Recent recommended SF & Fantasy

I have been mostly "audiobooking" fiction for the past few years, and
the books listed here are no exception. Here's the roundup.

I had never before tried Child, but Nancy Pearl recommended "anything by Lee Child" and I greatly enjoyed it. Child is an MP in the U.S. Army in this story set in 1989-1990 when the Berlin Wall was crumbling ... and strange things were going on in the army. Reacher is violent and possibly amoral, but a very enjoyable character. Five stars and I'm just going back into the Reacher pile for another one shortly.

Another violent story that I enjoyed:

This is the first book on the "culture war" between two future starfaring civilizations: the culture (hedonistic, AI-loving) and the Idrians, an expanding tri-pedal warlike world. The protagonist is Horza, a "changer" working for the Idrians. He was a bit hard to get to like, but the closing parts of the book were so fast-paced and plotted that I got a bang out of anyway. Four stars and I'm planning to continue with the series.

Next, a well done near-future Mars mission gone wrong:

This was an enjoyable tale that focuses on Mark Watney, who's been accidentally left on Mars when the rest of his crew escape during a storm. He turns out to be not only alive but resilient enough to start planning to survive until the next mission ... four stars!

Finally one from the seventies:

This is a time-travel story set in the 1970's ... and in 1882. The time travel "technology" in use is so dumb it almost made me give up on the book ... but I'm glad I stayed. The author romanticizes 1882 way too much, but there's enough plot and tragedy and conflict to keep anyone interested. Five stars despite my quibbles!

A straightforward options trading strategy to return 3-6% per month (almost every month)

Options trading can be complex; one can look at it as the biggest video game in the world!

But some relatively simple strategies can produce reliable income without a lot of effort and without requiring moment-to-moment monitoring of a position.

The one I'll discuss today is the Iron Condor:

Basically, you:

• Buy a put, strike price A
• Sell a put, strike price B
• Sell a call, strike price C
• Buy a call, strike price D

This is essentially the combination of a put credit spread and a call credit spread. You make a profit if the price of the underlying stock (or ETF or index fund) remains roughly between B and C at expiration.

The return on capital one can make with this trade depends on several factors, but the one we're going to focus on today is the width between strikes B and C. Basically we're going to choose these strikes such that there is about an 87% chance that the stock will finish between these strikes when the options expire. But we plan to close this spread before expiration, when it's achieved about 50% of its maximum credit. This makes the chance for profit more like 95 to 96%.

How do we figure this initial 87%? We use the normal curve:

See where the 1.5 and -1.5 marks are? That's where we want to choose the short strikes.

Let's look at an example ETF: SPY, the S&P 500 index ETF. If you set up the main trade screen to show %OTM (percentage out of the money), you're looking for something in the range of 92 to 93% probability:

This is the short put we started with; now we need to buy the same number of puts at least one strike away. Let's choose 5 wide, as this gives us more credit (in Thinkorswim, one holds down the CTRL key to build up a multi-leg spread one leg at a time.)

Now we look for the same 92 to 93% probability on the call side:

And choose the long strike 5 points away on that side too:

Here's where we calculate the yield:

300 / 4660 = 6.4% ... so if we close the trade when we get 1/2 that, that's 3.7%.

Suggestions for beginning this: start small! Use 1 contract SPY (instead of the 10 I'm using here). Your max loss would then be $466 instead of $4660. Try this for a couple of months. Then move to 5 contracts, then 10 ...

When you're comfortable trading 10 SPY's, try 2 SPX. SPX is 10 times larger than SPY, and trading it is a little different in that it's not (currently) automated. It's "open outcry," meaning humans are still involved in the trades. You'll have to move 25 to 75 cents away from the midpoint to get SPX condors executed.

How big do you go with this? Just decide how much income you want to make and size accordingly. Using this example ... if you want to make $3000 per month you'll need a 20X larger trade, which means 20 contracts of SPX.

Happy trading!

How to get a remote job

There's a recent trend of widely dispersed teams working with the help of the Internet and communication technologies that run on top of it.

A couple of books have been published on this topic: The Year without Pants and Remote. The former is a narrative of a former Microsoft manager's work for Wordpress, which has a globally distributed workforce. The latter is a justification that could be used to try and sell remote work as a concept to management or a work team.

I'm currently working mostly-remotely for a Silicon Valley employer. Here's how I did it.

First, I used the Modern Job Hunting Hacks techniques I describe elsewhere on this blog. Often this is all that's required; in particular many recruiters ignore the 'I am only looking near Seattle' flag and send job listings from other places. For jobs that look interesting I reply "I can't move but could go for a month and then work remotely" and sometimes this works, as in this case. It's always worth a try.

Until I got this job I also started scanning two job listing sites: We Work Remotely and StackOverflow. StackOverflow has a very useful allows remote checkbox and generally more listings than We Work Remotely, though the latter is growing and has (currently) a higher proportion of non-programmer jobs than does the other site.

There are also niche sites for specific skills/interests, for example Django Gigs.

Caveats about remote jobs: you have to create your own structure and your own opportunities to socialize. For an extrovert this can be like being sentenced to solitary confinement! Get out there and have lunch with a friend!

Interesting Tech Roundup

Heat your home with other people's computers for free: nerdalize.com.

A worldwide network of virtual pilots exists, some flying the same routes on
the same schedule as the real airlines.

A price war in cell phone plans is currently going on, mainly due to T-Mobile. This is a good time to renegotiate your current cell phone deal.

A company onlycoin is rolling out a single card that pretends to be all of your credit cards at once. But how are they going to adapt to the chip-and-pin cards coming to the U.S. (finally) in the wake of Target's little problem?

The 50 smartest companies? MIT Technology Review has a list.

Redox Power Systems' PowerSerg 2-80

Affordable fuel cells are coming, finally, in the next couple of years.

That's it for now ... comment on your suggestions for this feature please!

A selfie you'll never forget

... from superstar political cartoonist Mike Luckovich:

The easy way to buy a car, a crummy car dealership, an OK dealership, and my New Year's Resolution

Several years ago a friend recommended Heidi the Amazing Autowoman, an auto broker who will find the car you want at a price and list of options that you negotiate with her. All you have to do is meet her for 10 minutes, sign paperwork, write checks, and drive away in your new (or new used) car.

Heidi is terrific and I will never buy or lease a car any other way ever again.

Heidi happens to have a relationship with a local poorly run car dealership: Lee Johnson of Kirkland. This needn't have affected me, but I bought a Chevy Volt in late 2011 through Heidi and this dealership left out a couple of small parts: cargo net and front license plate holder.

They eventually got these parts in and I got them installed. They were a bit slow/sloppy in the way they handled this and I should have stopped going there after this. But I had an issue with the car losing the charge on its 12-volt battery, which runs the car's computer and locks and other systems and which is required to be able to start it. I called a tow truck who helped me jump it and I had them tow it, silly me, to Lee Johnson.

Not only did they no root cause analysis, they somehow goofed up the key fob that you use to get in and start the car ... and sent me off in the car without saying a word about this to me. If I hadn't had the owner's manual on the front seat I'd never have been able to figure what was going on (I thought at first the battery on the key fob had just run down) and get the car started again.

Clearly, this is egregiously bad customer service. (I got the car fixed at Michael's Chevrolet in Issaquah, who have been OK.)

I recently sold the original Volt and leased a new 2014 through Heidi ... via  Lee Johnson. I met Heidi at the dealership, sat in one of the LJ people's cubicle, signed paperwork, wrote checks, and was out in 10 minutes.

I had to go back and pick up my license plate when it was ready (actually about a month after it was ready, but that's my problem.) This was also at Lee Johnson, whose I guess subsidiary goes as Eastside Auto Licensing. I picked up the plates (and a refund check: $154.50; not sure why but I deposited it!)

The woman who gave me the plates said, brightly, "you can get the service department to install them for you!" I replied without thinking, "they messed up my previous Volt and I'll never do business with them again."

She looked stricken. I could have just kicked her dog or something. "That's terrible!" she said.

It was terrible, it was stupid, it was unnecessary. I'm telling you about my experience with the dealerships, but what good did it do to hit this lady over the head with this information? None.

So: (1) I forgive Lee Johnson. I still don't plan to do any more business with their service department, but I'm going to drop the chip on my shoulder and I don't have to broadcast my problem with them to any other individuals in person.

(2) If I have the chance of interacting with another of their employees, I'm going to bite my tongue and instead say "Oh, I'm a computer programmer and this is one of the few mechanical tasks I feel competent to handle and it's satisfying for me to be able to handle this." All true, and I got to dispose of the Lee Johnson advertising license plate frame at the same time.

I learned grudge-holding from my father and let it mostly go on an individual level years ago. But organizations are made up of individuals, many of whom don't have a clue about the running of the organization ... so no more!

The B612 Foundation: Finding the asteroids coming from our blind spot

Anytime you think you've had a bad day, just reflect on the fact that you haven't seen one of these coming:

Unfortunately, we have up to now only been able to see/track asteroids that are out where we can see them: on the side away from the sun, so the sun's light shines on them.

On the other side, we're looking right into the sun and the asteroids disappear. This is apparently what happened last year at Chelyabinsk in Siberia.

These things can ruin one's whole day.

Since our government is paralyzed when it comes to important things like this (although one would think it could be spun as "national defense"), there's a private foundation working on a satellite to be able to view the blind spot.

The B612 Foundation is that foundation and they're getting my support. How about you?