That Was Sobering!

That Was Sobering!

That Was Sobering!

 As many of us, in Southern Ontario, are aware… a large powerful storm just rolled through. Although the nature of this may not seem like a surprise to anyone who may read this from outside of this small part of the world for us this weather isn’t common or normal, but is becoming so. So how do I feel about this, and the culprits that caused it…...

Photo of a firetruck blocking off a major road with 3 electric utility poles leaning over towards traffic after the windstorm in Ontario May 21 2022

The lead-up!

   Friday I had a long conversation with someone during which they brought up their concern with how most people are so reliant on their technology but have no real solutions for if the power goes out. This made me think of how I don’t have a radio for that situation anymore, but I’ll try to get more into that later. I already knew we were looking “forward” to some thunderstorms during this long weekend, I thought we might watch them by the large window in my apartment. Alas that would happen but it would not play out as relaxing as I had hoped. The weather went from being nice to dark very quickly, the only other time I remember seeing weather change like this was when I was visiting Florida as a child and a tornado caused a reasonable amount of damage close to where we were. As the dumb Canadians we all got in the minivan and went to the store to go shopping after, only to see the destruction when we got there. Things got dark, the sky looked green… I did not like what I saw and suspected the power would likely be going out, although I didn’t expect it would be in such spectacular fashion on the infrastructure side of things which I will also get into later. By the time it started to downpour and we were trying to close the windows the power was already flickering. And then… it was out! Before I even finished explaining to my 9 year old how I wasn’t as prepared as I would like to be for a power outage we were now in a power outage. The storm was down to a light drizzle not 5 minutes after that and basically non existent shortly thereafter. 

   Great.. So now what? Although I’m from a small town where the power going out regularly was normal. I am a city dweller now and the power almost never goes out and when it does it tends to be quick since I live in a downtown area with businesses. I don’t have candles, although getting some and holders has been on my list lately it’s just not THE priority knowing I have lights on a few phones I can power up with my car if I need to. Thankfully the cellular communications towers weren’t taken out so we still had data, although even that proved to show flaws the longer it went on… yet another thing to cover later. This time it’s the general public being dumb. My phone had a reasonable charge of around 60% and it has a decent sized batter so it gives me a lot of use. My 9 year old on the other hand was already realising keeping everything she owns almost dead constantly may not be a wise choice in the long run. I’m able to load up my local hydro provider (what we call electric companies here in Ontario, like bagged milk.. it’s a local thing confined to a few areas) where they had the information already there with outages so I at least knew it wasn’t just me, because I sure wasn’t going out to ask my neighbours haha. I still wasn’t sure what had caused it and was hoping it wasn’t a tornado… but the youngster and I could hear a lot of sirens from emergency vehicles from different areas around us. You can tell by how they lay on the horns and how aggressive the driver is on the throttle, with a motor that loud it’s easy to hear it, how bad the situation they are expecting might be. It didn’t sound good.

 

Now what?

 

So all I know is things don’t sound great and the power it out.

Is it a hydro substation?

Maybe a transformer popped on a pole, a surprising amount of our infrastructure is still above ground here even in the areas they keep developing, or in a neighbourhood?

Maybe a tornado took down a few poles, since they are usually well kept when near homes and most of this city is developed and maintained? Right?

 

   So now I go to Twitter thinking that will likely be my fastest way to find out what is happening, I was correct, but it wasn’t as fast as I would have liked. That said although nothing was on the feed yet a friend almost immediately sent me a pic of the culprit. Several main feed hydro lines had fallen over in the wind. Yes… main feed, around residential, stores, and even a large high school at that intersection.. you did in fact read that right. this is also something I will get more into later. So I think to myself “great…. that isn’t going to be a quick fix” but now it made sense why the power kept coming on and going off like someone had hit a power pole.. because the “wind” took a few of them. At this point I’m going to the spots I know I stash things like batteries and such, to my surprise my portable battery pack is almost fully charged and my Bluetooth speaker seems to have a charge as well so I turn it on, but turn it down to conserve power, and I think let’s check the local radio stations to see what they are saying about the issues from the local authorities. within about an hour I went from thinking the radio was a useful tool for information in an emergency to realising the recent cuts by both Bell and Rogers, some of which was ironically being complained about by local viewers on one of the prerecorded shows I came across, mean no one is there most of the weekend to report anything at all. No emergency messages through the system they annoy us with when it’s for a test but not when it’s an actual city, or province wide emergency. It was shameful the only warning I really got was the weather network spamming weather warnings within a minute or two of each other.

   All in all I got lucky and my battery pack was charged, I had some food to get us by that didn’t need to be heated. Generally it wasn’t that bad for us outside of my daughter wanting to go to the park and me being too injured to take her once the weather got nicer. We coloured and such. With the energy companies website I was able to check things here and there and know a rough time as to when they expected to be finished. My 9 year old kept needing a reminder it wasn’t a definite time to count down to haha. I ended up sleeping to deal with the humidity and leg pain. Other parts of my province don’t seem to have been quite as lucky and many were without power for various reasons but usually all with the same root cause.

For others it wasn’t as nice.. there was far worse damage in other cities and our leaders should be ashamed of how this is playing out currently.

That said. To the emergency responding to emergencies and crews working to restore power and services through the weather… you are heroes. You are only fixing an inconvenience for me that can be life threatening for many others. I appreciate everything they did for us! The leaders on the other hand.. disgraceful. These people are struggling through years of infrastructure neglect.

now onto the issues

 

1. The First Issue – Lack of Publically Funded Communication Networks

   What happened? Money.. As always money has happened. As someone who grew up pre-internet being the main communication form I understand how linked to me having power or a network of locations needing power for me to have a connection. In an emergency this is a bad way to do things. I am surprised, and very concerned, we don’t seem to have any real alternatives left anymore. This brings up the fact that letting corporations own local radio stations isn’t a good idea long term and has basically made them non existent along with many of our local newspapers as well. We NEED pubically funded radio and people need to have hand crank radios for an easy to power device we can even add things like a flashlight to. These are devices that exist but are useless now because the radio stations we rely on don’t really exist anymore.

2. The Second Issue – Mindless Poorly Educated, Inconsiderate, People

   This has always been a problem in these situations. People often don’t think of others because we are trained to be capitalistic consumers at a very young age. We want to have more than the people around us, never ever less. Doesn’t matter if we need it, we WANT IT. With our phone systems, and electricity for that matter, people think the resource is unlimited because they can’t ever physically see the limits. As someone who has worked in that industry and climbed my butt up the towers to actually work with the equipment… I will tell you there is a very finite amount of data and even call capacity to go around. It’s a lot better than it was 20 years ago but is still more akin to the phone systems back then. When the power and cable would go out they would have regular notifications on the radio to tell people to try to keep off the phones to keep them open for actual emergencies and not to sit having conversations for hours to pass the time.

   So data showed it’s ugly limitations when I ended up having difficulty even managing a consistent stream of audio for radio. Why? because people all jumped on their phones to watch Netflix. Usually that is throttled through a single home connection. For phones it’s not since a single household can have multiple sim cards and thus multiple unlimited connections vs the typical one we can just throttle all of them with. So they throttle all of us.. poorly.. which even made accessing some websites difficult such as Hydro to see the status of things. This is when I just went for a nap.

  We NEED to be considerate and realise everyone else is also trying to do the same thing so try not to hog all of the data capacity with video streams.. listen to a podcast or something if you must.

 

 

3. The Third Issue – THE BIG ONE – Infrastructure Collapse Due To Neglect

   Now this one is a doozy… but in general the infrastructure systems are all collapsing in North America. I see a lot of dams and roads showing that in the USA and here in Canada I have noticed it with our roads, water, and power infrastructure systems the most. I think we can all see the roads suck far more than they have in the last 30 years I can recall. In Ontario I’m sure everyone knows the Gardiner expressway fell apart due to years of neglect and deeming it too costly. Well now we are seeing this with our highway overpasses such as the 403. As for water the region I am in had to admit to not even budgeting for emergency repairs or long term maintenance of water infrastructure when they had to raise taxes to accommodate for it all. These are subjects for a different time but just highlight a much larger issue with our current leadership… they live in pretend bubbles that aren’t part of the real world and thus never plan accordingly for the real issues at hand.

   So this brings me back to the more relevant state of the electrical grid. This bothers me because in 2003 we had the clear discussion around Ontario, Buffalo, and New York State when we all lost power due to the electrical grid being neglected for profit and thus causing the massive power outage. So why now am I watching major feed lines being blown over in the wind? I can’t say I didn’t notice how many of the poles around here are in terrible shape and we just prop them up.. In general it’s neglect when it comes to maintenance but also neglect when we engineer them in the first place. These are signs of an even bigger issue of Money doesn’t work and when we pretend it does it goes to the wrong people so we all pay for the issues over and over. Privatising Ontario Hydro was a MASSIVE mistake the Conservative set in motion and that the Liberals kept going.

This is an issue so big if we do not rectify it the coming more severe weather will bring our society to a screeching halt! Pretty much everything we currently do isn’t sustainable long term entirely by our own choices.

 

 

 

 

Solutions

More on a personal front here

   – Continue to work towards keeping more and more dry supplies that don’t require heat to be edible or cold storage to stay fresh. Ex. I usually have dry beans, tuna, and bread around.

   – Make sure to check my battery packs and spare phones so they are charged, especially when I know a storm is coming.

   – Possibly get a Radio, but we need to fix radio stations for it to be useful on off hours

   – Possibly work on bringing up issue with local leaders regarding radio and infrastructure neglect

 

 

 

 

 

 

We have made a situation where climate change can still be sorted out, but given we aren’t doing much about it currently it seems we best start planning for the less pleasant aspects of it and neglecting our infrastructure just isn’t going to be an option in the coming years.

 

– Anthony

 

Thoughts

Thoughts

I lived in this world decades before it was cool

And those who were here on the internet before the advent of cell phones know exactly what I am talking about

Many of us are very pro public transit because not having it stopped us from seeing the many friends we had.

We don’t think of borders like our leaders do

This generation can make the change we need to happen a real thing

 

– Anthony

 

It Has Been a Few Months – Update

It Has Been a Few Months – Update

Hello again to the few who have found this website in recent months without seeing any activity from me. I’m still alive, and finally back at coding. Life has been hectic since I finished that last version but I did continue on with making my own indicator module which I may or may not put with the downloaded. I personally feel I should add more web scrapping options to it rather than just have the alpha vantage api since they also want you to download that data through them, plus my numbers aren’t quite the same. Sometimes this is because I picked a different method or include more data points. Ultimately I want something that can pull w/e data from large data sets and go through it to find patterns I ask. Nothing terribly complicated, I would be the brains behind the tool so sharing it doesn’t really hurt me. There are likely tools that do what I want already but nothing free I’ve seen yet, it all requires me to code to use it.

I had intended to get back to this around New Years but 2022 has been one of the worst years to date for me with the absolute disaster going on both in the world and my own life. I went from getting a raise and working on contacting my doctor about a few of my health issues to slipping on some ice and having all responsible parties leave me down sh*t’s  creek without a paddle so now I’m dealing with trying to get a lawyer for that, dealing with my landlord is always a headache… always. The loss of my job and the inability to currently walk well enough to work labour jobs as I do has been a massive pain…… In all this I have obviously kept active on twitter as I do but more importantly I took the time to completely gut and redo my setup, both pcs, and finally have a workstation that allows me to code between the two pretty seamlessly but also stream with just a couple button presses meaning I’m more inclined to do it. I lost a monitor until I can get a better video card due to an unresolvable driver issue but did get a new larger case so I was able to cool the second PC better. I then spent time converting to using Google Chrome as they have finally sorted out the performance issues and it runs the best now. It also allows me to login on anything and have access to my bookmarks and settings. This was partially prompted by a friend on Twitter helping me update my resume and he used Drive and Google Docs, which I immediately fell in love with because I find Google’s text correction AI to be amazing! I have VScode set up to do a similar thing using my GitHub login and then am sticking mostly to extensions I can use with it so everything can be a one stop shop allowing me to code even on my laptop. My second PC is now running Linux as well, I prefer it and finally got my audio working through Jack audio server. Never did get network audio working but I don’t currently need it so whatever.

As it sits I plan to continue on with coding, maybe make a career out of it if I can, and I plan to start using this blog more often as well. I am making it easier for me to log in and write as it was a bit of a chore before.

I also have my code on GitHub. As it stands I have little reason to not share my source code so you can find me there at github.com/freakinbox.

Hope to be posting more updates, but at least now people can see if I’m still coding or doing anything through GitHub.

As usual I may or may not spell check this later lol

 

Stock Data Version 0.2.0

Version 0.2.0

So after far too long I finally finished adding a pile of things and learning to write sections of code better.  Also finally using legitimate version numbers.

I’ve likely missed issues… lol

new for v 0.2.0

– Many changes under the hood including some basic, but limited, exception handling
– Added everything but the economic indicators
– Crypto, Forex, and Fundamentals
– Removed Intraday options for non US market tickers

 

Still to do
– add in options for the various time interval choices and so fourth
– add economic indicators
– reduce overhead

 

Required
– An internet connection
– Windows 10 (I have no way of testing on anything below or above that)
– a free Alpha Vantage api key from https://www.alphavantage.co/ (I still haven’t added an option for those with a paid key, maybe make the program a paid version for that?)

 

To use :

 

Simply unzip and drop this folder wherever you would like the directory to be and then open the folder and run “avcaller 0.2.0”. After that it should be as easy as following the prompts. It will ask you for an alpha vantage api key as that’s the only source I’m currently pulling from. If you have others that are easily to implement feel free to suggest them, for now I won’t be doing web scraping to get the data although was considering adding it to the mix but that’s a whole other can of worms at the moment.

It takes a little but to initially load and I plan to reduce the overhead to significantly reduce the loading time.

report bugs here, something else I will look into when I see interest.

Thank you and enjoy 🙂

 

-Anthony

 

Humans are Dumb (and things are VERY bad)

Humans are Dumb (and things are VERY bad)

We are treating the pandemic like we do highways
 
 
We don’t look at the distracted drivers causing the congestion…
 
We just keep adding lanes for them to clog up.
 
It’s the exact same mentality right now.. it’s why we never fix problems with most things, just create more of the same problems.
 
 
Traffic with good drivers, even when busy, keeps flowing. The issue is so many bad drivers drive vehicles with super tinted windows and are usually larger so no one can prepare for their actions when either they, or the safety feature their vehicle may have, engages the brakes full stop to avoid rear ending someone… just to go back to doing it over and over again.
 
People driving standards for example will tend to favour just keeping a slow steady consistent pace over gunning it only to have to engage first gear again… Really, if you can avoid needing to get a manual car moving from a rolling stop they are really nice and easy to drive. and if you time it (while making sure distracted fucko behind you doesn’t rear end you because they don’t see brake lights and don’t realize the vehicle in front is slowing down) you can just ease off the throttle and slow down without using your brakes… again though, if some fucko changing lanes every two seconds doesn’t think that room is for them to shoot over almost smacking your front fender… because… fucko
 
 
Climate change… our answer was to find ways around epa ratings trying to sell less fuel efficient vehicles that kept the status quo of burning oil alive and flourishing, the crossover and pickup truck.. So now the world is on fire…
 
 
It’s always the same story…. wait until you realize how badly they have screwed up our ability to produce food. Part of my diet changes are based on what I think we will be eating, and the price increases on things I no longer eat sure tell me I’m onto something 🙁
 
 
 
This is like Brexit… For the entire planet…. and just like Brexit so many are so terribly ignorant instead of doing everything they could to prevent it… because both situations are preventable… but we never prepare, always react and always with greed in mind.
 
 
 
I keep track of so many things because it’s pretty vital to my survival, having food and not being on fire are mighty important things for that.

 

 

– Anthony

 

A day of Struggle!

A day of Struggle!

  Obviously It’s still not uploaded which means it isn’t ready. After a day of mostly being my own worst enemy in making silly problems I have things seeming to work but need more time to test it to be sure as while chasing problems I changed a lot of other things and just want to make sure it’s all sorted back out before I compile it for upload. I can tell the counter for the API calls isn’t working correctly for instance and it’s messing with the timer now.. Little things that are annoying still need to be cleaned up. If it wasn’t for the various bouts of pain I’ve been in I’d have finished it by now but it’s hard to code when I hurt that badly.

I really need to get better at recording changes as well so I have more detailed posts as well…. eventually. haha

Should be within the week and now has Stocks, Crypto, and Forex requests all working. Once I finish adding in Fundamentals and the Economic stats it’ll either be back to my own indicator calculator and then onto the plotter that will be able to use the data to give charts and other visuals with selections from the stored data. With the lack of direct interest in the program currently it’s most likely I’m going to go for my own personal part of the program either until I hit a wall that annoys me too much or interest picks up over here, as I’ve stated previously the programs on this site are more refined branches of my own tools I’m making with some things added, removed, or changed.

 

 

– Anthony

 

Just About There!

Just About There!

So at this point this program pulls 81 different indicators and separate price data sheets and in CSV form (comma separated value, in a basic text file for those not familiar) comes to around 10mb per stock ticker entered which would also take around 17 minutes using the free API key and the 5 call per minute limit. This will increase when I add in all the variables for different time frames and so fourth.

So now I am back to just cleaning up code and updating other elements of the program to match my other changes and updates while I modify what’s there to add in Crypto and fundamentals before I add in a separate options menu for the various different options such as various intervals and give the option to preselect the indicators and data you want so you only need to select which dataset you are interest in and then the Ticker or company name to go with it. I seem to be on track for a new release either late tonight or late tomorrow.

 

– Anthony

 

September 4th.. Making Progress again

September 4th.. Making Progress again

Still hurting but can code again when I have the time as I did before. I have made progress on the back end of the API requests to simplify it for myself, removing options that aren’t really needed in my opinion such as having both daily and daily adjusted  calls given the adjusted includes both the unadjusted and adjusted close prices. While I did this I added in all but 2 of the call options for Alpha Vantage (Listing & Delisting status along with Earnings and IPO calendar were left out).

So now I am trying to figure out a simplistic UI while updating the aesthetics and code to allow me more flexibility in altering it later on as I need. It’s pretty a pretty productive week and a half or so again which has been a nice change after losing around a month or so of coding time and needing to catch up on everything else the injury put me behind with.

 I’m hoping to have the version with Crypto currency, Forex, Stocks, and fundamentals out by the end of this weekend. Really just depends how much I can sit here for and I really need to set aside some me time that isn’t work, maybe some Storm Works or something. I keep getting caught up in learning better ways to code things causing me to rewrite or adjust large portions of code, it’s making me get better are learning how to segment things for testing so my workflow speed is increasing but as with anything… it’s a process with a lot of rabbit holes hahaha.

-Anthony

 

For now Enjoy some updated pictures of the slightly updated UI 🙂

 

FINALLY!

FINALLY

It has been around  12 days since I last gave any sort of update. Due to my injury getting worse I was still unable to do very much until the last couple of days, either unable to sit at the computer or being unable to focus enough to solve any real issues.

But tonight I finally got some coding done and a couple of issues sorted out. Ultimately I went with redesigning the wheel rather than using the wrapper I currently am in my code more for me having more control over the relatively simple task and also so I don’t have to rely on the consistency of anyone else’s code in regards to the functionality any more than I am already required to do.

Learning how to manipulate JSON files while in agonizing pain wasn’t very fun, but ultimately worked out in the end.

The goal is to hopefully get the api request code written and implemented by the end of next week and start to get Cyrpto and Intraday working properly. I did have Intraday working but didn’t like how I was going to have to implement it for tickers where that wasn’t available. 

I am reinventing the wheel in this case because over all my goal is to be able to use this code to read data in general, not just from Alpha Vantage and also not just financial data. So this will be more useful for me in the long run and will save me from trying to write it into my code later on, which I have been trying to plan for in the background this entire time.

One might think I had a little clue as to the steps of software development by the way I talk about plans, but I’m just doing my best to make my life easier is all.. haha

 

 

 

 

 

– Anthony

 

Priorities

Priorities

I’ve finally managed to spend a few hours in my chair off and on, with the help of muscle relaxants and a heat pad, but unfortunately for this project my daughter wanted a Minecraft Java server up and running and wanted me to play with her, and so that (and the troubleshooting with our old equipment) took precedence 🙂

 

Later this evening or early next week development will resume.

 

 

 

 

 

– Anthony