Ethereum

One year Ethereum price history

It's been a while since I checked on my Ethereum holdings, so today I took a peak. The current price is roughly $125 per imaginary coin, down from the $300 it was just over a year ago. My 'wallet' has accumulated 0.18 of an Ether coin, which works out to $23. So not as good as originally forecasted, but it hasn't completely disappeared either, so I guess I will it ride.

Pic of the Day

930M Caterpiller Small Wheel Loader at the scene of the crime

This is what passes for excitement here in suburban Hillsboro. Two o'clock this morning a couple of people stole this wheel loader and used it to flatten an ATM. They then gathered up the cash and sped off into the night.

Something is Rotten in Downtown

Hooverville under the Ross Island Bridge - July, 1936
Arthur Rothstein

Downtown Portland Oregon is booming. New high-rise buildings are going up left right and center, so somebody thinks we are going to need the space these buildings will provide. Which means there are going to be people wanting to rent these spaces, either for work or to live. Meanwhile we have the homeless camped out on any spare patch of ground they can find, including sidewalks, the shoulders of freeway ramps and patches of woods that are too steep to build on.

Then there are a large number of vacant ground floor storefronts. Given how difficult it is to get into downtown in a car, and the large number of vagrants wandering around, I am not surprised retail operations are staying away.

Lastly, there are a large number of food trucks downtown. There is at least one entire city block given over to them. When I was working construction umpteen years ago, food trucks (aka roach coaches) would swing by once or twice a day to dispense soft drinks and candy bars. Now we have them permanently parked on what has to be some of the most expensive real estate in the city.

Hooverville NYC Central Park 1932

I am trying to figure out why the vacant store fronts are vacant. It could be that the owners are asking for too much rent. But why would that be? Could be they are hoping a miracle will happen and some magical retail operation will suddenly swoop in and sign a 25 year lease for whatever imaginary price they set? This situation has been going on for years, and no retail angel has appeared.

I suppose it could be that if all the upper floors are rented then they are taking in enough money and they don't need any income from the ground floor. But that doesn't make sense. They are businessmen. The reason you build or own a commercial building is to make money. Nobody does it out of the goodness of their heart. Okay, there might be the occasional odd-ball here and there, but I don't think they figure into the problem under discussion. The purpose of the building is to make money, so you make as much as possible by insuring that all of the space is rented out and generating income. But not all the space is occupied, so it;s not generating income, so something is wrong.

I've read some stories that suggest that cost to finish these ground floor spaces and then the hassle of maintaining them are too high, but that doesn't make a lot of sense to me, unless,

1. everything has to be super fancy / science fictiony, which means very expensive build out costs,
2. they expect a rowdy clientelle busting up the place every night,
3. the government and the unions are imposing onerous costs, or
4. they feel that only the right kind of store would suit the image they want to project, and such an image is vital to their campaign to make their building the most expensive place to rent and therefor the most profitable.

I am kind of partial to the last one, but with so many empty store fronts, certainly someone would cave and go for real cash money now instead of waiting for imaginary cash winnings in the future.

Hooverville NYC Central Park 1932

I don't know what's going on, but something is definitely rotten.

---

Now that I've thought about this a bit, I am beginning to think that this is a manifestation of a political battle being fought between the big landowners and some politicians. The homeless people and the 'quality of life' downtown are just pawns in this contest. The problem is that no one really knows what to do about the homeless. I am pretty sure that most of the homeless are not living in tents out of choice. Oh sure, there are a few, who actually like their vagrant lifestyle, and there are problem a few crazy people, though some recent experiences make me think that there is a similar percentage of crazies living in houses.

You know, if we can't give them houses, you'd think we could at least turn a field into a campground. And what brings them to downtown anyway? Are they working? I mean if you can find a place to shower once in while, there's no reason you couldn't hold down a job while living in a tent. I mean it would be a colossal pain, but look at all the money you would save on rent.

They might be panhandling, but not that many, not compared to the number of tents I see. There are some soup kitchens, The prospect of a free meal could keep them hanging around, especially if they don't have anywhere else to go.

Many small towns in Oregon were devastated by the collapse of the timber industry. (It did collapse, didn't it? Something about the spotted owl comes to mind.) Maybe we should set up some soup kitchens in one of these small towns? Put the homeless in the empty houses. I can why it hasn't been done. Everyone would object. It would put paid to the political battle that is going on.

Top photo via Posthip Scott

Golden Apples

How Does Apple Make so Much Money?
I sort of knew most of what's in here, but some of the numbers were very surprising. I am now carrying a cell phone with me. I've had it for a year or two, but recently my life has gotten a little more complicated, so having it with me helps. It's just a flip phone from Tracphone with a miserable camera, but the cost is negligible.

I guess the biggest surprise is the business about "easy to use". I don't think Apple products are easy to use. Seems to me like they make you take a zillion steps to do the simplest things. I think people like them because the endless maze of menus gives them something to play with. "If you just do this, and this and this and this and this and then this other thing you can send a smiley face to your BFF." Wonderbar. Not. But since Apple is making money and I'm not, I must be wrong. I still think their products are overpriced crap.

Ural Motorcycle with sidecar

It's kind of like Ural Motorcycles that way. Ural Motorcycles might be decent bikes now (I don't know), but a few years ago they were the epitome of Eastern European junk. They were cool though, if you were into 60 year old mechanical designs, and they were cheap. But they were unreliable, the dealership network was non-existent, so your best hope of getting any help fixing your broken machine was from another Ural rider, and so a network of Ural riders grew up. Sort of the same thing with iPhones. Kids saw other kids do cool things (for some value of 'cool') with their phones and the best way to find out how to do that cool thing was talk to other iPhone users. Which is what iPhone people like to do: talk to other people. Me, I'm more like Sargent Joe Friday of Dragnet: just the facts, ma'am.

Map of the Day

Lower 48 Elevation by Scott Reinhard

Interesting color choices, but it certainly points out the flat nature of the Midwest.

Via Detroit Steve

Dogs of Berlin

DOGS OF BERLIN Trailer (2018) Netflix Series
This isn't the best show in the world, but it's got something, "je ne sais quoi". It's a cop show, in Berlin, with a whole cast of unsavory characters: Neo-Nazis, Turkish gangsters, German gangsters, officious busybodies and run-of-the-mill scumbags. Every one of them has some kind of major personality defect, but they manage to get through the day, somehow.

Watching this show, and from some comments I have heard from people recently, I am beginning to understand that much of the crazy shit people do is because it makes them feel alive, something your everyday, humdrum life doesn't. Much of modern life is designed to make life easy, safe and comfortable, but christ-on-a-crutch, it can also make you feel like you are being smothered. There is a fine line between feeling safe and secure and feeling like your life is killing you.

Update March 2020 replaced missing video.

Teleword

Wonderword Puzzle

Teleword is a word search puzzle that appears in The Sunday Oregonian. The daily paper carries Wonderword, an identical puzzle. Both are produced by the same guy: David Q. Oullet, who makes these puzzles by hand.

The aren't particularly difficult, all you have to do is locate the words from the list in the grid. It takes a little time and seems to go slower as you locate more words. It can be downright tedious when you are down to two or three short words and the entire grid seems to have been marked off. It's not my favorite puzzle, but if I am not ready to start my day, it's a good way to procrastinate.

Anyway, I got to wondering how hard it would be to generate such a puzzle, so I put my programmers cap on and set to. It didn't take long before I had solution. Well, I had a program. Let's run it and see if it can generate a square from the list of words in Sunday's puzzle.  I let it run overnight. It was still running the next morning and still hadn't found a solution. Hmm, maybe this problem is tougher than I thought.

Let's do a little analysis. The square is 15 letters across and 15 rows tall. There are 38 words with an average length of, let's say, 7. So any one word, on average, can fall roughly 500 different places

(         8 starting rows
times 8 starting column
times 8 directions).

means each word has 500 possible positions, so we have 38 (words) to the 500th power possible combinations, which is like a number with a thousand zeros which may as well be infinity. There isn't enough CPU power on the planet to try that many combinations. But maybe the problem isn't that tough and we'll get an answer in a some kind of reasonable time frame, like overnight.

When it didn't find an answer, I went back and revisited the code. I made some minor changes which I didn't think should effect it, but evidently it did because it returned a solution in about an hour. A solution, not THE solution. The puzzle I used as a model has ten extra letters, which would be spaces in my solution, and my program's solution only had three. Well, if we can generate one solution in an hour, maybe if we run it for a day it will find more solutions, and maybe one of those will have the required ten spaces. So some more minor changes to the code and I fired it up again.

Here's what it has so far (it shows its current state every one million attempted word placements):

 R H S M T S Y D O N O V A N G
 O O U P O H E A R C L A R K E
 C N L L R O E A R E       R O
 K E H L L I D A R D A H C A R
 A Y E E I A N Y N C B M   M G
 N C R H R N B G B I H I E E I
 D O M S O M G A F L M E R R E
 R M I Z P L A S L I U A R D S
 O B T F O E L N T L E E L S S
 L S S H R M N I S O O L S S J
 L       E E B C E B N O D S E
 B I L L Y W D I E S L E S K R
   A L L I C H D E R   A S N E
 P E T U L A   O I S     C I M
   Y T S U D S G G O R T   K Y
dimensionof(words): 38    wordcount: 8
placed: 30                counter: 164000000

---

This program is CPU intensive, which means everything else gets slow. I was thinking it would be handy to have another computer to run this program so I could go web surfing without having to drag this CPU hog around with me everywhere I went, and then I remembered that there are sites out there on the web that will let you write, compile and run programs on their servers, free. Well, shiver me timbers, let's try that. So I pulled up a few, loaded my program (copy & paste, it's only a couple of hundred lines long) and pressed the GO button. Here's the ones I tried.

• Repl.it - still running
• OnlineGDB - kicked off after roughly 30 minutes, but no explanation
• CodeChef - kicked off after 5 seconds
• Rextester - kicked off after 5 seconds

I'm still dinking with the program. I will post it on github if I am ever satisfied with it.