Beach, Shaved Ice, Dim Sum, oh my...

Well, I've been home a couple days now and it has been great. I'm trying to get back into shape since school has kept me locked in my apartment over the last month. So far I've been able to run everyday and even take a good swim in the ocean. I'm on my way to getting rid of my stomach.

Things I've been able to do since I've been here:
1) get to Waimea Bay
2) have Matsumoto's Shaved Ice
3) go to the Swap Meet
4) see my cousins again
5) have good dim sum (well, that's available in the Bay Area too, but it's lot better with family)

Things I would still like to do:
.... I'll work on that.

Step 1: Turn Brain Off....Check!

Hey, just a quick post this morning. Only a couple more hours and then I'll be on a plane from SFO to HNL airport. Time for a little rest and relaxation. I can't wait to start my vacation. My mind is already on my favorite beach in Hawaii, which is Waimea Bay. For anyone reading this, where is your favorite beach? Favorite vacation spot?

No Stress

Ha! I'm finally finished! I haven't written here for a while because I have been stressing about my programming class. However, after getting only 8 hours of sleep since Sunday morning, I performed a demonstration of my program and took the final exam and now I'm done. No more class until September 20!

First things first, let's talk about HSX. The only movie I'm really pulling for now is Transporter 2. It's priced low enough so that even without the huge summer crowd I believe it can still make a lot of Hollywood Dollars. Otherwise I am continuing to invest my H$ in starbonds of undervalued actors and actresses.

Tomorrow I get on a plane and head home to Hawaii. It's time to take a break from school and work and get back in touch with the family. Hopefully I'll get to post some pictures.

Heat Wave

Well, I'm still stuck trying to finish my final project for my summer quarter of class. The only good thing about it is right now I'm in an air conditioned computer lab in stead of roasting in my apartment. I was going to just work at home all day, but I got scared that my computer was going to overheat.

LiverLvr and my roommate have both put a lot of their H$'s into The Island this weekend. I have invested quite a bit of the cash into my portfolio into that movie too, but I decided to also put money into The Devil's Rejects. So in a way I hope The Island does ok, so that I don't lose money, but at the same time I don't want it to do too well cause LiverLvr and my roommate are going to gain a lot more money than me. So my best senario has Devil's Reject's having a huge adjust and The Island staying about the same.

Look for my update Sunday morning detailing everyone's movements.

H$10 Million Milestone

Yea! I just broke $10 million! I think that's pretty good since my account started with only $2 million eight months ago in December.


Wish I could write more but I can't; I have too much programming to do for my class. Laters.

StarBond Adjusts

Significant HSX Actions:
Covered 20,000 shares of John Leguizamo
Shorted 20,000 shares of Breckin Meyer

Slow Day Due to School

School is kicking my butt. I will be locked in my room programming for class, only to exit so that I can go to work and lectures.

=(

Harry Potter Fever

Well yesterday my shares of The Island (opening in 5 days, go see it!) were dropping due to HSX traders losing faith in summer movies. So I started browsing around HSX to see if I could find another place to put my money for a while. To ride the hype surrounding the book release, it seems HSX released and IPO of the movie stock for the Half-Blood Prince (set to open in 2009?). I saw that a lot of people were buying the stock so I moved all my money there. To my surprise the stock jumped H$17 this morning! Yea!

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had a huge weekend, adjusting its price up H$26. I can't believed I missed out on another great opening weekend. I have gone the normal HSX route and moved my money from Harry Potter to short Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, hoping for the price to drop by tomorrow morning. Then, with my faith renewed in summer movies I hope to get back into The Island before its opening weekend and hope for the best. Wish me luck.

UPDATE: Between noon and 1pm the price of The Island had gone up H$4. Forget shorting Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I'm back in.

Opening Night Anticipation

I finally saw Fantastic Four today. I got about five of my friends to go with me, so hopefully I'm raising the box office numbers for when my Jessica Alba and Kerry Washington starbonds cash out in three weeks. About the movie, they should have used more action. Maybe Mr. Fantastic should have continued working on his science experiment, but the Invisible Woman, The Thing, and Human Torch should have fought some crime in the city or something. Something else to make them realize the usefulness of their powers besides just sitting around being bored.

I'm hoping Charlie and the Chocolate Factory does well this weekend only because I bought the Call for the movie. If it makes more than $37 million this weekend, then I have gotten a lot more H$'s. The movie opening tonight that I would rather see however, is Wedding Crashers. It's just that it's rated R so I don't believe it will get enough people going to see it.

I have a lot of money riding on the performance of The Island, but that doesn't open till next week. Until then...

TV Plug

This last week I just finished watching the first season of 24. What an exciting TV series. I know, I know, I'm behind the times, but with school and work, I don't have the time to schedule an hour every week where I can watch TV. The only reason I even watched the first season now was Amazon.com had it on sale for $25 about a year ago. Now I only wish the other DVD seasons would go on sale for a similar price. Next is Season 1 of Alias, which I got for my friend last Christmas. Then.... I guess I'll have to sign up for Netflix or Blockbuster and watch every TV series I can. Any other recommendations?

Nothing Risked, Nothing Gained

Well, I have just had a bad week of HSX trading. In the last week of June I got out of my War of the Worlds stock early to invest in more starbonds. That weekend I saw War of the Worlds and believed I had made the right choice cause I really didn't like the movie. Well, it had one of the best openings of the summer and its stock went up around H$50. Then even after the stock jumped up I was still over cautious and didn't short the stock, which then dropped another H$20. Whereas LiverLvr did the opposite of my actions and made H$2 million over the weekend. Then this Friday I read early reviews of Fantastic Four and they all said it was bad. Even now RottenTomatoes gives it a rating of 26% good. Well with those ratings on the web, Fantastic Four's stock price started dropping so I got out. LiverLvr got out, waited for the price to drop to its lower point Friday morning, then bought it all back. This morning the price adjusted up H$44. BOO!

And now the review

Last night I saw War of the Worlds. My coworker and I thought that Steven Spielberg would play off of the success of Independence Day a couple years ago and give this disaster/invasion movie a patriotic feel. I thought this movie would show a valiant fight between humanity and the alien race (like Indepence Day), and although we would probably not get to see the end of the war, we could see the turning of the tide that would lead to humanity's eventual victory. Well, I guess I went into this movie thinking a lot of things, and that's why I came out disappointed. Don't worry, I won't give any of the plot line away, although by saying I didn't like the movie I may be spoiling it for you.

The things I liked about the movie were the actors' performances. Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, and Tim Robbins stood out amongst the masses of people in the movie. The aliens and their vehicles looked pretty good, and the suspense was pretty intense.

What ruined the movie for me were just tons of logic errors. When certain thing happen you keep asking yourself "how?" or "why?". At first you attribute it to "wow, they were lucky", or "man, those aliens are stupid", but the repetition soon wears thin and it really starts to pull you out of the movie.

For everyone who thought about seeing it before, I say you will still pull some entertainment value out of it. I definitely recommend seeing it on the big screen, but to get your money's worth I recommend seeing it in a couple of weeks in a bargain theater. If you really had no desire to see this movie before, than wait for the DVD and go see it on a good home theater system.

War of my worlds

Just now it has dawned on me that I entered the wrong line of work. As a systems test engineer with a background in electrical engineering, I test electrical boxes and make sure they fulfil their purpose. For awhile now, I have been thinking that I don't find my job satisfying because I'm always testing items created by other engineers. My career goals have for some time been focused around getting in charge of my own design work, bringing an idea from paper and converting it to a set of schematics, eventually empowering human thought to control real-world actions through the manipulation of the laws of electromagnetics.
If I think back far enough, I can see the path I took towards these goals, sitting through years of electrical engineering courses at USC. I can see myself memorizing theorems in high school calculus and applying them in physics class. If I look back far enough, I think I see the start of this path when I almost failed 4th grade mathematics, got scolded by my mom, and concentrated on math and science to become one of the best in my 5th grade class.

But now that I think about it, I should have just given up on math and stayed near the bottom. I should have given up on those equations and numbers when I was 10 years old and focused more on using my imagination. Instead of practicing my math skills, I should have read more books and practiced visualzing everything in my mind until I could see everything happening on the paper in front of me. I should have practiced my writing skills so that I could convey my own visions to those around me. With these skills I think I would have been able to at least attempt to enter the movie industry. Isn't that what we appreciate in directors like Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, and George Lucas? Aren't we all captivated two hours at a time by how they interpret words and put a vision to them? It's probably the reason there are sites like Hollywood Stock Exchange that focus on rating how well these movies appeal to Americans 365 days a year.

Boo. I'm going to think about this all night as I read my outsourcing book for engineering management class. That and how much I wish I was watching War of the Worlds right now.

The Stars are looking bright tonight

Well, today I sold a large chunk of the shares I had in War of the Worlds. It shot up last night and I didn't know if I should take the risk in this summer movie slump. I'd say I got rid of about 3/4 of my stock in the movie.

So now that I had a lot of spare H$ on my hands, I did some research and changed my strategy towards Hollywood Stock Exchange. I have chosen a more conservative route of investing in movies stars themselves, rather then their movies. A movie's stock price gets adjusted to match its opening and closing price, however an actor's/actress's Starbond gets adjusted to the average of their last five movies after they star in a movie. For example, this week Russell Crowe's Starbond adjusted to the average of his last five movies because he recently starred in Cinderella Man.
For anyone reading that actually plays on HSX, I'll give you a hint on one of the trades I made this morning. I bought all the stock I could in Kelly Hu (KHU). If you look at the price of her Starbond, it currently trades at about H$62, and she has a movie called Underclassmen coming out August 5. However, the average of her last 3 movies (she's only made 3) is H$113. So even if this new movie makes no money, her stock will eventually adjust to H$85, or a gain of H$23 per share. There's all this math to the calculations, but it doesn't matter. Kelly Hu is a good buy.

Anderson Reservoir - Today's Waterskiing Site 

Another beautiful day in Northern California

I was planning to be very responsible today. I woke up, ate, and started doing some research for a paper about off-shoring and outsourcing. Out of the blue one of my friends called and asked if I wanted to go water-skiing. I decided now was as good as any to try it out, and I had a great time. The weather was perfect: nice sun with a cool breeze to keep everyone from over heating. Even if I had just stayed on the boat I would have had a great time. However, I built up the courage to get in the cold water and had my first glorious failures at water-skiing and wake boarding. I didn't realize how much forearm strength was required to do any of these water sports. My hands are so exhausted I had to use both arms to open my car door. Even right now I can feel the burn in my wrists as I curl each finger to type. I guess I need to do more forearm exercises, but for now I'll settle for reading my text book for class as I fall asleep. Good night.

Lazy mornings

Saturday morning. I don't have any money invested in any of the movies this weekend because I could not guess which one was going to make any money. The three movies opening in the theaters this weekend are Bewitched, Herbie, and Land of the Dead. Movies are the quickest way to make Hollywood Dollars in HSX because they adjust Sunday morning to 2.8 times the opening weekend box office sales. So if Herbie makes $20 million in sales this weekend, on Sunday morning it will adjust to H$56. Well, since I couldn't make a good guess as to which of the opening three movies would do well, I didn't take the risk. My big weekend is next wekeend, when War of the Worlds comes out. Everyone go see that movie!!!

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You're in for a rare treat, cuase I actually feel like taking about my life right now. I'm trying really hard to finish my Master's Degree in Engineering Management within two years. I'm not really happy with my job and my degree is the only thing keeping me tied to it. I just have this feeling that there is something out there I'd rather be doing, but I just don't know what (or where) it is. Anyway, my efforts to accelerate this degree means that outside of my 40 hours of work in the office, I'm in the classroom listening to lectures for another 12 hours a week. This really restricts the amount of time I spend with my friends, and when I do hang out with them I am usually exhausted. Should I slow down my degree and get back into my social life? Is that worth being tied to work I am not enjoying?

And then there was....

Well, first post on my blog. Instead of re-telling the details of my day-to-day life like putting on my right sock before my left, I'm going to focus on an online hobby of mine. My coworker, LiverLvr, got me hooked on a website called Hollywood Stock Exchange. Think the New York Stock Exchange, but instead of buying stocks in companies with real money, you buy them for movies and actors/actresses using "Hollywood Dollars". It's pretty fun because I already like movies and enjoy predicting whether they are going to suck or do well. HSX just provides me a way to show how good (or bad) I am at it.

Am I going to post everyday on this blog? Maybe... probably not. But I'll try my best to keep my readers up to date on what movies are coming out, which stocks I'm trading in, and how I'm doing. Enjoy.