Slope of Hope Blog Posts

This is the heart and soul of the web site. Here we have literally tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. You can also click on any category icon to see posts tagged with that particular category.

My Own Private Bubble

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As a young man, I bought my house for the same reasons most people do: I was married and wanted to raise a family there. I wanted a nice big yard so I could have dogs. I wanted room to expand. I wanted to live in a safe, quiet neighborhood. So, in 1991, I was able to do all those things. It was a stretch, but we bought a small, run-down home on a large lot in a nice neighborhood in Palo Alto.

I didn’t buy it to make money. I didn’t buy it as a speculative investment. I just wanted a place to live. And yet……….

(more…)

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I Made Gilbert Laugh

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As I mentioned off-handedly a few days ago, I was listening (as I always do) to Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast, and I just about ran off the road when I heard them mention my name. See, I had whipped up a simple drinking game based on their show and tweeted  it to them. It was such a throwaway, I didnt’ even save it. But they mentioned it on a preview, and yesterday when the full show was released, they spent several minutes talking and laughing about it and declared it the best tweet. So the fact I made Gilbert and Frank laugh loudly made my day.

It’s behind a paywall, so I can’t share it, but here’s what I saw this morning:

Oh, and here’s Billy Barty, just for the hell of it. Thanks, Gilly!

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The Old College Try

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Over the course of writing thousands and thousands of posts on this blog (personally, about 15,000, although Slope itself has well in excess of 20,000), I take a certain amount of liberty with the topics I choose. By no means are all my posts related to charts or trading. Sometimes I talk about personal (but not too personal) stuff. This will be one of those posts.

This is just an off-the-cuff musing about how much the process of applying to colleges has changed since I was in high school. The reason this is on my mind is that my oldest child is enter the “hot zone” spanning end-of-Junior and start-of-Senior year during which applying to schools becomes a full-time occupation. I suspect I’ll be doing other posts about this adventure as the year wears on.

To set a baseline, I’ll share my experience from when I went through this. It won’t take long, because there wasn’t much to it. There were no consultants. There were no books I read. There were no seminars or college visits or any help at all from my parents. I didn’t do any prep classes, and I received no counseling from the school at all. All I did was take the SAT test, did a desultory job of filling out a few applications……….and I got into Princeton and Brown. (more…)

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Too Obvious?

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Suspicious fellow that I am, I’m afraid of even mentioning this, since I’m afraid to “jinx” the situation. However, waking up this morning and looking at our systems monitor, I am breathing a sigh of relief that, so far, things are silky smooth on the new site. What a sharp contrast to the blow-ups and explosions yesterday (see arrows). The real test is coming in the next hour (I am typing this before the open), when big traffic hits.

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Holy Philanthropist!

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It’s starting to occur to me that I go through “phases”. I went through a Bob Ross phase and a Norm MacDonald phase. My current one is Gilbert Gottfried – – more particularly, his podcast, which (as my family can attest) I listen to morning, noon, and night. I pretty much only turn it off in order to do my tastytrade show.

I recently listened to their interview of Burt Ward, whom some of you may recall was the actor portraying Robin in the 1960s Batman series. He wrote a “tell all’ book about his experiences: (more…)

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