Website
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I updated my website software. I made a WordPress update, which broke the blog, updated my PHP version, which broke the wiki, and updated MediaWiki, which fixed the wiki except for the abandoned extensions I’ll have to replace. The wiki took up my project time on Saturday because it’s less automatic than updating WordPress, which is why I haven’t updated it in a few years, but it took less time than I expected. Now everything is shiny and new, but only behind the scenes.
Finances
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I planned out my simplest goal, my next car. I’ll try saving what I paid for my current one, adjusted for inflation, with a target date of 15 years from that purchase. I’m not sure how used car prices behave over time, but I’m thinking they’ll either rise with inflation or they’ll stay about the same and I’ll be able to buy something more expensive, maybe an electric car. Or maybe I won’t need a car by then, who knows? The world keeps changing.
Reminiscences of a Stock Operator has lessons even for people who aren’t into stocks. It’s the fictional memoir of a stock prodigy’s journey of learning. I recognized some of its advice from other investing books, such as buying as the price is rising from a dip and selling as it’s falling from the peak. If you can wait out the stretches of jargon-heavy narrative, you’ll hear that even a natural has to learn, and learning can be found in any experience—failure, success, and even partial success. My other key takeaway was that some fields are extraordinarily counterintuitive, so it takes exceptional discipline to succeed at them. Some fields are practically antisocial. In stocks you have to follow the logic of the market and not the pressures of social connections (such as tips, favors, and the enthusiasm of the masses).
Video
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I kicked off my finance movie project with Trading Places. It was okay. My favorite character was the affably evil Randolph Duke. Trying to understand the trading floor scene will be a project in itself. The movies in my project are from this Investopedia article and a Letterboxd list or two.
I found some good YouTube channels on finance. These stand out to me because they seem sensible and well researched. I’ve been watching through their uploads.
- Common Sense Investing
- New Money
- The Financial Diet – I found this one a while back, but it’s worth mentioning here. Every once in a while I find myself binging it.
Life maintenance
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My whiteboard of life maintenance is filling up. I added a printout of my new cleaning schedule based on Clean My Space. I settled on a one-month table with a column for each week so I can check off each task for that week. The three pages take up the bottom half of the whiteboard in my bedroom. The top half has my Elastic Habits printouts and an empty space that will be filled with a graph for my habit scores, once I figure out how to make it. It all looks very sterile and corporate except for the colorful magnets I’m using to hold up the pages.
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