Utah Skiing, Day 1

I'm recently back from the ski trip I was planning for in Video Editing is Hard, and I captured hours of video every day on my new Contour HD.  Every day was a learning experience, and I tweaked the way I captured, edited, and narrated videos every day.  While in Utah I suffered through on the laptop using Avidemux primarily, because I wasn't willing to spend hours rendering video and I mistakenly believed that it would faithfully trim minutes around a target clip without corrupting the rest of it.  As a result, I generated a lot of video where I was talking like a chipmunk for the first half of the clip, and the second half was silent.  Days 4-6 didn't get posted at all from Utah because the WiFi I was hanging off of from the house suddenly refused to let me connect.  I hate when people get clues at inconvenient times.

Once I got home, I downloaded the latest ISO of Ubuntu Studio, having heard that it lended itself well to content creation.  I was pretty disappointed to discover that it only shipped with Kino, which refuses to work with the QuickTime files that Contour HD outputs.  However, the version of OpenShot that corresponds to Ubuntu 10.10 is much less buggy than the one I was using in Mint 10 on the laptop; and it was very easy to do the very minor editing that needed doing.  I was so much more pleased with the results from OpenShot that after editing and posting the remaining days of video, I started re-editing and re-posting days 1-3 to remove the chipmunk.  I'm nearly done with that process, only day 3 to go.

I also promised the guys that I would post all the video, even the full raw captures, somewhere on the web that they could access it if they wanted to.  I was originally going to throw it up on my hosted space at markmccracken.net and build a special web page for it.  But I discovered that to house the 17GB of video I had, I would have to pay 1&1, my hosting provider, another $5/month.  Google, on the other hand, would let me upload my files to Google Docs for $5/year, as long as I broke them up into 1GB or less chunks.  Fine by me, so that's what I did instead.

Rather than post all the days at once, I think I'll put them here in this blog one at a time.  The edited clips are all at YouTube, so they can be watched all at once from any blog entry.  The raw video is a little harder to access all at once because I have it accessible but not findable at Google Docs.  But there's enough of it that no one should want to watch all six days of it in one sitting anyway.

Note: be sure to insist that YouTube and Google show you the video in 1080p.  It's much less blurry that way.  You may need to click on logos, go full screen, and/or restart the video a few times.  I found YouTube to be pretty finicky about showing me the resolution I wanted.

Day 1: Alta
Alta is always the first place we go when we get to Utah, because it occupies skiers' hearts like no other resort in the area.  No one I know wears clothing from Solitude, Snowbasin, or other Salt Lake area resorts... only Alta.  The videos from Day 1 are a little frustrating to watch, because I hadn't gotten the hang of where to aim the camera yet.  Especially with Greeley, you'll see the snow in front of me but not much else.  This is because to ski well, one has to keep one's head down, much like a golfer might - but the fun stuff to see is a little higher up.  On later days, I solved this problem by angling the camera up slightly from eye level.




On the very first run of the very first day, John, Jerry, and I found some snow that needed new tracks.  We were very happy to oblige.




After lunch, we headed over to Greeley to see how it was.  It was pretty tracked up, but we had fun anyway, despite my prediction to the contrary at the top of the hill.  The annoying rattling you hear in this video is from the camera's safety fastener bouncing against the camera housing.  This is solved in later videos simply by tucking it up under my goggle strap where it won't flap around in the wind.

Raw Video For Day 1

1: Collins to Sugarloaf Transfer
2: Sugarloaf to Alf's for a wax
3: Standing at Alf's waiting for Jerry
4: Riding Supreme Chair with commentary
5: Scenery off the back of Supreme
6: Top half of Supreme, and a terrible tree run
7: Greeley

(7/24/2011: I have removed the raw video from Google Document storage.  If you would like a copy of a specific video, let me know.)

Next:  Day 2

Video Editing is Hard

For my birthday, the bintgoddess bought me a ContourHD, which comes with mounts to attach it to a goggle strap against a helmet, or to any flat surface.  This freakin' awesome video camera is only 4.3oz, and about 3 inches long.  It shoots 30fps natively in 1080p with a 110-degree wide-angle lens, so as to capture more of the surrounding scenery.  Check out some videos I found on their site here and here.  The second one starts a little slow, but stick with it for some great tree skiing.

Since I'm due to leave for the first ski trip of the season soon, I thought it would be a good idea to record some test video, and then try to upload it to the laptop and edit it some.  My needs are small: I need to be able to crop out boring stuff (stopping to wait for Jerry, fumbling with the camera to start/stop the video, etc).  I also want to suppress sound some of the time, since most of the skiing video I've seen with native audio on it just sounds like a wind tunnel.  Mixing in some appropriate music during this dead air would be great, but just lowering the sound track gain low enough that it doesn't drive viewers crazy would be fine, too.

I had no trouble shooting the video or getting it onto the laptop.  And once there, I could play the raw QuickTime video file without a problem.  But I had a lot of sharp noise when turning the camera on/off, or moving my hand around on it while holding it.  I wanted to trim off the excess on either side, and mute that noise.  I figured if I could do this, I can use the same tools for ski videos while sitting around the house in Utah.

Since my laptop runs Linux -- doesn't yours? -- I jumped onto Wikipedia and looked at open source video editing programs targeted at complete newbs.  Oh yes, I am a complete newb.  I am totally baffled by all these things that start with "MPEG".  I have no idea what the difference is between codecs, nor why I should care.  I just want awesome video, and I want it in 1080p.

First I tried Avidemux, because I'd heard of it, and because it started with A and therefore was near the top of the list.  Avidemux gives a lot of control over selection, which I like: I can move frame by frame.  But when it comes to actually encoding the edited video, I couldn't make heads or tails of it.  Most of the time it refused to generate video at all, complaining that my audio/video/container formats were not compatible with each other (then why let me choose that combination?).  Sometimes it would instantly trumpet success, leaving me with a 0-byte file.  Sometimes it would render my 61-second video for 4-5 minutes, spitting out a 2.5GB AVI that I could not play in any video player I had.

Next I tried Openshot, because it seemed to be one of the more popular ones, and it also seemed to be aimed at the totally ignorant (me).  It has a cutesy KDE-style interface that I suppose is designed to make me feel comfortable, but really makes me feel like I have no control.  I immediately ran into a bug where my video file would fail to appear on the timeline, where all the cropping and editing is done.  After searching online for a while, I found a workaround I could live with, and commenced with editing.  I spent an hour trying to line up pixels in the frustratingly inexact editing interface so I could start the video where I wanted it to start.  Then I crashed it by clicking somewhere that seemed reasonable to me.  I never did get a video file out of it.

Next I tried CinelerraCV, because it looked like it gave the user a lot of control over the audio and video.  I'm sure it does, but holy crap what a lot of buttons.  I was greeted with a toolbar that looks like this:

The best part is that none of the teeny tiny little icons have tool-tips, the more obscure ones are a complete mystery even now.  After three or four attempts, I finally managed to output a video file... but instead of the head-and-shoulders 16x9 framing in the original video, it was just the top half of my face in 4x3.  It was like watching a facebook avatar thumbnail come to life -- creepy. 

Finally I tried PiTiVi, which is written in Python, of all things.  I know a lot of you younger whippersnapper programmers think the world is written in Python, but I just can't get my head around why anyone would bother with it.  Despite my discrimination against the language, I gave PiTiVi a fair shake. In return, it gave me its share of confusion and frustration, but it also gave me HD video trimmed where I wanted it!  It was easier to learn than Cinelerra and Avidemux, and gave me a better feeling of control than OpenShot.  The rendering process was nice and straightforward.  I couldn't control the audio the way I wanted to, but I suspect it probably can be done... I just haven't figured out how.

The most frightening thing is that this little 61-second video required about 4:30 of rendering on the laptop, heating it up enough that it was blowing a hot wind at me out of its vents.  What happens when I have a couple of hours of skiing video to render?

Wrapping Paper Everywhere

Just to warn you up-front, this is not a trading post.

The bintgoddess and I returned from five days in Michigan just yesterday, both with pretty serious headcolds.  This makes three colds for me in six weeks, which is just <sarcasm>really awesome</sarcasm>.  I'm trying to remember the preceding year or two when I watched the bintgoddess get colds at normal intervals while I managed to fend them off without a sniffle.  But bringing that memory forward over the ringing in my stuffed up ears is a little challenging at the moment.  I just woke up from 11 hours of sleep punctuated by bizarre pseudo-fever dreams, and the bintgoddess sleeps on.

The worst part is that we're pretty sure we both picked this up on Sunday, and we saw friends and family Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday.  I really hope we didn't pass it along to everyone else, but if the entire Detroit Metro Area fails to show up for work on Jan 3, 2011, you can blame us.

It was great to see many of our Detroit-area friends on this trip, and I have to say that the scheduling really worked out well.  We managed to see everyone we had discussed visiting, and didn't feel like anyone got short-changed on time.  We even laid some preliminary plans for going with another couple to Punkin' Chunkin' next year, which looks like a fantastic nerdy silly time.  With its massive Discovery Channel coverage this year, I'm sure next year's PC will be booked to the gills.

With all the friends and family we visited, it was a pretty full trip.  But there was still time to try to cope with four dogs and four people cooped up in a house.  My coping method of choice was to disappear into my laptop, where I started learning about delivering rich web applications via Flash movies (SWFs).  I'm working on a top secret project which I hope to deliver as a Facebook application, and I reckon Flash is probably the best way to make it a reality.  Unwilling to pony up hundreds of dollars for Adobe's development environment, I started looking at other avenues.

The one that I settled on is OpenLaszlo, named for either a painter, or a cat who was named after the painter, it isn't completely clear.  OpenLaszlo is an open-source language that is based on an interesting combination of XML and JavaScript, and lets you compile to either SWF (8 or 10), or to DHTML.  There are a few things you can't do in DHTML like embed fonts, but I think Flash is a better solution for my particular problem anyway.  OpenLaszlo's pedigree is impressive: H&R Block, Wal-Mart, and Pandora are all using OpenLaszlo to deliver rich content.

Over the break, I read through the QuickStart guide, and started digging my way through the Developer's Guide.  I've gotten to Chapter 10 (of 57), and so far have built a little test application that doesn't really do anything useful, but lets me exercise what few skills I have managed to accumulate.  You can check it out here if you're so inclined, but don't expect much.  If you're a developer-type and interested in the OpenLaszlo code that made it happen, you can find that here.  I added ".txt" onto the end of the file so that Firefox will just display it instead of trying to download it.  As I keep working through the Dev Guide, I will from time to time post my progress up on markmccracken.net.  I will probably not keep the source file up to date, though, unless someone asks me to.

Predestined for Failure

Old Business
As I have noted recently, I am running about two to three days behind posting my trading activity.  There are a number of excuses for this, of course, and none of them all that valid.  I have also lagged behind in reading the blogs of others, and this morning I read an excellent post from one of my favorite options bloggers, Mark Wolfinger.  Unfortunately for my Iron Condor trade, I read it 11 days late. 

In this post he discusses the correct strike-pricing for protective debit spread adjustments.  He states several times that one should never buy farther OTM options than the iron condor itself, and that's exactly what I did.  Over the next few months, I need to reflect on this and tweak my adjustment strategy.  I'm hoping using this advice will help flatten out my returns, because I'm experiencing somewhat more volatility and stress than I would like, given the low income potential of this trade.

The AAII Sentiment Survey for 12/15/2010 still shows some very bullish investors out there, although slightly fewer than last week: 50% are bullish, down from 53% on 12/8/2010.  As expected, this results in a continued no-position for CS|MACO, which doesn't participate in trends that are fueled by investor mania.

New Business
I bought some Research in Motion (RIMM) puts this morning at the last minute.  I generally like to buy these a week or two before the earnings release, but I wasn't paying close attention and missed out.  RIMM has always been one of my favorite shorts during earnings season, and I personally think that they have no future without a major retooling of their business.  Nobody talks about "Crackberry" anymore, now it's Android this and Android that, with the occasional fan-boy crowing about iPhone coming to Verizon (still).  I was expecting RIMM to admit a further reduction in its market share, disappoint on earnings numbers, and guide lower for next quarter.  But that didn't happen, and when I left the office in disgust, RIMM was up 5%.  So tomorrow I'll unload the put for a 50% loss and move on.

Another put position I entered today was Kinder Morgan Energy Partners (KMP).  KMP owns and manages energy transportation and storage facilities in North America.  It has a positive correlation to natural gas prices, but not a dramatically high one because its income is fee-based.  Thus KMP's income fluctuates more with demand for natural gas than with natural gas itself.  KMP has a big dividend yield: 6.3%  So why short it?  Oh let me count the ways:

1. Jim Cramer loves it, and he usually loves at the top and hates at the bottom.
2. They have a $22B market cap, revenue of $8B, $192M in cash, and $13B in debt.  Debt is more than 50% of the market cap, and nearly 68x higher than cash reserves.  That means they're using debt to finance their dividends.
3. Quarterly earnings have declined 10.8% since this time last year, to $1.25/share.  Dividends are $4.44 per share, so they're also paying more in dividends than they're earning in profits.
4. They need to quadruple their profits in order to cover those dividends, but the highest praise that Cramer can come up with is that high dividend stocks are good in a rising interest rate environment.  Yes, true.  But that doesn't solve KMP's internal fiscal problems.

This stock needs to fall.  I bought some March 2011 puts on it, and I'm working orders to buy some more on a rally.  I don't know when it will fall or how far, but my puts are there to profit when it does.

Last but not least, I bought some calls on GLD (Gold ETF) today, expiring in March.  If the current short-term sell-off continues, I'll buy some more.  I'm looking for a GLD price above 150 by expiry.  That would be a massive return on the call investment.

Now I Can Afford That Operation

The CiG trade, which bought Eurodollars on an entry signal a week ago, finally gave an exit signal on Monday at the close, so I exited the position by selling GEH1 at 99.59.  That gives a $75 profit.  Since I trade this in paperMoney, I wasn't paying a great deal of attention to how much I should trade, but this one really brought that home.  The risk of one Eurodollar contract is not equal to the risk of one S&P contract - not even close - and the margin requirements reflect that.  Eurodollars carry a margin requirement of $877.50 per contract, while S&P futures require $5625 per contract.  In order to take the same amount of risk, I should be trading 6-7 Eurodollars for every contract of S&P I'm willing to commit margin for.  If I had, this $75 profit would have been $450-525... very similar to the $500 I made on the S&P signal.

In other news, one of my Iron Condor exiting orders also filled on Monday, closing out my remaining 660/650 put spreads.  This leaves my protective debit put spreads on with nothing to protect, and it also tilts the delta into the negative territory again: -20.  With December expiry coming this weekend, and with implied volatility near its 52-week lows, it seems best to close this one out.  I'm working orders to close the two call spreads - the original 810/820 and the kite-component 830/840, the naked long 820-call of the kite, and the protective 630/640 put debit spreads.  Since my current position still has positive theta, though, I see no reason to rush things.  Either way the market moves it will approach my exiting limit orders, so hopefully over the next week or two we'll get a little end-of-year waggle so I can squeeze out a few cents per contract on the way out.  If not, I have a month before I have to make a final decision.  Once theta goes negative, or if delta gets uglier, the pressure will be on to make that decision a bit sooner.

I've had a limit-sell order working on Microsoft for a few weeks now, and it filled today.  I'm still a believer in the stock, but I bought quite a few shares of it when it was depressed, so I'm just rotating some capital out to bring my position value back down where I want it to be.  Readers of my facebook notes will recall that I had 5 "units" of capital in Microsoft.  This sell brings me back down to 5 units of capital in position value.

I'm expecting another increasingly bullish (for me that means bearish) sentiment survey this week, released tonight sometime.  If that's true, CS|MACO will still stand by and watch the Fed Cheerleaders... er, I mean Stock Market... without getting involved itself.

Such a Slacker

I've been distracted most evenings lately from the four Xbox games I picked up during Black Friday madness, and so it has taken me even longer than usual to record thoughts, trades, and rambling nonsense.  As if that weren't enough to eat up my attention, the Bintgoddess and I just received our HTC Incredibles we ordered through Amazon Wireless, and I at least have been spending more time than I should customizing and moving into my new phone.  I had intended to switch from AT&T+iPhone to Verizon+Android when my contract ran out in August, but the Bintgoddess' pre-pay plan ran out of minutes, and we could save more money to switch us both to a family plan now, despite the early termination fee from AT&T.  With nearly free phones (1 cent each from Amazon Wireless) and free 2-day shipping, the choice was pretty clear.  And yes, Amazon did charge my credit card $0.02.  Silliness.

Iron Condor
The January 2011 Iron Condor position has required some adjustment to keep it close to delta-neutral recently.  Recall that I opened a 650/660/810/820 iron condor on Nov 8, and then adjusted it Nov 16 by buying a 630/640 put spread.  Since we're into December, I'm now erring on the side of closing positions rather than opening them - but I'll still increase a position if it's the right thing to do for the risk or the greeks.

The stock market had been rallying pretty hard the last week or two - in fact, it has been rallying pretty hard ever since the day after I put on that downside protection.  This is not a surprise - it's just how I roll: don't believe me? watch me play poker on Full Tilt sometime.  But I digress.  With the stock market rallying and delta going pretty negative, it was time for some upside protection.

First, I bought back about half of the 810/820 call spreads for 1.40: a very reasonable 10c loss.  This moved the delta up about halfway to where it needed to be, but gamma was still pretty negative.  Another up-move and the position would be in trouble again, so I beat the rush and put on a Wolfinger Kite Spread.  Specifically, I bought back an extra 810 call for 3.70, and financed that by selling four 830/840 call spreads for 50c each.  Not only did this bring delta to a nice manageable level and give me some much-needed upside protection, it also significantly improved my max-loss on the upside.  Of course if MDW is reading this blog, he's probably seething that it isn't a perfect Kite Spread - I should have sold the 840/850s, or reduced the sales by 1 contract.  Tough.  I am convinced this was the right trade to make, whether it can rightfully be called a Kite or not.

The next day, I took advantage of another rally to buy back a few of the 660/650 put spreads for 45c.  This lowered delta a bit again, but like the previous day's adjustment, it really helped out in the max-loss department.  The total position now has a nice flat S-curve to it, and theta miraculously is still 13.  So a sideways market for the next 30 days should net me about .25 per contract - that may not sound like much, but that's 2.5% margin-return on a monthly trade.

It's also about time to be looking for a February trade, but I'll learn my lesson from January and wait for volatility to come up a bit.  Using paperMoney is nice, because I have so much fake margin in there that I can make trading decisions without having to be concerned about margin.  If I want to put on February before taking off January, so be it.  Doing that with real funds would take some very careful money management... or more money than I have.

CS|MACO
Still very bearish signals (53% are bullish as of last night, way too many for my taste) from investors, who happen to be right this time about the market as it sustains an uptrend, and bullish signals from the trend following MACO component.  As a result, it still waits in (fake) cash.

CiG
Eurodollar futures (GEH1) gave a bullish entry signal on Tuesday, so I bought them at the stock market close for 99.56.  Trading Eurodollar futures is similar to watching a bad horror movie: long periods of mind-numbing boredom punctuated by moments of pure terror.  So far I'm in the boredom phase - two days after buying them, I'm up 3 ticks.  W00t!  No exit signal yet, so I wait.

Happy 1975

It's 1975 this month in my "year a month" project, and my band list yields:

Black Sabbath: Sabotage
Deep Purple: Come Taste the Band
Rainbow: Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow
The Who: The Who by Numbers
ZZ Top: Fandango!

This month is kind of a loser, though.  Mid-way through last month I used the Sabbath album to round out free shipping on an unrelated Amazon purchase.  The Deep Purple album just sucks, so I didn't get that one.  I had high hopes for Rainbow, seeing as how it is the debut album for one of Ronnie James Dio's earliest projects (let us not speak of Elf).  I was already familiar with Man on the Silver Mountain, and hoped the rest of the album would be just like it, but sadly no... didn't get that one either.  The Who by Numbers is a bit of a step up from some of their early pop-filled discs, but not quite what I'm looking for; I may pick it up someday, but not today.  Behind Blue Eyes is a big standout on this album, but of course we already have that one from the Greatest Hits album we picked up some years back.

Thank goodness for ZZ Top, or this month would be a complete bust.  This early ZZ Top is right on the edge of my blues tolerance, but if I'm in the right mood it's perfect.  I dig the live versions of a few of the songs at the end - they pulled out a few more stops live than they did in the studio.  I've never seen them live, but I certainly would if the chance came along.

Maybe the nicest part is that I had a $5 Amazon MP3 credit sitting around, and that is coincidentally the price of this album.