Personal » HunterDavis.com

Goodbye Paypal, Goodbye Ebay

Finance, Live For Free, News, Personal, Personal Finance 2 Responses »

May 162013

I considered titling this post many things.

Ebay: 15 years of asshole buyers
Paypal: Your game is up and it’s about damn time
I’ll never get screwed by Paypal again!
I’ll never get screwed by Ebay again!

In the end, I went with the above. If you’ve read Live For Free you know how badly eBay and Paypal can (and often do) screw people over, myself included. So when I saw this announcement today by Google, I knew what it meant to me personally. I’m done with Paypal, forever. Consequently, I’m done with eBay, forever. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the economics of the secondhand electronics market have changed drastically since I wrote LFF. Quitting eBay 5, or 10, or even 15 years ago would mean a loss of income. That’s no longer the case. So much time and effort (and fees, so many fees) are wasted on eBay due to fake buyers, buyers who don’t pay, foreign buyers who are allowed to bid on US only auctions, etc. Paypal only exacerbates the problem with its terrible customer support and awful service. eBay doesn’t even allow you to directly email anyone without going through a ‘guided help wizard’. Ridiculous.

I mean seriously, there’s a website purely to help people fight Paypal screwings. Gotta love their campaign though:

OPY: I dumped all my eBay stock.

OPY: When is a Doughnut not a Doughnut?

Finance, News, Personal, Personal Finance No Responses »

May 072013

Q: When is a doughnut not a doughnut?
A: When it costs 50$.

Seriously though, my significant other and I enjoy the occasional trip to Baskin Robbins and/or Dunkin Donuts. Last night was one such an occasion. While the ice cream was quite reasonably priced at 6$ for two, the stock is currently hovering at around 7 times that. That’s quite a tax for ice cream (and donuts). Still, the stock has a steady 25% gain over 5 years and I do love me some ice cream.

DNKN – $41.05

If you’re in the mood for an interesting corporate history, check out the corporate ownership history for Baskin Robbins on Wikipedia. Apparently investment groups love them some donuts and ice cream as well.

Also, it turns out that doughnut jewelry is a popular category of food-related jewelry.

Only Pay Yourself: Throwing Common Sense Out The Window

Finance, News, Personal, Personal Finance No Responses »

May 062013

During the first week in May, I considered myself quite thrifty. I bought a used magnifying glass from a thrift store, along with an ancient pair of studio headphones I plan to refurbish. Neither are produced by companies that still exist. Having not made a corporate purchase since the 1st, I was feeling fairly economical. On May 6th, that all changed.

You see, on May 8th I fly down for a long weekend in Virginia Beach. Having just sold off the remaining tablets I had in my possession last month (in preparation for the Google I/O yearly tablet price drop), I was in the market for a media consumption device to use on the plane.

My first consideration was the Google Nexus 10. This seemed like a bad idea for 2 reasons:

There’s likely to be a hardware refresh at I/O this month
Google’s stock price is over 3x the cost of the tablet itself

I did find myself enamored by its 1080+ screen. A high resolution screen like that could be used to great effect in document (and code) editing, and my primary complaint with my last batch of tablets (both Android and Win8 RT/Pro) was their (now antiquated feeling) 1280×800 resolution screens.

Fate intervened in the form of a failing business (Barnes and Nobles (B&N)) trying to sell off stock and gain market share. On May 5th, B&N dropped the price of their 1080+ resolution tablet down to 180$. You also can get 2x 25$ gift cards by going through their ‘refer a friend’ program. That drops the effective price of the tablet down to 130$. Quite a deal, especially when you factor in B&N’s current stock price of $18.

Why then, is this write-up titled ‘throwing common sense out the window’? It’s obvious to anyone in our industry that B&N is struggling, badly, and is likely to fold.

“Common sense” would clearly dictate that you shouldn’t buy stock in a company you think will fold soon.

Does common sense have a place in the high-frequency cesspool that is modern investing? Only time (and data metrics) will tell.

Overall stock + cash purchase for a 1080+ Android tablet (which recently got the Google Play store): 148$. Not bad.

Only Pay Yourself: May 1st Recap

Finance, News, Personal, Personal Finance 2 Responses »

May 012013

Though it was a couple days before the official kick-off, I went ahead and started the investing week early. For the first time, starting Monday I followed the ‘Only Pay Yourself‘ investment and lifestyle strategy I created earlier this week. Any time I needed/wanted to make a purchase, I first had to acquire (at minimum) 1 stock from the company that makes/distributes/produces said product or service.

In general, I’ll be posting up here to the blog and updating my purchase spreadsheet (visible at this page and at the bottom of finance posts) on any day which I purchase stock or weigh a purchasing decision.

For those that don’t care to read the details, here is how the first two days worth of stock purchases went down:

Read on, for the full write-up:
Continue reading »

The Ads Are Back

Finance, News, Personal No Responses »

Apr 292013

Long time readers will know that I had ads on the front page of this site for many years, but removed them a few years back in lieu of a ‘donations’ button. As I’ve not once received a donation (and frankly I miss the income); I’ve re-added the ads to the bottom of articles. That way you can get through the entirety of a front-page post (and half of a multi-part article) without being advertised to. Hopefully they are not too intrusive, and I think it strikes a fair balance.

Lifestyle: Are Your Personal Tastes A Sound Investment Strategy? Wherein I create The ‘Only Pay Yourself’ Strategy.

Finance, Personal, Personal Finance 1 Response »

Apr 282013

I’ll be the first to admit it, I have not made the wisest of investments over the years. From cashing out my retirement to help fund my start-up, to keeping cash reserves in low-interest bearing accounts; over the years I’ve made about every investing mistake in the book. What I did invest, I invested cautiously. Mutual funds, index funds, foreign index funds. I gambled on some of the big internet companies that came up over the years, and sometimes it paid off, sometimes it didn’t. So I’m proposing an experiment, and I’ll be following through with it starting May 1st (coincidentally my birthday).

From this point forward, I’m only going to purchase products from corporations I own a part of.

I call it the “Only Pay Yourself” strategy (OPY). The theory is this, if you’re going to pay a corporation for their goods and services, then it makes sense that you’d believe in their quality and long term viability. Is this inherent belief in the worth of a product or service useful in a market strategy?

Pay Yourself First, Last, and Only

I’m setting up a new brokerage account just for this experiment, and starting May 1st 2013 I’m going to literally put my money where my mouth(‘s food) is (coming from). I’ll be keeping track of the entire thing, and logging with metrics. Just like my open-source software and its subsequent income, I’ll be writing the whole thing up.

Read on for the details!

CS Nerds Are Not Just Obsessed with Cats

Multimedia, Personal No Responses »

Apr 272013

We like dogs too!

Basic Skeletal Animation: From Paper to Math to Code, Part 1

Android Apps, Android Games, gaming, News, Personal, Programs No Responses »

Apr 272013

Textures are heavy. Bloat-y. They weigh down your apps, and consume memory. Sometimes you just want to efficiently animate something procedurally. One useful technique to have in your bag of tricks is that of basic skeletal animation. In this article series, I’ll run you though the basics of 2-d skeletal animation. I’ll be implementing this as part of a variant of the popular ‘run as far as you can’ games on the Android platform using AndEngine/OpenGL as the rendering back-end. Those more interested in reading code can follow along at the 5 Seconds GitHub commit history. At the end of this series, you’ll be able to implement basic skeletal animation in the language of your choice. I’ll be using Android/Java/*OpenGL as the pedagogical example, but the code should port easily to other platforms.

*Note that if you’re following along in code, you’ll see the original game engine was a basic multi-threaded game loop/render loop combo I created for this article series (any 5-seconds games using OpenGL would inherit from these base classes I cooked up). After a few months of some awesome projects at work taking up my time, I switched it out to andEngine. That said I’ll still be running through a bit of basic engine design. If you’re looking to get a feel for basic Android game programming without the OpenGL and much of the multi-threaded bits, I’d recommend reading through the source code of the ‘Pop X Color Balloons’ game contained within the project. As always, you can try the code out at anytime on your own Android device because everything about it is open sourced on GitHub. Eventually I’ll make this game series available on the Play store as a compilation game (think Wario-Ware), Until then, GitHub will be the place to grab the project.

Skip Ahead:
Let’s Talk about “Boundage”
Prequel: Choosing your Draw Ordering, and The Importance of The Separation Between Game Logic and Game Graphics
Ensuring Thread Concurrency and Avoiding Deadlocks
Baby Steps: Step One: Start with an Arm is an Arm is a Leg?
Baby Steps: Step Two: Now Form The Head
Some Thoughts On Procrastination

Let’s Talk about “Boundage”

For me, it all starts with an off-the-cuff sketch on paper. This often occurs while I’m doing something else with my family. Why burn your eyes out doing design work at your laptop? A good design can be translated from sketch to mathematics on paper. When you’ve got a good solution mathematically, then you can consider the implementation details. When it’s time for coding, you’ll know it.

You are Buying This for Life!

eBooks, Live For Free, News, Personal 2 Responses »

Apr 272013

The economic potential of amateur pc computer resale has changed, almost completely disappearing since I wrote “Live For Free” (LFF), and is declining for apple computers steadily. This makes a direct sequel to LFF unlikely, as it would need to be about computer and electronics repair. I’ve had my current development laptop for about 2 years now, with no reason to think I won’t be using it in another 2, or 4, or maybe even 10 years. In the 2000′s and during the course of writing LFF, I probably went through 30 laptops, ever running to beat the elusive pricing curve. Now that I’ve beat it, what’s next?

Perhaps my next book will be about just that. In the mean time, I’ll be posting up shorter and more timelier articles in an attempt to kick-start things and get back to some weird, hacked-together stuff.

Rhapsody + Ford Sync Debuts at CES Today

Android Apps, Business, Multimedia, News, Personal, Programs 1 Response »

Jan 082013

It’s not often I post up about something about my professional career. I think that most of my readers get their business/professional/industry news from other outlets, and there’s not generally much for me to say on a topic that’s been covered my the mainstream media. Knowing this, I tend to post up those things which appeal to my readers: personal projects, hacks, games, cool software tricks, hardware builds, etc. There are some times, however, where I do think it’s OK to put on my work hat for a while and post up something about how things are going for me in the professional software industry.

Today, things are going rather well. Rhapsody + Ford Sync was launched today to much fanfare at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES). After many months my NDA is lifted and I can finally publicly talk about one of my secret projects! Everyone who has Rhapsody on their Android device can get into a Sync enabled Ford car and use this functionality today, functionality which I implemented myself last fall! If you saw the live announcement today they actually praise Rhapsody’s Android + Ford Sync development team. That’s not to say this work was done in a vacuum, oh no! I’m backed up by a tremendous team of folks from business, QA, design, product development, and marketing (not to mention a terrific iOS developer) who make my job all too easy sometimes. It certainly puts a smile on my face to see another successful product launch.

News reports have been coming in all day:
Bloomberg
Hot Hardware (apparently Bloomberg leaked the news first)
Ford’s official announcement page
The Verge
Pocket-Lint mentions us 1st
Auto News (via Bloomberg)
Automotive World
Slash Gear
The New York Times
Motor Authority
Motor Trend
Cnet
And many, many more!

Older Entries