Raymond P. Burkholder - Things I Do

Evergreen/Gavekal publishes a regular newsletter regarding investments. In a recent newsletter, they describe the benefits of an actively management portfolio.

One key point is that a safer portfolio is one that may not catch all the highs of a bull run, nor does it catch all the lows of a bear run. And in the end, this is actually better for portfolio performance. The end appreciation of such a portfolio is actually better than one which follows the equity market directly.

From the newsletter, they suggest the following style of portfolio instruments and activities are considered

—and include when attractively valued—a variety of components, including but not limited to: specialized stock market investments (e.g., actively-managed, high-dividend, covered calls, long/short equity, actively-rebalanced, preferred stocks, etc.), specialized bond investments (e.g., actively-managed, convertible bonds, inflation-protected securities, principal-protected notes, etc.), alternative investments (e.g., master limited partnerships, royalty trusts, REITS, commodity funds/advisors, private equity, hedge funds, timber, etc.) , annuities, variable life, and others.

I would go one further step and explicitly state that obtaining these types of instruments in additional currencies may yield additional stability.

Up to this point, I've been using Adobe Premiere Pro for editing video files. But I've wanted to do some mixed animation and video for a while. Adobe After Effects can do some special effects, but after having searched around for alternate tools, Blender seems to neatly integrate video editing with animation capabilities in a more flexible manner, for a lot less money.

The positive aspect of Adobe Premiere Pro is that is seamlessly works with Panasonic's P2 originated files. Blender, on the other hand, almost handles things, but not quite. I was surprised that Blender with directly work with the DVCPRO MXF video files. No problems there.

On the other hand, Blender doesn't recognize the MXF wrapped audio files. Since Blender already knows how to deal wit the MXF wrapper on the video side of things, I wonder how much work would be required to make it familiar with the MXF audio file wrapper.

In case there is extra decoding work, I came across an open source utility for dealing with MXF metadata: Advanced Authoring Format. This library may be of use for decoding MXF metadata.

But since I don't have time to look into it directly, I needed an alternate work around. As I work on Windows, I think there are various Windows utilities around for dealing with the issue from a GUI perspective. But changing into directories, clicking on files, choosing conversion methods, and making the conversion seems to be too much like work. I like command line stuff.

The program FFmpeg fits the bill quite nicely. But it needs to be wrapped up in a batch job in order to process a bunch of files automatically. I could try something in Windows PowerTools, but since I have a Linux background, I have cygwin installed on my computer. It provides a wide variety of linux tools and allows them to be run in a Windows environment.

The first of the following two lines: 1) lists one file per line, 2) pipes the list to awk, which 3) formats a command with ffmpeg to convert the .mxf audio file to a .wav file, and 4) outputs to a command file. The second line then executes the command.

ls -1 | awk '{print "ffmpeg -i " $1 " " $1".wav" }' > file.sh
sh file.sh

ffmpeg needs to be somewhere in the path for this to work. Running the command effectively doubles the amount of space required for keeping the audio files available.

The .wav file can now be loaded into Blender for use along side the video file.

Blender caught my eye the other day when performing research on how to handle camera tracking for adding special effects to video presentations. Before performing this level of siophistication, I first needed to learn about the animation aspects.

A friend was telling me about some significant psychic talismans, one of which is the Merkaba. Looking a little further into it, Ka Gold Jewelry has this to say:

The Merkaba with Prana Sphere ... represents the energetic field that surrounds the human body while activating the Merkaba. The sphere represents the female and the straight lines of the Merkaba represent the male. Combined together, the Merkaba inside the sphere represents a perfect balance.

The Merkaba assists us in our spiritual growth and connects us to our higher self. It enables us to feel unconditional love, thus healing ourselves as well as others. The Merkaba gives us the possibility of creating any kind of harmonious reality we desire.

Another jewelry site representing the Merkaba is Cosmic Jewels. They say our life force (Prana) was significantly reduced 13,000 years ago, approximately when the poles of the earth reversed. They say that training can help recover some of the sensitivities and mental abilities lost during that period.

The Merkaba is a nice simple symbol to render as a first time attempt. I used an internal light source to represent the inner spirit channeling the Prana energy: