Dawn of the Geeks

Stocks!?! is a simple portfolio management tool I use to keep track of all my real investments and fantasy investments. You can create an account for free and have as many portfolios as you want. Stock prices for all stocks are updated daily after the markets close while stocks that portfolios are tracking are updated about every 15 minutes. Yahoo’s financial tools are used to collect stock information.

There was a slight glitch in the overall gain/loss percentage calculated for the stocks. That’s fixed. It now accurately shows how much you have gained or lost percentage wise based on the amount of cash that has been put into your account. There’s a second percentage that takes into account fees and earned interest as well. This way you can see how well your stocks are doing and how much damage fees are doing.

Commission fees are included in the loss/gain calculation per stock symbol. Commission is considered added cost to buying a stock. Fees are the cost of having the account. Some types of accounts charge periodic fees. Others charge per trade commissions. Some charge both.

When I first started creating the stock portfolio site I thought it’d be simple stuff. Turns out that it’s rather complicated. There’s a lot of math involved and organizing the database properly is necessary to make sure the math comes out right. But it works great and I use it.

The Dawn of the Geeks Forum is now up and running. The registration rules are lax. There is no account verification email. As long as you remember the username and password you can log in even if the email address you supplied is bogus. There is no moderation.

I want to see what the state of the forum will be in 6 months. It’d be interesting to see what kind of content finds its way into the forum.

CNN is reporting that Hollywood is helping to foot the $1 Billion bill to convert a lot more movie screens to digital so they can play 3D movies. 3D movies reportedly do better in the box office than 2D movies and that shouldn’t be much of a surprise. 3D is something you can’t get at home. Theaters used to provide a unique experience, not just the ability to see something first. But now people would rather spend the money renting or buying the DVD and watching a movie at home than spend $20-40 to go see a movie in the theater. What the theater provides is not unique enough to justify the expense.

If you want to see a movie in 3D, you have no choice but to spend the money to go to the theater and it is worth the expense as long as the movie itself is good. With a lot of movies being computer animated in 3D it’s trivial to render the movie to be able to be viewed in 3D on the big screen. Recording the movie digitally to begin with also makes it easier to have two cameras rolling at the same time to be used for 3D viewing.

In the 1900’s it was a gimmick. In the 2000’s it looks like it’s going to be very common and more than a gimmick. With polarized glasses instead of red/blue glasses the effect is much better. Technology just makes it an all around a better experience than decades ago.