If lightning was music

...it might look a little like this:

Nice pickin' there, fellas.  :D

Something frozen this way comes

Snow, man.  Freakin' snow everywhere.

I saw the flurries in the weather forecast a couple of days ago.  I also saw the high temperature of 44.  That told me that the possibility of snow was overstated.  Besides, the weather people always exaggerate.  They engage in sensationalism just like regular "news" people and for the same reasons.  I figured the likelihood of it actually snowing was small, and the likelihood of it sticking to ground was even smaller.

Yet here we are, post-blizzard.  :/

On Sunday, it was warm enough to go outside in short sleeves.

On Wednesday and Thursday, it rained non-stop in a fashion Noah himself might have found familiar, and there were tornadoes in the area.

Now this.  Freakin' snow, man.



UPDATE:  The snow has already melted.  It's completely gone.

Now we have fog.  Thick pea-soup fog.  Because why not?  We've had everything else this week.

You don't see this every day

The stock market has taken some interesting turns this week.  There have been three straight sessions where the S&P has gapped up.

The proverbial wisdom is that gaps want to be filled.  You see an example of that after the big gap down in that image.  The next candle after the gap occupies the gap.  That's typical.

The last three days, though, have been one gap up after another.  None of those gaps have been filled yet.  Not unheard of, but not common, either, especially when the gaps are with the overall trend rather than against it.

So what does it mean?  Beats me.  That last cross-shaped candle looks like it might be a turning point to the downside, and the 63 RSI supports that, but the MACD is about to cross over to the upside, too, and the price action bounced right off the 50-DMA support line, so the signals are conflicting.  When you can't figure out the technicals, then the best course of action is to either do nothing or look to the fundamentals for guidance.

I'm not an expert at this stuff.  I'll stay on the sideline for now.


UPDATE:  The latest gap filled today with the market's downward move.  This might be the start of a long-awaited correction or consolidation.  Things have been running hot for a long time.  A couple of months of treading water would be beneficial, I think.

Something familiar about this

There's a new illegal drug causing havoc:

A lethal new drug known as “gray death” has been found in Louisiana — and it is so powerful that touching it could kill you, authorities warned.

Gray Death, eh?  Where have I heard that before?  ;)

Little snags

I'm in the process of proofreading my book.  I expect to publish it within the next several days.  I had hoped to publish it on Feb. 3rd or 4th when I had planned to send my newsletter out as part of another obligation.

A few days ago, though, I updated Calibre, and then I started getting error messages when I opened an epub I made in it.  I thought it was a problem with the book.  To make a long story short, I went through a lot of formatting-related hassle to correct a javascript problem that might not be the book's fault anyway and is probably a bug in the program. 

So I've been delayed a bit.

I reached a critical mass of exasperation, threw my hands up, and decided to revisit the issue after the Super Bowl.

Speaking of the game, I was mostly disappointed in the commercials.  That's all I was interested in, not the game itself.  I stopped paying attention to the NFL when my team made the biggest choke in sports history.

I liked the M.C. Hammer commercial and the Groundhog Day commercial, but that's about it.  A lot of the jokes fell flat for me.

Still on track to publish this month, and almost certainly before Valentine's Day.  Book 4 is coming.  Stay tuned.

Got some maintenance done

I spent much of today doing updates for the laptop.

I had noticed that, over the past day or two, the internet was going very slowly.  To the point of uselessness, actually.  My first instinct, when that happens, is to assume the proivder is either having issues or is intentionally throttling the bandwidth.  That wasn't the case this time, though.

I use the laptop at the edge of the router's wireless range, and I've got a range booster between here and there to make up the difference.  The problem with a range booster is that it lowers the top speed of your computer's internet connection.  And if something else slows that speed down even more, than it can cripple your connection altogether.

Well, that "something else" comes in the form of Windows updates that happen in the background without telling you.  Even when set to "metered connection," it's still a burden on your bandwidth.  Nothing was loading, not even the simplest web pages.

So I set my laptop up on a tv tray just a few feet from the router--where the signal is as strong as it gets--and did all the updates I could.

My internet speed is now back to normal.

I also ran Malwarebytes and quarantined a thing.  Not sure when or how that thing got there.  But it's in the naughty-code cage now.

To paraphrase what's-her-name from Poltergiest, "this computer is now clean."

The answer is 42

In my work in progress, I thought I had forty chapters and an epilogue.  I had miscounted and mislabeled them, though.  I actually have 42 chapters and an epilogue.  There's a lesson there about double-checking and triple-checking everything.

I also downloaded an update from Calibre.  When I made an epub in the latest version, the epub reader looked different from what I expected, and I sort of freaked out a little at the lost functionality.  Then I remembered that the developer isn't the sort to reduce functionality; instead, he simply "hides" functions until you go into your preferences and activate them.  So, after a little searching, I figured out how to customize the epub reader to my tastes.  Yeah, Calibre is still awesome, and the developer is still a bona fide hero as far as I'm concerned.