I love youtube. lisa and I just spent like an hour listening to old music.
Anyways I found this poem from Salt of Salt N. Pepa that I saw a long time ago on def poetry that I found to be... brave and honest. I don't think its easy to talk about submission and following the lead of men in this day and age.
I have all 3 Def Poetry Jams on DVD if anyone ever wants to come check it out... good times.
I don't think you know what its like to fear for your life until you cross the street in saigon vietnam... I took a .5 mile walk this morning to the sheraton where i had a meeting w/ my coworkers and it was definitely a hairy experience! I resorted to shadowing the locals as they crossed the street :)
some pics.
a quick snapshot of super tame traffic... stupid xanga won't let me rotate it for some reason.
couple snapshots of the view from my hotel:
hopefully i can get a picture that really represents how freakin scary it is trying to cross the street here with hundreds of scooters baring down on you...
One of the great benefits of growing older is that I've been able to notice more and more of my little idiosyncrasies as each day passes.
Today's idiosyncratic behavior is that I am able to focus better and work better when I listen to the same song that I dig on repeat. I'm digging this david crowder song, wonderful king at the moment and its been repeating for the past hour and half now.
This is a tail of my stock market playing woes, if you have no interest in me, in me complaining, or me complaining about stocks then you might be slightly bored in the upcoming post :) unfortunately its not a tale of sadness and woe followed by inevitable redemption, its simply just sad currently lol. enough preamble, on to the show!
I started putting some money in stocks last year. nothing too much just enough to play around and make a decent profit if possible, but not too much where I would die if I lost it (though I would probably be pretty sad lol). you know, just to diversify a little. And overall I would be doing ok if it were not for a couple costly mistakes.
Here are 2 stocks that I bought last year based on reading tech forums, journals, etc. Not on personal affinity towards their product:
SIRI - sirius, I don't really know the company but I was interested in their tech and I really thought it would be the next cable TV. No one thought that anyone would want to pay for cable when it came out either, but now its a multibillion dollar industry. My research seemed to indicate that this was on the cusp of explosive growth. wrong! I figured it would be a value buy at 4, it has since dropped down to 3 and currently hovers around 3.25. even the potential XM merger didn't help it any. another SAD one.
AMD - AMD is the nail in my coffin, I bought it at 24. I thought the ATI acquisition would push it up, nope Intel destroys them in the CPU industry and nVidia destroys them in GPU. This one makes me cringe to this day. It currently sits at a healthy 13.5. yes this is almost a freakin 50% LOSS. double sad.
Here are some stocks that I was going to buy on personal affinity and belief in their solid product line but didn't buy based on conjecture of overvalued stocks, impossible to sustain growth, etc:
AMZN - amazon, I personally LOVE amazon. tax free? I'll take it. dirt cheap prices? I'll take it. I got all my christmas presents on amazon last year and am a proud member of Amazon Prime. I really wanted their stocks but the more research I did the more it seemed to indicate that amazon was a bloated and overvalued company selling at around 35 dollars. I wanted to be a smart investor so I held off on it to drop at the next earnings report so I could hop on... oh so wrong. it has more than doubled in the last 6 months... and currently sits at 90 nearly triple... WHY!
APPL - I love macs. I have successfully convinced most of my family and friends buy macs pver the past few years because of how much I love them. I love them enough to betray the PCs that I used all my prepubescent and you adult life. I'm typing this on a mac currently with my lovely iphone next to it. I'm learning how to program for my mac. I wanted to buy this also last year but everyone said it was getting crazy with its recent rise do the ipod and new macs. its been gaining for so long it will drop off, so i wanted for it to level off (dip) soon at which point i would buy like everyone said it will. nope. wrong again. I wanted to buy at around 70, its currently 150 a year later.... -_-
.............
The 2 companies I bought based on other peoples advice/columns have
been a huge loss for me. The 2 companies that I didn't buy based on
those same people has resulted in an even greater loss of potential
income.
There must be a stock market blues song somewhere out there, send it to me will you?
oh well... live and learn i guess. I always say that we gotta learn from our mistakes, some mistakes are just more costly than others this happens to tip the costly scale a lot.
And what did I learn from all this? To do your homework before
investing, but ultimately trust in your instincts. Trust the future of
the companies you love, with the product/service that you believe is
great. Maybe theres a life lesson in there somewhere too about trusting what you know and not trusting other peoples opinions so much... maybe.
