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not a great time to liquidate my mother's stock holdings
Friday, March 14 2025
This morning our neighbor A and her little dog Henry came over to walk in the forest with Gretchen and our dogs. (Neville came because he loves A.) They ended up hiking out to the waterfall and beyond, chatting the whole time about this and that. When they got back, A talked about the various school options for her kid, balancing the price against other factors like class size and diversity exposure (some of us still care about such things!). We then talked about our respective school experiences, with me mentioning starting high school in the eighth grade looking like I was maybe eight while some of the seniors had been held back for years and were bearded 20-somethings. A talked about what a nerd she was in school, getting great grades and participating in lots of extra-curricular activities while mostly being hated by her peers.
While Gretchen was off having lunch with Falafel Cathy, it occurred to me that it would be nice to have a haircut before I start my new job. And, being me, when I get a haircut, it's always self-inflicted. So it needed time to grow out. With this in mind, I got naked (I hate to have sharp sticks of hair stuck to my clothes) and went out into the driveway with a pair of scissors and cut my hair. Temperatures at the time were in the 50s, so it wasn't too bad. As always, I tried to put my hair clippings on top of the vegetation so birds could find it and use it as nest-building materials. I cut more from the top than usual, which was a good idea, though the results were rougher than usual and Gretchen would be amazed at how bad the back ended up. But I looked at it with two mirrors later and the only real problem was that I cut too deeply into the hair in a few places.
After I was reasonably happy with my hair, I jumped in the shower to wash away all the little needles sprinkled on my body. While I was in there, the phone rang. It's normal for my brother Don to call at the most awkward times, but it in this case it was the woman at the bank in Staunton working with the IRA I was inheriting for my mother. She wanted to know where to mail the check that would come from the sold-off positions. "Wait," I asked, "is there any way to not sell them now; I mean, the stock market is down." It turned out that she'd already given the order to sell the stock, so I just sighed and said I'd find the address for her. It would've been so much better had she sold the stocks back when she first started telling me about them, because that was near the top of the market, just before it started pricing in the reality of Donald Trump's insane tariffs. The hope now is that I can get back into the market before it recovers, or, better still, after it experienced further declines.
I made enough progress with my new system for encrypting the plain-text storage password that my ESP8266 system sends over http to the server. This system uses sixteen hexadecimal values to encode things that are done to respective characters in the storage password, with a provision for two operations per character. I'd come up with sixteen different operations, which include things like rotate left, rotate right, XOR with the checksum of the transmitted data steam, and even bitwise negation. Then I'd pasted the C++ code into ChatGPT and had it come up with the PHP code to undo these things to decrypt the data. ChatGPT didn't do a perfect job; for instance, it didn't figure out that it needed to reverse the order of the two separate operations performed on each character when doing the decryption. But it got things generally right and was managing to successfully decrypt a few of the encrypted characters in the storage password.
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