This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon
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Over the weekend we dropped the asking price on the house in Florida about 10 grand. Ten grand and six dollars to be exact.
The price of the house now matches my customer ID at the place I work. Not my employee ID, my customer id. Which back in the day when I made my account in 1997 were given out sequentially. Little did I know before I came to work here that I was six people away from a very round number. If I had just hesitated one or two seconds before placing my very first order back in 1997, I would have had a customer ID with five zeros in it and that would have been very cool. As it is, I have four nines in a row, and that is kind of neat, but not quite as neat.
Anyway, since it turned out that the price we were going to drop it to anyway was right near there, I said why not, and set it to match exactly. It probably won’t, but if it actually sells at exactly that price it would be kinda nifty.
Anyway, as predicted a month ago when we finally got the place on the market things are pretty darn slow. We’re maybe getting one or two people a week looking at it. Our price per square foot was actually somewhat agressive (even before this drop) compared to other houses in the area that sold within the last six months and other houses currently on the market. It is just that very few people are in the market right now in our area. Our agent said things were averaging being on the market 90-120 days before they get an offer. He wasn’t kidding.
Hopefully this will get us some additional traffic, preferably even an offer. If not, we’ll reevaluate again after another month. We could have been even more agressive to try to prompt it to move faster, but while we want (need) the thing to sell, we’re not yet at the point where we’ll just drop it a crazy amount just to get it to sell “NOW”.
But the paying for a house plus an apartment thing really can’t go on forever. We start the monthly payments for Amy’s school on July 1st and things are already tight enough as they are.
Spilling coffee on your mouse on Friday afternoon and then leaving it to dry until Monday morning is NOT the best way to have an enjoyable mousing experience to start off the work week.
As of earlier today my oldest unanswered email turned one year old. Now, this is unanswered email in my inbox, and also includes things that never will be answered, but need to be looked at and perhaps something done with them before they are filed. At the moment my oldest unanswered email is a Google Alert for “Palm Bay” that I received May 28, 2005 01:40:30 GMT It was about a Central Florida Man who was sentenced in the death of a shaken toddler. For this particular email, all I need to do is file it away in the 2005-05 folder, but I haven’t done it yet, and it is now a year old.
Sigh!
In addition to his long defunct Tripod Site and his not updated all that much Phatback Blog, about a month ago my friend Al opened up an online store (using CafePress) selling t-shirts.
There are such gems as “If I wanted to mow the grass, I wouldn’t have had kids!” or “I smell like feet!“.
Enjoy:
Titus Buttry’s Cr@p Shack
I set up a personal wiki for myself a little while ago. Over a month ago at any rate. At work I had been using one on a daily basis to document projects and also just to keep a personal to do list organized. So I decided I wanted one at home too.
From the begining there was nothing to stop random people from playing with it if they found out the URL from somewhere (and there were a number of ways to discover it). But I was going back and forth on if I should lock it down so that only “authorized people” could see it, or just open it up and link to it from here.
As you can see, I ended up deciding to go ahead and link to it.
Not that there is all that much on it that anybody other than me would care about. For the most part it is an online to do list to remind me to do things. And yup, there is indeed a sort of grocery list on it at the moment too. All that sort of thing. But I’m also using it as a scratchpad for notes on various projects I want to do. Most of which, again, will be of zero interest to anybody but me. But hey, if I link to it and let Googlebot and the like spider it, then who knows, something might end up someday bieng of interest to someone… unlikely, but hey, you never know.
It is an open Wiki, so if anybody reading this wants to, feel free to dive in and contribute anything you may want. Add information to any of my projects that you think might be useful, or just add things to my to do list or grocery list if you feel like it. Whatever. Of course, things that are actually constructive would be prefered to adding “Please Bathe, you stink” to the to do list or some such. But since it is open, I really don’t have all that much control over that.
At the moment I require registration, but anybody can register and start editing and such instantly. If that ends up being abused, I’ll probably have to shut that off or restrict it in various ways. But for the moment, I’ll give it a shot and leave it open. (Aside from registration.)
The links are on the left nav of the Abulsme.com Home Page now and will stay there indefinately unless I decide to pull it at some point.
Or of course, here it is in this post:
AbulWiki
For the last couple of days my mousing arm has been getting sore and achy. To the point where I really want to not be sitting at the computer doing stuff, even though both at work and at home, there is lots I’d like to be doing that involves using my mouse. Last night I didn’t do anything on the computer at home (other than watch a couple of things passively) cause every time I sat down, my hand just said “no”. And my whole arm just didn’t feel right even while just lying down. Woke up this morning, thought it was all better. But after an hour or so at work it is starting to hurt again.
Hope this isn’t the start of a real RSI sort of thing. That would really suck. It has just been a couple days though, so hopefully it will go away over the long weekend. Guess I might want to plan on reading or something rather than spending the whole three days on the computer though.
I just finished packing my box and labeling my chair and computer. Over the weekend the movers will move our group from the 5th floor to the 1st floor. I will get a new office mate. I hadn’t bothered to look at the spreadsheet until about an hour ago. Turns out I lose Ian and gain Jeff. I liked having Ian as an office mate. I may be able to suck more information I need to learn out of Jeff though. I’ve been learning a lot from him in the last couple weeks as I slowly brush up my Computer Science knowledge (last seriously thought about my freshman year at Carnegie Mellon) and my mad skilz with fun unix command line text processing stuff.
zcat blah.gz | grep ^foo | cut -f 5,6 | sort -u > newthing.txt
Woo! And SQL. I’ve always been near it and have occationally had to make trivial modifications of exsiting queries and the like, but I haven’t had to do the stuff myself. Now it would be very useful for my job, so I’m ramping up my hands on knowledge of such things.
My current office does not have a window, and neither will the new one. But in the current one I can look out the door and see plenty of sunlight. That will not be the case in the new one. It looks like it will basically be a cave. More lights may be in order. Dunno.
Jeff is also a Math guy. I like Math. He’s always writing equations on the whiteboards. Equations are good things. I like equations.
I need to work on my energy levels though. It seems I am often tired and find it hard to focus a lot. I just feel droopy. Have for a couple weeks now. And that kinda sucks. Eating right, exersizing and sleeping on a regular schedule would probably all help, but those things are hard. Maybe I can find some nice pills at the drug store that will deal with all that more easily. :-)
Anyway, time to head to a meeting. And then, since nobody has their stuff any more, it will probably mean everybody will just call it a day a little earlier than normal.
And then it is the weekend.
Ah, what might have been… just looked at how a bunch of the stocks I bought during my last couple years in New Jersey and Pennsylvania have done over the years since then. Just the ones I bought on my own, not retirement plans or options and grants and the like. Lets take a look at how they all have done over my initial cost basis. (Not counting dividends, which on a couple were pretty significant.)
GRMN, up 348%
WAB, up 201%
AAPL, up 127%
MER, up 117%
BAY, up 109%
PWI, up 72%
SPY, up 20%
DIA, up 17%
and then I did have three stinkers…
QQQQ, down 12%
TIVO, down 60%
VIGN, down 97%
Overall, not that bad…
Of course, thing is, a lot of those gains were in the last 2 years. And, well, in 2004 and 2005 I was strapped for cash and had to sell my stocks to live and such. I didn’t want to, I had to. Part of that whole thing with the previous job never coming through with what they had promised.
In any case, I didn’t sell it all. I actually kept one single share of each of the above. Just to say I still have some. So I can still be happy when they make new highs! And I still made out OK, most of them were up when I sold them, but not by all that much. I would have been a lot happier if I’d managed to hold on to what I originally had of each of those!
My original intention was to hold onto all of them for decades, but that just was not to be. :-)
I haven’t bought anything new outside of 401K’s for several years now. Once the house is sold and things are stabilized again, perhaps I’ll start buying a little bit of a few things again.
Of course, the very instant I do that will be the signal that the market has topped again, and we’re due for another correction for a few years… :-)
Someday, I’ll properly alienate all my classmates
(Greg Haverkamp, Otherwise Occupied)
Some us apparently believe in freedom of speech and its concomitants, while others merely believe in it until a politically correct topic is adversely impacted by that right.
…
But that is hardly the point, anyway. This is about the freedom of expression. And while I can only gather that you believe only in freedom of expression for those expressing views you feel are “right,” I’m having difficulty understanding why you think the SBAWVC should be forced to express a view that it’s okay to be openly homosexual and Irish. Neither you nor I nor the Supreme Court should tell people what they must believe. People have the rights to be bigots in this country, and they have and must have the rights to express whatever bigotry they so choose.
…
Or, you can take away the more meaningful idea that freedom of expression is critical, that parades are inherently expressive activities, and that groups that organize parades, whether their views are popular or not, should have the right to determine was messages their expressive activity will send.
I love reading this sort of thing from Greg. In this case I agree with Greg completely, but in more general terms I like listening to debates about Constitutional law and the such. I find it all intensely interesting. Enought that occationally I find myself thinking that law school would be a hell of a lot of fun.
And then I remember that I have the memory capacity of a walnut, and if I can’t derive what I am supposed to remember from first principles I am hopeless, so if I had to remember case references and specifics of laws and procedures without having them right in front of me, I’d be done for. And then I also remember that I get incredibly frustrated when looking at precident that I think was stupid, but is now completely entrenched. (Like most Supreme Court decisions since the Civil War… OK, exaggerating just a tad.. but…) And of course I also remember that I have absolutely no interest in actually bieng a lawyer. I just like some of the debates… and more to the point, some of the underling political and ethical philosophy issues which underlie and inform some of those debates. Fun stuff.
OK, a bunch of you out there have done statistical stuff more recently than I have (although I did read that stats text book a couple months ago). Anyway for those of you who have done stats calculations any time in the past five years or so (Chad? Greg? Randy? Chris?) could you please check this? I am really rusty at this and could easily have made a fundamental mistake…
Here is what I am trying to analyse. In the last post I mentioned that big long chain of ancestors. That long chain all hinges on a connection with a Jane Gillham born in 1773.
All the sources that I can find that mention Jane Gillham being married to John Minter and having kids that result eventually in me give Jane Gillham’s birthday as April 21st 1773 in South Carolina.
Meanwhile, the document I can find linking a Jane Gillham to her parents, and through them eventually all the way back to King Kenneth and the like… lists her birthday as October 21st 1773 in South Carolina… and has no mention whatsoever of John Minter… but also not of any other information that would contradict her being the same Jane… other than the birthday.
My hypothesis is that at some point in the last 233 years, as the Gillham records that show who Janes parents are were copied over and over again, April at somepoint got miscopied into October. (Someone couldn’t read it, recreated it from memory, whatever… )
Basically, I think these “two” Jane Gillhams are really the same person. But there is no proof of course, so I want to figure out the odds…
Here is the analysis I did… please check me and point out any math or logic errors I may have made:
- South Carolina population in 1773 was about 250,000 (based on 1790 census so this is actually bigger than reality)
- Live births were approximately 50 per 1000 population in the late 1700’s (based on stat in “Encyclopedia of the New American Nation”)
- This gives about 12500 births in South Carolina in 1773.
- About 6250 of those would have been girls.
- About 3% of those would be named Jane (based on Given Names Frequency Project for 1801-1810 time period)
- That gives us about 181 Janes born in South Carolina in 1773.
- We need to multiply by the percentage of the whole South Carolina population that were Gilhams.
- I have no idea what that number is. For now I will call it “G”. (As a fraction, not a percentage, to avoid the factor of 100 everywhere.)
- So the number of Jane Gillhams born in South Carolina in 1773 would be about 181*G.
- Now, we know pretty confidently that John Minter’s Jane Gillham was born April 21st.
- We could figure out the odds of a second Jane Minter being born on October 21st specifically.
- It would be 1-(364/365)^(181*G). This would be our lower bound on the odds. (Using math principles found on Wikipedia Birthday Paradox page)
- But… the hypothesis is that sometime in the last 233 years someone just transposed October for April in the Gillham family records.
- In that case we don’t care specifically about October 21st, but instead just the odds of a second person being born on ANY of the 21sts other than April 21st.
- That is because our hypothetical miscopier could have switched it with any of the eleven other months, not just October.
- In that case our odds turn out to be 1-(354/365)^(181*G). This should be our upper bound on the odds.
- This gives the chances of another Jane Gillham being born on the 21st of any other month besides April, given that our Jane Gilham was born on April 21st.
So lets run this with some possible values of G:
This shows the chances (X) of a second Jane Gillham being born on the 21st of another month, and therefore probably being an actual second Jane Gillham rather than the same person with the date miscopied.
Everybody in SC is a Gillham (G=1): 99.6%
1 out of 2 is a Gillham (G=0.5): 93.7%
1 out of 5 is a Gillham (G=0.2): 67.0%
1 out of 10 is a Gillham (G=0.1): 42.5%
1 out of 20 is a Gillham (G=0.05): 24.2%
1 out of 50 is a Gillham (G=0.02): 10.5%
1 out of 100 is a Gillham (G=0.01): 5.4%
1 out of 200 is a Gillham (G=0.005): 2.7%
1 out of 500 is a Gillham (G=0.002): 1.1%
1 out of 1000 is a Gillham (G=0.001): 0.6%
Reversing the calculation… and solving for G…
G=log(1-X)/(181*log[354/365])
Plugging in a few numbers there…
As long as there are fewer Gillhams than 1 in 108 you have over a 95% chance that these two Jane Gillhams are the same Jane Gillham and not seperate people after all.
If there are fewer Gillhams than one in 552 then you have over a 99% chance that these are the same Jane Gillham…
(And even if there were so many Gillhams that 1 in every 8 people in SC was a Gillham, you’d still have better than even odds that this was the same Jane Gillham.)
One in 108 would mean that there were about 2300 people with the surname Gillham in South Carolina around the time of the 1790 census
One in 552 would mean that there were about 450 people with the surname Gillham in South Carolina around that time.
So, this all depends on the number of Gillhams in South Carolina in 1790… but if there were any less than 2300 or so, I’d feel really confidant betting that this is only one Jane Gilham, and someone just miscopied her birthday at some point (probably on the Gillham side… although all the math is the same if it was the reverse.)
Thoughts?
Links to the sites I got stats and math from:
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