Coronavirus, Day 4 – Investing During Disaster

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

This seems like kind of a weird post to write as we see more and more people getting laid off or struggling for work as the virus spreads, so just bear with me…

I found myself buying some stock yesterday.

Not a lot, really. I think I spent about $150 between two different companies, and the only reason I did is because quite frankly, it was really, really cheap.

That’s kind of the unique perk of the markets tanking like they have over the last couple of weeks – while it’s painful to watch our retirement accounts fall something like 25%, it also presents the opportunity to buy at a discount for however long this market takes to recover.

This is intriguing to me because I don’t like to admit it, but I stopped contributing to my 401k a little over a year ago when our finances weren’t doing so hot. In fact, I doubled down by taking out a 401k loan and then stopping my regular contributions, too, which I’d been otherwise making religiously for a long time, so I’ve been disappointed in my retirement savings whereas it used to be something I felt pretty good about.

I’ve had the conversation with people a few different times now that despite uncertainty in the markets, now isn’t the time to pull your retirement funds. If anything, as long as you’re nowhere near ready for retirement, low points like this are when it’s smart to buy more! So far this year I’ve slowly started limping my 401k contributions back up from 0%, and though they’re nowhere near what I’d like them to be … it’s something.

Anyways, the other day at random I started thinking about some of the businesses currently on hold – namely theme parks and cruise ships – and it wasn’t much of a surprise to see that they’ve really gone south!

As of when I’m writing this (3/19, after market close), here’s what they looked like (compared to one month prior)…

  • Walt Disney Company (DIS) – $94.93, down 34% from $144.63
  • Universal Corporation (UVV) – $44.13, down 12% from $50
  • SeaWorld (SEAS) – $8.54, down 76% from $35.25
  • Six Flags (SIX) – $11.39, down 75% from $45.11
  • Royal Caribbean Cruises (RCL) – $22.41, down 83% from $133.51
  • Carnival Cruise Lines (CCL) – $10, down 80% from $50.83

Now I honestly don’t think much about individual companies for investments anymore – what little stock I did own, I sold off and traded for an S&P 500-based index fund instead. And of course, all of our retirement savings are in similar mutual funds.

Still, it’s kind of fun to own a small piece of a company – something I used to boast about Disney before I sold my shares because kids are even more expensive than their park tickets!

It’s also worth noting that A) I like all of these companies, and B) I don’t really have any doubts that they’re going to recover from all of this … eventually. It might take a while, namely because lord only knows how long these closures will need to drag on, but they’re all popular entertainment businesses with large assets, be it cruise ships or castles or even whales and dolphins… 😉

So for starters, I bought a handful of shares of both SeaWorld and Royal Caribbean. I’ll probably buy a few more tomorrow once we get paid, too, depending on how all of the dollars and cents wash out.

I’m not looking to get rich off of these investments, however I do believe in each of their brands and what they do, and 80% off seems like a pretty good deal when you’re buying companies that you enjoy and admire!

If they can help to bridge that gap left behind by not contributing to my retirement over the last couple of years, that would be nice because honestly it’s probably one of the few “risky investments” that I’d ever feel comfortable gambling my money on.

Do with these thoughts what you will, as I’m certainly not a financial professional. I’m just a guy who likes Florida’s tourism industry, and saw a fun opportunity to own a piece of some fun companies that my family enjoys. 😉

Coronavirus, Day 3 – Shopping Frenzy

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

Yesterday was the first day I went to the grocery store since all of this started and it was like Target was liquidating their entire grocery section.

I kind of figured that water and toilet paper would be out, but this was entire aisles just empty.

At one point I watched a couple staring at one of the cooler cases that sit in the middle of the main aisles and I couldn’t help but imagine their dialogue, “Well, I guess we can eat these pre-made mashed potatoes for the next two weeks…”

My biggest concern at the moment is finding distilled water for my CPAP machine. I don’t have to have it, but I’ve had a sore throat and it helps at night. I was able to add a case of it for backup to our bottled water delivery, but that’s a few weeks away.

It’s all definitely surreal because I’ve never seen hurricane reactions this bad. And yet I get it – people are scared, and so they do whatever they think they can do to look out for their families.

I think it scares me more to read that gun sales are apparently through the roof, too. It makes me wonder if we’re going to fall to a place of robberies and looting if supplies aren’t readily available.

Yesterday I found a huge smear of dog shit on the back of my car parked in our driveway. No idea if it was just kids screwing around or if somebody has a beef with us.

The only one I would guess would be the HOA and I’m pretty sure they’re still just sending nasty letters!

The Coronavirus

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

We’re kind of living in a weird time, aren’t we?

Almost any place of gathering – schools, sporting events, even Disney World and other theme parks – are all closed.

Pretty much any office job is recommending their employees work from home.

And for some reason, there’s a major shortage on toilet paper … which ironically enough, I only learned about 30 minutes ago that we’re actually running low on at my house! 😯

I’m really trying to adopt the philosophy of focusing on the silver lining of this whole situation – that being a change of pace, albeit forced, from the daily life that is normal for me right now. Instead of a day filled with rushing to work only to leave to pick up kids a few hours later, then trying to juggle more work and supporting my family until bedtime, and then trying to support my writing business with whatever’s left, I’m challenging myself to take a different approach…

In being home all day, I want to truly take advantage of being home by spending lots of time with my family, breaks to help them with crafts and academics, meals together, etc…

I also want to try and get a tackle on organizing our house, as for the next several weeks apparently it’s going to become our lifeboat!

I want to reinforce my support for remote work by showing how physical location has no impact on the quality of my work. In fact, I expect it to improve as I won’t have to don headphones like whenever conversation surrounds me at the office!

I want to do what I can to help support small and local businesses because I know that some of them are going to take a real beating from this thing. Actually, just this morning I supported a local business by paying a guy to come fix my sprinkler system, so we’re off to the races already! 😀

If I can find the time, I’d love to squeeze in a little exercise … we’ll see…

And ultimately I just want to help improve myself by taking this bizarre opportunity to slow down and focus on the things that are really important for a change.

The whole legitimate excuse for avoiding people I guess is simply a bonus! 😉

FINALLY! An Actual Use for QR Codes!!!

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

There’s no sense in holding back now – I’ve honestly always thought that QR codes were kind of dumb.

BUT…

I just stumbled across a pretty cool idea for them at home that I wanted to share!

You see, I just bought a new wifi access point, so I’m doing some spring cleaning on my home network and I ended up renaming the SSID that my guest network uses.

This is notable because I’m one of those weird people who believes in long, simple passwords instead of complicated strings that are hard to remember and thus I’ve grown accustomed to many an eye-roll when people ask what my wifi password is at home … often times resulting in guests just handing over their devices and asking me to type it in for them…

But no more!

So I found this blog post talking about an office posting a QR code that visitors could use to easily login to their guest wifi and I figured, why not try that at my house, too?!

I took it a step further by using this free website that let’s you generate your own QR code in about 30 seconds…

And the end result, after a couple of quick tests to watch the magic work, was this simple Word doc that I could print out and stick to the fridge for easy access anytime someone visits:

For the most part, I still think that these things are dumb – maybe because they just never got the penetration here in the States to justify companies pasting them all over everything instead of using their URLs – but if it saves me from being tasked with typing my 46-character wifi password into the phones of every friend and family member who comes to my house, then I will take one for the team and admit … this particular use case is kind of neat. 😉

Dream Journal : Sky High Living

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

It’s not uncommon for me to have dreams where I’m suddenly back living in my hometown and I have to essentially figure out how to move out all over again. Sometimes my job has also vanished, however this time I was still working remotely for my current employer, so money apparently wasn’t a concern.

After cycling through the usual options – find an apartment of my own in my hometown, move downstate in Michigan, or again move to Florida – I found myself also branching out in a new direction by deciding that I’d always wanted to live in a high rise, so now was the time to do it…

It started with exploring a skyscraper in downtown Tampa that was surprisingly similar to the one that I worked in (Tampa City Center) when I actually moved to Florida. The “apartment” that I looked at was pretty ridiculous, spanning two floors with massive, floor-to-ceiling windows looking out across the rest of downtown. It even had a fireman’s pole to slide down from the loft to the main level!

Once we had gawked at the incredible views that said ridiculous apartment somehow afforded on a meager software engineer’s salary, we went to explore the rest of the building of which quite a bit was actually accessible as we were able to ride up and down in elevators and take staircases and sometimes even climbing ropes between the various floors.

It was when we came to a rather large and ornate ballroom, we found an artist painting a beautiful mosaic on the floor. I asked her if she was creating something new, to which the woman explained that she was merely doing touch-ups because the building had recently been sold.

I can’t remember if it was being sold by or being sold to, but I recall that one of the parties involved was none other than Donald Trump.

…and needless to say, it made me very mad!

After brooding for a while and hoping Trump was losing money on the deal, me and my friend found ourselves being chased by a group of security guards … presumably for wandering around in places where we weren’t exactly supposed to be. Luckily we managed to put more and more distance between us as we ducked in and out of secret passages and even more strange mechanisms to move us from one floor to another – the latest being a sort of platform on a track that winded between floors and around a bar that overlooked a restaurant on the floor below.

It was never clear whether I ended up renting that incredible apartment high in the sky, or if I ran into Mr. Impeachment himself. I still think it would be neat to live in a skyscraper, though family life … and the salary that it entails … makes that lifestyle pretty impractical anyways… 😉

Evolution of a Media Collection

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

I wish I had kept better records of this over time – I’m basically just going by when I added new drives, but it’s still crazy to see how this collection has grown over only five years time…

Consider this – when I first got interested in collecting media back in my early twenties, I started with three 80 GB hard drives … one was fully dedicated to music, another animated TV (mostly The Simpsons, Futurama, and Duckman), and the third was live TV. These disks were filled first with a 56k modem that incessantly redialed all night long, and then later by a 1 Mbps cable modem.

Now here in 2019, I just finished building out a 106 TB NAS, with a 500 Mbps fiber line to fill it.

It kind of makes me wonder just how long the remaining 35 TB left on my new NAS are going to last me, especially when the data somewhat shows how I tend to go through a bit of a spike in downloads whenever I have new disk space available to me. 😉

To Migrate 70 Terabytes…

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

It’s true.

The project that I started almost two months ago to migrate all of my home server data from rapidly aging desktop hardware to a rackmount NAS is finally completed.

What was previously around 60 TB spread across 9 hard drives of varying shapes, sizes, and ages has now been moved to a dozen 10-12 TB drives all born within the last year, including the addition of two parity drives for redundancy in a new-to-me server that will be dedicated to nothing but storing files, thus finally separating out Plex and the various apps that I use to download media to their own hardware where disk conflicts should officially be a thing of the past!

Of course, it didn’t take that full two months solely to move the data from one set of drives to the other … even though at times it certainly felt like it…

A good chunk of time was spent waiting for Unraid to clear and format new drives – a little over a day for 12 TB drives. 😯

I also had to limit when I could migrate data so as to not impact Plex, considering both that copying at full tilt ate up a lot of CPU on my old server AND I found that copying at full tilt into the new server would make it difficult to stream media from the affected drive at the same time.

I ended up counteracting the latter by adding a 1 TB SSD cache drive to Unraid, which unfortunately limited me to moving about 1 TB at a time because the mover process that moves data from the cache to the array (normally at night) is equally intensive.

That said, most of the speeds I got from the old server weren’t enough to matter anyways. For drives attached directly to the motherboard, I could average speeds of 60 MBps, however a good chunk of my media was living on external USB drives which meant that it was more likely for my transfers to crawl along at 30 MBps instead…

Comical when the SSD can do upwards of 90-100 MBps and even higher read speeds, but hey – I knew that speed wasn’t one of the selling points of going with Unraid, anyways.

Those two months also included a disk recovery … truth be told, I actually lost two disks that prompted me finally putting all of this into motion! One was a lost cause and I just made a list and re-downloaded everything over time, but the second I left alone until everything else was done and then was able to recover using this great free app that I found called testdisk. It turns out that basically the partition table had gotten corrupted somehow – a problem that actually already affected me once before that I previously had been able to repair, but this time once I realized that testdisk would allow me to copy the contents over to another disk that I now had to spare, I opted to just do that instead and about 12 hours later roughly 490 movies were sitting on a fresh disk and ready to migrate over to the new array!

So anyways, as of yesterday now everything is living on the new server and I’m basically ready to power down old faithful and prepare it for its afterlife. I think I decided that once I get the cables I’m waiting on to move the new NAS into my rack in thcloset, I’m going to bring that old server down to my office and disassemble it, give it a good cleaning and actually remove the dead drives that are still installed, and then I’m going to wipe the thing and turn it into a sandbox of sorts for a few random things that don’t really have a place on my other servers…

  • Plex media local backup – Until I can build out a proper backup NAS, I’m going to take a couple of leftover 8 TB drives and backup the most essential 16 TB of media in my collection for an additional backup on top of the 1 TB that I’m now backing up to the cloud.
  • Torrent seeding – I found this great docker for Transmission that incorporates OpenVPN for a seamless experience, which makes me feel a little more comfortable having it running full time to help seed some of the more difficult to find files that I had to hunt for after not being able to get them from usenet.
  • DVD ripping station – Right now the only computers left in this house that still have CD drives are one rackmount server and a very old laptop that I first trialed Plex on before moving it to my desktop hardware. I actually bought an internal bluray drive shortly after I started getting into Plex because I thought that I’d end up ripping all of my media instead of just downloading it, so it’s been buried underneath my desk for about four years now. Nonetheless, I want to install it in this version of the computer to have something a little more accessible for the random DVDs that I have to rip myself.

Not sure how much else will end up there simply because the CPU inside is pretty weak at this point, but I’m really trying to keep my main environments a little cleaner and not just install any old random thing that I come across, so this will be a good place for that because it won’t really matter if there are disruptions.

Looking forward to writing up a separate post outlining all of the reasons why I love Unraid now that I’ve been using it for a couple of months, and of course, I’m already working on expansion plans to move beyond the 106 TB limit that I currently have installed in my already very full, new NAS today! 😉

Things I Want for Christmas… – 2019 Edition

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment
  1. I need to figure out why the ice from the ice maker in my freezer all melts together into an unusable blob in the bucket so quickly.
  2. I want someone to fix the sprinkler pipe in my garden that I broke with a shovel while grumbling about our HOA … not because I’m not capable of doing it myself, but because every time I think about it I just get angry all over again!
  3. I’d like to go an entire week without stepping on a single toy in my house.
  4. I’d love to not have to drive 60 miles round trip to get rid of my styrofoam recycling.
  5. I wish the lights in my garage that went out a month and a half ago would magically start working again.
  6. It would be a blessing to have someone properly trim the hideous oak tree in my front yard.
  7. I really want to have all of our Christmas lights up by December 1st this year.
  8. I’d like to solve the problem of us constantly losing our remote controls once and for all.
  9. Both of our cars could use a thorough cleaning.
  10. I’m really curious to know how much electricity my latest server upgrades are going to cost me.

Things That I’m Excited About Right Now! – November 2019 Edition

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

Thanksgiving Dinner
We’ve never actually done a traditional Thanksgiving dinner all by ourselves. Typically we’ll get a pre-cooked turkey breast from HoneyBaked Ham, and if we’re feeling really lazy, sometimes we’ve even gotten the sides and dessert pre-made, too, so “dinner prep” is more of a reheating exercise than anything else.

So this year we’re doing things a little different.

We actually don’t have any family coming over, so it’ll just be the five of us, but we’re going to try our hands at actually cooking a turkey, making the sides in something other than a microwave, and hopefully getting a bit of family time out of the whole ordeal, too. We still need to plan a menu and go grocery shopping, but I’m surprisingly looking forward to the challenge!

Christmas Shopping
The last year or so, including Christmas 2018, was kind of tight, so we’ve had to cut back in areas a lot more than we would like, however at least for the time being things are turning around … mostly because my wife has been picking up loads of extra shifts … and so after getting a bunch of bills finally caught up, I’m looking forward to splurging a bit and have already caught myself digital window shopping for the various folks on our list.

Spoiler Alert – It’s all about the clam candy canes!

Disk Space!!!
Even though it’s also been stressful and there’s been a lot to learn, I’ve really been enjoying building out my new NAS over the past couple of months – particularly this past weekend when I dropped in five brand new 12 TB drives that I picked up on sale at Best Buy to max the beast out at a whopping 106 TB of usable storage!

Granted, it’s a little concerning that this thing is already almost 70% full, and unfortunately every drive bay is filled in the current enclosure, but it should at least tide me over for a few months until I figure out where to go from here…

So what did you do this weekend?

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

I myself was surprisingly productive!

  • Brought in server rack from the garage and started reorganizing servers in closet.
  • Spun up a new VM and installed Home Assistant to start tinkering with the next level of home automation.
  • Started working on a new script to keep up with downloading YouTube videos into Plex.
  • Cleared off two shelves of expired foods in the pantry.
  • Put away Halloween.
  • Made somewhat of a dent in cleaning the living room and playroom.
  • Added new hard drives to NAS and expanded parity volumes from 10 TB to 12 TB. (I love Unraid!)
  • Gave the dog a bath … after the kids covered her in applesauce.
  • Cleaned out bedroom closet to make way for said ginormous server rack.
  • Reorganized recycling in garage … because it’s a giant pet peeve of mine that they can’t just all go to the same place.