A Pile Of Blog

Same Name, New Look

Well now I’ve gone and done it!  Goodbye WordPress, Hello Tumblr.  I think I mentioned it before, but now I have pointed the domain to my Tumblr site.  So the data is all handled at Tumblr.com now.  Tumblr is a bit easier to use, easier to automate, much less hassle to maintain and I think this will translate into more frequent posts.  And isn’t that what blogging is supposed to be about?  Posting.

Just check out the frequency.  I even made like 50 posts in May on another Tumblr blog for my trip to Mexico.  Incredible.

Christians Repent!

Christianity has become quite the source of entertainment for me as of late.  Being that I live in Texas I have a never-ending source of kooky Christian behavior.  I will one day post a picture here of a local resident of Denton who wears the same t-shirt every day, and the front and back are scriptures and exhortations to repent and behave.  But today I saw a large billboard on I-35 south of Fort Worth that was a treat.  We were on the way to a convention in San Antonio so I didn’t have the chance to stop for a picture but perhaps I can get one on the way home.  It is hand-painted (poorly) but advertises the web site RepentChristians.org.  It’s run by the Mennonites in Austin.  I had no idea there *were* any of those in Austin.  Strange, but true.

The web site is calling other Christians to task and repentance for somehow supporting abortion.  I’m sure it’s those liberal Lutherans that are causing the consternation.

Investing Mis-steps

The good news is that we’ve set aside a decent amount of money in the last year for our early retirement plans.  We’ve also seen a few investment purchases achieve really good gains.  Unfortunately a lack of cohesive investing strategy, including money management, position sizing, stop losses and risk, has caused us to miss out on locking in profits and escaping losing trades.  So we’ve seen the awesome potential and leverage of options, but lack the readiness to prevent losses and take advantage of sideways and down markets.

In order to remedy that situation I am reading a lot of books, including Van Tharp’s “Trade your way to Financial Freedom.”  One of the concepts I have already acted on is the issue of information exposure/overload.  I determined that I was being distracted by the regular chatter coming into my email inbox, specifically an email discussion group of investors.  Many of them are smart and rich, but it proved to be an undue influence on my thinking, especially when I was beginning to think of selling or buying.  So I’ve put the email group on ‘web only’ mode.  I can still read whenever I want, but emails won’t assault me while I am developing/reaffirming my overall strategy.

I am all-cash right now until I am confident in my direction.

Slowly leaving cable

We’ve had cable for TV and internet for awhile now.  The main reason we switched from DirecTV was due to me wanting High-Def DVR.  For the most part it’s been fine, but recent internet outages caused me to check out AT&T’s DSL offerings.  I can get 6mbps download speeds PLUS free wi-fi at Starbucks and Barnes & Noble locations, all for $35/mo.  This ought to go very nicely with the iPhones we will be picking up next month.

Now if they only offered Fiber in my neighborhood I’d use them for TV as well.

Strange to be an all-Ma-Bell household again after all these years of deregulation.  Why did we do all that again?