Week Cal, My DateBk Replacement on the iOS

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With the recent Week Cal update allowing rolling events to be flexible (i.e., I can set it to roll for 1 day, 2 day, 1 week, 1 month, etc), I am compelled to mention the iOS calendar app Week Cal.

In my Palm Pilot PDA days - I love the calendar DateBk. But after my Palm Tungsten T5 suffers from drop too many drop, I ended up getting an iPod touch and were abhorred with the crappy program that is Calendar. Perhaps crappy is too strong a word - it is just that the default calendar program is exactly what the program name suggested - a calendar. The screen real estate is poorly utilized, and there is a severe lack of features.

After googling on and off for about a month, I was thankful to find this Lifehacker article (here). And for the better, I am happy to have settled with Week Cal by chance.

For those that used DateBk, I love the conditional formatting, templates, and floating events. I use the conditional formatting to mark important or timed appointments (which is useful because I put a lot of other information on the calendar in additional to just appointment. The conditional formatting allows me the highlight the actual appointments. I use floating events also because of the various other information I put on my calendar - so that I do not have to manually roll these events for each day. For those unfamiliar, the rolling event is an option that you can set to have events automatically "float" or "roll" to the following day. Even I first started using Week Cal, they already have the first two features. With the past two updates, the rolling event function is added, making it close to everything I need.

How to Connect to Remote Server using Remote Desktop Connection and Share Local Work Files

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Before setting up the Remote Desktop Connection options - if you work on multiple computers, you sometimes find that you have to change the file paths in your code because the document folder tends to be different for different versions of Windows. Or, your file is on a USB drive and different computer maps your drive to different letters. Remap the location of your work files to a drive letter allow you to always reference your files to a specific location. To do so, follow these steps:

A. Start a command prompt by clicking the “Start” button and then select “Run”, then enter cmd and click “Ok”.

B. In the command prompt, use the subst command as described in the figure below. In this case, I map my project files (Treasury Supply) folder to the m: drive. The last line in the figure will map the directory l:\moreWorkFiles to the n: drive.

To setup the Remote Desktop Connection option so you can access your files, follow these steps:

1. Start the program (the pictures are clipped from Windows XP, but the program is also installed by default on Windows Vista and on Windows 7)

2. Click "Options" in the Remote Desktop Connection dialog box

3. Select the “Local Resources” tab, then click “More…” under the “Local Resources” tab

4. Expand “Drives”

5. Select the drive you want to access on the remote computer (I created the M: drive using the subst command), then click “Ok”

6. Select the “General” tab to enter your computer and logon information, then click “Connect”

7. Profit! (I.e., done.)

Floating Rate Notes

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Felix Salmon on the Treasury Department's plan on the Floating Rate Notes:  Why Would Treasury Want To Issue Floaters? (Link here) One point he makes in the article about the potential reference rate:

Continuing in the mode of offering self-serving advice that would be bad for Treasury, the TBAC recommended that Treasury use the new GCF index as the reference rate for FRNs. This would put Treasury in a position of taking on private credit risk, since, if we had a 2008-style meltdown and general collateral (rates) widened out due to counterparty risk, Treasury's FRN borrowing costs would soar.

The data on the GCF index can be downloaded (here), but I find it interesting that the DTCC (Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation) only publish the data for the past year, even though the data does go back a little further than that and the amount of data is sufficiently small that it is hardly a computing resource drain.

Plotting what is available, here is the Repo Index with the corresponding Par value used to average out the index:

In addition to the potential counter-party risk that Felix mentioned, the figure below shows how the repo index is more volatile than the constant maturity rate that the Treasury Department calculates every day (Felix also make this point in his article). The constant maturity yield is also a potential for use as a reference rate, though the concern here is that there’s a potential conflict of interest if the Treasury use a reference rate that itself calculates. One way to alleviate that is to make the methodology of calculation the constant maturity public info. The calculation is currently not clearly specified by the Department.)

 

I wonder given the relative volatility, would the use of the repo index deter some market participant from buying the instrument.

Reference: DTCC GCF Repo Index [DTCC],
  Daily Treasury Yield Curve Rates [Treasury Department],
  Why Would Treasury Want To Issue Floaters? [Seeking Alpha]

News to Me: The Thai Chipotle

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The information is dated September 2011, but is news to me nonetheless: Chipotle founder tries new Asian format with ShopHouse. The website is (here), and it lists only one location in Washington DC. I wonder if the company feels that the concept still has not been sufficiently tweaked to warrant expansion. From the article date, the restaurant would have been opened for about a year now.

I was in DC a year ago (and sadly, did not know about the place at the time). However, there are other places that are Chipotle-like for other types of food. Roti in particular comes to mind (website here).

A random statistic: as of August 6, 2012, the ShopHouse has 1,427 likes on Facebook, versus 1,850,393 likes for Chipotle. That is a multiple of 1,297. According to Wikipedia (reference here), there are 1,316 locations for Chipotle. The popularity of the ShopHouse as measured by Facebook likes, accounting for the number of locations (somewhat), seems comparable to Chipotle.

RSS to Email

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I was considering merging my information streams from email and RSS feed (via Google Reader) into just email. One way to do this is to have RSS updates be sent to my email inbox directly. After some googling, the one service I like is feedmyinbox [http://www.feedmyinbox.com/]. They allow users to have RSS feed updates for each email address. Paid accounts have this limit removed and enjoy some other benefits like real-time notifications.

After some testing, I decided to stay with having email as well as RSS feed. With Google reader and services like Full Text RSS Feed Builder [http://fulltextrssfeed.com/], I am able to read the complete article from within Google reader. Furthermore, I often save articles with Pocket [http://getpocket.com/] to read articles offline on my iPod Touch. The latter benefits outweigh the benefit of having everything in my email inbox.