Sergey Pisarenko

I like bicycles. I like riding them, I like fiddling with them. But for some reason I never consistently commuted by bicycle. 6 months ago I made a decision to commute by bicycle every single day regardless of the weather. Even if it rains or storms or snows. As it turns out adverse weather conditions are conquerable with appropriate gear. I am lucky that I have an opportunity to change clothes and take a shower upon my arrival at work. [Read More]

December’s update The R script does not work anymore! It turns out that Yahoo has disabled URL “charts.yahoo.com”. However, “icharts.finance.yahoo.com” works fine. The problem is that the URL is hard coded into quantmod package. The quick solution is to check-out latest code and build the package from source. The alternative is to wait until CRAN includes quantmod with the fix applied. Here’s how I fixed the problem: # check-out latest quantmod code using subversion $ svn checkout svn://svn. [Read More]

On one of the last weekends of December me and my wife went to a weekend trip to Leukerbad to enjoy the hot springs and do a little snowshoe tour around a mountain lake Daubensee.

Leaving from train station in Zurich:

Arriving at the hotel in Leukerbad:

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Christmas and New Year’s Eve evoke mass hysteria to reflect and to resolve to change unlike any other time of the year. People write down goals for themselves, think about their purpose in life. Planning and goal setting are praised important even outside of the festivities. I believe it’s mostly harmless but also pointless. I look back to the moment I first embraced the Western custom of goal setting and I don’t have much to show for it. [Read More]

The weather on weekends has been excellent lately. On December 8th me and my friend John went for a snowshoe hike close to Braunwald.

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I have added a couple of sites and online magazines to my subscription list. Check out the News sources page for the full updated list:

• Aeon magazine - Aeon Magazine is an online magazine about nature, culture and ideas.

• Aeon film - Aeon Film screens contemporary and classic short documentaries, exploring the intersections between nature, culture and ideas.

• Habrahabr - (Russian) an online tech-oriented community/aggregator. Most of the articles are written from scratch, rather than republished. I had to spend considerable amount of time unsubscribing from different channels to bring volume down to a manageable level. But apart from that inconvenince there is lots of interesting material that is not published anywhere else.

• Digital Photography School - regular tips and guides on digital photography. I like the amount of published material. Frequent enough to be intersting to follow but not as much to become overwhelming.

Novembers’s update** As of **“2013-11-30” VBK VBR VTV 16.93042 16.68999 14.38888 Last month’s VEA’s position has been taken by VTV. We avoid investing if price is below 10 month SMA. Running through 10-month SMA check we get: VBK VBR VTV TRUE TRUE TRUE This means portfolio should be fully invested in VBK, VBR, VTV. As of **“2013-11-30” symbol 1 3 6 12 avg VBK 2.3614663 11.351201 15.5519199 38.4571033 16.93042264 VBR 2. [Read More]