Tomato Conserva

I made some “tomato conserva” today. I started with 3 lb of tomatoes and ended up with 6 oz of a thick tomato paste. The flavor is incredible though. It is like tomato essence. I got the idea from here:


I’ve also been processing the basil harvest. So far I have spent two hours picking basil leaves off the plants and I probably have another hour to go. I am drying most of it, but I have frozen one batch.

Trip to Las Vegas

We took a trip to Las Vegas with a friend to see the Star Trek convention. It was the 45th Anniversary and Leonard Nimoy’s last appearance. We also rented a car and went to the Hoover Dam and took the tour. We also went to an “Ice Bar” called Minus 5. The room was mostly made of ice and kept at -5 degrees C. They gave us coats and gloves when we went in. And the drink glasses were made of ice. The full set of pictures is here.

SimFinance Progress Update

The SimFinance application is mostly done.

As is always the case, the software was more complex than I thought it would be. The main complications were due to the fact that my partner and I aren’t married. So the application had to try to optimize who paid the bills to manage the size of each of our accounts and how much taxes we each had to pay. The other big complication was trying to manage our traditional and Roth IRAs to minimize taxes each year.

There are some big things yet to do:

  1. Come up with a model for stock dividends. Right now, dividends are simply included in the return of the S&P. However, that is not really accurate, as the yield of dividends lags behind changes in stock prices. Also, taxes are due on dividends the year they are paid instead of the year the stock is sold. Those two differences may end up balancing each other out in the overall results.
  2. Investment strategy comparison. Would dividing our money between bonds, i-bonds, and stocks be better overall than having everything in stocks? Does the reduction in volatility pay off? Or is it better to just accept the volatility and maximize returns?
  3. More optimization post 60. The order of IRA withdraws should change after 60. Need to model medicare.

The model is giving us an 85% chance of success right now. I don’t really think that the things that are left to do will change this number significantly. It is surprising how much money we have to have to get a 95% chance of success and how much variation there is in the possible outcomes.

It is possible that treating the S&P 500 as a random distribution is wrong. While the historic data looks random, there probably are some underlying “fundamentals” that keep the stock prices within a range. I am not sure how to add that to the model besides trying to put an overall cap on the market returns.

Student-t distribution for stock returns

I have been working on the SimFinance 2.0 application and have been struggling to find a way to simulate the stock market. (Note: I am not trying to predict the stock market, I just need a way to generate a random stock market return that is similar to historic returns)

My first idea was to use a normal distribution centered around the average return with the same standard deviation that the real data has. This was close to correct, but if I plotted sample returns from history against the normal distribution, the historical returns had much longer tails. Meaning that, in reality, there are more really bad and really good years than there would be in a normal distribution.

After doing some research (I am not the only one interested in simulating the stock market), I found that some people are using a Student-t distribution. After playing with the parameters of that distribution I was able to get a much more realistic curve. Based on the historical data for the S&P 500, I am using the following parameters for the distribution: DOF = 3.40234, SCALE = 35, OFFSET = 0.00725

In software, I am using the boost library to generate random numbers according to the student-t distribution.

New Photo Gallery

I have changed web hosting companies and re-designed my web page. The biggest change is to the photo galleries. There are a lot of photo gallery programs out there, but I couldn’t find one with the feature that I wanted. I wanted to be able to upload a large set of pictures, but only display a sub-set of them on the main page. The rest of the pictures would be “behind” the displayed set. So, if I go to Paris and take a bunch of pictures of the Eiffel tower, I can put one picture on the main page, but allow users to see the rest of them if that is something they are interested it.

I wrote my own system with php and mySql that lets me manage the photos and the galleries. It also lets me separate the galleries into public and private areas. I have been scanning prints of family photos from my childhood and I put those online for the rest of my family to see.