Byrne's Eye View

I'm your host, Byrne Hobart. I've been writing various sorts of blogs in all kinds of random places for the last three years, and I've been thinking vaguely bloggy thoughts for even longer. I thought I'd finally get myself a domain name and a serious¹ blogging platform, and really get down to business. So that's what I'm doing.

A few useful facts about the author

• I bought my first stock when I was 11. It's moved sideways since. I bought my next stock when I was 13; I paid $9.98 per share, and sold at $10.30. It's up a little less than 900% since then.
• I read constantly, usually three or four books at a time. I also read (and love) The New Yorker and The Economist. Obsessive reading is actually a bit of a distraction for me. I remove the labels from shampoo, vitamins, aspirin bottles, etc., so I don't waste valuable seconds re-re-rereading the ingredients.
• I'm pretty picky about which computers I use. I run OS X and Emacs, for basically the same reasons: They both have the kind of learning curve that lets me do what I need to do without the interface getting in the way, but they both let me really dive in and figure out 1) How things work, and 2) How they could work better. Quicksilver is a pretty essential OS X tool; hard to describe exactly, but you'll miss it if you ever stop using it. Other than that, I dabble -- Opera, Safari, and Firefox have their merits as browsers (in order: Speed, OS integration, versatility), and I don't spend enough time doing other stuff to really care.

About the Blogs

I've been writing a finance/economics/stock market blog for a few years, but after a while I noticed that I was writing two blogs: One was an Instapundit-style list of links and comments -- basically a filtered RSS feed of stock blogs. But I'd also do occasional essays on strategies, individual stocks, memes, themes, and other mostly original stuff. I'd assume that anyone reading my blog for one kind of entry was a little disappointed at the other sort, and they'd both be disappointed if I invaded the financial patter with some social, musical, technological, or -- scary thought -- political commentary. Rather than make up an audience I'm constantly disappointing, I decided to split my blog into three blogs: Byrne's Marketview for the traditional essays and analyses about topics economic and financial, Quicklinks for financial stories that are worth reading and might require a comment, but which won't lead to much original thought from me, and Byrne's Eye View for everything else. I'll probably post a digest of the day's quicklinks on Marketview, too, but the Quicklinks page (and feed) will be more timely. Basically, individual quicklinks will have an expiration date in the immediate future, but bundles of them will give a good estimate of the stockblogosphere's Zeitgeist.

[1]"Serious," in this case, means "Requiring me to stay up until 3 AM installing." But that's the price we pay to run Movable Type.

[2]Slate's Paul Boutin has a nearly evangelical description of just how great RSS is.