Quinn’s Brain, aka QBrain

This blog just sold for $15 million to Bankrate.com, the website that everyone uses for, well, bankrates.

Congratulations to Johns Wu for providing a reason to use banking and profitable in the same sentence.

October 5th, 2008 | Category: General | Leave a comment

I was wondering the other day if property taxes kept Texas from participating in the real estate bubble. If you look at the tax rates by state, you will see that Texas is ranked second in median tax rate nationwide.

What I have noticed is that there has not been a significant increase or decrease in the home values in the area. If you look here, you will see the home prices have only increased 16.2% in DFW over the last 5 years. Inflation over the same time 5 year period was 14.29%, so while homes in other parts of the nation might have been appreciating at gangbuster rates, Texas was flat.

During the same time period that DFW increased by 16.2%, LA increased by 63.12%. Median tax rate in California 0.48%. Were the tax rates in Texas preventing Texas from participating in the housing bubble? Doing more research, I could probably show a correlation between tax rates and price volatility.

Since I don’t like taxes, and on good days I like price volatility, that is the last thing I want to show. I have always thought that Texas property taxes have kept Texas real estate from being as high as the rest of the country for similar sized metropolitan areas, and this appears to be more support for that theory.

October 4th, 2008 | Category: General | Leave a comment

If my contract extension does not solidify next week, then I will have to look for a new job.

In preparation, I am reading up on Spring. If my contact does solidify, I will finally start in on Options. Either way, I plan on doing intensive studying for a while.

Only a 125 pages read so far this weekend. Hopefully I can double that before the day is over.

September 28th, 2008 | Category: Education | Leave a comment

I learned a couple things today.

First, my wife is more scared of fire then entertained.

Second, an electric stove top can heat a cast iron skillet to the point where pouring corn oil into the pan, the oil will immediately catch fire.

I was making cast iron skillet steak, I had heated the cast iron skillet on high, and then added a little oil to the pan before adding the steaks. This tablespoon or two of oil immediately caught fire with a pop, which drew Brooks attention from the other room. She was not exactly thrilled to see things on fire in the kitchen, but being only a tablespoon of oil, it quickly burnt out on its own. Unlike alcohol, which has a low colorful flame, the oil had a very high bright yellow flame.

As I was finishing up dinner and setting things on the table, I notice the Home Depot list on the table now had a new item, Fire Extinguisher.

Made for an exciting Saturday night. Brook’s steak turned out to be the best she ever had.

September 28th, 2008 | Category: Food | Leave a comment

There are some days, when you come to the realization that you are not actually as good as you thought you were.

And then there are days when your mental self image is completely shattered.

So this morning my wife and I are sharing a lane in the swimming pool. I am going fairly fast and my wife is swimming 5 seconds behind me, or about 10 yards. During the swim she touches my foot with her hand, which is the universal swimming indicator to get the hell out of the way. So I stop and let her pass. We we finish our swim, I am only 4 seconds off the pass I wanted to keep for a 5 minute swim, and I probably lost 10 seconds letting Brook pass, so I felt I was going fairly fast. But she not only started behind me and passed me, she also finished the swim well ahead of me.

For anyone with swimming knowledge, we were doing a 400 free, and I was trying to hold a 1:20 pace, and was holding about 1:18 when I was passed around the 200. I finished on a 1:21 pace, even after stopping. Brook ended up going about a 1:15 pace. The fastest 100s sets either of us do would be on a 1:20.

How am I dealing with this? Rather poorly, but the first step is admitting that you have a problem. I have a problem with my wife STILL being faster then me, 4 months after I have been back in the water. My next step is therapy, and hopefully I can follow that up with couples counseling.

September 26th, 2008 | Category: Swimming | Leave a comment

So I had this idea that I wanted to do a Steve Pavlina type trial. Steve has done several trials that have been very popular, including a polyphasic sleep trial and a couple raw food trials.

Two questions should come to mind. Why do you want to do a trial and what will your trial be?

First, why. I am currently researching building online revenue streams. Two common paths are affiliate marketing, where you advertise someone else’s business and they pay you for the sales you generate, and online advertising, where people pay you for space to advertise on your site.

Now I am approaching both with this trial. What if I can find a product, that the best way to promote the product is to show documented results that the product works? If I document my experience with the product over a trail period, I can kill two birds with one stone. I will be promoting the trialed product, and hopefully create new followers of the site, which will increase potential ad revenue.

This is starting to sound like a get rich quick scheme. It isn’t really, I don’t have any experience with marketing blogs or products, and I will need to learn both to get rich. What I do know, is how to eat and exercise.

And now, what will I trial? I have no idea, but I expect it will fall into the supplement, diet or exercise categories. What I don’t know is if I can actually keep track of everything I need to to make for a good trial.

First things first, to find out if I can keep track of my eating and exercising, I have started a food and exercise journal. This is nothing fancy right now, it is just a spiral notebook left over from school. Once I have proven to myself that I can actually keep track of everything I want to keep track of, and that I want to continue with this nonsense, I might actually buy a Moleskine or some other “nice” notebook.

The format of my notebook is currently free form. I tried to find some templates, but this apparently is not as common as I would have thought. I think I will discover would have been a helpful template to follow.

Drawing the line in the sand, I wrote down my weight, bodyfat percentage and all the common lifting measurement (arm, thigh, waist, chest, hips and neck). No pictures of me in a speedo yet, but proper documentation demands it. Now that I have just finished dinner, it would be a great time to take a belly shot!

September 21st, 2008 | Category: Food, Swimming | Leave a comment

I have been to Bob’s Steak and Chop House 3 times now, and I am less then impressed.

My main disappointment is with the service. It is professional and aloof, noticeably aloof. So aloof in fact, that it has stuck out in my mind from each trip. On top of the air of superiority was an extreme sense of detachment. Like everything was scripted and delivered in a dead pan, robotic manner. Spread across four different waitresses, this manner must be something that they must recruit for and I don’t understand why.

Another thing that was mentioned last night was the noise. We had a party of five at a small round table, and your could not hear the person across the table from you with paying attention. It was so loud that when the waitress knelt next to my wife to say something too her, her sister sitting on one side mentioned that the waitress was trying to get her attention, but I had to tap her on the shoulder to actually get her to understand that the waitress was right next to her. Now I like a restaurant to be a little noisy, so you don’t feel the need to talk in hushed tones.

Now for a non-complaint, just an oddity. In three trips to Bob’s, I have never seen the sommelier. During the first trip, the waitress came around for drink orders, asked if we were having wine (it was a large party of maybe 15), and we said yes. She moved on and then came back with everyone’s drinks about 10 minutes later, including a couple glasses of wine. We waited another few minutes, and asked if we could order wine? “The sommelier will be with you in a moment.” Ah, we just wanted glasses of wine, one was ordering a bottle and if we were, there were 3 people at the table who could have ordered without a 15 minute wait for the sommelier. We ordered our glasses and were done.

My next trip, I ordered a bottle of wine that I was very happy with, but I was not offered the services of the sommelier, nor did the man who brought my bottle introduce himself as the sommelier. This was an early dinner mid week for business, so it is very possible that there was no sommelier.

Finally, last night, no one ended up ordering wine, but it was prime time on a Saturday and I was surprised that the services of a sommeler were not offered. I have already complained about the service, and you typically do not tip the server on a bottle of wine, but you do tip the server on other drinks, so maybe…

Now, having never seen the sommelier, he is doing his job. I have not had a glass of wine at Bob’s that we did not go out and buy a bottle of. I have two good Pinot Noirs and Brook has had a good Riesling, so I am happy with the wine list that has been put together.

In the end, the food is good, the wine selection is great, the service could be personable, and I cannot say that Bob’s is “worth” it.

September 14th, 2008 | Category: Food | Leave a comment

I have written more C++ then I have read about how to write C++ and this might be the typical way people learn programming languages.

When I needed to learn Perl, I went the other way around. I read and worked through all the exercises in Learning Perl and then followed that up by reading the first two thirds of Programming Perl. This was all accomplished before I had written more than a 1,000 lines of real perl and I think this gave me a much stronger base for understanding the how and why of things. Of course when I learned Perl, I was able and willing to devote 80 hours a week to the task, and going through Learning Perl and Programming Perl probably only took 3 weeks.

Last year when I went to talk to by soon to be adviser about working on my Master’s thesis, he said that he wanted everything written in C++. No big deal I said, but I have never taken the time to develop a strong ground work in the hows and whys of C++. Thus I ordered C++ Primer Plus.

I was planning on reading the entire book over Christmas break, but instead spent all my free time working on my thesis. Obviously, I had waited too late to do the right thing and did not really start on the book until after graduating. I am certain that the code for my thesis could have been better, but certainly was no where near the worst that has been written. After graduating, I made it one of my goals to finish the book since I really enjoyed writing C++ for my thesis.

Reading this book gave me some insight into C++, but it is no Programming Perl. What I now have is background in C++, and know that I probably should read a book just on IO and spend a very long time working through template examples. My weakness in C++ is really what has been developed in the last, oh, 15 years.

September 13th, 2008 | Category: Education, Technology | Leave a comment

So my father in law made cobb salad for the first time and was happy with the results, offering to make it for us the next time we are over. “You can check the internet for the ingredients.” his email read.

So I googled Cobb Salad.

As you can see in the image to the left taken from my google search, Cobb Salad does not include watercress. Wikipedia has been fixed, but google cache lags the latest version a little.

September 5th, 2008 | Category: General | Leave a comment