We had 2 snow days right out of the gate this month, once because it was extremely cold (1/16 Tuesday), another time it was due to the freezing rain and black ice on the road. Basically the road become a skating rink (1/22 Monday).
The green firetruck hit the blue car (nobody inside), barely missed the house, fortunately no one got hurt
Both my kids loved snow days. In the process I also learned the typical Americans’ ritual to get snow days: such as “Wear your pajamas inside out.” On serious note, black ice (ice on the concrete or asphalt) is dangerous both for the cars and the pedestrians. I have 1st hand experience on both. Once my minivan was spinning like the firetruck above at the Briarcliff club house parking lot. Another couple times I was walking like a duck crossing the Olive road, or walking near Olive and Spoede road.
School buses and the drivers for school buses would encounter the same issue. And the teachers and staff too. Plus the parents (guardians) drive or walk kids to school. This is a no win situation in terms of going to school. And we can always learn or have school on a normal day.
School lunch
Last 2 weeks, my old daughter got hurt during tennis clinics (group class). And I sent her to places to make sure she is okay. Once I bought her Chick fil a on the way back from provider to school around lunch time. She liked that. I think the school lunch is probably not as good or flavorful as the chick fil a sandwich.
My younger daughter does bring lunch to school on Fridays. So yesterday morning at the bus stop, right before the bus coming, she said: I forgot to bring the lunch. I said: I can either do carpool to drop you off, or I can drop you off at the next bus stop that your friends will also be there. We did the latter.
(Original) Some people may know I worked at CAD industry for a while: I actually explained a bit here (search for “my 1st employer”).
I heard about Bentley Systems many years ago, but until fairly recently, to be precise in year 2020, it came to public market. Here is their IPO prospectus filed in Sept 22, 2020. In last year or so, I traded and still own some of their stocks $BSY (note this class of stocks has less voting power compared to the Bentley families, and this is quote common in tech stocks, btw. More explanation in the next paragraph). And in last few days, the stock dropped quite a bit and I added a bit more in the last few days too.
Their main competitor includes another former employer of mine: AutoDesk $ADSK. I didn’t stay at AutoDesk as long as the 1st employer of mine. Unlike AutoDesk and many medium sized software companies, Bentley has a small quarterly dividend: 5 cent per share. Note the Bentley families still has the voting power. It’s probably one of the few family controlled software companies in the world. Many software companies are public and has no controlling shareholder: with the exception of Alphabet (Google), Meta Platform, and Hashicorp $HCP etc. Founders usually have control of the company via Dual Class Stock. In a way Berkshire Hathaway has a similar structure too: A share has way more voting power than B share, and Warren Buffett and his family has the control.
It seems they just exceeded $1 b annual revenue in year 2022 (here are the link to their annual reports in recent years).
Future and risk factors
Family control. No check and balance from outside shareholders. Note this is true for many companies. The exception is usually when a stock underperforms the market for a long time, an activist shareholder may emerge, e.g. Nelson Peltz vs. Disney at this time.
Likely lower growth or even negative growth in China, both in terms of R&D and end market. This is similar to many west/US tech companies. APAC (Asia Pacific made up about 18% of the revenue, so this is still manageable).
US recession, or no growth. Possible, but software companies usually sell products in multiple years, eventually the growth will come back, even with the economy cycle.
If you just want to look at the contractor list, it’s here.
Basic Knowledge
Living in the USA usually also means driving and owning a home. And we need some knowledge about the cars and the house. Even if we live in condo or apartments – in those cases we typically don’t need to mow the lawns and in the case of apartment, the leasing or the management company usually is responsible for things such as refrigerator, HVAC (AC and furnace), cooking stove, built-in microwave, windows and doors. And sometimes carpets too: if it’s worn out. We need to know basics such as the AC is usually for summer, heat is for winter; windows usually has a screen, lock the dead bolt for the main door over the night – in the good old days, I left the keys in the door overnight a few times, with family, kids and so on, I am more careful on those type of things.
Once, the furnace at my condo had issues, as you can read from this blog post (search “minor scare”). After that I learned a bit more about how the heat is generated in our home in winter. Note there are two main energy sources for the furnace: electricity – which is the one at my old condo, and the gas – which is more common in the Single Family Homes in the area.
Single Family Home(SFH)
If one owns a home, it will need more knowledge and work. For example, the home owners are usually responsible for the trees in the front and back yard. The tree requires quite a bit of work, in addition to picking up the broken limbs, branches, the leaves and sometimes the sweet gums (or other nuts) if the tree produces lots of nuts such as acorn.
Sometimes broken tree branches hang on the tree. I think it’s best to remove them, because it could potentially fall, and hit someone or something. It actually happened to me once: the broken branch hit my roof, and caused a small damage. I knew the branch was there, and I was hoping it didn’t fall. Hoping is never a strategy, btw. Recently when this sort thing happened again, I contacted the tree company and asked them to take out the dead tree branch, in addition to trimming the branches. Trimming is a common task too, especially when the branch is approaching a electric wire, or the roof.
Sometimes, when the temperature is extremely low, such as this week, I found the garage door cannot automatically close. It seems the door needs some lubrication. I think I probably need to do some research on YouTube and do it. The door worked fine when the temperature bounced.
The Major’s Contractor List
The Google sheet view only is here. If you like to contribute or participate as an editor, please email me: minjie DOT xu AT gmail DOT com, and we can go from there. I did think about post it on GitHub, so that we can have some version history etc. But I haven’t decided it yet.
“They brought them in from other areas of the company. The new leadership team – from my director down – they all came from St. Louis, Missouri. They said they were all buddies there.”
“That entire team came down. They were from the military side. My impression was their mindset was – we are going to do it the way we want to do it. Their motto at the time was – we are in Charleston and we can do anything we want.”
“They started pressuring us to not document defects, to work outside the procedures, to allow defective material to be installed without being corrected. They started bypassing procedures and not maintaining configurement control of airplanes, not maintaining control of non conforming parts – they just wanted to get the planes pushed out the door and make the cash register ring.”
(Original) I recall the famous Warren Buffett said that investing is somewhat like investigative journalism. A lot of my day work (software development) is in some way like that. Reading other people’s code. Trying to understand and ask what and why.
The failure of Boeing 737 MAX is in someway due to “lack of curiosity” from top all the way down.
Let’s throw the baby out with the 🛀 water. I think they did okay except the MAX disaster (both literally and figuratively). Still something they can overcome as a company – but again this will take a leap of faith and we are sorta trying to bet a turnaround story. Hindsight is…
My tweet on Boeing stock today 01-16-2024: I have a small long position now
Also, came across two Cramer’s takes on Boeing, this one is recent. Another the second one was a few years ago shortly after the 2nd 737 MAX plane downed.
I started software development journey from Oct 2000 in the US (my LinkedIn profile here), for about 8 years my main focus was the C++ CAD software development, and I didn’t use much Database or SQL in my day job. I did take a graduate level database course when I was in Rolla in year 1999 or 2000.
I started to use database, SQL and Oracle PL/SQL for my day job from 2010, when I started working for a small consulting company that does work for the Union Pacific Railroad. The application I worked on uses quite a bit of Oracle PL/SQL partially because during the time of development (around 2000 to 2003), PL/SQL was the “new and hot”, and also Oracle itself was the mainstay in the enterprise application/database development platform too. Later on at Mastercard I learned the Master Reward System (or platform) used PL/SQL extensively too, as one of my colleagues put it, it’s really the heart of the system. This is also confirmed by one of the former developers’ LinkedIn profile (John McGuinness).
Lead developer and technical owner of back end of MasterCard Rewards Loyalty System.
Used C++, Korn Shell, PL/SQL, and Java in a Sun Solaris Environment.
Btw, once in 2005, I recall my “formerly IT/software engineer” mortgage broker and I had a quick talk after the closing of the house (condo to precise), and I recall he was doing VB (Visual Basic) before his mortgage career, and we tend to agree “software development using database as backend” is funner. Green is always greener at neighbor’s yard. I think it applies in the software development field as well 🙂
My own DB experiences – Working in progress as of 01-14-2024
Below are some of my observations on the relational DB in various production environments across multiple applications.
Unidev (contractor for Union Pacific Railroad): year 2010, when I 1st touched the DB, Oracle SQL and PL/SQL, C++.
Arch Coal (now Arch Resources): I used SQL server, it’s a small app in which I created both backend (C# .NET web services), and front end (iOS on iPad).
Btw, for own mobile apps, iOS apps, I used parse and google firebase (no longer active maintained).
Mercy: I used both Oracle and MySQL (we have different apps using different databases for backend).
Mastercard: Oracle (the main backbone for the MRS, see below), and Postgres (a small database for the Pay with Rewards app), this is the most substantial app I ever worked on – Mastercard reward system (MRS), Exadata: which is the high performance Oracle/Sun Sparc dedicate DB hardware. At MC I had opportunity to work on some performances issues on our SQL, both in the web application and the batch application, including promotion.
I also touched upon the Oracle Advanced Queues for the Pay with Rewards app I mentioned above. Overall I gained most of my DB exposure when I was working at MC. Before working at MC, I think I consider myself still a newbie on the DB (I was more confident on the java, and web apps dev side of things), after the MC gigs I was much more confident on both the DB as well as web admins (Site Reliability Engineering, using Google’s term).
A very subtle yet interesting observation: at MC they have teams such as software engineering (dev team), business operation (Technical/Production Support + Site Reliability Engineering), Database Engineering (DBA team) etc. At my current place we have dev team, Dev Tools team (somewhat like Dev Ops), dedicated Production Support team, and Data Management team (DBA team). Overall from my experience, only the MRS at MC has a dedicated application DBA. Most places don’t have a DBA with in-depth DB knowledge.
Enterprise Fleet Management (current employer): Oracle and Postgres (no production yet), some issues around DB (frequent locking, and concurrent DB connection exceeding alert limit, this happened at MRS too).
When the system hangs due to the exhaustion of database connections (basically DB server got overloaded), DBA’s usual workaround is killing the blocking session. In the extreme cases, they have to restart the DB server – but this could cause outage if there is no secondary DB server.
Application DBA is a DBA that has knowledge on the application database, in other words, he/she may be familiar with the data model in the database, and sometimes could provide valuable input to the performance and optimization of the database design, and database queries.
Outage
To avoid outage, we could have a primary and secondary database and database servers. Basically during normal operation, we use the primary DB server. Keep in mind the data is sync’ed (one way) from the primary to the secondary all the time (sometimes this is called data replication on Oracle). In the event, we need to take the primary DB server down, we can start up the secondary server 1st, switch the application DB connection to the secondary server, and this way we avoid an outage. When the primary DB server is available again, we can cut the application traffic back, keep in mind, when we switch back and forth, we need to make sure the data is kept up to date: for example, the case of switching back to the primary server, we need to replicate the data from secondary server to the primary server 1st. There are existing software solutions for that, e.g., Oracle GoldenGate is a popular choice for Oracle DB replication.
Web app <=> [ Primary server ] => secondary server
Some tips:
Always backup before deleting.
In addition to relational DBs, we need to be aware of object datastores (sometimes people called NoSQLs) such as MongoDB.
We can do Entity Relational (ER) model using MySQL Workbench for the WordPress MySQL DB – I think the Data Modeler role at MC (and other large organizations) may used similar tools to check the data modeling. It seems many small organizations don’t have this capability. The ER model is a very good way to introduce new developers to the system.
Reading Time: 5minutesHistory Wall at Ladue Horton Watkins High School
(Update 01-16-2024) It looks like Dr. Thompson (LMS Principal) just posted the relevant information for the 8th graders via the parent square (and her weekly Sunday email) – “LMS Weekly Memo: 1/15/24”. All 8th grader parents and guardians can see it either from the ParentSquare (web, Android app, iOS app) or via the email – look for the section titled “8th grade families”.
(Original) Cannot believe our old daughter is starting high school this fall. It seems not too long ago we sent her to the toddler’s program, the kindergarten, middle school, and now high school.
I have been to the high school quite a few times, both before pandemic and post pandemic. Before pandemic, I recall I went there for the elementary school night (the football game), and the basketball game shortly before pandemic shutdown, and post pandemic I went there more often for a bit over a year as I was the Parent District Council rep for Spoede School Association (our Spoede Elementary School PTO/PTA). Not to mention I have been to all the ‘Due Run for Education (Ladue Education Foundation) over the years since year 2017.
Curriculum night at the high school
It was good. I saw a lot of familiar faces. Due to covid/pandemic, and kids grew apart from elementary school days, I didn’t have a lot opportunities to see the familiar Spoede friends faces. I got to see the teachers and the staff at the high school too. And I stayed almost to the end, and talked to some of the teachers there.
I took some notes on the presentation. The notes are far from complete, but I think maybe helpful especially for those who could not or didn’t make it for some reason. One friend didn’t make it due to the misunderstanding of it will be held the next week (probably just glancing through one email/parent square post about the potential severe weather). I like to exchange notes with you all too 🙂
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Enjoy high school Pump the breaks – assistant principal Mike Tarpey – a kid only needs go to one college (for most kids; one can’t go to 5 or 10 Univ.) Dr. Rappof – associate principal for class of 2028 LinkCrew – a tool for transition to high school (new to me, research?) *Public speaking electives in addition to English 9 (other journalism focused course?) may be encourage my daughter take it? Social studies: at sophomore they can take AP history Encourage kids to self advocate (a slide)
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I took pictures of all the slides, and if anyone needs it let me know. Last but not least, I think the advice of “be yourself” and “advocate for yourself”.
Math: math is foundation for science and many other things. Try to get better at math. No need to be scare of it. No need to rush it either.
Science: Ladue has much more choices, in addition to the biology, chemistry and physics we had in China, Ladue has life science, biomedical science, earth science, environmental science, and so on. One thing we need to note though, is the Physics course has some pre-requisite for math.
Electives
Project Lead the Way: Project Lead The Way is an American nonprofit organization that develops STEM curriculum for use by US elementary, middle, and high schools (Wikipedia). This is the 2nd time I heard about PLTW, the 1st time I was at an LEF event.
Time is different, two different countries, and you bet the curriculum is different. But I am very proud of my education I received there. Overall I think I had a heavier workload in the middle school, compared to high school, due to special circumstances (we have a quite strict counselor in the middle school, high school counselors are more laidback). I expect the kids in the Ladue High School will have a heavier course load compared to the middle school. This is a general trend in the US, in addition to the competitive nature of many students here.
Other standout item is the money the school spent to renovate the language lab, and essentially I started my English listening comprehension training there (VoA, BBC and TOFEL?). The English teacher in high school is both nice and very good. I did mess up my Physics class to some extent: I didn’t always pay attention to the teachers, and sometimes I was doing something else. A kind of joke, once the teacher said, the grade of Physics shows someone’s IQ, it seems from there my grade started going downhill 🙂 But once I was very proud, in a less significant test (none the less, a simulation test) before the GaoKao, my Physics test got 95 or something, there were very few students got score over 60. I didn’t know why or how, but I think probably less a pressure played a role here. Or maybe my IQ was not that bad at all? 🙂
I attended a wonderful middle school (and high school) in China, in the middle of 1980s, Zhenhai Middle School. We do have 2 tracks from the 2nd year in our high school: note in China there are 3 years for high school. The two paths are: liberal arts, and STEM (文理分科 in Chinese). The “liberal arts” track students take Geography and History class, and the STEM kids take Physics, Chemistry and Biology classes, in addition to the core: Math, Chinese language, English and Political Science (there is some philosophy stuff which I think useful). Last but not least, I think the Math is slightly easier for the “liberal arts” track.
High school transitiontips: don’t work too hard or push your kids too hard, pump the breaks sometimes
I think everyone will have some transition. But the continuity plays a role: the kids went from the same middle school got an edge (same means same school district). In my case, my middle school and high school are the same. In the case of my 13 year old, it’s the same school district. She will have the same percussion teacher.
When I bought my condo back in 2005, I had two choices, one is the condo near Olive and Creve Coeur Mill road (Parkway school district). Another one is the Briarcliff Condo in the Ladue School District. I picked up the Briarcliff although it’s a bit more expensive.
The school district passed the Prop R in 2016, and finished the work in year 2018 (or 2019). This initiative and bond issue completedly changed the Ladue High School. In fact, the 1st time I was in the building for the PDC meeting at the library, I was impressed by the facility as well as by the students there (I was thinking wow, I hope my daughter will grow up like them: confident and polite).
The famous investor Charlie Munger used to say unfiltered* and he commented: every time you hear EBITA (Investopedia definition, note sometimes it’s also called EBITDA, where the D stands for depreciation), which stands for Earning before Interest, Taxation and Amortization (and depreciation), you replaced it with Bullshit earnings.
More cheats, liars and lies
I have received unsolicited calls from Timeshare, Hilton Grand Vacations to be specific. I politely declined. But those phone calls are relentless sometimes, and eventually I hand up or blocked the calls. Looking back I felt good that I did the right thing.
By the same token, I think we can do the following replacement. All creative suggestions are welcome.
我的理财理念是天上不会掉馅饼: if something is too good to be true – it’s a lie。
I do like her attitude of “solider on“: which by the way, is also another Charlie Munger life motto.
*Unfiltered: I think Warren Buffett is more diplomatic than Charlie Munger on criticizing. Warren said this many times: criticize by the category; praise by the name. I believe nobody likes to be criticized. Criticize others is much easier than blame/criticize self: e.g., I just saw this gem “The current situation with my classmates are that I am undoubtedly the only one that has morals…” from a google review (James Lai). And Bill Ackman is not too far behind here too.
Accurate? Ackman: Claudine Gay plagiarized! Gay Defenders: It’s not really plagiarism, just missing quote marks and boilerplate ideas.
BI: Ackman’s wife also plagiarized! Ackman: It’s not plagiarism, just missing quote marks and boilerplate ideas & I’ll show all of MIT does it.
So after proudly leading the charge to oust Claudine Gay over alleged plagiarism, @BillAckman finds himself defending his academic wife against the same charges. Below, I’ve compiled a short thread of examples of Ackman invoking his natural right to hypocrisy. Enjoy! 🧵 https://t.co/vZ74gSZjSN
And this made me to think two small stock positions I have and I may have talked about them in my blog posts too: LEG (Legget and Platt) and SCS (Steelcase). I just did a bit more search and reading.
(Update 01-23-2025) Recently I started attending more group exercises classes at the J. Right now I am mostly doing the Saturday morning (7:30 am) and Sunday morning (8 am) weight training classes. I feel I need those. Honestly I need a lot more. But I will do my baby steps and slowly ramp up.
(Original 01-02-2024) It’s the beginning of the year, and one common theme or joke is people sign up the gym membership in January. This is probably true. I do think we should look long term for the fitness and health. Personally I am not a believer of new year resolution, but at the same time, I do believe in milestone, and each year end/year beginning do offer suc an opportunity to review important things in our lives: families, health, savings (401k) and so on. Or better yet, we can review it periodically.
I joined JCC back in year 2012, when I was working for a coal mining company. The company has a benefit that basically they pay 3/4 of the monthly due (membership fee), and I pay 1/4. I usually go to the J Creve Coeur for swimming and showering before lunch. I didn’t work for the company for a long time though. But I kept the membership. In fall 2014, I was looking for a job, and I almost left STL, because the employer (Nordstrom) is based in Seattle, and they asked me for onsite interview. I think around that time, in that summer our younger daughter was born, and sometimes I still take our old daughter to the J, or other playgrounds that’s suitable for her (such as this one).
I recall one September morning, I went to the J outdoor pool, and I don’t remember exactly whether I brought my older daughter or not. But I felt this is a type of community I want to live. That’s one reason I stayed in STL: another reason is my wife didn’t think it’s a good idea to move at that time, with new born baby and everything. But the stress from the day job for me was real at that time. I recall I even did some research on the neighborhoods in Seattle area, and so on. But eventually I decided not go there for the onsite interview.
J is more than a Fitness Center
I understand the J is more than a fitness center. They also have summer camps (btw, here is my post on Summer Camps in the STL area), early childhood centers, youth and team sports and other arts and programs suitable for grownups, including the mature adults too. I do understand their membership fee is a bit steep: compared to others. But they also have one of the best facilities (two fitness centers, Creve Coeur and Chesterfield), and group exercise classes. They do have scholarship for families in need. And on the spot, the membership office can offer some discount (for certain employers) or promotions. I think the money is worth it if you have kids go to their summer camp, and use their facilities for exercises etc.
For about 5 years I went there for swimming etc. (2012 to 2017?): including the years I worked for the credit card company, at that time I used the Chesterfield J as well, because it’s on the way to and back from work. I recall one front desk lady knows my name and call me by first name 🙂
One thing to remind though: always lock the lockers in the locker room. Here is a real life lesson from my 13 year old. Many years ago I heard similar stories from a friend at Washington U. gym (locker room) as well. Personally I almost always lock the lockers. And in some cases I could no longer open the locker for whatever reason, I called the custodians many times at the J. Just remember don’t try to do it before an important work meeting or work tasks 🙂
LifeTime Fitness: I saw their location next to Plaza Frontenac. I heard good things about them, but I also heard their membership is more expensive than the J. So until I win the $1 m lottery, I will stay with the J.
YMCA: I visited one YMCA (at Brentwood). Note they have many centers, and my understanding is there are two tiers of membership, one allows access to all the YMCAs, and another one limiting to the certain branch.
Last but not least, some offers free trial or day pass: I think it’s a great idea to try out.
Frontenac: I just noticed the Woodsmill club joined them. Many years ago (2006 to be exact), on some Friday evenings, I go there with friends, and they have a deal ($5 or $8, not a lot of money anyway), and they have pizzas and the indoor tennis court. I think the reason why Woodsmill joined the Frontenac club is probably economical. I heard in the last 5, 6 years the tennis playing population dropped and at the same time the Pickleball is getting hot. I saw some efforts in some clubs converting the tennis court to pickleball court, in addition to opening of standalone (or commerical) places such as Chicken N Pickle and Paddle and Pickle Olivette.
Or no exercise at all
This seems worked at least for one famous person: the great investor Charlie Munger, as I heard from him on YouTube video, that he rarely exercises. But on the other hand though, I do believe he went to great length to avoid unnecessary risks, including in his older years avoiding fall at all cost. Personally I think this is rare. Note Warren Buffett, who is about 7 years younger than Charlie Munger, did have personal training in his 70s and 80s. I don’t know how he does now: Warren is about 93 years old.
Last but not least: this is something I have been thinking about for a while. I think everyone is different, ultimately it’s up to us to take care of ourselves in terms of health. We cannot depend on our partners or our kids. Also, we need to listen to our bodies and nowadays smart watches such as Apple Watch has a lot of useful feature to keep track of things including fitness.
Indoor play spaces
(stlmag) St. Louis escape rooms, bowling alleys, arcades, play spaces, and more that kids will love
