Mascarpone meat balls

The nice thing about using a bicycle is that it is easier to part in the city compared to a scooter and I've been visiting the nicer grocery stores which are a little ways off from where I live to pick up some better (and cheaper!) ingredients for cooking.

I found a great recipe for meatballs using ricotta cheese. Unfortunately I couldn't find ricotta cheese and substituted it for marscapone cheese instead. The recipe calls for ground beef, parsley (and plenty of it), diced and slightly fried onions with garlic, bread crumbs, an egg and salt and pepper to taste.


The meat balls made at first doesn't look like the most appetizing thing in the world as they look very gooey at first, however the point of the cheese is to keep the meatballs damp and moist after cooking. I can tell you that the cheese did an excellent job of doing that.

After frying the meat balls in olive oil and soaking out the oil with tissue paper, I dumped in 2 chopped tomatoes and added a little tomato sauce for some extra kick which led to the following.


Now those look like great meatballs. The cooking process took about 20~30 minutes and good care is required when flipping these meat balls at first as they seemed a little easy to break. But after being cooked through thoroughly, they hold together quite nicely. After that, I just had to put them over some spaghetti and I was good for dinner.


The image was a little blurry since I was more interested in eating dinner than taking photos. But those were the most juicy meatballs I've ever had. Something I'll make time to do again.

My new cross bike

It's winter and in an effort to get into more shape, I've decided to buy a new bicycle --> a cross bike, which is a hybrid between a road bike and a mountain bike. The easiest way to describe the bike is a road bike (the ones with really thin wheels) with slightly thicker wheels.

I did some shopping around at various stores near by where lived and most of these bikes go for about $500~$700 for a cheap cross bike, but with the advent of the internet, I managed to find one going for about $400 which was a good deal in my books.

The bike I bought is a 11.5 kg, 24 speed, aluminum body cross bike. The thing arrived last month and I am loving the things to bits. The last time I had a bike with any sort of real gearing was when I was in Canada and I am quite certain that the old bike I had was easily in the 20 kg range. The bike I got looks like this:

The new cross bike

This puts out an incredible amount of speed with barely any input in pedaling power. I estimate that I can easily go 30 km/h and pushing it a little, up to about 40 km/h. I am certain that I am a thorn in most driver's sides as I am a pain in the rear to pass in single lane streets-- just going fast enough that it takes more than a few second window to pass me that it's find to find that opening in the on coming lane. As much as I might be a pain for the drivers, I really enjoy riding this bike.

I really never was that interested in long distance cycling before but after taking this bike out for a spin after work and on sunny weekends, I can easily see my self going on 30 km+ adventures. It is much easier to make the decision to stop somewhere and check things out on a bike than compared to driving in a car or riding my scooter; a car being big to park on the side of the road and a scooter goes fast enough making it hard to make the spit second decision to stop somewhere (I usually end up doubling back if I see something interesting). Riding a bike around town is great for photo shoot adventures and below are just a few shots of what I've taken on a ride I did in early February:

A bridge under construction

A rice field after harvest

Though I've have a scooter, this bike gives me new reason to go out exploring again and I am having a great time doing it. My next long ride will be down to Kamakura, which is a wonderful stretch of beach about 15 km from where I live. Plenty of things to see and eat there so I'll be looking forward to touring around during the next sunny weekend. If that goes well, I am looking to trying a weekend tour where I'll push about 150~200 km to go from where I live to Tokyo and then come back home.

For long tours, I am tempted at buying a GPS and playing around with geo-tagging photos, where my photos are automatically tagged to where they were taken. It would be awesome to keep track of all the interesting places I've visited. My friends have recommend that I get an iPhone since it had a built in GPS. It's a very tempting proposition and the costs in Japan are fairly good. Many people use the iPhone for data only and pay about $25/month for it so it's something I'll have to look into.

The goal is to slim down and remove some excess fat for the summer, we'll see how this goes!

More writing in a bit...

Bought a new cross bike recently and have been riding it to bits lately.

Been quite an active weekend and will have photos up in a bit. It's hard finding time to relax, write, go out and do things and juggle work all at the same time.

I read in a book once, that once you start working, life becomes a process of making sacrifices. As much as I hate the thought of it, it seems kind of true.

Visualizing the Stock Market

I've finally gotten the stock market analysis program up to a point where I can start plotting data again. There has been some issues with robustness of the program vs the data I am using so I've had to lots of debugging and internal checks to get the code base where it is now. I am confident for the time being that I should be able to start ramping up on writing code to analyze general stock market data to understand the stock market better.

This project has been nearly 2~3 years since starting as a pet project while I was in university. The code base was originally developed in Matlab, but had many limitations when it came to running parallel processes and speed issues. After nearly 3~4 rewrites of the code base, I have finally settled down on the data structures and how to interact with the data. There is a saying when it comes to programming in that you should be prepared to throw out the first few versions of your software.

The program I am developing at the moment is mostly educational, to help me look at the stock market in different ways compared to what is presented at most financial webpages. Looking at the stock market through the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial index gives a very limited look at the entire stock market and there is a lot of information lost when everything is averaged together. Why look at only 100 to 500 stocks when you can look at nearly 3400 all at once to have an idea of what is going on?

Though I have been participating in the stock market in the last 4~5 years, I never did feel that I understood the big picture of the stock market. The most basic question that I desire to understand is to find out the "right price" for a share in some company. I have read a few investment books and most of them give the general idea that companies with good growing net incomes, low debt and risk factors are good companies to invest in. I generally would have to agree, but what price would you pay for a share in that company? If the share was $20 would you buy it? What about if it was $50 instead? Would it still be a good buy?

The problem with the stock market is that there is no canonical analysis technique to determine the price of a stock. Canonical, being a procedural method when applied by any person result in the same answer. Thus there is no way to say "because condition A therefore the result is B." At best, we may only make predictions, in other words "because condition A result is probably B." Because of this mode of thought, I believe that it is helpful to take a statistical approach to looking at the stock market (though I am against technical trading). In this endeavor, it is necessary to look collect and analyze larger amounts of data an apply decision making strategies and determine how often you are "right" (where being "right is still ill defined at the moment...)

The first few phases of this project has finally been completed, where I have been finally able to get stock market data and plot them for the majority of the listed companies. I've made one plot, which is a Share Price vs EPS plot. One would generally expect that the share price is somewhat correlated to the EPS, which is something we see here with a very wide band going upwards and towards the right in this plot.

Share Price vs EPS

What we also notice from this plot is that there is a large scattering of points to the left side of the graph and with few points scattered to the right. Points to the far left represent stocks that are probably over valued and points to the right are stocks that are possibly undervalued. From what we see in the plot here is that there are many companies out there with a very negative EPS but still high stock price. What has yet to be determined is if the market is expecting those stocks to recover or if those stocks are truly over priced.