Digital Dave

I need to get out of my friends apartment as soon as possible.  Her landlord isn’t too thrilled that I’m still here due to the apartment complex policy, which puts me in an awkward situation.  Luckily I have a job (woot x∞), I just need to find somewhere to live.  Regardless, I’ll need to leave tomorrow.  I can’t risk getting them evicted by old man scrooge.

I do have two great options on the table in Novato, CA.  I’ve only pursued one and I am just waiting for them to get in touch with my references ASAP and giving me the thumbs up. I would pursue the other, but this one sounds like it will work out. If not, I’ll scramble to get with the second individual (who basically lives down the street from the first…).

I do have my twitter-networking post nearly complete.  I will post that soon.

Edit: The first option in Novato fell through.  The other tenant didn’t want a male to come in to occupy the other space.  Unfortunate.  My female friend here in Glendale has a) tech support and b) a personal dish-washer.  Trust me, I make myself useful.

Edit: The second option in Novato was a success!  I have somewhere to live! Woot!

This is my first involvement in this sort of financial disaster and I have to admit that it has been one hell of a ride.  It definitely takes a gut of steel to stomach these steep declines in the market, and I’ve got to imagine that we are close to a bottom.

But just remember, every disaster has a bottom.  Professional investors are just sitting on the side lines with their cash on hand to dive right back into the action.  I’m looking at stocks that are extremely discounted because they have been beaten to death. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with these companies! People just jumped off the ship because they were scared as hell.  Which, is a natural reaction.  Nobody in their right mind wants to lose money.  But if you sell, you LOCK IN those losses.  If you don’t sell, you have time on your side to recover that money unless you are very close to retirement.

And you’ve got to realize.  You’re not the only one getting thumped.  Order will restore itself eventually, and I believe it’ll happen pretty soon.

In other news, this job search is a pain-in-the-butt.

I can say without a shadow-of-a-doubt that network contacts are so freaking vital it’s not even funny.  It’s not like I didn’t know this (see: Darius, this applies to even more than the gamedev industry), but seeing the value of it first hand is mind blowing and it really makes me wish I would have pounded MUCH harder on it.  So if you are a freshman or sophomore, listen up.  Get on it.

It doesn’t help when you are searching for a job in a recession, nor does it help when you are applying during the time when companies typically go through a hiring lull (Fall).

I’m optimistic.  I know I’m valuable.  I’ve been admired by those who have led me, and those who have followed me.  I also know how hard I work in a business environment.  I mean, hell, some day I want to be an entrepreneur.  Not just an entrepreneur, but a successful entrepreneur.   Raw passion, an eye for initiative driven opportunities, and a motivated attitude all drive my work ethic.

65 days until graduation.  I’m excited.

ASIA [1/20]

• Hang Seng Index: -5.49%  (chg: -1383.01)
• NIKKEI 225 Index: -4.58% (chg: -610.25)

Europe

• FTSE 100 Index: -5.48% (chg: -323.50)
• GERMAN SE XETRA DAX Index: -7.16% (chg: -523.98)
• CAC 40 Index: -6.83% (chg: -347.95)

Tomorrow is going to be a pretty interesting day… To say the least… I’ll pray for your 401K and you can pray for my personal portfolio.

I guess the good out of all of this is: If you are not investing, pretty soon you are going to have a perfect buying opportunity.

*Resumes Coding*

Edit Before Bed

ASIA[1/21 - So Far]

• Hang Seng Index: -8.04% (chg: -1,914.73)
• NIKKEI 225 Index: -5.03% (chg: -670.46)

United States: Futures

• DOW: -3.6% (chg: 436.00)
• S&P500: -4.3% (chg: 57.1)

Not good…

Well, we had the day off from school today, which gave me some extra time to study up on some things.  I didn’t get as much as I wanted to get done this weekend, due to taking a trip back home, but the semester is charging full steam ahead.

October is here, and that means that enrollment is just around the corner.   It looks like I can take 16 credit hours in the spring or fall, and the other semester will need 13 hours.  I’m still determining what classes I want to take for my electives, but I need to get with some people to figure out what direction I should take.  I’m getting pretty anxious to graduate, if this blog couldn’t tell.  I miss work.

Today, Nokia made a pretty interesting move in the GPS market.  They ended up buying a company Navteq.  Navteq produces the maps that you might see being used on Garmin products.  As you can imagine, this is a nice strategic movement for Nokia.  Having Navteq will help Nokia provide a GPS enabled phone.  But this pretty much slammed Garmin’s stock against the wall, and nailed it between the legs.  Garmin’s stock fell to it’s knees pretty bad today.  I’ve got to think irrational selling on some of those investors.  I don’t see this 8.1 billion dollar buy from Nokia to be something that shatters Garmin.  But there sure were a ton of people jumping ship.  It ended up falling ~12% at the EOD and at times it was down around 16%.

Anyways, I took a nice hit from this.  But, with all things, once investors see the light, they’ll come back.  For now it’s at a nice discount.

If you are a student, and are interested in investing, head to www.updown.com.

In other news, Kansas State football smashed the University of Texas.  What a great game. GO CATS!

So, today was pretty interesting.  I didn’t have my first 8:30 class, and thenI found out my 1:30 philosophy class was canceled.  So, all I had was finance at 11:30. What sort of luck is it when you nail 2 cancellations in one day?  I was hoping for that third, but it never came.

So the network coding assignment was pushed back until today due to last week being the career fair, and a lot of students were a little more concerned with finding a job.  The project ended up “alright,” in my book.  I was trying to figure out threading at the same time I was figuring out how the server and client interact, and, well, the threading tripped me up a little.  The UDP version + Sniffer turned out just fine.  It was just the TCP version that had some issues with connecting with more than 1 client.

All in all, it was a fun little assignment, but I’m looking forward to the next one even more.  I’ll definitely have threads and the connections ironed out by then.  We’re to develop a client / server chat application that will also have a directory of other servers (implemented by using RPC or RMI).   Extra credit is to keep a tab on the servers, and updating the directory if a server ended its session.  Doesn’t sound too difficult.  We’ll find out.  I’m debating on developing it in C# or Java, but I’m leaning a little more on C#.

Alright, I’m off to do some reading. Peace, journal land!

Oh, yeah.  So, my investment portfolio is up 19.5% (6 months). Right on!  If your money is just sitting in your bank account, bringing in a few % of interest a year, you might consider starting an investment account at Scottrade for $500.  Take a deep breath, and dive in, what do you have to lose? Time?  Good luck!

In my finance class, our portfolio is up about $65,000.  I made one of my best stock picks last Thursday, and I made one of my saddest mistakes today.   Let’s just leave it as: If you invest, and your stock runs up 50% in two days, SELL 3/4, or at LEAST 1/2.  That one stock I picked, ran up 60k.  I ended up selling it today at ~20k. But, to end, I still <3 China (for now).
Ok, time to go read. For real.

School starts Monday!  Thank goodness.  I’m about ready to get back into motion.  I love breaks away from school, but I also enjoy learning new things and being around the academic atmosphere.  I’m taking some interesting courses this semester.   One being a networking course that will utilize Java and maybe some C++.  I could use a Java course right about now, I haven’t touched Java for a while.   Another course deals with business programming that will be pretty easy.  I’ll get to come away with having experience programming in COBAL.  Not sure when I’ll ever use it after college, but it never hurts to pick up a new language.  Other than that I’ll be taking a philosophy course (business ethics), a finance course (equity securities and markets), and a biology course (which will finish my 14 hour science requirement, thank goodness).

So, not a bad line up.  I was going to take a Game  Programming course that utilizes  DX9, but I ended up having to drop it to save myself the pain of taking 3 programming courses next fall.  It’s only offered during the fall semester, so I may be out of luck with that course.

I didn’t do a whole heck of a lot today.  I noticed that the federal reserve cut the discount rate.  Which doesn’t mean a whole lot to individual investors, as it deals with the rate at which businesses loan each other money.  I’m still hoping for that interest rate cut next month.

Spent some time fixing my moms computer.  Picked up a copy of Windows Vista from newegg (sys builders copy), and installed that beast.  She rarely uses the computer, so I doubt the flaws will mess with her.

Have you seen the game Bioshock?!  It doesn’t release until the 21st, but the game is getting incredible reviews.  A few:

• Games Radar = 10
• Eurogamer = 10
• 1UP = 10
• Game Informer = 10
• IGN = 9.7
• PC Zone = 9.6
• PC Gamer = 9.5

This game had not been on my radar until just a few days ago when I noticed all of these reviews pouring out.  I’ve rarely ever seen so many 10’s for a game and my first thought was, “Ok… These people could not find a single thing wrong with this game?”  I started looking into the game via pictures, movies, websites, etc, and I’ve got to say ‘whoah.’  It has a LOT of hype, but it looks like it could possibly live up to it all.  Everything I have seen is making me want to play it.  I don’t own a 360, so I’ll be waiting to grab it for my PC.

It looks like Jack Thompson is already gunning for this game to be off the shelf and out of your kids hands.  If you don’t know who Jack is, he is a very outspoken critic of video game violence.  As unrealistic as this game looks, he’s still going after it.  I wrote a research paper on video game violence that included some information about him. I may be post it in the future, but I’ll leave it up to you to Google him if you are unaware of who this man is.

The girl and I are heading out to see Superbad tonight.  Movie looks hilarious.

Just a quick update. I do not have the assets that I need to put together the development page, so I’ll be waiting until next week before the site is fully finalized. I did not realize I did not have my projects on this external hd I brought home.

So, if you are an investor, you are on this roller coaster ride. I’m fairly new to investing, having taken fully control of my portfolio back in march. Just a few weeks ago, my portfolio was sitting at a 16% gain. And, now that is irrelevant. It just amazes me on how the effects of this credit crisis affects the entire market like this. Sure, if it is difficult to get money, it’s hard to spend money, which doesn’t bring in the money for companies. And… That pretty much kicks profitability down the drain, thus giving no reason to own the stock.

But talk about a mind game. You don’t want to sell in a crisis like this. It’s difficult to look at the losses, but once the market finds it’s correction spot, then the train will be in motion again. I can’t pretend to have the experience of going through something like this, but I can’t also see any reason to sell my investments right now, even though those 50% gains are now sitting at a fraction of that amount. I’ve invested in solid large cap companies (grmn, pcu, mrk), and a small cap natural gas company (clne).

This does make for a good buying opportunity. It’s unfortunate that I’m a student, not generating a whole heck of a lot of income. But, I do have some cash on hand that I forked into the portfolio, and am now just sitting tight for an opportunity.

So, what happens now? How does a market fix itself from here, to send those indexes up, instead of down? Is this the fault of investors? Should the fed step in and lower rates? I mean, they’ve forked in billions of dollars into the markets. I think that if this trend does continue, they will have no choice, but to raise the rates. They need to. DOW down over 1000+ points in less than a month. Credit problems, and a freaked out economy.

It is fun to watch the attitudes of the people that work for CNBC. You can tell the pains that they all feel while they are reporting. Getting snippy at each other and such. I’m definitely not alone. But, I couldn’t imagine dealing with a MUCH larger portfolio than I deal with. Looking at THOSE kinds of losses would be brutal. Those mutual fund managers that are down billions of dollars…

Is it sadistic to think that this is fun (in a way)?