Olympics London 2012 Construction

I have not published a blog lately but here is a website that I have found very interesting on the construction of the various structures for the London Olympics in 2012. Their progress is coming along nicely.

The aim of these games was sustainability. The designers are reaching this aim by the use of various sustainable building practices, including the possibility that the main stadium could be disassembled and assembled elsewhere where needed. Such a re-use of a stadium of this size would be unprecedented.

You can see the progress of construction using these webcams.

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TV with IKEA Dioder

I promised I would upload some photos of my desk setup with the addition of the IKEA Dioder lights, so here they are...

Apologies about the poor quality images all I have at the moment is my phone to take photos.

Here is a video of how the IKEA Dioder lights alternate between colours. For further information on the IKEA Dioder lights check out my previous post.

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Trading Stock

I have been practice trading using my virtual portfolio on kaching.com for over a month now. When I wrote this post I was $170,000 up on my starting position of 10 million. I have invested in vast array of stocks in the past month, testing the waters.

One stock which I held on to for a significant amount of time was the AAPL stock. Unfortunately I did not end up making a profit on this stock. This was the case as I had held onto to beyond a price where it had reached all of its potential. At the end of October Apple released their yearly accounts announcing a large profit. This profit came as a result of the new Iphone - the Iphone 3GS. However at the time when I had over a $35,000 profit on my stock of AAPL the company reached probably its max valuation for that period. However unfortunately I did not realise this before the stock dropped significantly leaving me with a loss. This drop in share price was further deepened by the rumours that the touch screen laptop Apple have rumoured to have in development was severely delayed or even shelved altogether.

However in contrast to this my GOOGLE shares continue to increase in value. Currently I have a profit of $100,000 on my 3,000 shares of this company. I believe this is due to the fact that Google continue to grow and widen their market share. Currently two of their most eagerly anticipated developments - Chrome OS and Google Wave are being tested and the feedback from them is quite positive. Whether or not these applications will be a success is not clear but it certainly allows for hope for the future of Google and their continued growth.

Portfolio Performance Graph

The graph above shows the performance of my portfolio since I started back in October. It has been mostly positive as you can see. I avoided a large pitfall at the start and have managed to keep my head above the water. However it does appear that my portfolio is still quite volatile and sensitive to market forces (although any portfolio will be).

The other industries that my portfolio concentrates on is healthcare. I have been trying to move away from the Technology sector as I believe it to be too volatile. I have picked this industry as the best genius on kaching - Min Thang relies on this industry for all of his portfolio. I hope to learn a lot by keeping an eye on his portfolio. Of course I have nowhere near the experience he has with Healthcare shares so it will be a steep learning curve. Of course with the current talk of reform of healthcare in the US, the healthcare market could become volatile also.

Summary of the diversity of my Portfolio

Above the pie charts show the division of my portfolio into Industry, my Investment Style and the Market Cap. Also the the graphs above that show where the majority of my returns have some from.

Of course I am very much a rookie at the trading game, however the innovative kaching website is helping my learn a lot fast. I would recommend you check it out if you at interested in the ups and downs of the stock market. Or at least you can check my portfolio here.

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Wave of the Future

I have gotten an invite to Google Wave and have started my account. I have only played with it for a while and still am getting use to it. It is still rough around the edges, of course it is only a preview of the finished article so this is to be expected.

Google Wave was first introduced by Google in May 2009, where they presented for over 80 minutes on its capability, including its various possible applications - an alternative to email, Instant Messagers and even a highly interactive collaborative tool for business and research.

Certainly it has some potential, although time will tell whether it will catch on. It will require a substantial marketing campaign if Google wishes it to gain a large user base. Many at first had seen Wave as an alternative service to twitter but Google have done their best to differentiate their product from twitter. Of course Google Wave can do sooo much more than twitter. The place where I see Google Wave perhaps having the largest effect is on users of boards and forums. Wave will allow users to discuss their interests and allow greater collaboration and communication between posters unlike anything seen on current forum websites.

Google Wave is not as intuitive as I thought it would be. Requires some time to get use to and I have found it quite laggy. It also requires you to learn some new commands (well at least new to me). These commands however are simple and should not be hard to learn. There some interesting extensions which could become quite useful to communication with friends and plan various events. Currently I do not have many on Wave and so I have only really tried out the more community/forum based waves. These types of waves add a new dimension to the usefulness of boards and forums, allowing simple editing of posts and direct collaboration in the wave.

For example I have been part of a wave discussing the various Bars and restaurants available in Dublin. One of the more useful elements of this wave was that in the first post there was a map gadget which had the same interface as the usual Google Maps however one could add points of interest to the map, in this case locations of bars and restaurants that you would recommend.

Example of a wave

Other extensions which I believe will be interesting are 6rounds and Gravity. 6rounds is a webchat app available in Wave where one can connect to your friends and do various tasks including surfing the web together or play games. Gravity is a business focussed collaboration app which allows people to build a flow chart of a process at once at the same time.

To conclude I have two spare Google Wave Preview invites which I will be happy to send to anyone who leaves a comment asking for one on this post.

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Lighting with Ikea & buy stocks online

DIODER lights.

Last week I bought LED multi-colour lights (DIODER lights from IKEA - €59.00) for the back of my 32" mounted LCD TV. I wished to create the appearance of the Philips Ambilight TVs without breaking my budget. It was my first purchase from the IKEA in Dublin and I was quite pleased with the service. The store itself seems to be always full of people wandering if not buying. The store seems to be laid out in such a way that you have to walk through every single section to find anything. This means that you must zig zag through this massive store even if your looking for no more than a light bulb. I find this aspect of the store quite annoying, but I guess it has probably worked for them in numerous other countries so guess don't fix something that ain't broke.

The lights themselves are very well made and well-thought out. There are a number of different set ups which you can have. They can be set up in a row or seperately and have a number of settings, you can pick one of seven colours, set them to flash from colour to colour or to slowly merge from colour to colour which is quite atmospheric and relaxing. All in all I am very happy with these lights and are worth their price. I plan to have photos of this in my next post.

Watched an exciting if rather poor game between Man City and Burnley which ended 3-3 over the weekend. Burnley well-deserved their draw against an opponent who appeared at times to want to be in a cosy living room rather than brave the November rain in Manchester. It seems Man City's 'Galacticos' were lacking enthusiasm and hunger however they still managed to claw back a two nil deficit. It seemed Adebayor didn't want to get his jersey dirty and was lackadaisical at best. Man city's defence, especially Lescott, was left in no man's land for Burnley's 87th minute equaliser. All in all Mark Hughes needs to instil in his side some organisation and cohesion. As a team they only play as individuals and will not enter into the top 4 without playing as more of a team.

I found the kaching website in a post on lifehacker. Kaching is "an investing talent marketplace where individuals investors can get access to the best investing talent". I have been playing with my own virtual portfolio and am currently $9,000 up at the end of this week. While this sounds impressive, I have bought well over $1.5 million in shares so it is only a 0.1% gain. But of course this is only in over a week so at least it is still a positive.

I have had a distant interest in stocks and shares but never really a great understanding of theory behind them. I hope that buying and selling virtual stock will help me to learn the basics (without losing my hard earned cash). I have been following a couple of geniuses and this seems to help me choose my stock. I haven't really decided on a strategy at the moment I am only trying to keep my virtual stocks floating. Anyone interested or studying stocks or business should consider joining this site. The Lifehacker website as mentioned above is a very useful site with some interesting posts every week.

The Kaching website is free to join and it is also possible to invest real cash in the stock market. The website has an option where you can follow 'geniuses' with your cash, buying the stocks they buy at the same time and selling them at the same time as your 'genius'. A user is made a 'genius' if they have logged a year trading on the kaching website and have an Investing IQ of at least 140 (this is calculated using a variety of business metrics). This seems an interesting and innovative idea but I would be cautious at investing similar to another user as if you were not extremely careful who you picked you could be left penniless. I understand that the minimum amount you can invest using the website is $3000 so I guess this would mean that it would attract serious investors who have probably invested heavily in the stock markets before.

Juventus had a rather tentative victory midweek in the Champions League away to Macabi Haifa. Haifa have a great ability to prevent skilful teams from playing and that is certainly what they achieved against the 'Old Lady'. Only with the help of a lucky deflection did Camoranesi manage to put the ball in the net. Juventus were also assisted by a fine performance by Buffon who had to pull off some fantastic saves to keep his clean sheet. Juventus should confirm their place in the last 16 if they beat Bayern Munich in the upcoming games, although they have a chance to overtake Bordeaux if they to beat them in France.

Juventus did up their performance against Atalanta however last night, with a commanding 5-2 victory. Camoranesi had another fine performance, scoring two goals in two minutes, and may be emerging finally as one of the leaders in the team. Mauro scored with his head, in a similar fashion to hurt-breaking goal against Ireland. While many see this as surprising I do not. Camoranesi has always been great in the air even with his diminutive stature and has a great ability to lose his marker in the box. Admittedly perhaps his size means that he is not given the defensive attention in the air that his ability deserves. It was an all round good performance with Diego and Trezeguet getting on the score sheet, Trezeguet reaching fourth in the overall all-time top scorers for Juventus.

I still feel however that they still require some additional players in the January transfer window perhaps another attacking fullback and a winger. For these positions my favoured choices would be Sagna (or even Rafinha) and Aguero although both will come at a price. Certainly Aguero will if the rumours that Chelsea are planning are bid are true. Although he did some two crackers versus Chelsea midweek. The new-comer Cacaeres, who arrived from Barcelona in the Summer, has shown potential and hopefully will continue to affirm his place in the squad. Grosso has been a solid addition also. Juventus as a team is lacking a leader in central midfield, someone who can control the pace of a game and to pull the strings, especially with Del Piero continuously injured and the retirement of Pavel Nedved.

I will also hopefully receive an invite to the Beta session of Google Wave in a couple of days.

From what I have read it seems that this may be a very interesting addition to Google's portfolio of apps. Google Wave attempts to improve on the email standard with live replies and live collaboration. It is becoming understood as the what email would look like if it had been invented today. It could in fact eventually take over from twitter. In contrast to twitter it is open source and therefore can be used by any other website or company which wants to use it, while twitter is confined to just one website.

For more information click on Google Wave.

I am also hoping to get a laptop in the near future, I am looking at the DELL Studio XPS 13. Is a lovely designed laptop and seems to have a good level of specs and of course a backlit keyboard. I am looking forward to trying Windows 7 on a high spec notebook as I currently am only running it on a notebook 5 years old. It is quite impressive that Windows 7 can work on this notebook at all, I would bet that Windows Vista would not.

I will continue my blog sometime next week. I plan to embed photos of my study area (you can see other people's here) and hopefully to update you on Google Wave.

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Structural Engineer jobs

Grand Canal Dock Theatre.

Interesting news this week as it was announced that the Grand Canal Theatre in the Dublin Docklands will open on Paddy's day next year. This development was designed by ARUP and will be a landmark in the docklands redevelopment along with the large Conference Centre on the other side of the river with its cantilevering sloping glass cylinder.

Construction of the theatre

The new Convention Centre; Dublin Docklands

The new convention centre due to its complicated front facade required an innovative construction method which included propping the steel members of the sloping cylinder, you can see how the method of construction here. The Docklands area of Dublin has had extensive development since 2000. Such as various large apartment developments, previously unseen in Ireland in this scale. Such development of this scale will probably not be seen for at least a decade to come with the economic climate is it is.

Another interesting development in the docklands was the installation of Calatrava's Samuel Beckett Cable-stay Bridge which will connect the north and south inner ring roads. It was floated to Ireland all the way from Netherlands where it was constructed. There was some difficulty in sailing it up the Liffey due to high winds but it is now in position and finishing touches are being put in place including the rotation mechanism to allow shipping traffic along the river. Calatrava is both an architect and structural engineer who was born near Valencia in Spain. He has designed a number of other bridges and very interesting structures.

Calatrava has been widely heralded as having the ability to bridge the division between architecture and structural engineering. He has continued the Spanish modernist movement and brought it into the 21st century, previously developed by Felix Candela and Gaudi. One of his most famous bridges is Puente del Alamillo in Seville has been a bone of contention for a number of structural engineers. It has been argued that this bridge is structurally inefficient. This may be a valid argument as the sloping cable-stay tower creates significant bending moment in the bridge deck. If the cable-stay tower was vertical the forces involved would be more easily resolved. The angled pylon does offer a counterbalance to the concrete bridge deck. However one cannot deny the impressive vista that the forcefully asymmetric layout of this bridge portrays.

Another of Calatrava's famous designs is the Chicago Spire in Chicago, Illinois.

Construction on this skyscraper began in 2007 but was stalled in 2008 due to the economic uncertainty. Calatrava imagined this structure as an imaginary smoke spiral and also the 'graceful' forms in a snail shell. From the top a viewer would be able to see four states. The curvature of the structure should add to the strength of the structure while minimising wind forces to which the structure will be subjected to. The structural engineer appointed to this construction was Thornton Thomasetti who had experience on the Taipei 101 and Petronas Towers.

The developer for the skyscraper was in fact Irish - Shelbourne Developments who were financed by Anglo Irish Bank. Of course this is partially why the construction is delayed as Anglo Irish bank are in severe difficulty at the moment and may well continue to be even with the passing of the NAMA bill in Ireland this week.

Of course Anglo Irish Bank announced this week that they are seeking 320 redundancies so it does not look like the construction of the spire will restart any time soon. Of course perhaps with the initiation of NAMA and also Shelbourne Development's application to the American Federation of labor a& Congress of Industrial Organisation (AFL-CIO). The AFL-CIO is interested in funding the construction of the tower as it would create thousands of construction jobs for up to 5 years injecting substantial money into the Illlinois economy.

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