Poojan (Wagh) Blog

I use Google Talk at work mainly to post to social networks (army.twit.tv, identi.ca, twitter.com, yammer.com). It is possible to receive notification using Google Talk (which is just a Jabber/XMPP instance), but I find that too intrusive to what little work I get done.

1. Run pidgin (if not already) and select Accounts->Manage

   

2. Select Add to add another account:

   

3. Select XMPP for the protocol type:

   

4. Fill out the form as follows with gmail/gtalk username & password; domain is gmail.com; Resource is (optionally) Work:

   

5. Click advanced button. Select old (port 5223) SSL. Select 443 for port number. Server is talk.google.com. Fill out http proxy (for example, wwwgate0.example.com, port 1080) & http-proxy username & password (not likely the same as your gmail username/password):

   

This works because http proxies generally allow ports 80 (http) and port 443 (SSL/https) through. They generally disallow other ports. Luckily, google’s jabber server (talk.google.com) accepts connections on port 443–and they are SSL (encrypted) connections, so that’s good, too.

MAJOR DISCLAIMER: I am not a financial analyst/expert, and I know nothing about stocks, markets, and money. If I did, I would have probably figured out how to monetize this blog. If you want real financial advice, seek a financial adviser.

Dollar-cost averaging is a phenomenon that occurs when you regularly invest the same amount of money in a stock no matter what happens. What tends to happen when you adopt this head-in-the-sand attitude is that when stocks are high, you end up buying fewer shares; when stocks are low, you end up buying more shares.

Note that the old adage of “buy low, sell high” is still the best you can do. However, (as Burton Malkiel points out), timing the market on these highs and lows is extremely difficult.

Here’s an example. Let’s say for 12 months, I invest in a stock. The first 6 months, the stock goes up, then returns to its initial price. The next six months, the stock goes down then returns to its initial price. Let’s say I invest $1 per month in the stock no matter what the price is doing. Here’s a table with the numbers:

The thing to take away from this is that at the end of the 13th month, I have made some money. It may not seem like a lot of money, but the stock price did not go up; it’s exactly where it was when I started. In general (though not always), the stock market goes up over long periods of time (5-10 years), so I’ll be even better off than in this pessimistic (though timely) example.

Sure: I could’ve made more money if I sold all that I had during the 4th month (when the stock price was high), and then just waited until the 10th month (when the stock was low) to buy everything back. However: that would require a great deal of prognostication.

With dollar-cost averaging, I can make money withour requiring the stock to go up. Of course, if it goes down, I don’t make money–unless I keep investing and it eventually goes up.

For a while, I used to try to stick to a set schedule. I’d get very angry at myself when I deviated from it. If, for some reason, I didn’t get a work-out in the morning–or if I didn’t put away the laundry and the kids dispersed the formerly clean clothes throughout the house.

What I recently realized is that I don’t have to do that schedule every day–and I certainly shouldn’t agonize when I deviate (even on a regular basis) from the schedule. What’s more important is that I return to it at some point. I’ve had some pretty long fitness kicks, but usually, I end up going 6 months to a year of no excercise.

It’s more important to make this daily routine a daily default rather than a rigorous discipline. What do I mean by default? I mean that unless I have a reason not to, I am going to stick to the things that help me become healthier.

Here are some of my defaults | and some reasons I might skip them:

• Working out (running or weight training) in the morning | sleeping in late
• Packing a lunch (rather than eating at the cafeteria or at a restaurant) | meeting my friends for lunch
• Drinking lots of water | there’s really no good reason not to
• Folding and putting away laundry in the evening (used to be morning) | playing with the kids or helping with homework
• Emptying the dishwasher in the morning (and possibly re-loading it at night) | slept in or the kids got up early
• Reading a book (rather than surfing the web) at night | but I really want to write that blog entry about healthy defaults

Over at The Growing Life, Clay Collins talks about life balance and insanity. I didn’t realize it before, but that post influenced me in re-assessing my daily schedule (and the discipline I tried to enforce on it).

What’s important to me is that I ensure I don’t derail from my default for too long. It’s all too easy to decide that I need to write 10 blog entries right now–or I need to learn a new programming language. Usually, when I do (resume my default), I find that my default is a welcome return.

Not sure how I did it, but somehow, I managed to go for a nice run this morning.

It was unlikely that I’d go for such a run. The forecast said it would rain at 6. It seemed like it would be cold outside. It was pitch black outside. I usually get up early but somehow get sidetracked online. Curiously, because I thought it would rain at 6, I was motivated not to waste time on the computer this morning. I found a small flashlight and put batteries in it. I looked for a long-sleeve shirt, but instead stepped outside and found that the weather was perfect.

I was able to get out at 5:30 AM and run under the moon and stars. The temperature was perfect (58 degrees C) and there was a nice warming fog everywhere.

I’ve been wanting to get back into a moring excercise routine for a while now, but have failed due to static inertia. Luckily, this morning I made it out, and I’m glad I did.

Curiously, I had to focus my mind on my surroundings. My initial reaction was that “this is so great of an experience; I should blog about it.”

I could’ve easily squandered an hour or so this morning, surfing the mindless Internet. Instead, I got out and re-appreciated the warm wooded neighborhood in which I live. I ran to the fitness center, did some core strength excercises, and started my way back.

I decided to extend my run (another example of static inertia–in this case, a healthy one) and took the long way home.

2008-10-01 Update
I’ve been informed by Verisign that you can only have one FOB attached to your PIP account. This is no big deal for me, since my FOB is on my keychain and you can always have a one-time password emailed or SMS’ed to you as a backup.

Personal Identity Portal (PIP) is an OpenID provider. This means that you:

1. Register an account with PIP. You’ll get a URL (i.e. example.pip.verisignalbs.com); that is your OpenID URL.
2. Go to other web sites–called OpenID clients–for example, My Yahoo, most blogs, identi.ca, army.twit.tv, etc. Instead of registering a username and password, tell them to consult your OpenID URL. Instead of giving them a username:password combination, you just tell them your OpenID URL (example.pip.verisignlabs.com).
3. The web site then consults with PIP to see if you are authenticated. This authentication is done in a very secure manner, using cryptography, so that no one can impersonate you. To do this, you are temporarily transferred to PIP’s web site.
4. You select what information (name, location, DOB) that PIP should share with the OpenID client.
5. You are now logged into the OpenID client and can go about your business. The whole time, you only had to remember one password: your PIP password.

OK: big deal. So, I don’t have to remember more than one password. Here’s the cool part: PIP can be set up so that you get a neat FOB (a keychain doohiky). Here’s a picture of mine:

When I hit they grey button, I get a John Nash-like one-time code (only I’m pretty sure I’m not imagining it). This way, no one can log into my account unless they have my key FOB. I can have only one key FOB, and they come in different form factors (including a credit-card size one that fits in your wallet). You have the option of buying them from Paypal for $5 or the cooler looking ones (credit-card size and waterproof FOB) from Verisign for $30-$40.

If you don’t like carrying it around, you can also have PIP SMS or email you a one-time password.

Here’s another cool feature: PIP also has a little javascript bookmarklet that will save passwords for other sites that don’t support OpenID (linkedin, facebook, etc). Now, I don’t use this capability because I have a pretty good solution already (KeePass), but I might someday.

A list of web sites that support OpenID is at http://openid.net/where/.

Finally, a runner-up that I’d use is Yubikey. However, being an OpenID provider isn’t their main thing right now (although they do provide it sort of as a demo/utility), and I already bought the PIP/Paypal FOB. Alternative providers (including one that works with Yubikey) are at http://openid.net/get/.

Steve Gibson and Leo LaPorte’s SecurityNow podcasts have in-depth discussions of all these technologies.

I wake up every morning before the kids/wife wake up and try to get a few hours of unfettered time. I use the 80/20 rule (to which I was introduced in the Four Hour Workweek) to figure out what to do.

Out of the many things I could do:

• Pick up the house
• Do dishes
• Do laundry
• Pay bills
• Get a headstart on work

I chose doing the laundry, and if time avails, doing dishes. The reason: I’ve noticed when I’m home that if the laundry isn’t done, finding clothes takes an disproportionate amount of time. Similarly, when the kids want juice or a bagel, it’s really hard to stop and wash a cup or plate (and inneficient, too).

From Four Years | 43 Folders.

One particularly gifted arrival on the productivity and self-help scene authored some of the most profoundly useful advice I’d ever heard about attention management — but, then followed it up by showing how those extra cycles could be used to game the system so efficiently that you can sit in a hammock for 164 hours a week while people in India write birthday cards to your friends. That one became a runaway bestseller and, perhaps unintentionally, formed the new template for how to market productivity as an extreme lifestyle. I also have to imagine that it singlehandedly revived our nation’s sagging hammock industry.

I’m rather illiterate in this field, so if there’s someone else this describes, I wouldn’t know. My apologies ahead of time to both Merlin Mann and Tim Ferris if I’ve got this all wrong.

P.S. I did enjoy Tim Ferris’ book, which details several techniques of productivity–even if the whole month-long getaway isn’t my bag.

I’ve been listening to Manager Tools Podcast for a couple years now. I really enjoy it, because the direction is specific, yet one can generalize the specifics to form concrete principles.

The podcast presents everything in very basic steps. If the topic is hosting a meeting, they tell you (in a dozen or so steps) exactly what to do. I mean exactly.

It occurred to me a week or so ago that I’m an unlikely fan since I’m not in a role to execute any of their detailed steps.

I realized early this week why I like it so much: by being presented with these basic steps so often, one can generalize on them and gain very insightful principles.

For example, while detailing a discussion about feedback, they tell the story of Shamu–and how Shamu only gets positive feedback yet learns to jump over a rope suspended above the water.

I realized immediately that I don’t give enough positive feedback to my peers nor my children (nor do I receive enough from my bosses). After realizing this deficiency, it became very easy to compensate for it–both at home and at work.

I stumbled on this great tool this morning:
Website Grader checks your web site for keywords, Google Pagerank, Yahoo directory, Alexa. and gives you a score for SEO.

The neat thing about the tool is that it gives you all this information in one place, which lets you verify and debug if Google and Yahoo are crawling your web site.

Update 2008-09-21

I just realized that Amazon S3 is 15 cents/GB/month, not 10 cents/GB/month. So, Dreamhost (which charges 10 cents/GB/month only for space above 50 GB) is even more attractive!

In the latest DreamHost newsletter (Newsletter v10.8 August 2008):

Now, you know how we give out a LOT of disk space with our hosting? Well
technically that space is only supposed to be used for your _actual_ web
site (and email / database stuff) .. not as an online backup for your
music, pictures, videos, other servers, etc!

Well, just like every other web host does, we’ve been sort of cracking
down on that some lately, and it seems to catch some people by surprise!
Nobody likes being surprised, especially in the shower, which is where
we typically brought it up, and so now we offer a solution:

You CAN use 50GB of your disk space for backups now! The only caveat is,
it’s a separate ftp (or sftp) user on a separate server and it can’t
serve any web pages. There are also NO BACKUPS kept of THESE backups
(they should already BE your backups, not your only copy), and if you go
over 50GB, extra space is only 10 cents a GB a month (a.k.a. cheap)!

I’ve been thinking about this for months: I pay about $10/month and get 250 GB of storage (or maybe it’s double that). At the same time, I’m paying Amazon S3 (& Jugledisk Plus) to backup my files. Why can’t I use my DH space for that?

I realized the reason is that if DH allocated 250 GB per user and kept it available, they couldn’t support the $10/month price. It’s basically the law of averages. Not everyone is going to use the 250 GB, but the few that will are covered. As stated, they’ve had to crack down on people getting a little nuts and using it for personal backup.

However, it is great that they realize that there’s some leeway here. I figure that at 10 cents/GB from Amazon S3, I am saving $5/month through amazon. Plus they don’t talk about charging per GB for bandwidth (which S3 does). In addition, if I go over the 50 GB, I pay 10 cents per GB/month–which is exactly what S3 charges. (Maybe they’re using S3 for storage?).

Anyway, awesome job, Dreamhost. I clearly made the right choice in hosting provider.

P.S. Anyone know of good incremental backup software that supports FTP/SFTP?