) by Michael J. Mauboussin is a great mix of philosophy, psychology and statistics easily explained across 30 essays.  If your reading time is limited and you want to expose yourself to a little of each of these topics, then this is the book you want.

What finance books would you add to the list?

Three quick updates on the cooking front.

I made my first stir fry using a real Wok.  The veggies cooked much nicer and the flavor was better than any stir fry I’ve made to date.  It tasted so good, I didn’t even pause to take a photo.

The second update was my failure story.  I was making a soup using kidney beans.  Everything was cut and prepped and ready to go.  However, I was missing an ingredient.  The recipe asked for chili powder and I substituted jalapeno powder.  Mistake.  Big Mistake.

Although it tasted good, albeit quite spicy, it destroyed my stomach.  The spices were like battery acid on my gut.  Even though I had made over 10 servings and probably spent $10 in ingredients, I had to throw it all out.  Losing $10 was a cheap lesson compared to the $9000 I lost on shorting oil without a stop-loss earlier this year.

Update number three was a simple whole wheat spaghetti made using buffalo meat.

Really I tried.  About two years ago I discovered Coke Zero.  A zero-calorie version of Coke that didn’t taste like a diet drink.  It was amazing.  After going years without drinking any soft drinks, I was back to a can a day.  It was zero calories and I no longer feared Nutrasweet, what could go wrong?

In February, the Economist ran a story about how low calorie sweeteners can trick the body into being fat.  From the story Sweetness and Light -  Metabolic Syndrome II: obesity:

Dr Swithers and Dr Davidson also measured the body temperatures of their charges before and during the chocolate meal. In normal animals the brain raises the body’s temperature before and during eating. This is to prepare for the energy-intensive job of digestion. As expected, those rats on the sugar diet showed a normal temperature rise. Those on the sweetener, however, showed a diminished increase in temperature, suggesting that their physiology was in some way affected.

The article goes into how repeatedly fooling the brain with low/no calorie sweeteners may interfere with the body’s ability to judge calories and the result is you end up eating more.  Yikes.  All I was wanted was a sweet beverage option that didn’t cost me any calories.  Seems you can’t fool mother nature.

So I quit buying cans of Coke Zero.  Then after several days or a week I’d rationalize just getting one drink.  A 20 ounce bottle of Coke Zero from the quickie-mart is $1.62 after tax.  Since the drinks were infrequent, the cost wasn’t too much of a problem.  Then the temperature got warmer and I started buying more.

So like a cigarette smoker that figures out quitting isn’t on the horizon, I decided to buy my carton equivalent.  Today I caved in and bought a 24 pack.  OK, I bought two, they were on sale.  It’s summer.  Once we head into fall, I’ll quit for real.  Except for …

The one thing I am most kidded about is my early bedtime.  I have the sleep habits of a middle-schooler.  On a typical night, I’ll go to bed between 10 PM and 10:30 PM.  Then I rise between 5:00 AM and 6:00 AM without an alarm.  Yes, I am an unapologetic morning person.

Although waking up early and being productive is a highly valued attribute for a family man, it is a disadvantage to a single guy.  It seems other single people do like the night life.  By 11 PM, I look like a kid in the back seat of car returning from a day at the amusement park.

Of course this fact provides an endless source of amusement for my friends.  So I decided to investigate sleep.  I’m only 30 pages into the book Sleep by Carlos H. Schenck and I’ve already learned a few things.

…it appears that the tendency to be a “morning person” or “night person” is something we are born with.  We all have unique biological needs and do our best when we accept them instead of forcing ourselves to fight them.

There is also a type of insomnia called early-morning awakening.  It occurs when the sleeper wakes up too early.  I may have this and have learned to deal with it by going to sleep earlier.  Or maybe I just wake up each morning with a lot of things I want to accomplish and after a full day of working on them,  I get sleepy.