1. I watch another finance film
2. Some contemporary scam companies meet the fate
3. A totally opaque web 1.1 change
4. Some quick house projects
5. PUBG vids cause what else are you going to do on server maintenance days
6. Thunder Road: Vendetta
7. Obligatory cuteness

I finally got around to ticking another film off my finance watchlist. Since Rogue Trader is freely available, I put it on while I slogged through the refactoring discussed below.

Turns out the refactoring was more interesting than the movie. The premise of Rogue Trader is solid - the true story of a guy who made a bank insolvent through ill-advised futures trades. But there isn't much more to it than that. The film spends most of its time beating the viewer over the head with Nick Leeson's (Ewan McGregor) gnawing guilt, unconvincing lies to his coworkers, and problems at home.

It secures the bottom spot on my running ranking of Wall Street/finance/scam films:

1. The Big Short (2015) A smart/funny drama that follows the handful of people that saw the 2008 Global Financial Crisis coming. This film excels in its explanation of the GFC both at a high level and through its ground-level stories. It also takes a refreshingly honest approach to the 'based on a true story' genre.

2. Enron:The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) Enron's rise and fall told in a documentary that will make your blood boil. E:TSGitR covers Enron's scammy accounting methods, Apple-like cultishness, and (with audio transcripts) Texan schadenfreude toward California.

3. Margin Call (2011) An unofficial counterpart to The Big Short, Margin Call tells the story of a Wall Street firm the night it realizes the bubble is popping. It isn't as heavy-handed in its condemnation of investment banks/bankers as you might expect; the characters are complex and personable.

4. The China Hustle (2017) Investment movie night finally goes abroad with this documentary about the reverse takeover (RTO)/Muddy Waters saga of the early 20-teens. The China Hustle describes short sellers' investigations into the hazards of speculating across sovereign borders.

5. Panic: The Untold Story of the 2008 Financial Crisis (2018) An unofficial counterpart to The Big Short and Margin Call, Panic is a documentary that focuses less on the causation of the GFC and more on the response. This might be dry to some, but it drips with intrigue if you're into macroeconomics and/or government.

6. The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (2019) Elizabeth Holmes once asked the question, "What if we did a Fyre Festival but instead of music and tents it was blood testing?" The answer was Theranos and it became an HBO documentary in 2019. She was convicted in 2022.

7. MADOFF: The Monster of Wall Street (2023) Ponzis are the vanilla ice cream of scams but Bernie's had more scoops than anyone else. The Netflix docuseries isn't bad, but not as compelling as some of the competition.

Rogue Trader (1999) Dramatization of the Nick Leeson derivatives market blowup. More about guilt and lying than causing the collapse of a large financial institution.

In other news:

• I enjoyed reading "autonomous trucking company... has rebranded to CreateAI, focusing on [gen ai for] video games and animation." Lots of synergy there.
• Another truck company, meanwhile, rebranded from 'Nikola' to 'bankruptcy'. These dudes were famous for their "HTML 5 supercomputer" and gravity-powered vehicle.
• And the saga of that weird NJ deli scam finally concluded.

Looking at my Outer Web memory footprint, I decided it'd be a manageably-bad idea to try to cut my RAM needs in half by replacing instances of String with new types that aren't 16 bits per character. My code already does a UTF8 conversion on page data and things like URLs have to be ASCII, these can be represented as byte buffers.

I had a few concerns.

1. Strings are used a lot. Even if it's find and replace, it's a lot of find and replace.
2. I had no intention of implementing things like regexes in the new types. Converting an 8-bit string to a Java native string to use these operations would have a performance impact that would blunt the memory benefit to some unknown extent.

So I backed everything up, cracked a two liter of Shasta, fired up my all-Rush mixtape, and went to town.

It took a while, wasn't awesome, but ultimately worked out. The biggest pain was maximally reusing code up and down the class hierarchy...


... while avoiding downcasting and factory types.


Dani and I had a full day to ourselves so we went rogue and conquered some kitchen projects. The vent hood needed replacement and rewiring. The work was disproportionately not kid-friendly, so there was a lot of "dad, give me a job".


We've pretty much never used the light above the sink. The switch is well out of reach and it doesn't provide all that much light. But when I did the sink it occurred to me that a motion sensor would be good here. The light is recessed so it's unintrusive but helpful when doing dishes or wandering into the kitchen at night.

The fixture is not particularly common (see above). The cover - which was R.I.P. - attaches to the recess the same way bathroom fan grilles do. I browsed the Home Depot site a bit and found they added an AI assistant that reads product documentation.

It seems to know its own limitations.

The non-AI assistants in the store told me I'd have to go to a specialty shop. So for the moment it remains open and untrimmed.











The board game crew lost our Arkham Horror campaign and moved on to Thunder Road: Vendetta. The game reminds me of X-Wing Miniatures in that the movement and combat rules are well-designed, tactical, and balanced.


Because of the solid mechanics, the game lends itself well to expansions and is kind of dull without them. Drivers and upgrades make for a deeper, asymmetrical experience. We're currently duking it out in a vehicular thunderdome.


I'm going to claim there's some rogueishness here because Dani made Uncle Ted an Octonauts birthday card and Kwazii is pretty rogue.

Kajiit has wares if you have coin.

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