Lehman goes under, Merrill sold for a song. The weekly Sunday slaughter on Wallstreet continues.

Lehman is being allowed to fail instead of bailed out, score one for moral hazard, and that won't affect individual Americans as much as if it were FRE/FNM, which actually are too big to fail.

Yet, the concerning part, I can't find any press or research on the actual market value of CDO's. When Lehman's CDO's are sold at market, suddenly other financial companies have a way to value their own hand-wavy balance sheets and that's what scares me. Day of reckoning. Sunlight-as-disinfectant is a great idea and is what we need for the long term, but I do fear actually living through that process, and am glad the industry I work in is education, a bit removed from the greater turmoil.

Also, there are still big lending institutions that have yet to go under but appear to be teetering: Wachovia and WaMu. And, AIG, the insurance company, is pretty much insolvent and now has permission to borrow from itself to continue operating. That's insanity. I bet one of those 3 companies is in the news next Sunday as being forced under or into acquisition. And another the week after that.

"They can make a bridge loan to themselves" - Gov Patterson, about AIG. Sign of times during the Bank-apocalypse?

If it turns out the Bank of America was allowed to fund their purchase of Merrill with treasury funds secured against CDO's, I really will have lost all faith in the market personally. It's gotten down to glorified check kiting. (Update - supposedly a stock swap, so maybe this fear is unfounded?)

The over all derivatives market is something like $100 trillion dollars in the US , and granted most of that is never going to see the light of day or be made actual, but can any person honestly understand the effects of four levels of chopped and diced risk? Institutions clearly can't. Our elected representatives surely don't. I don't! Maybe we need some restraints on how imaginary investments can get before they're plain old fraud. 2nd order derivation is about where I lose my ability to follow along, and I'm a fairly smart guy.

So, what it means, as I see it: no more living on credit for Americans as individuals or as a nation. It's going to hurt. I have a feeling that I won't be able to buy a home until I save 20% of the purchase price, like back in the good old days.

Why? Not letting 2001 become a real get-rid-of-the-deadwood recession, but instead injecting insane cash into the system, and letting real estate values build up to soak up the liquidity and prop up the economy, because it had nowhere else to go but overseas. Financial markets were deregulated, allowing investment banks to merge with regular banks, removing firewalls and independence and creating bizarre shadow world markets that are magnitudes larger in notional dollar value then the stock market. For the last 30 years, our economic measuring tools have been made worthless by presidents of both parties, making the situation seem less dire then it actually is, inflating or hiding information to make themselves look good. Also, a half trillion dollar war in Iraq didn't help.

I do not see a soft landing in store for us, and am glad I have another 35 years to be able to save up money to retire at some point.

Congrats, (e:James), you spent three months kicking ass and being
awesome. Sam Hoyt won!

OK!

I was able to program / animate the LED matrix. Basically, there are 8 pins on each axis, and you scan down one column at a time shifting bits out to off/on states for each LED in the row.

Each LED is only light 1/8th of the time so I need to boost the brightness a bit, see if I can lower the resistors maybe.

Now that I have it working I can get it all permanently soldered into place, and then work on the sensor components.

And of course, come out with some nicer animated faces :)

::Download Flash Video::

Finally, finally, took the time to go get my UB Card (need to be prepared for buying CS4 when it comes out in October). Bad hair day, for sure, with the wind. Hard to read, but I am technically in the staff category at UB.



The company I work for is just somewhat related to UB, I am not actually teaching or anything crazy.

I am eligible for staff parking on campus though :)

Have the matrix hooked up to the LED driver chip and that to the microcontroller. Will figure out how to program it tomorrow. Mmm, bitshifting.

This is a freaking 4 hour news cycle election.

I usually try very hard to stay out of commenting on politics on (e:strip), and confine my anti-religion rants to 2 or 3 per year, but I'm falling under the weight of an urgent need to talk about every little detail of the political season.

Aaargh. 2 more months to go.

So, after a couple days of revelations about Sarah Palin, the nail in the coffin comes: she was a member of an organization that sought Alaskan sovereign nation status.

Yes, that's right: John McCain choose a secessionist for his running mate, and his slogan is "Country First". Clearly they didn't check Palin out at all. He just sort of panicked, I suppose.

Can you imagine if Obama had belonged to a 3rd party that in any (even minor) way challenged the US's legitimacy?

Alaskan Independence Party. Source:

I'm building a DIY version of this Tengu thing ( ) for my first full project.

I've got the LEDs for the eyes in and programmable, and have the face matrix assembled but that's not yet programmed. It will eventually be hooked up to sensors to react to the environment as well.

So far this weekend I've spent a lot of time relearning C and especially pointers. Matrix and timings for the rest of the animations will be challenging, too. Trying to fit everything in a few Kb of space brings me back.

::Download Flash Video::

Watching myself on video makes me realize I really need to work on my um's. :(

Here's a video of what it should end up looking like, although mine won't look so polished:

On a slight tangent from yesterday :)

Don't break a window with a brick and your bare fist. I'm an idiot.

Next time I'll wrap a shirt around my hand! I think taking a photo of my hand afterwards is due to Paul's blogging influence. He's my blogspiration.

So, my boss has been on sick leave for 6 weeks or so with cancer. It was actually treatable and I think his prognosis was at least somewhat hopeful. Last night was the first night he was home alone, and today no one could get in touch with him on the phone.

I volunteered to go to his house to check on him, but there was no answer and he is not well enough to drive so eventually I broke in through the window. He'd committed suicide last night and I found him on the floor.

I guess it was better that I found him instead of a family member, but still... not the way you want to last see someone. Too late for me to do anything about, I wish there was more I could do.

He was the best boss I've ever had, and a friend.

Goodbye, Luke.