A Day in Paradise

We need another programmer for our team here in West Palm Beach, FL. It’s not rocket surgery, we’re just looking for a PHP guru with a good knowledge of css, mysql, zf, javascript, etc. Knowing Flash/Actionscript is a plus.

The first test in the recruitment process is figuring out how to contact me! I will respond to all requests, so if you don’t hear from in 24 hours comment on this post.

As you, my regular readers know, I have a soft spot for self-published authors, and when I find an autographed advance copy of “An American Hedge Fund” written by Timothy Sykes and self-published under the “Bull Ship Press” imprint, you know I’m going to take off with it and tear through it on a lazy Saturday morning.

Tim Sykes tells his own story of how he starts off with just over $12,000 and during his years at collage turns it into over $800,000. Read the book to find out the details of how he does it. After he leaves college he creates the “Cilantro Fund” and starts looking for investors to invest in his shiny new hedge fund.

The book doesn’t go into great detail about exactly what hedge funds are, so let’s talk about that for a minute. A hedge fund is generally a limited partnership which is formed to allow investors to become limited partners with the fund manager (or an LLC formed by the manager) as the general partner. The LP is used as an investment vehicle and the gains and losses of the fund are passed directly through to the investors after the fees. Generally the manager takes a 2% management fee, and 20% off the top of all profits.

This elaborate structure is set up to avoid having to deal with the SEC and bypass the restrictions that other money management structures, such as mutual funds, have to deal with. There is a catch. Only “Accredited Investors” can invest, you can’t advertise, and before an investor can invest you need to have a pre-existing relationship (of at least six months).

Many of the established hedge funds manage well over $100 million, have a two to five year track record and a 50+ person staff, so finding accredited investors is difficult. For the Cilantro Fund and their comparatively tiny $1.1 million, finding investors and fighting to stay afloat became a substantial challenge. The second half of the book describes the downward spiral in detail.

While many of the other reviews of “An American Hedge Fund” call the book “inspirational”, I am going to go with “spirited” as by the end of the book I was more exhausted than inspired. The book is a great read, and takes you through the ups and downs of a small player in an industry where the deck is stacked in favor of the Goliaths.

Since writing the book, Timothy Sykes has closed his hedge fund and started a website which is dedicated to inform the public and cut through the secrecy that has shrouded the hedge fund industry.

If you’re interested in Hedge Funds check out this article on what a hedge fund is.

Call me and ask for an invite

I am on hold with bellsouth, and the longer they keep me on hold the longer I am going to rant about them. The trouble started before I even got into work, I started getting reports of “flakey internet” so when I get in and do a quick diagnostic sweep and determine that it was our DSL connection was at fault (as opposed to the shitty DNS service that we get which I can get around) I call bellsouth tech support.

That was 4 hours ago.

The first half an hour was spent with them trying to figure out how to get into our account – even though I gave them our username and phone number. I was then put on hold for 5 minutes while they got someone from billing to take care of us. Billing pulled up my information right away (with the exact same information I gave to tech). They then put me back through to tech and I was on hold for another 20 minutes.

After ever 5 minutes or so, the billing person would pick up the line and apologize for the wait. Finally she said “I keep putting you through to a tech, but they just pick up the phone and don’t say anything and then hang up”. I told her to keep trying and 5 minutes later I was on with a tech.

This tech told me that for them to do anything I had to be directly connected to the DSL modem, not any routers. I asked for a direct number which I could call when I was directly connected and they said that they couldn’t give it to me, but I would have to go through the whole process again.

I hauled a computer to the router and plugged it all in… and then called again and spent another 10 minutes on hold before speaking to another tech. This time she asked me a bunch of (the same) questions before and then told me she had to put me through to a tech.

This is the good part – instead of putting me through to a tech, she put me through to her slightly confused hairdresser.

Once I disconnected with the salon, I had to call back into bellsouth and work my way back through to the tech. Once I finally got through to a tech, they said “we can’t run a line test because you’re having an ‘outage’ – if you still have trouble in 30 minutes call back”.

So apparently we have a couple clowns working on our DSL line, and the only site I can access is my blog… oh well, sucks being them!

At least we have our TVs up

I opened my google docs this morning (like I open it up every morning) and noticed that we now have the ability to create web based presentations from within google docs.

Not only did I find the interface fairly intuitive (after a 3 minute clicking session), but it comes with the functionality to actually present your presentation online, invite viewers etc.

There is currently no way to export as a powerpoint (although you can import) but it will give you a html version of the presentation for offline use.

Now I need to see what kind of API it gives for programmers. I can see this being LOTs of fun.

http://www.december.com/html/spec/colorsvg.html

… of getting bought up by google?

If 100% of your revenue is through google adsense, and google is making 100% (or more) on your 100%, then wouldn’t your worth to google be cut by 50%?

This is disregarding my “community in a box” article.

Looking for a flash based chat system that can easily (and safely) be embedded within a website.

Flash IRC Client: IRC Client – a bit ugly
Tufat FlashChat: PHP/MySQL backend (can be resource intensive)

Posted by mobile phone:
At 2pm the thunder started. We has just done the “sandstorm” and were getting ready to do the “Congo River Rapids” when it started to rain and they shut everything down.

We took refuge in the theater and then made a run for the cinema where they are doing the 4-D pirate experiance.

They let everyone in, but still aren’t going to start the show for another 40 minutes.

So we wait. I guess its better than being in the rain.

Posted by mobile phone:
Time for food and a show at Desert Grill and Theater.

Its been good so far, I think I am enjoting it more the second time around. Annie and I did the Gwazi, I remember promising each other that we wouldn’t do that to ourseves again.

Posted by mobile phone:
232 miles in 3 hours and 40 minutes. I guess an average of 50mph isn’t that bad considering city traffic and 3 pit stops.

It rained as soon as we got out of the car, the tram is coming to a stop and it is sunny.

Stopping the blogging for the day.

Posted by mobile phone:
They are insane. Doing all kind of stupid things like blogging while driving. Pffft.

Almost there now 228 miles

Posted by mobile phone:
Made good time but got stuck behind a patrol car for half an hour.

Now at 155 miles.

Posted by mobile phone:
We are taking our first pitstop on our trip between wpb and tampa.

Been on the road for 1.5 hours and covered 90 miles.. 150 to go.