All Tweaked Out, Help Wanted!

By now you should be well aware that I'm not the most technically proficient human on the planet. So the following story should come as no surprise to you.

You will notice the blog has a slightly different look to it today. This is the result of me tweaking with the blog template yesterday, and after a bizarre series of miss-clicks (by me) the situation snowballed! Not to worry I have a back up of the template saved, right? Er, no. Back ups are (were) for sissies.

I've been contemplating changing the look of the blog for sometime, I just didn't know that time was yesterday! My options were to spend hours reconstructing my old template only to change it in a month or two, or to stride boldly into the unknown. So off I went.

I have managed to export all the posts, links and comments from here to the new address of the 'virtual' Castle Sidewalker which is below:

http://lukesidewalker.com

I don't know how this will workout with my followers (come on Dad, you can figure it out!), I hope it is not too much trouble and if you could bookmark the new place and come join us there that would be fantastic. If you get lost in the move, it has been a pleasure to sidewalk with you and may all your sidewalks be littered with coins...

If you make it to the new place, I'll see you there. It's not the finished article yet, due to the haste of the move, but we're getting there!


-Luke Sidewalker
-Current balance $24.28

Month End Report October '09

Days since inception: 669
Cash balance: $24.28 (all time)
Cents per day: 3.6293(since inception)
Predicted day for $1,000,000: Friday December 25th 77,446 AD

10/31/2009
$1,000,000
= 957.21 oz of Gold @ $1044.70 (as per Nymex close near month)
= 12,998.70 barrels of oil @ $76.99 (as per Nymex close Light Sweet Crude near month)
= 61,553.61 oz of Silver @ $16.246 (as per Nymex close near month)


For two months in a row now I have missed my target. By the end of this month I had hoped to be at $25. Is my declining rate of finding money due to a deteriorating real economy even in the face of better than expected GDP numbers published this week? Is coin finding seasonal in my present location? Every month end seems to throw up more questions and never any answers!

Disappointingly for the first time since records were kept the completion date for my quest to find a million dollars has actually moved away from me by 107 years since last months report. It's a bit deflating to be honest, but the journey will continue. And my currently projected completion date falls on Christmas Day!

This month saw the 100 year flood at Castle Sidewalker. I also had an article published about Black Holes at FiLife and Sidewalker Jr. almost got expelled from Pre-K for shaking down the dinner line.

There is never a dull moment around these parts! I hope next month will be better, but I will have a conservative target of $26 by the end of November.

Happy Halloween...


-Luke Sidewalker
-Current balance $24.28

Sidewalker Mailbag #8

It's Friday, so it's as good time as any to delve into the mailbag once more at Castle Sidewalker. After the flood the day before last the letters are a little damp, but still legible. This week I received a letter from Cap'n Tinkerson, for those of you not familiar with him you can find his bio by clicking this link. It is about half way down the list of miscreants!

Anyway this is what he had to say:

Lord Sidewalker,

Baltimore, the city of my residence, has introduced a new scheme for collecting charitable contributions for the homeless. They have placed a series of fake parking meters at random points on the sidewalk. (Note these parking meters are not near obvious parking spaces to avoid confusion). I assume they are recycling the old style parking meters which have been replaced by "pay and display". I recently found a coin at the base of one of these charity collection devices. I shall not share my next action, but I am curious to know what you would do on discovering coinage in a similar location?

Regards,
Cap'n Tinkerson

LS: After recovering from my initial shock - people pay for parking in Baltimore? I settled down to consider the question at hand. The mantra we live by at Castle Sidewalker is; 'Every coin has a home...in my pocket!' But as you see not every situation is created equally. There is a low probability that this coin was dropped elsewhere and rolled to the base of the charity meter, therefore one would have to pick it up and proceed to deliver the coin to its intended location within said meter.

I'm not going to ask the good Cap'n to reveal his course of action, as I know he does a lot of good work for charity, and there is no way that the coin in question found it's way into his chest full of booty.

In other news, this week I did an interview for one of my favorite blogs Red Pine Mountain. It is based on a rural outpost in Vermont, she has some lovely photographs and good posts. It is my 'virtual' escape from the concrete jungle that surrounds me. I'd like to thank the 'Mountain Woman' for the opportunity to be interviewed and the flattering lead-in she bestowed upon me. The full interview can be read by clicking here

Have a great weekend...


-Luke Sidewalker
-Current balance $24.23

Not Re-MOAT-ly Funny

Living at Castle Sidewalker definitely has its challenges. It is not the newest construction on the block, probably by a good hundred years. Over time I would like to restore it to its former glory. Among the renovations I'd like to perform would be the essential addition of a moat. No self-respecting castle can exist without a moat!

As you can imagine a project like that would take plenty of planning and plenty of money. Taking up a lot of time and cash, two things that are quite scarce in my life at the moment. Yesterday we had excessive rain in the local area, and as I looked out of the window with Sidewalker Jr. to see the run-off surrounding the Castle; we both imagined it was our moat-to-be. Then we heard the water rushing which I thought was strange because we were inside and the water was outside...wasn't it? Oh no, not the basement!

I rushed down the stairs past the cellar; still dry. Further down I went, past the dungeon; still dry but the noise of rushing water was increasing. Then I arrived at the sub-dungeon and sure enough the natural moat that was surrounding the Castle was also running right through it!

The falling leaves had blocked the storm drain and it seemed the whole neighborhoods' run-off had been diverted to my basement. I sifted through the flotsam and jetsam to see if any coins had been carried in on the flood waters, but no such luck.

Today the plumber comes to take his cut of the Sidewalker Fund...


-Luke Sidewalker
-Current balance $24.23

Heard at the Scuttlebutt

I heard a very disturbing rumor yesterday at the Castle Sidewalker scuttlebutt. I normally don't give much credit to rumors, but as you will see this one may have some legs.

The word out there is that Bank of America (BAC.N) may need some more money to stop from going belly up. It would be no great surprise to me, after their acquisition of Countrywide and then their forced ingestion of Merrill Lynch; I'm shocked they have managed to survive this long!

Previously I have commented about Bank of America's CEO Ken Lewis when he testified to Congress in the post Flaming Pantaloons in D.C. It came down to the fact that either Mr. Lewis, or Bumblin' Ben Bernanke the Federal Reserve Chairman was telling a massive whopper about the Merrill Lynch transaction. At the time it was a tough call to make, as Bumblin' Ben has a great portfolio of whoppers himself, including but not restricted to "...we have sub-prime contained" and denying the recession until we were a year into it.

It looks like Bumblin' Ben won that encounter as Ken Lewis is stepping down at the end of the year to concentrate on enriching a host of lawyers, as they try to defend him from the raft of lawsuits headed his way.

So as you can see there is no honor amongst this bunch of thieves. With their track record I can't dismiss any rumor I hear in the financial sector.

Will Bank of America be dipping their hand into my pocket once again? Hopefully not. Can I guarantee it won't happen? Definitely not!


-Luke Sidewalker
-Current balance $24.10