I Pinch.
It has been 4 months since my last post. Whew, I’ve been busy…but have accomplished remarkably little.
From a CNN.com article on Bernie Madoff: “Thus far, federal investigators have identified 1,341 investors in Madoff’s firm, with losses exceeding $13 billion.” Hmm… $13B between 1341 people. That’s $969,000+ each. Ouch.
Fannie Mae is holding up the sale of IndyMac, demanding that they pay $1billion for bad loans they sold Fannie. Interesting considering that they are both run by the feds. I’d personally like IndyMac to be sold, but that’s mostly because I bought several shares this summer at a price I thought was pretty cheap — just not as cheap as it is now. Its up about 400% since last Friday in anticipation of the sale.
So I’ve been busy for last couple of months, as evidenced by my not posting much. I started a new job with a major manufacturer of agricultural and construction equipment. I have been working as an engineer focused on continuous improvement in the primary parts depot which is just outside of Indianapolis. We have purchased a house in Zionsville on the northwest corner of Indy.
Here are a couple of pics…
I do miss the people that I worked with at American Greetings when I was in Danville, but I don’t miss the job much. If anyone is interested in a home in central Kentucky, I have an extra one of those now too.
I checked on the performance of all of my investment accounts this afternoon. For a year with a whole bunch of volatility I didn’t do too badly.
My taxable investment account registered a gain of about 9.57%; which beat 2 of 3 major averages (DJIA: 6.43%, S&P: 3.53%, NASDAQ: 9.81%). I owe most of that to owning Apple at a couple of different times, and two or three well-timed short positions of other equities. My wife’s Roth IRA gained around 8% and mine lost about 2%. I took a more hands-off approach with these, and I bought some stuff in my IRA near a high point towards the middle of the year and never really recovered from that. I also checked my 401K and despite some reshuffling in May, I could only make 3.9%; there’s only so much I can do with that though.
I been getting better at paper-trading commodities of late. Since opening it in the middle of October, I’ve gained a little better than 11%, and that’s after being off about 40% at one point.
I ran across this list last week. GMAC apparently did some research to see how well drivers would do on the written portion of a driving test. Idaho was declared to have the smartest drivers in the nation. This illustrates the difference between being “book-smart” and actually being able to apply the rules of the road. Having lived in Idaho, and driven in many other parts of the country, I can tell you that Idaho has some of the very worst drivers. My personal experience would lead me to rank Idaho and Kentucky as being a tie for states with the worst drivers (Kentucky ranked in the middle of the pack at 29), while I would put Illinois (which was ranked at 45th) near the top.
Rivals.com declared the Ducks to be the number 1 college team in the nation Monday; from the games I’ve seen I wouldn’t argue too much with that. I might make an argument that it is difficult for me to believe that a school without an engineering program is a real university (it’s the only one in the PAC10), but that’s a whole different discussion; the football team is good.
In any case, I looked up my alma maters, the Universities of Idaho and Illinois, and they were separated by some 99 positions. That’s great for the Illini; the Vandals, however, beat out only Utah State and Florida International, both of which have one fewer win than than Idaho at 0. The Vandals have had a terrible time winning games, but the same could be said about the Illini for the past few years. I’m still holding out hope for Idaho, but I’ve been waiting for that turn-around for several years now, and I guessing that it won’t begin at Boise State this weekend.
I got this on Saturday. It was tough to find a Pathfinder SE-V8 with leather; I had to drive up to Cincinnati.
I guess it is good that someone visits this site; even if they don’t spend too much time in careful contemplation before they leave a comment. (See this guy.) I suppose that this is just what happens when you share a name with a semi-well-known person. In any case if you have not yet picked up on this fact, I am not former White House aide, Dan Bartlett. He has probably doing speaking engagements or has joined a think tank or something; although I would be happy to do any of those things if anyone is interested in paying me.
I would think that a former counselor to the president would have better things to post than complaints about not getting the Big Ten Network on his cable package or some kid who unlocked his iPhone. I just Googled my name though and my page was sixth down in the list of results; that’s pretty good.
So the Big Ten is getting its own network — Great. I checked Time Warner’s website yesterday to see if I even have a snowball’s chance of getting them to throw that into my basic cable package, but it doesn’t look good. The message on their site said:
“We think that the best place for this network is on a sports tier, so people who want this premium sports programming can choose to pay for it. This way, it would not add to the cost of your Standard Service.”
No, it’ll get stuck in a sports package with 12 other channels that I don’t want to watch but will have to still pay for. Additionally, this will undoubtedly require me to also purchase the standard digital cable package with another 20 ridiculous channels for another $12-$15.
And as long as we’re talking about paying for channels on basic cable you don’t want to watch, I get FSN Ohio now. The only teams in Ohio that are worth watching are Ohio State, the Bengals, the Browns, and the Cavs (and those last three are a real stretch) and none of their regular season games are shown on FSN Ohio anyway. You can watch the Reds lose all summer though.
I guess I’ll have to wait and see how it all shakes out, but it looks like I’m going to have to keep choking down all this SEC crap that they keep putting on the TV here.
WreckedExotics.com is a site full of pictures of expensive cars that people have rolled over, crashed into light poles, or otherwise maimed. If you are a car lover it is sad to see so many beautiful cars smashed up; it’s just so hard to look away.
