know when to back out

The fun of 50-100%+ profits are indeed, enticing, but sometimes the market rally just hits a stop. Do you stay in? Do you play it safe?

(Grandcoin run, market stagnation at 390. I got out right then :-) )

The proper way to analyze this is to look at the buy/sell volumes that are right near the closing prices and look at who has the power. For penny coins, there may be as few as 2 or 3 major players in the market rocking the price back and forth with a couple bitcoins worth of penny coins. Think to yourself - can that one guy buying conquer the sell wall in time? Be honest, and decide accordingly. 20% isn't bad, and it's certainly better than wasting your time and ending up with 0% at the end of a 1-2 hour market run.

General rule of thumb: parabolic curves never last long. If you think you should get out, you're probably right.

edit: definitely mistake, heading up to 430. Lessons will be learned, stay tuned.

edit 2:

Definitely the right choice. Only missed out on a small profit margin. If I stayed, trades would've been much riskier.

don't settle for pennies

In the world of cryptocurrencies:

Go big, or go home.

When I sold off my LTC, I thought $400 was a lot of money. That is peanuts when looking at the potential of some of these coins long term. I won't be settling for anything less than $1000 CAD by the middle of next year - even then, it's not a lot. Why stop there? $10,000 is not too far away.

coin mania!

I've been journeying into the world of cryptocurrencies for the past month. I have to say, the most difficult aspect about getting into these things is the amount of research that must be done on how they work as well as the time you have to spend researching the market along with any new developments. Catching up with the news is absolutely critical, as coin values can fluctuate by over a hundredfold with a single news piece.

In this blog post, I won't talk about how these coins work. Likely the reader would already know - in the case that they don't, there are various well written resources on the underlying mechanics of these coins whose explanations I cannot hope to match. Wikipedia is actually a good start.

Instead, I'll focus on my time on my mining experience and opinions on some of the various currencies that are out there as well as non-mathematically backed predictions on some of them.

I mined Litecoin over the summer with my 6970 that I had purchased off of Craigslist for $150 or so. I remember taking the bus to school for summer classes and checking my mining status over the phone every couple of minutes. Indeed it was exciting. The rate I was collecting them was at roughly 1 every 2 days. Over the period of 2 months, I amassed around 30 coins, which I just sat on for the next couple of months. I retired from mining, as I wasn't noticing a lot of returns. I wasn't aware of the demand for Litecoins nor the services I could use them on.

A few weeks ago, the Litecoin price boosted. Instead of hovering around $4 to $5, it flew to $20, 30. I sold my coins to a cyptocurrency investor (whom I met in person at a Starbucks while discussing coins) 10 at a time as the price was going up. By the time I sold all of them, I had $400 CAD. As nice as that sounds, I was still bummed out that I could've potentially earned $800 by simply waiting an extra week then the prices boosted to $40 a coin. However, if there's anything I learned from this, it's that you must be prepared to accept losses. In any investment field where there's potential to make massive gains, there's also potential to lose just as much.

At this point, I thought about what I should be doing.

1) I want to make money
2) I want to make more money than I'll be earning from just working
3) Cryptocurrencies are still young
4) There is still a lot of potential for making money there

I had been so discouraged from mining due to the ever increasing mining difficulty (of Litecoin, specifically) that I simply stopped checking the news from summer until now. However, now that I am determined to make bucks, I have done my research. What exactly is going on in the crypto world? How can I take part in it, and most importantly, how can I get $$$ out of it along the way?

(above) One of my two mining rigs, holding a 280x. This computer is one I have borrowed from my friend for 8 months while he is in Japan.

Making Money

To put it simply, there are 2 ways to make money with cryptocurrencies.

1) Mining
2) Trading

Of course, you can work on both, but that would requite a significant time investment, and may not be realistic for a student studying full time or an employee. Both are very stressful in their own regard.

The mistake I see a lot of people making when mining (in my opinion) is that they chase after the top coins with their expensive mining gear. A 7970/280x costs $350 at retail stores in Canada including our ever-high tax. They sell out fast in Craigslist, but if you can find one, chances are they'll be no lower than $280. A miner's first goal should be to pay it off, but at current difficulties, they would earn $0.60 worth of Bitcoins per day per card. Is anyone willing to sit on their butts for 600 days hoping to pay off a video card?

Thanks to the massive boost in value, one can earn about $10-$13 of Litecoin per day per card. That definitely appears to be more appealing that 60 freakin' cents, but why stop there? Why are you so afraid of the smaller currencies that haven't received a whole not of mainstream media attention?

http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency

If one looks at current profitability charts, they'll notice all sorts of alternative currencies at the top of the list. Their positions fluctuate like crazy, but their profit per day lingers around $20 or even more per day. To reiterate, every number I mention here is based off of the assumption that one if using a 7970, obtaining a hashrate of 700kh/s.

Then should I grab any coin at the top of the list? This is where you must use your own judgement. Some of these coins hit the top of the list, then hit the bottom within the next few hours. An example of such a coin would be Mincoin, which at the time of this writing, is at the bottom third of the list. Then there are coins like Tagcoin, which jump from being number 1 to hitting the middle all the time.

My way of choosing a coin goes as follows:

1) What coin do you have easy exchange opportunities with?
This point is critical. If a coin is at the top of the profitability charts, but you have no way of pulling that out to CAD or USD (or fiat currency of your choice), there's no point mining it. Of course, if you are experienced and comfortable with exchanges, it would be possible to extract any coin into any currency of your choosing, but that would require additional time investments.

2) What coin has a lot of trading volume?
This point may or may not be important, depending on how you pull your currency out into the real world, but nevertheless it is still something to consider. I have seen Mincoin sitting at a standstill at Cryptsy with buyers and sellers camping out miles apart expecting the other side to make a move. This occurred for many many hours (or days, who knows), and trading volumes are tiny green spikes at the bottom of the chart. Coins without a lot of transactions can be seen as not being very popular. Nobody is pumping, and hell, nobody is even dumping. I just don't see a lot of growth potential in such coins. Even if such a coin hits the top of the profitability charts, it's not going to stay there for long. Mining is a long term endeavor. One must take into account possible price fluctuations over a period of a month, 2 months, and even a year (if such a thing can even be predicted).

3) Infrastructure developments.
This involves knowing who the developers behind the coin are and the kinds of projects they are working on. A lot of coins don't have active development teams behind them. Wallet clients are never updated, and there are minimal pushes for the coins to be released on exchanges. How will a holder of the coin be able to spend it? If the only way to access the coin is by trading through Bitcoins, then there isn't very much of a chance for the coin to become widely accepted in the future, even if it's value may rise on the short term.

So then, what is my cryptocurrency of choice?

Worldcoin.

There is a healthy amount of trade volume (on Cryptsy, I don't check other exchanges). It's profitability on Coinwarz has consistently been in the top third. While it never reached number 1, it never fell below the halfway point. At this point, my projected income per day fluctuates between $20 and $25. In addition, I feel safe about it's value due to the low fluctuation rate.
The investor connection I have is willing to buy Worldcoins to me at any time for cold cash. In addition, I can easily trade it on Cryptsy for BTC, which always has buyers at any price in the case that he is unavailable to make transactions.
Scharmbeck Financial Services are being developed around this coin, which will allow for straight trading with USD to WDC complete with integration from American bank organizations. This is actually huge news. Upon release late this year/early next year, I fully expect a rise in price per coin. Any gain, whether it's 20% or 2000% is a plus for me.

As this post is getting a little bit long, I will stop here and post more on this topic when I see fit.

da independent life

For the past week, I decided to move into my friend's new apartment right by Thunderbird Stadium, and I'll probably be staying for another week or two (or longer, depending on how things go). Why? The building looks fucking cool. Here's a photo:

Also, my simple life at home was starting to bother me, which is part of the reason why I don't want to be in school at the moment. I'm sick of this 'fantasy' life where I have no responsibilities other than sitting in front of a computer and finishing off assignments/studying. I just want to switch up the rhythm to my life, and I figured this would be a nice way to shake things up. Indeed, it was.

Here's some shots of the interior of the place:

Not too shabby. In the second photo, you can see my air mattress and my sleeping bag to the left, along with my laptop and other study tools on the table.

My roomie is at school most of the time, since he likes studying in the library rather than where he lives, so I have been treating the place like it's my home. It's an incredibly empowering feeling to walk up to a fancy apartment building, whip out your apartment keys, and walk into a classy looking suite. I've always wondered what it feels like to own your own place, and now I know. Is the independent life all that it's cooked up to be?

My schedule looks like this:
- Wake up at 6:30-7:00
- Make breakfast for the next 30 minutes or so
- Eat breakfast, leave some for friend
- Make lunch for the next 30 minutes or so
- Take my morning dump, change, pack
- Yell at my friend to wake up
- Head out for class

Having that extra responsibility of feeding myself is actually great. If I starve for whatever reason, I have no-one else to blame except myself (maybe my roommate, if he doesn't go grocery shopping when he should). I must take into account the length of time it takes to make each meal and the quality of the food. Of course, the tough part is learning to cook when you've never really had to make food for yourself for your entire life.

Thankfully, my friend knows a thing or two about cooking, so he showed me the magic of cooking steak. We made some for dinner on Friday, and this was the result:

Not bad. Thanks Jenn for the food prep tips over text!

Another interesting point to make about living in this apartment is that there is no internet.

Wut? No internet?

Yes. No internet. And also possibly never any internet.

But is such a thing even possible?

When I mentioned this to a friend, the first thing he mentioned was, 'but how will you pleasure yourself?', with a genuinely worried face. He's a funny man for having that being the first thing to pop into his head. But that's beside the point. Living without internet for more than one day is an intense experience. You think a lot more about your immediate surroundings. You have more time, which you can use for physical exercise, meditation, or studying/doing homework. Whereas there may be days when hours pass by browsing the web, without that connection you are always aware of the time. It makes you plan ahead. Dare I say, the experience is refreshing. I'm not sure how much longer I can hold it up though, considering the basic connectivity I require from being a computer science student and working on a web app project.

I am typing this from home, which I returned to for the weekend. Back to having food made for me. Back to convenient internet access. All this made me reflect on my experience.

One of my biggest goals in life (which may be modest for some people) is to get a place to live. To be self-sustainable. To be able to earn enough money to pay my own rent as well as give a couple hundred to my mom so she can live without having to worry about whether a certain food is on sale at Safeway, or if her apartment rent will go up. I pretty much got a taste of that life. I returned to my 'own' place after classes, which I could treat as my own, and I could do whatever the fuck I wanted to do.

It made me think: now what?

What do I do, once I reach that theoretical point? I would have to imagine that there could be times when I'm sitting in my fancy apartment on my fancy sofa sipping a glass of wine, being bored and wondering what to do other than waiting for the next workday to show up. What would be the next step in my lifestyle?

Is this even something to think about? I'm probably looking too far ahead. As things are right now, I'm a non-working debt-ridden university student. I will never be able to purchase a full home in Vancouver in the foreseeable future. But I have to say, thank god for my co-op salary next term. I'm definitely looking forward to it.

walking mechs

Here' a video I made to show my partner my progress on my locomotion system. Since it's on Youtube, I might as well post it here.

A brief explanation of the system I am using: Mecanim behaves as a state machine (I wish somebody told me this earlier), jumping from from animation (looping or not) to another depending on certain parameters. In my system, I use 2 parameters: a float for keeping track of the direction and the walking/running state of the character, and a boolean to keep track of the jumping state. The jumping state overrides everything else (obviously), which is the reason why where are so many crazy transition lines in the state machine. The character has to be able to jump whether it's walking, running, or idle. Take into consideration that there are 2 different poses for the jumping, and it adds a lot more complexity to the states.

What I am working on implementing:

- When idle, the body should turn without the legs turning along with it. I'll probably implement this by storing the rotation in a temporary variable when the character is idle, and carrying out the rotation once it is out of that state.

- Sideways dodging. Pretty straightforward, should be easy to implement.

- Inverse kinematics for advanced animation functions such as foot - slope recognition. I do not know if such a thing is possible with a non-humanoid bone structure. If it is not possible, I will try to develop my own system with raycasts and such so that the mech can run up slopes with proper ground detection per foot.

long overdue update

Yes, I haven't posted in a month(s?), but I didn't want to write a post without a whole lot to talk about. Now there are a couple things I'd like to talk about, complete with pictures.

First off, I was pretty sick for a good week and a half. It started when I slept on the bus wearing only a T-shirt. In case you haven't checked them out, Richmond seems to have new buses which would be awesome if it weren't for the fact that they are fucking air conditioned to -10 C at all times. I wake up feeling a bit whoozy. Of course, the next day I wake up with a headache. The next day, I wake up with violent chills, and the day after my lower right stomach begins to hurt so much I can't straighten my back.

Off to the ER it was. It was probably the sane thing to do - one doesn't simply play around with the possibility of appendicitis. After staring at ultrasound images for a while, he told me that it appeared to be a crazy lymph node viral infection that replicated almost all of the symptoms of appendicitis. Whew. I was able to go home without getting my belly cut open, and although the pain didn't disappear for the next 4 days, I was able to sleep well knowing that it would eventually go away. That is story no. 1.

I've also been dabbling around with Android over summer. It sucks that I don't have a mentor for a close friend who knows this shit though, since when certain types of problems occur, I have no way of knowing what the problem is even after hours and hours of Googling and searching Stack Overflow. After several days, I may come across an obscure post that tells me that I was making this tiny mistake, but until then I'm stuck at a roadblock.

For example, I was trying to make a simple news reader for my android project. I decided to use Google News as the news source, as they made it convenient for me to make a keyword search and pull an RSS feed just for the searched news. However, when I clicked my news links, an incomplete url was being sent to the browser, resulting in invalid webpages showing up every time. After a while of debugging and trying to get to the bottom of the issue, I discovered that the symbol '&' was not registering properly for the parser, resulting in the link cutting off whenever & showed up. Some follow-up reading revealed that, yes, RSS parsers could not handle ampersands without a '&amp' replacement. I don't know how in the world I was supposed to know that, but ok.

Being the stubborn man that I am, I decided to try to keep working with this crazy RSS feed instead of trying other feeds. I learned how InputStreams worked in Java, and I tried to feed in the RSS feed from Google News in the form of a String, stick the whole thing in a buffer, and replace all instances of '&' with '&amp' (except for cases where that has already been done, wtf Google...), and feed the result into an RSS creater and parse it. As expected with such a strange method of handling RSS, I ended up with all sorts of problems, and ended up giving up. I just didn't know enough about RSS and the parser I was using in order to know exactly what was going on.

This whole process must have taken a good week or so, with me working on and off, due to summer courses. At the end, I picked another site's RSS feed (which gave properly formatted feeds, thank fucking god) and everything worked smooth as silk. Someday, I will re-tackle this problem, and figure out what went wrong.

Ok, that's enough talking. I'll show a couple pictures of the app.

Being the ass that I am, I decided to work on this whole thing inside of a friggin canvas. This means playing around with draw methods, figuring out all the coordinates (and all the problems that come with them), and figuring out strange ways to show movements and animations with awkward out-of-place variables.

The above is supposed to be my main screen, the first thing I worked on. It initially only shows the UBC button, which when tapped, expands out to show the other 3 buttons. I see occasional glitches with the way I've currently coded it, but due to how convoluted the code looks for this Activity, I've been afraid to touch it. Someday, I will re-design the whole thing from scratch, knowing all the problems I know I have to tackle directly in the design of it. I faced a lot of problems I had no idea would be coming.

This is the second component of the app I completed, which is evident from the more refined look I designed. As you can probably tell, it's a UBC-based news reader, pulling news straight from the UBC News website (whose existence I didn't event now about until last week). I intent to play around a bit more with the xml layout to make it more visually appealing and more feature packed.

This is supposed to be a list of faculties (accessed through the 'About' button from the main Activity) that can be expanded into it's majors/specializations when tapped on. When I was planning this out, I could not find a built-in layout in Android that could do what I wanted (at the time - now I know that I should've used ExpandableList). I build the whole thing, again, in Canvas. This meant implementing my own scrolling mechanic (which was ridiculously difficult), and my own selection mechanic (which must take into account that the finger may move slightly when the user still intends to make a tap), but everything worked out after I had those set up.

And for the heck of it, I added a menu option that sorted every single major in alphabetical order.

What I'm currently working on is another Activity that implements Google's new Maps v2 API, that will search for locations restricted to only within the campus along with listing out particular points of interest (callback to CPSC 210, fun course!). As for the design of this Activity, I plan to use Android's built in side-swiping layout, which I need to use ViewPager and FragmentPagerAdapter for.

Afterwards, I'd like to create something that would automatically log me into SSC or Connect when I open up the corresponding links through this app, but from my early attempts this is going to be incredibly difficult. Not only are there all sorts of issues with security doing that sort of thing, but the website seems well designed to prevent such things from happening. For example, I can't even link to the 2nd login page where the textfields are - the server fucks me up and tells me that I must enter from the original login page. There may be a way to brute-force username and password entry, but I'll have to do plenty more research for that. In the end, it will be worth it though. I hate typing in my user and pass on my smartphone EVERY time.




No, that's not all, there's more to this damn blog post, keep reading. I have joined a compsci friend of mine in creating a game. The idea is that it's a modernization of a 2001 mech game called Phantom Crash, built in Unity (of course it's in Unity, everybody and their grandmas use Unity). What I found fascinating about this is that it's really unique. It's not a generic first/third person shooter. It's not a platformer (again, everybody and their grandmas make platformers), and it's not even a type of mech game that's currently out in the market right now. Games with Hawken and MechWarrior focus on heavy, slow-moving robot tanks, while this game emphasizes speed and agility.

(Above is one of the placeholder(?) mechs I modelled and rigged. Total time: 10 hours)

Following my strengths, I'm in charge of creating the entire animation system, along with creating all the animations too. This could be an easy job if I was aiming for a mediocre game, but I have a keen eye for movements, and I do not intend to have clunky movements in this game. All blending will be perfect, there will be left-foot-forward/right-foot-forward idle states, there will be torso/leg animation independence, there will we weighted movements, there will be movement momentum/environmental interaction... and the list goes on. This also means that a lot of the gameplay mechanics will be determined and created by me, since the animations systems will dictate how the mechs play out.

The great thing about this project is, my partner is no scrub. Absolutely not. He is the master programmer. He is 2 years younger than I am and has won numerous programming awards. He plans to graduate within 3 years of starting school and get into the real world as fast as possible. He has been developing a GUI system within Unity that can handle all resources in the game, browse them, edit them, view them, etc for easy resource access in the future my ourselves and potential modders alike. He is currently developing a mapping system for storing all the data on maps/events. He has planned all the data/classes for holding the information about the GameState in one massive game design document. He seems pretty serious about getting this thing working.

(Above: a typical day in 3ds Max)

Due to my inexperience with a lot of the hard coding elements my partner is working on, I will be working with a lot of the systems he designs, along with modifying them for easier use if necessary. Scripting for the game though, is certainly a little bit easier, and that's how my animation system will come into play. After I get some basic animations completed, I will develop a simple version of my character animation handler and see how that goes, hopefully by the end of this week.



And that's it for my crazy long post. I hope you enjoyed reading (or at least thought the pictures were cool).

你好，好久不见!

Taking an intensive language course is definitely an interesting change of pace from my usual computer science stuff - especially after a whole semester of nothing but numbers and lines of java code.

Thinking quickly on the spot is not something I'm been used to. When the professor asks a question in Chinese class, in a split second you're expected to put together all the relevant vocabulary, arrange them in the correct grammatical format, and then pronounce them as accurately as possible following their tone marks. I still speak sentences in a choppy manner, but I'm getting there.

Speaking of tone marks, holy crap Chinese people are super sensitive about that stuff. I tried speaking the little bit that I knew to some of my friends, and they ripped my pronunciation apart over the smallest things. Tone marks are some hard shit, I don't think I'll ever get them right in my life.

It's nice and all that I'm finishing off my arts credits in a month, but it not any good that I hardly have time to work on my Android project. The thing about languages is that you're never done studying. There's always something more to work on, there's always some aspect of the language, whether it's speaking, writing, character memorization, etc. that you're not quite up to speed on. My little Android apk remains an app that only displays a white page, with no functionality yet. I thought I'd be able to take on both Chinese and computer science at the same time like a champ, but it doesn't seem to be the case.

The very least I can do is work out the preliminary planning for my app and think up possible problems I'll run into beforehand to make the actual coding part as smooth as possible.

In other news, my mom will be going to Korea for a week or two. Her dad has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, so she wants to see him before he is unable to recognize her. Nothing's stopping her, not even the $1200 + tax round trip ticket price and living expenses - understandable, as she wasn't able to see her mom before the passed away.

And also in other news, my sister has decided to go to UBC Okanagan and become a nurse. Not bad, not bad. The Okanagan nursing program has been pretty competitive over the past year or so, so it's nice that she got in. She's not the most academically driven girl I've seen, but she's some strong drive. She took over her high school's MUN club and turned it into something with reputation, as opposed to the shitty, poorly-managed club that I attended when I was in grade 12. It's always fun to see her kick out a member who hasn't been regularly attending meetings.

That's it for today's blog post. 再见。I'll finish it off with a link to one of the most magical songs I've ever listened to in recent memory. Brought to you my the one and only Daft Punk.