Challenge:

Create a minimum of 3 meals using the ingredients below. One meal must use potatoes (I have 3 pounds of potatoes that need to be used), one meal must be a salad and use cherry tomatoes, and one meal must be a juicer recipe.  You can assume that I have things like condiments, spices, and every-day kitchen ingredients.  You are not limited to the ingredients I have, but please utilize as many of them as possible.

Ingredients I have:

• Potatoes 3-4 pounds
• Jalapenos
• Cranberry Jalapeno Jelly
• Tortilla shells
• Fruit
• pears
• nectarines
• grapes
• apples
• oranges
• kiwis
• lemons
• limes
• grapefruit
• Cherry tomatoes (from garden)
• Vegetables
• Carrots
• Onions
• Cucumber
• Frozen corn
• Shallots
• Chives (from garden)
• Garlic
• Cremini Mushrooms
• Lettuce (from garden)
• Milk
• deli sliced ham
• deli sliced turkey
• Eggs
• Frozen Edamame
• White Wine
• Vodka
• Rum
• Beer

Have fun! I am looking forward to seeing what you come up with!

10:00pm – On the phone with Tony, decided to pull an all nighter because the only thing I accomplished all day was to improve the length of my to-do list.

Emails: 52 since 3:30pm     Tasks: 31

10:30pm – Went to the gas station to pick up some liquid energy and a snack for tonight, cricket decided she was going and offered to drive.  I bought 3/5 Monster Energy, a Nos in case the monster energy’s flavor sucks (it will) and a bag of sunflower seeds for $10.78.

Get Glue – Monster Energy

11:00pm – Got home from the gas station, set up my seat and cooler.  Then I started an episode of The Office halfway through. Michael impersonates “Survivorman” and then says “That’s what she said”. Started this blog post.

Get Glue – The office, earned “The Office Coming Soon” badge

11:10pm – Started episode 8 of Pawn Stars. Rick laughs at a guy for asking too much for a Coke Machine, laughs at another guy about some comic books.

Get Glue – Pawn Stars, was offered 10% off Pawn Stars Merchandise

Emails: 58      Tasks: 31

11:15pm – finished a Spicy McChicken and a Double Cheeseburger. Looking forward to hearing about how awful my food choices are from friends on twitter. This food is already having a McGangBang in my stomach.

11:25pm – installed login lockdown on a WordPress site, realized that it would be a ton of fun to restore cars with Tony. Maybe that’s the next thing we do with Spotted Koi?

11:55pm – my stomach is starting to hate on me for all this garbage that is sitting in it.

Emails: 66   Laptop CPU temp: 50* C

1:15am – found out google maps API v3 sucks at removing hundreds of markers from the map, this is a serious downfall to v3.  Now we have to restart this half of the project on V2 and tell the customer we need another 48 hours. Also, we’re eating this extra time. This kind of sucks.

Pawn Stars Episode: 14     Emails: 28

Task completion status: minimal – still don’t know where to start. I guess I’ll kill these emails off.

 1:50am – emails almost nearly tackled, a couple of tasks completed from both PM list and personal list, email tasks completed.  Checked reddit for a couple minutes break.

Emails: 17 (6 new since 1:29am)    Tasks:30

2:15 – checked analytics and adsense, two sites together are averaging $20-25 per month. How can we make that $50-100?  Started 2nd Monster drink.

Emails: 22 – wtf!?      Tasks: 30, I closed 2 tasks…how is this possible?

2:50am – stopped for a minute to look at Facebook/Twitter/EmpireAvenue after closing out a couple tasks for my projects.  I started typing stupid shit in emails I am sending out, repeating peoples names in sentences and then closing applications instead of closing windows. Will have to double read everything before I send it out.  Also, I am amazed how many of these Pawn Stars episodes I have seen and recognize.

Emails: 25 – seriously, who is sending me emails at 3 in the morning?       Tasks: 24

Pawn Stars Episode: skipped 17, 19, 20 – no watching 21

4:00am – My break was an hour long, fell into reddit for a while. Getting back to work now. Hopefully this doesn’t effect my overall completion of tasks too much. Oh man, I have to pee like crazy all of a sudden.

4:20am – I decided to go through my inbox from the bottom up, checking anything that I was saving for later. While doing this, my legs started cramping up. I think it is probably from not drinking enough water. Oh well.

4:40am – my stomach is ready for food, it started talking to me. Also, the tip of my thumb has started to feel like I have a pin in it. My cats are a little confused by my presence in the living room, they are staring at me.  Time seems to be moving much faster than it does during the day.

Emails: 27   Tasks: 22

4:53am – I am starting to get spacey. I noticed that I am starting to stare at things and not move for minutes at a time. I was in the middle of writing something, looked up at the TV and by the time I looked down I had to re-read what I was working on to figure out where I was.

Emails: 20    Tasks: 22

5:23am – all my emails are tackled as of right now. I am closing Sparrow so I can focus on the tasks in PM and on my paper. My brain feels like there is fog in there and my eyes make everything seem like it is way further away than it really is. It’s like being high, but crappier.

Emails: 0     Tasks: 21

5:40am – I looked outside and I am starting to see signs of a sunrise. I also got initial tasks for two projects setup and assigned so that they can get started right away. Only 3 more project’s tasks to set up and assign and then on to the remaining tasks I have in PM

Tasks: 23  Projects to Assign: 3   Sun: Coming up

6:45am – It is light out already, I had to scan a document and send it out so I opened my email program Sparrow again. Already back up to 17 emails.  I have assigned all the tasks from my projects, all that’s left are tasks in PM and checking up on a couple active projects. I just thought it was strange that I switched from using colons after my time entries to dashes, so I scrolled up to see when I had switched. I hadn’t switched, I just imagined it. Everything I do from this point forward needs to be double checked. I no longer trust my fingers to type what they are supposed to type, or at least my brain to interpret correctly, or whatever I am trying to say here.  Ding! 18 emails now. Shit.

Emails: 18   Tasks: 23, still   Sun: Smug bastard is out, making the sky blue again.

Ding! 19 emails. Fuck. Shit.

7:17am – Something I learned and discovered while describing my evening: Monster energy drinks taste like someone poured pixie sticka into 1% juice drink from concentrate with high fructose corn syrup and then mixed it with soda. It is this thick syrupy nastiness that tastes like fruited ass.

9:07am – I drank a fruit smoothie thing, exercised hoping that would wake me up, and took a shower. I basically feel like complete shit. Not only did the jumping around not help, it made me nauseous. I need water, but also want caffeine so that I can work a real day of work. Not sure if that will happen.

9:34am – Trying to sit at my computer is not working, set the coffee pot and my phone to go off 15 minutes before my meeting at 11. I am going to put head to pillow and let eyes rest.  It is amazing how this feeling sort of swells up inside from the stomach through the chest and then attacks the brain and eyelids. It is a foggy weakness that is all consuming at the moment. More for later. Hopefully the slapstick silliness sets in during or after my meeting, that could be fun and with this customer – they would find it hilarious.

Here’s your challenge:

Take the ingredients listed below and help me come up with creative meals using these ingredients. I also have a full pantry of spices as well as various alcohols, condiments, etc.

I am looking for recipes and instructions for how to utilize the ingredients in recipes. I love all kinds of foods and trying new things. I will take pictures of things that are suggested when I am done.

If you are curious if I have an ingredient like spices or condiments, just shoot me a question and I will answers.

Have fun and thanks!

Ingredients:

• Frozen pizza
• Mini frozen pizza
• Snack packs:w butterscotch, chocolate and fudge
• tortilla Chips
• salsa
• wheat bread
• spaghetti noodles
• spaghetti sauce
• chicken breasts
• bacon
• mojito lime marinade
• lemonade
• Frosted Flakes
• Milk
• Fire roasted Diced tomatoes
• Frozen taquitos

Updated with incidentals discovered in Fridge:

• Lemon
• Lime
• Avacado
• Celery
• Onions
• Serrano peppers (2)
• garlic
• cilantro
• frozen cooked shrimp
• eggs
• flour
• corn meal
• rice

I am open to healthier options!

There are some serious players on Empire Avenue who have come up with ROI calculations to give them all the answers for who they should buy. In managing my own portfolio, I was attempted to give weight to specific factors while trying to figure out the best way to rank tickers I should buy so that I can get the most out of my eaves.

Caution: Math Ahead! This is a little math lesson of some of the calculations I have looked at and what I was thinking when making them. I would love to hear your thoughts!

I will use a couple example tickers to illustrate how these formulas would rank these tickers:

Ticker – price – divs – shares owned

A – 33.31 – 0.69 – 33.31 – 200

B – 39.1 – 0.51 – 0

C – 104.38 – 1.39 – 0

D – 164.01 – 1.72 – 247

E – 39.00 – 0.75 – 199

Legend:

DIVS - the currently displayed number representing the average weekly divs being paid out

PRICE -The currently displayed price for this ticker

MAX_SHARES – The maximum number of shares you can own in a ticker (between 200 and 500)

SHARES_OWNED – The current number of share you own in a ticker

1.05 – This is used to add in the cost of commissions. Typically, this is redundant since most purchases have commissions.

Importance: Daily Divs

100 * (DIVS / PRICE)

or

100 * (DIVS / (PRICE * 1.05))

Originally, I took the easy route and just looked at avg div versus share price. This is as simple as it gets, to give a rough prediction of what will happen to your eaves once you purchase this Ticker. No magic here at all.  The reason I multiply by 100 is simply so the resulting number is easier to read.

The second formula takes commissions into account. This can be done on any calculation where price is considered and does not change the ranking of the results, so I will not include commission calculations in the following sections.

Based on this, you would buy the above tickers in this order

A – 2.07
E – 1.97
C – 1.33
B – 1.30
D – 1.05

Results:

A is the winner here, because when you look at the div ratio as a whole number (multiply by 100) and then subtract the share price, these two numbers are the furthest apart from each other. This is appropriate because this is a ratio of numbers, so the further these numbers are apart the better the ratio.

Importance: Cost to be maxed out in shares when compared to divs

aka: How many shares remaining multiplied by cost, compared to divs.

100 * (MAX_SHARES * DIVS) / (PRICE * (MAX_SHARES – SHARES_OWNED))

This calculation is different from the original because it takes into account the number of total shares that could be bought (MAX_SHARES), the number of shares currently owned ($shares), and the commissions charged by EAv upon purchase. You can read this like so:

Take the maximum number of shares that you can own multiplied by the current div price and divide that by the current price times the commission times the number of shares remaining to be bought until maximum shares is reached.

This calculation is intended to give a calculation of total available ROI once remaining shares are bought, which takes upon itself the philosophy that buying up to the max is most important only seconded by the number of divs received per share.

Based on this, you would buy the above tickers in this order

E – 394.74
D – 69.91
A – 8.29
C – 1.33
B – 1.30

Results:

E wins here because it has the highest shares owned so the barrier to maxing out is extremely low. Without E though, D would win because of the number of shares owned and the high divs. Also, take notice that C & B are exactly the same as the formula in the previous section because there are no shares owned which essentially makes this formula and the previous one exactly the same.

Importance: divs weighted versus share price

100 * ((DIVS * MAX_SHARES) / (PRICE * (MAX_SHARES)) + DIVS

or

100 * ((DIVS * MAX_SHARES) / (PRICE * (MAX_SHARES – SHARES_OWNED))) + DIVS

This formula is very similar to the one above excepting that it adds an extra bit of weight to the daily div averages by adding them to the total. This will allow the people who have higher average divs to rank higher than people who have lower divs. Which actually takes away from the importance of share price in the calculation.

Based on the first formula:

D – 173.05
C – 140.33
E – 76.97
A – 71.07
B – 52.30

Based on the second formula (taking shares owned into account):

E – 469.74
D – 173.05
C – 140.33
A – 77.29
B – 52.30

Results:

D wins the first time because it has the highest number of divs, but on the second calculation the numbers of shares owned in E trumps D significantly. This is interesting because it shows exactly what this whole blog post is getting at pretty deftly, which is that you have to choose what it is important to you.  A little change in the formula, like calculation of remaining shares can seriously screw up your rankings.

Importance: Days till break even on share purchase

((PRICE * MAX_SHARES) / (DIVS * MAX_SHARES))

or

((PRICE * (MAX_SHARES – SHARES_OWNED)) / (DIVS * MAX_SHARES))^§

This formula simply inverts the original formula, to calculate the number of days at this current dividend rate it would take for you to break even on the purchase. The caveat here is that you can’t assume the share price goes up and divs don’t change.  I threw this in, because out of all the talk that I have seen on Empire Avenue I have never seen anyone talk about “days to break even” about a ticker.  I have only seen this with regards to luxury items.

^§ assumes you only care about the break even on remaining shares until you max out.

Based on the first formula:

A – 48.28
E – 50.67
C – 75.09
B – 76.67
D – 95.35

Based on the second formula (taking shares owned into account):

E – 0.25
D – 1.43
A – 12.07
C – 75.09
B – 56.67

Results:

This is a really interesting ranking formula because it brings back the exact same results as when only divs and price are concerned (first section), showing that the lower the share price and the further the distance between divs and price, the faster you will make your money back on divs alone.

The second formula is a little bit silly, because you would almost never ignore the previous purchase that you have made on this ticker. Despite that, the ranking is exactly the same ranking as we have in the second section, where we take shares remaining into account. Kind of interesting (although not really because the ratios are exactly the same, just flipped on their heads).

Conclusion

There are a bunch of ways you can calculate ROI, some are so closely related that you will see clusters that are very similar (or exactly the same). However, if you were to give equal weight to each of the ranking algorithms above, whereby you assign a point value for each position (position 1 = 1 point) you could simply play a game of golf with these tickers (lowest score wins) then you would be forced to buy your tickers in this order:

E – 10   [2 1 3 1 2 1]
A – 16   [1 3 4 4 1 3]
D – 17   [5 2 1 2 5 2]
C – 19   [3 4 2 3 3 4]
B – 28  [4 5 5 5 4 5]

There are other calculations that are being used for ROI. If I have missed one here, please tell me and I will add it in!

Melissa and I took a week long trip through Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and Canada. It was pretty awesome because I got to go to parts of this country that I have never been to before.  We also got to see every animal on our list of animals to see, except a wolf.   We saw coyote, marmot, Bull Moose, Grizzly, Eagles, Hawks, Horses, Bison, and tons of other animals. Overall, it was a great trip!

There are a BUNCH of pictures here, sorry about that. Also, there are a couple duplicates because I kept the HDR (digitally edited) version of the picture.

You can find the pictures here:http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10100361734857400.2662539.15911758&l=7d71fb96d9&type=1

I love my iPhone4, and the HDR feature is pretty awesome – for some things. Pretty much any time you are moving, or if there is a sign in the image HDR will cause some weird issues.  The other thing I have found is that it gets weird in places with lots of detail, like on a trail, or whenever there is snow. Here are some of the weirdest images we got from our Glacier trip.

Information about HDR from Wikipedia.

Melissa and I went camping and checked out what Colorado had to offer near Bailey, Como, Kenosha Pass and Guanella Pass this past weekend. We had a great time.  I had an amazing time, because I got to drive offroad so much with the 4Runner.

Photos from the trip:

Melissa Playing Hey Cow, the wrong way:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuV106VblDE

Some offroading videos we took:

We are strange, and that’s why the ladies love us!

Seriously though, the reason that I grow my hair and beard out when I want to push myself towards something is that it is a really good motivator.  I can tie a string to my finger, but those fall off and get lost.  I could write myself a note, but I lose my todo lists and I keep those in our Project Management software.  The main reason is that it is always there, it is right up front, “in my face” (haha).

Recently I grew my beard out until we “launched” something at work. It was a fun way for myself and friends to continually be reminded that I haven’t launched anything yet. My beard was awesome.  Some (like my wife) would say gross, but I am sticking with awesome. I actually grew all of my “above the neck” hair out longer than it has ever been during the part of my life where I was paying attention to such silliness.

I have grown my facial hair out for another reason in the past, Movember. This is an awesome organization that raises money for research to fight Prostate Cancer. I have done this in the past two years, and this is where I got my idea for growing hair/beard for our product launch.

The product that we launched was 1TrackFind, a site for keeping track of music and artists that you want to remember to listen to later.  We have been working on it for a couple months, deciding what feature to put in and what features to leave out for now.  All this work grew me a mighty beard, and today I got to shave it all off – well most of it.

I included pictures of my beard shedding, just for fun.

Just about every morning, one of these cats gets on my lap while I am working and begins tap dancing away until I pay attention to them. At the point when I go to pet them, they take off running. It’s a sick game.

I was talking with a friend about all the Facebook page likes and what happens when you “like” something.  It turns out that there is a way to view all your likes.

1. Go to Discover Facebook Pages
2. In the top right corner, you will find “My Pages”

Once on that page, you will find all your pages in reverse chronological order.  At this point I am not sure how to “unlike” any of the pages.  Which fits with true Facebook fashion of always being positive.  What I don’t appreciate is that if I ever liked something accidentally, or something embarrassing, I cannot get rid of it from my list.  Oh well, thanks Facebook!

Just For fun:

The My Pages links are built using your Facebook ID, mine is 15911758.  There are many ways to get this ID from facebook as many links and things reference this number.  The easiest way is to right click the image link on your profile page and get the image URL.  Mine looks like the following URL and my ID is the bold part:

Image URL: http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-snc4/hs351.snc4/41629_15911758_5870_n.jpg

Matt’s My Pages URL: http://www.facebook.com/pages/browser.php#!/social_graph.php?node_id=15911758&filter=fanned

So, if you want to see one of your friend’s “Likes list” you can just go to their profile, find their ID and plug it into the place of my ID in the URL above.