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After taking a little bit of a break, I have decided to get back to doing stock reviews again. As you can see, a few post prior to this one I did a review of Netflix (NFLX). One thing that I have been trying to do is place the review in a .pdf file, rather than just a really long post on the blog. I think that the long post on the blog sort of takes away from the whole blog concept because it is makes it more tedious to get to other posts, especially if you don’t feel like reading the review.

So basically what I am going to do from now on is just have a short Cliff’s Notes version of the review with a link the full report. This way if the user wants to see they whole report they can just click on the link. Otherwise they can just pass it on by and go to the next post.

Random Reviews, Stocks

I have decided to add a non-blog section to the site. It is more dedicated to company analysis (at least for now anyway). I have a “beta” version of a small example of the site. Hope you like it! Click here to see it.

Random, Uncategorized, Websites new site

Since the price of gas has been going up so much lately, I have tried to make a conscious effort to try and drive less. Besides the fact that is makes sense for me economically, it is good for the environment as well. I am proud to say that I have gone over an entire month without filling up my tank. What makes this even more impressive is the fact that my car only gets about 250 miles per tank. The last time I filled up my car was 7/22/2008. That makes it a month and three days as of today, and a month and four days as of tomorrow.

I have a few theories about why I managed to accomplish this feat. 21 days had been my previous tops since I bought the car in October 2007. The main reason I think that has contributed to my decrease in driving is my new living location. Previously I had to drive back and forth to the park and ride each day. It worked out to about 8 miles each day in driving. It doesn’t sound like much, but if you think about it, that is 40 miles per week. My car only gets about 17 mpg in the city, so that means I went through 2.35 gallons per week. Now I have an extra 2.35 gallons per week to do something else with. I can also walk to the grocery store now instead of always having to drive. That saves at least 2 miles per trip as well.

All in all I can’t say I am too upset with not driving as much. It has definitely saved me a bit of money as well.

Personal Finance, Random gas, miles per gallon

The other day I concluded my hunt for an apartment! Although it is a bit more than I had initially wanted to spend, I think that it should work out pretty well. It is nice because I can just walk from the park and ride instead of driving. Theoretically this will save me money, but the park and ride at my old place was directly between my place and my girlfriend’s place, so I was going to have to drive that way anyway. Assuming she stays in the same place, it works out that I save $3/mo in gas by staying at this new place. I am going to also assume that my new bus will save me 10 minutes each way on my commute, and if I value my time at $13/hour, then this new place saves me $90/month.

Of course there are other things about my new place that are priceless to me. First of all having an entire space to call my own without having to deal with roommates and all that other nonsense. Although roommates tend to help out with bills and can help to make things interesting, they can also be a large pain as well. Being able to use the kitchen whenever you want and watch whatever you want on TV definitely has it’s perks. I think that I can justify spending the extra money for these amenities.

I can officially move in less than a week from now, and I can’t wait! It will be nice to leave what I call the “hippie house,” named after the interesting people that have inhabited this place over the past 10 months or so.

The other cool thing about my new place is that it is month to month after the first nine months. Most places don’t give you that option.

Random apartment, moving, rent

This morning I read an article on Yahoo Finance by Charles Wheelan, who authored the book “The Naked Economist.” The article was titled “High Fuel Costs Could Spur a New Rationalism.”

In summary the article basically says that people will make economic decisions based on how prices affect them. Right now the price of gasoline is the primary driver to consumer’s economic choices. He says that as the price of gas continues to rise consumers will no longer find it rational to commute long distances to work because the cost to them is so great. Wheelan predicts that as the cost of gas rises consumers will be forced to make economic decisions about where to live, work and how to commute.

Wheelan suggests four changes that could possibly be made in order to cut one’s energy spending.

• Move into a smaller house. Having a large house out in the country may be nice, but energy prices will soon have you feeling not so happy about your grand palace. When you consider the costs associated with heating and cooling your home as well as the gas driving to and from work you might start to see your energy bill skyrocket.
• Businesses may make smarter location choices. Although city commercial space is pricey, a firm will have a better chance of attracting quality employees if they are located in a central locale. “Suppose you’re considering two jobs: One is in a building three blocks from the commuter train station, and the other is in an office complex 21 miles away from anything except cornfields. How is that decision affected by $6 gas?”
• People may start moving back to the cities. Many people often consider cities to be polluted and dangerous places, but the opposite is starting to become more true. “Both Chicago and New York City had the fewest number of homicides in 2007 than in any year since the mid-1960s.” Cities also tend to have more options when it comes to entertainments as well. They tend to have more sports teams and performing arts centers to name a few. They also tend to have more universities located nearby as well. Downtown Seattle has three major universities to choose from. Larger cities would likely have even more options.

Although I currently live inside the city limits of Seattle, I will take all of these factors into consideration when my lease comes due here at the end of August. Since I use transit to get to work, the cost of driving to downtown isn’t really a factor, but instead the cost of getting to transit is more of a concern. Here is what I will be considering when I move.

• Cost of the rental unit
• Size of the rental unit
• Distance to nearest reliable bus
• Distance to girlfriend’s place
• Parking availability
• Time it takes to get to work from the rental unit

After considering all these factors, I might end up choosing a place that costs a little bit more in rent because the cheapness of another unit could be outweighed by the cost of gas to travel from one place to the next. I would also pay a premium to be close to a reliable and quick bus.

Personal Finance, Random apartment, moving, rent

For today’s post I wanted to look into how my spending on gas as a percentage of my income has changed over the years. The period of time that this study covers is 2003 through present day. My initial guess would be that the percentage of my income that went to gas would be increasing over time since gas has continued to rise throughout this time period.

The data that I found initially may seem rather surprising, but you must keep in mind what I was up to during this time period. 2003 through present spans when I graduated from high school to after college graduation.

Here is the data:

• 2003 14.7%
• 2004 8.8%
• 2005 4.5%
• 2006 4.1%
• 2007 4.9%
• 2008 6.7%

Of all the years I would have to say that 2005 - 2008 have the most reliable data. 2007 should realistically be 7.3%, but it is much lower due to graduation presents that I received. The income that I used for my data was for just income in general no matter where it came from.

Is 6.7% high? Well, according to an article in the International Herald Tribune (the global version of the NY Times), “Americans spend 3.7 percent of their disposable income on transportation fuels. At its lowest point, that share was 1.9 percent in 1998, and at its highest it reached 4.5 percent in 1981.” So yes, as a percentage of income I am spending much more on gas than the average American. If I keep the same driving habits as I have right now, my take home income would have to increase by 82% in order to have my spending as a percentage of income be in line with the average American. Alternatively, I could choose to drive 45% less than I do now in order to be on par with everyone else.

Here are a few possible factors that might be keeping me above the national average:

• Some people do not drive, therefore they spend zero income on gas
• The average driver likely has a higher income than I do
• My car isn’t economical when it comes to gas
• My car uses premium fuel
• Gas prices in Seattle are among the highest in the nation.

Personal Finance, Random gas prices, income

Adding to the fun things that have been happening to me lately are truck problems. I have a 1994 Ford Ranger that I have driven for the past seven years or so. Now that I live in the city, having a 2WD pickup truck doesn’t really make a lot of sense for me. The truck is really underpowered and has a lot of things that need to be fixed.

Here is the list of things that I know are wrong with it:

• Needs new tires
• Replace windshield (cracked in two places)
• Replace rear drum brakes
• Get new shocks all the way around
• Replace clutch

There are probably a few other things wrong with it that I don’t know about, but this is the list of the big ticket items that it needs. I figure I can get some cheap-o tires for $200, windshield replaced for $600?? (not too sure what these go for). Drum brakes are $500 easily. I think my quote a few years back for new shocks and install at Les Schwab was around $400-$500. A new clutch with install should set me back another $800.

All in all we are looking at about $2600 assuming that my guesstimates are somewhat close. That is a decent amount of money to put into a truck that isn’t worth a whole lot more. I guess the only good thing it has going for it right now is that it only has 110,000 miles on it, which is very low for a 1994 vehicle. That’s only 7,800 miles per year. I guess I should feel good since I haven’t had to replace any of these items since getting the truck at 56,000 miles in 2001.

So here is the fun stuff that I was going to get in to. When I got off the bus at the park and ride this afternoon I walked back to where my truck was parked. As I walked towards it I decided to look at my tires for some reason or another. Maybe something caught my eye. I can’t really remember right now. Anyway, I noticed what looked like a hole or a missing chunk out of my front right tire. It wasn’t huge, but noticeable. As I started to look a bit closer at the tire I noticed a screw jammed into my tire. It was in as far as it could go. The interesting thing if you want to call it that was that there was a washer on the screw as well. I’m not sure if someone did this or if I just happened to run it over. I tried to pull it out hoping that maybe it was a short screw. As I started to pull up on it I heard air seeping out. I decided to just leave it in and hope for the best, especially considering that it had been in there for who knows how long and it was still holding air. I think that my project for this weekend will be that I get new tires for the truck. It definitely needs them.

Random ford, ranger, repairs, tire

I have spent the majority of my day today attempting to reinstall windows XP on my PC. The main dilemma that I had was that I could not even start windows, which was the reason that I had to reinstall in the first place. Because I could not start windows, I was unable to back up my files. In order to back up these files, I ended up spending the majority of my time trying to find out how to go about doing this.

What ended up happening was that I had to use a program called Knoppix. From what I gathered, Knoppix is the CD version of the Linux operating system. This means that you don’t have to install Linux/Knoppix on your hard drive for it to work. All the files that your computer needs are on the CD.

To get Knoppix onto a CD, you first need a working computer which I luckily had. Then, you must go to the main Knoppix website to download the latest edition. After you download, you can then burn the .iso file to a CD. Next, you will need to set up your boot menu on the broken computer so that it boots from CD first and then Hard drive. This way it will automatically boot into the Knoppix program.

Once I got this all set up, I had some initial struggles getting the program to work. It seemed like everything was working alright,  but then the screen would go blank and say “out of range.” I think this happened because the screen that I was using was an LCD 19″ screen. After doing a bit of research I found out that if you hit F3 at the first screen, you can enter special setup commands. The command that got my screen was “knoppix vga=0″. After that everything worked perfectly more or less.

From time to time the Knoppix system kept crashing on my while I was trying to transfer files. I wasn’t expecting perfection, but this was getting annoying. I tried to find some other Linux programs to run. The ones I came across were “Damn Small Linux” and “Slax.” I found Damn Small Linux to be about worthless, but I don’t think I knew what I was doing. For some reason it wouldn’t let me access my files on my hard drive. Slax kept crashing, so I was even more worthless to me.

I decided to go back to Knoppix because that was the only one that had worked for the most part so far. When I went into the F3 screen I noticed that there were some other available commands. One I believe was called “toram.” This command temporarily installed Knoppix on the RAM in your computer. This allows the program to run entirely off of the RAM rather than constantly trying to read the CD. Once I applied this fix my crashes were but a distant memory. Also, everything ran a whole lot faster as well.

There was one annoying quirk about Knoppix. The reason I was using it in the first place was so that I could transfer files from my main hard drive to my external hard drive to be backed up. The problem I ran into was if my external was on and plugged in when I started Knoppix, then the main hard drive would not show up. If I started up Knoppix with the external off, then it would detect the main hard drive. It was only at this point where I could start up the external. Once that was detected everything worked fine.

In conclusion, I must say that Knoppix has saved my files from being deleted on the reinstall. If I were a bit more computer savvy, I could see myself switching over to Linux. It seems like they have their act together a bit more than Microsoft when it comes to certain things.

Random, Reviews, Uncategorized knoppix, linux, reinstall, restore, windows

If you have noticed a gap between this post and my most recent one, there is a good reason for it. Apparantly my computer has been infected with some sort of virus and it has been inoperable for the past week or so.

Here is what happened:

I turned my computer on just like I do every morning, but that particular morning it decided that it wanted to check my disks. After it checked my disks it rebooted. After that initial windows screen with the scrolling squares underneath, the screen went black for about five seconds. Then an error message came up stating that file “ole32.dll” was missing so that it could not start winlogon.exe. Then it gave me the same error message for file lsass.exe. I clicked ok on each of them and the screen just went blank. If you waited long enough it would go to the desktop but nothing would come up. Lame. I tried to restart in safe mode, but no luck. I also tried to restart with the last known good configuration, but that did not work either. It was at this point that I decided that I needed to reinstall Windows XP.

Today was the day that I was to embark on my mission to reinstall Windows XP. The first store that I visited today was the local Best Buy. They were all out there, and the sales associate wasn’t even sure if they were going to keep selling it. Then, I went to the Target next door, and they were all out as well. The sales associate there told me that they would probably be out for a few more days, but the Target about ten miles north of us had two copies in stock.

I left the shopping center on a journey to find the next Target. On my way there I noticed  an Office Depot off the freeway. I thought about it for about two seconds and then darted onto the off-ramp. When I got to the Office Depot, I was immediately greeted by a friendly staff member. I told him that I needed a copy of XP. He brought me over to where they sold their operating systems. I initially went for the $99.99 version, but it turns out that this is the version that you use when you are upgrading from Windows 98 or Windows 2000.  Since this wasn’t the case I went with the standard $184.99 + state and local taxes version. This was the real deal full installation I was told. At this point I was too frusturated to buy the “upgrade” version, take it home and find out it was the wrong version, and then take it back only to find out I couldn’t return it because I had already opened it. I decided to just bite the bullet and get the “Full Meal Deal.” Yes, supersize it.

Now we are current and I am in the process of repairing Windows. It attempted to do the repair about a half an hour ago, but it restarted after 3% completion for some random reason. I did not see why because I was doing laundry in the meantime. I told the setup disk to repair once again, and now we are sitting nicely at 16% in the “h” section of the files. At this rate it should only take another hour. I spoke too soon, it decided to restart again…lovely.
So if I already had XP on my computer, why did I go out and buy a new install disk you might ask. Well…I built this computer myself a year or so ago. This would make me the tech support for when things go wrong. At the time I thought that I could just install windows from the reinstall cd that came with my Dell Inspiron 1100 laptop. It turns out that it doesn’t quite work like that. Luckily my roommate at the time had a copy of Windows that I could use, and I have used that copy since. Now that I need to reinstall, I don’t have that copy and I was forced to purchace a legitimate version.

Now nothing seems to be working. Hopefully I can figure out this mess and keep all of my old files as well.

Random, Uncategorized best buy, office depot, ole32.dll, reinstall, target, windows xp

A recent article in the Seattle P-I written by Andrea James reports that Starbucks has announced that they are going to start selling smoothies in their coffee shops. “In April, Seattle-based Starbucks Corp. said that it hopes to expand its customer base by serving blended fruit and protein beverages, energy drinks and healthy foods.” While this may seem to be a deviation from their current business plan, it may be interesting to note that “Jamba Juice got its start with the help of Starbucks Chief Executive Howard Schultz, who was an original investor and had served as board member of the company.” To date, Jamba Juice has grown to over 700 stores.

Although Schultz helped to start Jamba Juice, I don’t really see how smoothies fit in with his remake of the company. It always seemed to me that Shultz’s goal was to bring Starbucks back to the vibe it had 15 years ago when it was still a smaller company trying to make it big. He got rid of the delicious breakfast sandwiches because they were overpowering the aroma of the coffee. It would seem like each individual Starbucks would need a lot more room in order to accommodate a smoothie bar as well. Wouldn’t this also take away from the romance and niche of the coffee bar? I guess we will see.

Random, Stocks jamba juice, sbux, schultz, smoothie, starbucks