Lots of snow in Heavenly last weekend for very nice skiing! Then sunshine on Monday with terrific views of Lake Tahoe.  

Tags: heavenly, ski, tahoe

The “mystery bird” on Windy Hill is indeed a white-tailed kite.   Here’s a photo from my hike this weekend when it made a close fly-by and then perched in a tall oak.

Thanks to Ron Pavellas for identifying the species.

Tags: birds, windy hill

Click here to download the first issue of BackTesting Report free without registration.  

BackTesting Report helps you make rational investment and trading choices by giving you the results of rigorous testing of popular technical strategies.    It gives you the data without all the effort of backtesting yourself.

Please share this report as you wish.   You can email it, link to it, reprint it, or blog about it.   Please also include a link back to www.backtestingreport.com and drop me a line so I can publish a link back to you.  Thanks!

The actual link to the document is http://www.backtestingreport.com/BackTestingReportBaseline.pdf 

(This post and the associated document are licensed this under the Creative Commons License, Attribution 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/ .  I am the majority shareholder of Own Mountain Trading Company, the publisher of BackTesting Report. )

Tags: backtesting, Investing, trading

Here’s a free e-book on marketing that I found very interesting and inspiring.   David Meerman Scott is really walking the talk of the World Wide Rave by giving this ebook excerpt away totally free, and making it easy to forward as I am doing now.    This gives me a blueprint for making my BackTesting Report more accessible. 

Quoting from the author’s blog: ”

Please download my new ebook Lose Control of your Marketing! Why marketing ROI measures lead to failure.

(Please note: This link brings you directly to the PDF ebook with no registration required and no landing page. It is a 1.2MB document, so please be patient.)

Do you market like the Grateful Dead? Or like Led Zeppelin?
(Find out in the ebook).”

Tags: David Meerman Scott, internet, WorldWideRave

The New Rules of Marketing suggests using one’s middle name to stake a unique space on the web.  I took note and now googling Jackie Ann Patterson brings me to the top of the list. I’m pretty happy about that.  So when New Rules author David Meerman Scott posted a request for photos with the poster for his upcoming book, I was happy to take my new camera out for a spin.  I took a walk down University Ave in Palo Alto, stopping at a few cool places along the way.

The Apple Store is not unique to Palo Alto, but its always busy especially during back-to-school season at nearby Stanford University.   I have no idea who was in the blue coat reading the newspapers but he stayed oblivious the whole time I snapped pics. 

Red Mango is a relatively new kid on the block.  Their tart pom yogurt is my favorite, although I haven’t had a chance to sample their competitor in Korean fro yo, Pinkberry.  

The next stop was beautifully restored Stanford theater which was running a Bogey double feature.

facebook headquarters sits back from the street down by the train station.   The lobby guards were very accommodating as I got a quick shot to update my facebook profile.  

I’m looking forward to reading World Wide Rave and learning more about using the web and social media.

Tags: Apple, David Meerman Scott, facebook, Palo Alto, Red Mango, Stanford Theater, WorldWideRave

Sempervirens docent Karen DeMello led a fun interpretive hike at Little Basin — filling our imaginations with scenes of the redwood forest and sounds from the Nutcracker Suite.    What a treat!  

Little Basin started as HP’s corporate retreat.   Hence the garage door mock-up on the amphitheater stage.  We learned on the hike that HP’s first customer was Walt Disney, who bought audio oscillators for Fantasia, which coincidentally features the Nutcracker Suite.  (clip)

Nice that all of this forest and history can be preserved by Sempervirens and POST.  They are the land trusts who bought Little Basin.  The eventual goal is to make it a state park, by adding to Big Basin.  

Scott Peden brought a series of maps more than a century old showing how Big Basin State Park has grown as a result of Sempervirens members.  In addition to helping the forest, members get exclusive access to Little Basin before it is opened to the public.  

Click here to join Sempervirens.

Tags: Nutcracker, redwoods, sempervirens

Hard to believe that a day like today – unusually foggy in town – can be brilliantly sunny up on Skyline.  We hiked the Long Ridge Trail.    Highlights included an old moss-covered apple orchard, the “No Swimming” sign on the algae-covered Zen pond, and a few fungi along the path.

Tags: fungi, Long Ridge, open space

Windy Hill Mystery Bird

This weekend I finally got half-decent photos of the white bird that hunts near the top of Windy Hill Open Space Preserve.    This photo and video below were taken near the top of Spring Ridge Trail on a very still evening.

Please comment or send me email if you think you might know what kind of bird this is.

Tags: Bird, hawk, Raptor, windy hill

I’ve updated the licensing for the Cloud Clothes designs. I make them available “CC-BY” as per the wordle creator, Jonathan Feinberg. I let go of the GPL licensing because I’m told that wordle is “fair use” of copyrighted material. Furthermore GPL and CC-BY seem to me to have the same intent of preventing anyone downstream of claiming exclusive rights.
The designs are available for download from these two pages: Calculus and WP_Code_Cloud.  The shirts are once again available at www.cloudclothes.com

Tags: blog, cloud clothes, holiday, wordle

Downloads and sales of my Cloud Clothes designs are temporarily disabled due to a licensing snafu.

The images generated by wordle.net are covered under Creative Commons Attribution and require that derivative works be covered under the same license.

For my Cloud Clothes, I chose source text covered under GPL and require that derivative works be covered under the same license.

It may take some time to get the licensing and attribution sorted out and printed correctly on the shirts.   Apologies for any inconvenience.

Tags: blog, cloud clothes, holiday, wordle