Americana Dawn: (Old) Official Soundtrack

The old Americana Dawn soundtrack used in the RPGMaker/C++ engine era has now been recently released on Soundcloud, with commentary and the cover art for each of the songs from screenshots spanning between the two eras (including songs that didn't make it between the transition). However, what's more interesting is the backstory regarding the release of these tracks.

The soundtrack descriptions might reveal spoilers and important plot points about the game, though it may not be relevant anymore considering the fact that AD may be headed into a new direction. Notably, this includes Cadence; despite her appearing in various pieces of concept art in 2013, her character bio included in the soundtrack was never publicly released.

It is worth noting that as the result of this music no longer being used in the game, none of the original assets as seen in the original (2012) Kickstarter trailer will be part of the final product.

None of the official game pages have made mention of this album release.

Robinhood CLI

Five seconds to a buy order

Links: Download (build Aug 25, 2016) - Source Code

Robinhood CLI (rh-cli) - a simple (unofficial) Windows command line client for Robinhood that no one asked for.

Despite being command line, it's more focused on usability than automated trading, and attempts to reduce the time to place a trade to that of other trading platforms, helping to avoid possible price fluctuations in between.

I mainly use this project as a means to get myself into C# programming (making something that works and is something people will use irl) and to learn the more advanced aspects of that language (such as asynchronous programming and parsing json files), but it might be useful to a number of people.

I intend to add features to this program for at least several more months while I'm still looking around for a full-time software development job; feel free to point out any changes made in the backend that prevents this program from working, or any corner cases that I didn't check (such as whether rh positions with > 150 stocks owned will fail to load (either partially or at all), because URI length > 8k ).

Features

This program adds a number of things not seen (afaik) in any other unofficial RH implementation. This list will be added to as time goes on.

• Increased Realtime Quote Speed - Increased the update time to once per second (this is slightly faster than the update speed on Google Finance), particularly since battery drain is not a real issue on a PC. This is around 5x the speed which Robinhood updates. There might be rate limits, but so far I haven't hit any of them. (If you have a lot of stocks up at one time then updates are slower)
• Margin Buying Power - Displays how much actual buying power you have in your account in an Instant account. In Robinhood Gold accounts, this also factors in extra buying power based on the tier you have subscribed to, although you will be informed if you cannot use all of it when buying that stock. (A number of assumptions were made on how margin is implemented, so this value may be inaccurate)
• Maintenance Margin / Initial Margin - Gives you information on how big of a position you can open when extra buying power from RH Gold is considered. (We assume that "extra buying power" represents additional funds handed to you by RH, and are subject to margin requirements). If either of these percents are above 50%, you might not be able to utilize all of your extra buying power on that stock. The official app will adjust your buying power accordingly but will not give you exact margin requirements.
• Intraday Buying Power (Day Trading Buying Power) - Determines how much you can trade during the day. It's based off of 4x excess margin, so accounts comprised of blue-chip stocks (example) will have substantially higher buying power than those who are mainly holding low-priced and/or volatile stocks (example). On non-PDT accounts, you may start getting High Volatility warnings once you go negative; you will receive a Day Trading Margin Call if you are flagged as a PDT. Buying leveraged ETFs will reduce this faster, so your intraday buying power will be adjusted accordingly. (The app will limit your buying power to prevent this, and does not make any mention of DTBP at all, except in Disclosures.)
• Max Buy/Sell: Tells you how much of that stock you can buy right now given your buying power, as well as how many shares you have currently and in open orders. (If the price does move past 5% between when you entered the command market orders may not fill). Currently this does not factor the max amount when you place a limit buy order, so be warned if you are planning to spend to the last penny.
• Stock Split Indicator - If your shares vanished (or were adjusted) because of a reverse stock split, didn't see a notification regarding this (or never got them), and it happened within the last two weeks or so, you will know now. (If you don't have enough shares to meet the reverse split ratio, they are usually converted to cash.) You will also be informed if the opposite holds true.
• Fees Paid if Applicable - If you are charged a fee when the order is filled, it will inform you. The commission might be zero but the regulatory fees aren't. This fee is more noticeable when selling tens of thousands of dollars worth of shares at once. (FYI: For options, the cost from options regulatory fees alone bumps the total fee to 4 cents a contract, whether you are buying or selling, so make note of that when they support options trading.)
• Account / Portfolio View - You can display either basic account info and/or a list of all your stocks in your portfolio (including quantity held, equity, cost basis, current price, and profit/loss so far) If your portfolio consists of a lot of stocks it may take a while to load.
• Extended Hours Trading - Allows you to choose whether your orders will be active during normal market hours or extended hours as well. RH Gold has no setting to toggle this off, so this might be useful in some cases.
• Additional Warning Messages - Because you are using an unofficial app you may be able to get by some of the restrictions that the official RH app has set in place should those orders fill, so it is my responsibility to cover these scenarios. There is one additional warning if the limit price you are entering is substantially lower than the current price.

  Also, market sell orders executed on this program will not execute if the price would be below 75% of current price (most likely due to significant slippage), at which point you should do a limit sell instead.

Project: Unofficial Robinhood (Web) App Development

When I need more info and a substantial decrease in latency when making trades.*

The lack of non-mobile trading options on Robinhood has led to a large amount of unofficial implementations (most on Github) that allow you to trade while away from a smartphone (other than using an emulator), however a majority of them cover only basic functions to do trading (such as buy/sell stock, get quote information). Seeing an opportunity to enter into the field of web application development, I decide to join in as well, believing I can bring something new to the table.

My first open-source (and real C#) project starting my Github programming portfolio involves use of the console to assist with active trading utilizing the RH API. You still have to manually enter your orders, but it's able to enter positions faster (mainly by skipping the Trade Preview step).

This program was based on other open-sourced apps that used the API; I don't know why most of these implementations have been largely abandoned in recent times, but I guess I'm about to find out.

Github source for the above available here.

Please note: This project exists mostly as a coding portfolio piece; I only have part-time working experience but completing this might get me much closer to getting my foot into the door somewhere.

Progress:

This project is divided into four segments:

• Robinhood API docs: A forked version of an existing RH API documentation with more endpoints filled out and more focused on consistency.
• RobinhoodNET: A C# .NET API that allows easy access for most parts of the RH API.
• rh-cli: command line interface to get various quote information, buy/sell stocks, and a few other things. Stock quotes are updated once per second while placing an order.
• rh-alt: Alternate* Web Client interface (might be coded with a combination of Angular.JS, Javascript, HTML5 canvas, d3.js, and more)

Joann Fabrics Closing Sale

While in the area, I noticed a sign that Joann Fabrics was closing and that all of its items were on sale. Normally I would have at least a paragraph or two about how I went there in order to get a few supplies years ago (typically perler beads for several projects) and how they had weekly 40% off an item coupons. However... they are just relocating.

I did go in and half its shelves were empty. There's a sign at the front saying that the sale will end at the end of June, when they finish opening up the new store. They specified an address where they were moving to, which I could just simply look up.

I didn't have to. It's much closer - as in next door.

I still don't know why a sell-off is needed for moving into an adjacent building, but I'm guessing it's due to both a renovation and moving into a space half the size of the original building. (On a similar note the Wal-Mart in Lodi moves next block in July, but its new location stands to be one of the largest in the US.)

Marie Callender's - Stockton

This will be the last time I see the Marie Callender's building in Stockton (or at least what's left of it anyways) after it closed down last January.

It apparently will be replaced with Chick-fil-A over here; I have previously heard about it but never gone over there, so it might be something new to try when they open.

Krispy Kreme Superhero Day

On April 28th, Krispy Kreme has a Superhero Day promotion where you get a dozen glazed doughnuts for free if you buy a dozen on April 28th. There's a doughnut box to match, with the appearance of a comic book.

This is the first time I've actually heard about it, and there's nothing on the official website about this year's event at the time of writing, but it can be assumed to be valid since they ran this in previous years.

Red Robin Black and Bleu Burger

A true knife-and-fork burger... once you ask for them.

The Black and Bleu burger at Red Robin sounded like a good idea at the time when it came to finding something new to eat, as I've almost always gotten burgers with swiss and portabello mushrooms at restaurants and never had blue cheese on a burger before.

It's not as salty as other burgers I've been normally eating at fast food restaurants, it's much worse.

At 4,496 mg worth of sodium as is, this beats the Saltiest Burger in 2015, as well as being way more sodium that I'm willing to handle in one day, let alone one meal. I had to split the sandwich into two parts as a result. Note that the sodium count does not include those from the endless fries.

Remind me to order this burger without the sea salt and pepper, as it effectively cuts the sodium down by more than half, and there's a supply of that on the table to season it to taste.