Actually, it will be a week-and-a-half by the time I’m finished, but so far… 1 day.

Usually I wait until I return from a trip before I blog about it.  But I’m compelled to provide some play by play action.  Not really.  I’m just grooving in the pub.  My wireless internet access apparently doesn’t work on the side of the hotel where my room is located.  The porter’s advice was to come here. 

Basically, I’m here to conduct a couple of disaster recovery exercises for a client at a couple of their locations here in England.

The trip over was good, aside from the 1 hr delay in take-off from Detroit due to a combination of de-icing and a de-icer-team shift-change.  But once in the air, I had a few glasses of wine while watching Rush Hour 3 and fell asleep just before the ending.

Once on the ground, I grabbed my bags and headed for Enterprise to get my rental car.  While doing the walk-around to identify pre-existing damage to the car, I pointed out to the kid that the steering wheel was installed on the wrong side of the car.  He told me it was that way intentionally.

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This afternoon I put on my coat and gloves and stepped outside to get a better look at the bluejays and cardinals that have been hanging around the past month or so.  There I noticed some leaves on a tree that grows just off the porch.  Apparently, snow melted off the roof and the water dripped onto the tree then froze.  It was so cool that I went back inside to grab my digital camera. 

I took several pictures from different angles.  Nature can be beautiful and I wanted to capture it. 

When I was finished, I proceeded back onto the porch where I slipped on the ice and busted both my ass and my camera.

I spent the afternoon taking the camera apart trying to fix it as I couldn’t make the situation any worse.  Eventually, I gave up.

The good news is that I managed to salvage the picture.

I know… who really cares? 

I read on a few boards that the 32-bit version of Windows doesn’t recognize more than 3GB of RAM, so buying 4GB for my new laptop would probably be a bit of a waste. However, I don’t think that’s necessarily the case.

Granted, this might not be a very good way to measure performance as I’m new to Vista, but maybe someone will find it interesting.

Basically, I tried a couple different memory configurations and captured my "Experience Scores".

Here’s the baseline, with 1 GB RAM (as shipped). 

Now with 1 of the new 2 GB sticks installed, giving a total of 3 GB (which I was I read was the most Vista would recognize).  The RAM score went up to 4.8 (from 4.5), but the Graphics score actually went down to 3.4 (from 4.6)… possibly due to the brand mismatch?

But with 4 GB of Kingston RAM installed, the RAM score stayed at 4.8, the Graphics score went back up to 4.6, but the Gaming Graphics score went up a notch to 3.5. 

I’ll post more details after I get a chance to use it more, but basically, I got a new tablet PC for work. It’s a Toshiba Portege M700.  This model was just released a few months ago. I ordered mine custom-built at the end of December and it finally arrived this week. 

Why I’m writing now, though, is that when building your laptop online, you have several memory options.  1 GB is standard.  2GB will cost you an extra $100.  4GB will cost you an extra $550.  Rather than pay Toshiba for the RAM, I ordered the machine with the standard 1 GB and then ordered 2×2GB sticks (4GB total) from NewEgg for $88.  What a bargain!

However, yesterday when I went to install my 2 new memory sticks, I found that there was only 1 slot in the bottom.  I did some online research to find that the 2nd memory slot is "hidden" under the keyboard and requires a bit of disassembly to get to.  However, on many forums I visited, there were several people looking for a ‘how to’ guide to finding this "hidden" slot and install RAM. 

Fearless as I am, I proceeded to find this "hidden" slot and took pictures along the way. So, for those looking for a guide, here ya go:

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For the day: up $75, and down $1491 overall.

First, I’m likely not going to post daily on this subject anymore because, since I don’t trade daily, I’m mostly recapping the same stuff (up/down status) you can find if you follow the links in my “watchlist”. That and my little ‘vacation’ is over and I have to get back to ‘real work’ tomorrow. So I’m going to have to go back to more of a ’swing trade’ strategy that served me better than the recent pseudo-’day trading’ I’ve been trying out.

I’m also contemplating starting a new blog specifically about being a new trader, documenting lessons learned, etc. I’ll keep you updated if I go that route. I have a feeling most of my regular visitors aren’t interested in that sort of thing anyway.

With that said, today’s market activity was unpredictable, at least according to my methods, yet a good day in the end.
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This being a Monday before a holiday, a lot of people, I’m guessing, took a 4-day weekend. Hence, it was a light trading day. Despite volume being down (or maybe because of it) and the Dow being down 60-100 points all day, CSUN managed to stay up.  That is until the last 30 minutes when the whole market took a final nose-dive, and took CSUN along with it.

CDS, on the other hand, was down about 3% most of the day.  I was really tempted to sell and take the losses to offset my taxes, but I doubt the loss will really make much of a difference, and I have a feeling things will start looking up.

So, for today, I’m down $192, and down $1566 overall.  What a way to start the new year!

I was almost dead-on in my prediction last Friday.  Look at the day’s chart.

There was a big sell-off in the morning and a modest recovery in the afternoon. However, the recovery wasn’t enough, so I opted to take a gamble and see what today might bring.

So, for Friday, I was up about $8.40, down $160 for the week and down $1375 overall.

I was and still am expecting CSUN to have at least a small sell-off early in the day, then recover later, even if only for a short time.  That’s when I plan to take my profit.

Take a look at the chart.  To me, it looks like a replay of late-September/October.  If it does dip, it won’t be far and will likely continue the up-trend over the coming weeks.

But as I’m watching the pre-market activity, it’s trading right around my purchase price.  I know it’s still early and pre-market isn’t usually a good indicator of what the day will be like, but it’s nice to see the price is probably going to gap up from yesterday’s close rather than the other way around. 

In other news, I’m going to upgrade this site to the latest version of Wordpress. But I already know that the current “theme” isn’t 100% compatible. So I’m reverting, temporarily, to another theme and will fix things up later.

Down $103 for the day and $1268 overall.

The good news is that I finally got out of my small CFC position. I can almost guarantee that it will go up tomorrow… but at least it’s one less thing I have to worry about.

CDS was up and down on very little volume. I think the world has forgotten about this stock. I wish I could. I’m still holding.

As I mentioned in this morning’s post, I was keeping an eye on CTDC and CSUN. I was right in my prediction and glad I stayed away from CTDC. It tanked today… until about 2:30p when it broke out into the green. In the end, it closed a smidgen higher than yesterday.

CSUN, was a roller-coaster ride. It spiked then settled, then spiked again and settled, signaling to me that the next spike was a good wave to catch. So I bought in at $18.41… which really is pretty high, but I thought a good entry point for what I was expecting to follow. I also decided on this trade that I would play it a bit less conservative and not sell at the first small-profit-taking opportunity. Instead, I was going to wait for a big end-of-the-day rally. Unfortunately, the DOW dropped big at the end of the day and the rally never came.

However, the price never dropped below my risk threshold, so I didn’t sell. I do fear that it will follow CTDC and tank in the morning, but we’ll see.