HAL!

Within the time it took my mind to register something was amiss I felt that queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach I usually experience a time or two as a boat pitches from a turbulent sea. Prior to this I was, not unlike usual, searching for something during a time when I shouldn't have been and I was conscious of my thoughts and reminded myself, “Didn't I just say I wouldn't distract myself?” The impulse gripped me however which I at least found entertaining for a moment because it highlighted exactly what I was addressing, only this time I was aware of the act itself and not letting it go without acknowledging. As I was admonishing myself for this modes transgression I saw the Java splash screen and thought, “This can't be good.”

As if that wasn't enough of a sign, my browser crashing and the dozens of pop up alerts layered like pancakes followed by an alert that my drive was malfunctioning and informing me to click “Yes” if I wanted to fix this heightened the sinking feeling. I thought against that and did a quick scan which alerted me to 4 trojans which I quarantined and restarted. I was thinking I was in the clear as I rebooted but that feeling didn't last long as everything came to a screeching halt when the screen went black and a cursor began blinking in the upper left corner.

After another reboot and letting some minutes pass I knew I was screwed on this and it was simply a matter of dealing with it. As I dual boot on my Mac Book, I booted up OS X and took the time to do a complete system back up before opening up the patient hoping the guts wouldn't spill out. This took over 4 hours, but at least I managed to back up all documentation on both partitions. After this I spent an hour researching the problem and came across a number of solutions that I proceeded to move through one by one with each step getting closer to the least desired result, completely hosing the partition and reinstalling everything.

As hour after hour passed and the sun set I became increasingly frustrated and more despondent. I managed to resolve the blinking cursor, only to encounter another stumbling block- “missing or corrupted hal.dll.” In researching this I found out it is a common problem with dual boot Macs so I figured with 100s of hits there should be a one size fits all problem. Yes and No. There were a few solutions but most did involve a complete partition reformatting. After spending more time not succeeding at this and questioning how much more effort I wanted to put into this I finally decided to wipe and start over.

The irony does not escape me that Hal would have something to do with this. Nor does the irony escape me that what I was focused upon for the past two weeks manifest itself in a computer malfunction, after all this is something I know much better about and yet... I still don't do anything about it. I know periodic back ups and I know up to date virus protection and the periodic disk management and hard ware diagnostics are important but I continually opt to be neglectful of this. This isn't even the fourth time something like this has happened to me- for whatever reason having MBRs swiped, hard drives click to death, mother boards fry, and the occasional complete system collapse, I obviously haven't found these negative events significant enough to apply best practices.

The serendipity of this system crash carried weighted significance this time because it uncannily coincided during a period where I was documenting and researching exactly this phenomena –the gap between knowing and doing. I was in the process of starting a series about what I have come to understand about this disconnect inspired from going through my trading journals and coming across a post that I found disheartening. It was my second journal post and I felt the knife twist in my belly as I recognized it was virtually the same post from a week previous.

Things worsened as I noted this crept up time again through my post and I documented a consistent theme, tone, verbiage, and insight that permeated this body of work until I felt like I was in Borges' “Library of Babel.” The sheer repetition page after page after page had gone unaware for so long I felt like staring at a spring leaf wondering if I'd notice the moment of discoloration the fall brings. Also, it wasn't like I was unaware of this, there were plenty of post where I noted my previous notes and that this was beginning to be a narration of neurosis but even that was not enough to make a behavioral change.

Making behavioral changes has become the theme I've committed to over the past few weeks, absorbing as much modern research as possible and documenting points that are significant to me. Having gone through my past journals and trades I've come to a realization that I don't know what I am doing correctly, but what I am doing erroneously is a clear as Bart Simpson and a chalk board.

“If I knew then what I know now I would have...” What would I do? Now is my opportunity, an opportunity to start with that blank slate and choose what is important for me to rebuild. The confines of my habits have been broken. I can no longer boot up and move from A through Z before I even realize I've done just that. The dozens of TC2000 V7 scans I have and don't even know why any more but found myself attached to regardless because one day they might prove useful –gone. All the book marks I'd cycle through on my browser and I didn't know why –gone.

What at first started off as a soul crush morphed into a lightness. Yeah, it's a pain in the ass rebuilding, but now it's a clean install and a fresh environment devoid of habituation. OK, it's not like I've lost all my scans and book marks, they are backed up after all, but it's an opportunity to simplify and rebuild my user space around a behavioral change of intention and action. I've become accustomed to a process flow that was counter-productive and was beginning to make key changes to my process loop, this simply expedited the situation by force.

A number of my past post have been about market breadth and I've been looking for a new topic to approach and this seems like the time to do such. It's my plan over the upcoming weeks to begin a series of post relating to topics involving modern neuroscience and the light it sheds upon trading and in turn shed light and increase awareness of my own knowledge about a subject that I've come to realize effects me much greater than I originally believed.