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Fund Performance

The main downside of investing in the market is that I now find myself constantly staring at the stock ticker. I guess the big part of it is the gambler’s high I get when I see how well things are doing. It’s the same feeling I got back during my poker playing days, when I’d pull in a big pot and make some money. However, in this case, the stakes are way higher. So I thought I’d provide an update on how well things are doing. It’s been roughly thirty days since our initial investment in Google and Visa, and we’ve bought a few more stocks.

Our biggest gain so far, which thankfully is the largest chunk of portfolio, is with Google. We’ve gained almost 25% from our initial investment in it. We also gained 23% in a company called DryShips, which ships dry goods such as coal.

Visa has been kind to us and has increased about 20% since we bought it, and we have strengthened our position on it (bought more stock) yesterday before the earnings report. It was a gamble in that the stock price could fluctuate wildly depending on the news. Looking at its past reports, I had predicted a strong report that would beat a lot of estimates. I guess we’re trying to recapture the magic when our Google stock had jumped when it released its earnings report. Anyways, the Visa report came out yesterday at 5 pm showing stellar gains. Not only did they increase their earnings, reduce their operating costs, and boost their market share, but they beat analyst estimates by a fair amount. Something strange happened which I didn’t quite understand, its share price actually dropped close to 6% on this news during after-hours trading. I’m not worried though, as the stock has rebounded back to its closing price before the news. I’m still investigating the cause for such a drastic drop.

We also picked up some other stocks too, some which have been doing really well, and others that aren’t doing so great. Due to the economic decline in the financial sectors recently, it looks like there are some really juicy stocks that are selling at bargain prices. We picked up Citigroup (The US’s largest bank, and the world’s largest corporation) last week, and it’s been up more than 7% since then. Citigroup happens to also have quite the juicy dividend (profits returned to shareholders) at 5%. We also bought some shares of TD Bank, which has grown 2% since we picked it up about 2 weeks ago.

Of course, not all of it can be roses as we have some stocks that have been losing value. We bought some Transocean, an offshore drilling company, that has declined about 1%. Cal-Maine foods, the US’s largest supplier of eggs, also dropped about 3% since we bought it. Though I’m not too worried, as both those companies will probably grow quite well in the long run. What’s nice about the egg producer is that it provides a whopping dividend of 10%.

So all in all, our portfolio is up about 11%. Which is a damn good gain in a span of 30 days if I do say so myself. Who knows how things will play out on the long term though.

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The Wire Ruined TV

There are some things that you experience in life that set the bar so high, that is so enjoyable, that you know that it has ruined you for the rest of your life.

It’s like the time in your life when you first enjoyed a beautiful cut of perfectly cooked steak after living a lifetime eating only hamburger.  Hamburger will never taste and look the same ever again.  Mangled random bits of beef no more, you now demand some sweet filet mignon.  The bar is raised, now that you know how good charred beef can be.

Well, that very experience is happening to me right now.

Lately I haven’t been watching as much TV as I used to.  Mostly due to the fact that a lot of the shows out there are complete trash.  Of course there are a few shows that I find really great, like Breaking Bad, Dexter, and I must give a nod to Battlestar Galactica (but on a lesser extent).  At least those are a few gems in the rough that keep me entertained when I’m hankering for some TV time.

But I’ve stumbled onto a cop show called “The Wire”.  It’s kinda old in that it’s been out for 5 seasons now (with the 5th being the last).  I can’t believe that I haven’t come across it before, but being that it’s on HBO it’s a little obscure.  Also, the fact that it’s another “cop” show might turn most people off.

Cop show - been there, done that.  With the flurry of cop shows out there, it’s easy for something like the Wire to get lost in the sludge of mediocre.  With more CSI and Law & Order spinoffs than you can actually watch, it just seems like one cop show is just like the next, but with slightly different formulas.

But the Wire is different.  It doesn’t follow a formula for every show.  Instead, it’s like a mini-series stretched out over 5 seasons full of gritty realism, superb acting, dark humor, social satire, and elements of the human condition.  It’s hard to describe because there’s no show quite like it.  It’s sort of like The Sopranos in that it shows a world of crime that most of us aren’t involved in.  It’s only “sort of” like the Sopranos though, because the Wire outclasses it in every way.

Anyways, the Wire to me is the best TV series … ever.  Not this year, or last year, or in the decades of TV that I haven’t seen before I was born.  I will boldly say that there is probably no show that has ever existed that is better than The Wire.  With the way that TV is going right now, I’m pretty confident that there will never be a show that will be better.

For that reason, for better or worse, television will never be as enjoyable as it was before I watched this show.  Everything else pales in comparison, and it’s a comparison I can’t not make when I watch TV.  Regular TV tastes like a cheap McDonald’s cheeseburger after dining on this fine cut of beef.

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Finances

“If you’re not a socialist when you’re young, you don’t have a heart. If you’re not a conservative when you’re old, you don’t have a brain.”

I’m not sure where that quote comes from, but it stuck with me for a long time. I guess I do have a heart, as a younger Lee was quite the bleeding heart socialist at one point. Hell, I am still a lefty in a lot of ways. But lately, I’ve been dabbling on the financial side of things, reading up on stocks and bonds and things to do with money. Now that I’m out of school, I actually have a bit of money that can sit to the side. Yes, I feel like a scum sucking capitalist pig … but maybe I’m starting to see things differently.

Finances is something I never really took the time to learn while going through school. I had always felt that it was pointless, since I had no money to invest in. Sure I had a part time student job and went through internship and such, but why should I go through all the hassle to shove my paltry savings into an institution to only earn 1 or 2% in return over a year! Two percent on a thousand bucks isn’t worth all that hassle.

So I bought some books on it to get myself educated in the world of greed. I bought myself “Investing For Canadians For Dummies” and Jim Cramer’s latest book. I finally got plain English explanations of what a stock is, a mutual fund, a GIC, and what the hell the stock market is and how investors make money. Cutting through all the jargon, the rules of the game are pretty straightforward. Buying that For Dummies book will probably be my best investment ever.

Reading those books allowed me to see work and my career in a completely different light. Making money and being wealthy can be achieved not in some big bang, like winning the lottery. But for most people, becoming financially secure enough to retire early is a long drawn out process that starts out when you’re young, not when you’re old. And the sooner you plan for it, the bigger the reward at the end. By the simple power of compound interest, someone in their 20’s like me can input $1 and pull out $32 by the time I’m in my fifties, and that’s if you play the game conservatively.

However, it’s not just about becoming wealthier either. It’s also about protecting whatever savings you have from inflation. That 2-5% annual inflation also compounds over time too. So no matter how much you save, if you don’t invest it somewhere, you’ll be losing whatever money you save. If you’re not protecting your money somehow, then its better to just go out and blow your money right now… at least you’ll get more value out of it.

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So anyways, Renata and I have started investing directly into some stocks. Being totally new to this, I find it hard to judge the value of a company. So I stuck with some companies that I fundamentally know will be solid winners. The two big stock purchases for us have been Visa and Google.

Visa for the simple fact that it just went public, and is an absolute no-brainer. It basically dominates the credit card market. And everyone already knows how mighty Google is. Some people say Google is too bloated and overpriced, but recently it dropped 40% from its all time high.

Google dominates online advertising, and their search engine is still the best out there. They’ve got a ton of cool web-applications, and though it hasn’t made them a ton of money yet, it just shows that they’re always innovating and pushing out interesting things. The fact that they hire the best and the brightest and have a wicked corporate culture that drives innovation will keep them in the top spot for a long time. Google is here to stay, and I think we’re really just starting to see the beginnings of what it can do.

So anyways, we bought quite a fair chunk of Google stocks within the past few weeks, seeing as how their price is low. Amidst all the rumors and negative speculation of its performance these past few weeks (which thankfully drove down its stock price), Google’s stock price jumped 20% within a few minutes after it announced its earnings for the quarter.

So far, our little venture has netted us some positive gains. Visa has performed pretty nicely since we bought it, up almost 5% in a little under 3 weeks. We also bought shares of DryShips, which gained 6% after we bought it that very day two days ago.

Hopefully things will continue the way they go

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Pixelicious

I just bought a second LCD monitor for my home computer.

It quickly dawned on me that I didn’t necessarily need another monitor, but in this scenario, more is always more.  Once you’ve gone dual screen, it’s hard to go back.

My older monitor, a 22 inch Dell, seemed to display colours quite nicely, and appeared to be a pretty wicked monitor.  But now, beside my brand new 24 inch Samsung, it’s definitely showing its age.  I guess it’s been a year or two since I’ve noticed the new slew of monitors out, but they’re way brighter and the colour is much more vibrant and accurate.

Anyhow, to answer my first nagging question of necessity.  No, I could live without a second screen… but productivity is increased with more pixel real estate.  Especially as a programmer, it really helps to minimize repetitive tasks like switching between windows.  Now with two screens, I can have my editor up on one screen, and some reference material on another.  Ah… it makes coding less painful.

It also makes sense that the more real estate you have, the more efficient you’ll work for most computer related tasks.  There’s less time spent managing windows and finding what you want.  A recent study from the University of Utah drew the conclusion that productivity could be increased by up to 50% with the right screen real estate.  After a certain threshold, productivity actually drops (most likely due to the fact that with too much space you end up spending time seeking to find what you want).

The two monitors for some reason make it feel really good to work on the computer.  I’ve been nagging my boss at work to get me a second one, and I think I’ll get one soon

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Speaking of efficiencies.  I should mention some really handy tools that have made me more efficient.  They’re not programming tools, but just general tools that everyone should give a try:

•  Slickrun: Slickrun is a little tool that allows you to open up programs by typing in a custom word.  That way you can map your commonly used programs to words that you know, so that you don’t have to hunt around the start menu or the desktop to launch a program.

  For example, I have the word “mp3″ mapped to Winamp, my mp3 player.  I just have to hit Alt-Q, type in mp3, and then hit enter and bam!  Winamp is launched.  Launching programs this way is way faster and more intuitive.  Rather than remembering where the icon is on my desktop/start menu, grabbing the mouse, and hunting around, I can just punch it into my keyboard without having to lift my hands.

• Virtual Dimensions: It’s a multiple desktop tool for windows.  Basically, it allows you to swap between “desktops”.  Most Linux desktops have this feature, but Windows is severly lacking in this department.  Virtual Dimensions is the best multi-desktop app for Windows that I’ve tried, and I’ve tried quite a few of them.  Again, the efficiency in it is that I rely more on the keyboard to swap between desktops instead of hunting windows with the mouse.  I usually stick my internet browsers on one desktop, an editor on another, and my music app on a third… all while switching between them with hotkeys.
• Finally, I recommend Winsplit Revolution for those with fairly large screens.  I noticed with my new 24 inch monitor that a lot of space is wasted when surfing or editing text.  The monitor is so wide that I could in fact open up two browsers side-by-side, and the browsers could still be usable.  With Winsplit, you can resize and move windows to fit exactly one half (or quarter, or third) of the screen.

Check them out!  You’ll thank me later if you do.

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“Home”, 1 Year Later

So I just got back from a week-long trip back to Alberta two days ago

The main reason for my leaving was that my grandmother from Vietnam had flown into Edmonton to visit my family.  She’s over 80, and for a Vietnamese person that’s considered to be really old.  Lack of proper health care and nutrition often means you don’t live as long as most westerners do.

So I flew back to visit her, as the only time I have ever been with her was 6 years ago when I was in Vietnam.  And, who knows when I’ll ever see her again.

She’s doing well and she seems very strong still, and definitely still sharp mentally. I was really glad to have flown back to see her, and we took her to see the Rockies.  How could you visit Canada and not visit the mountains!

Well, the trip was good mostly for eating, sleeping, and lounging around.  It was a little boring to be honest, as I’m so used to doing some kind of activity while there.  Just doing absolutely nothing grew tiresome pretty quickly.  But still, it was a good reunion of sorts as I haven’t been to the Rockies with my whole family since I was little.

Other than that I caught up with a few of my friends. It was great to see them again.  What was really common between us all, was that we missed school in some way.  Mylore and I even spent an hour walking around campus, through the halls of ye-old-faithful Comp Sci building, and through all the major student hubs.  The faces around seemed younger than I remembered, but school still felt like home.  It was refreshing to be back on campus.

Being back home in Edmonton was a little strange at first.  Strange in that it felt as though nothing had changed there, but that I myself have changed.  I guess I’ve resolved that Ottawa is now “home”, and that my suburban-office-working lifestyle is my new life.  A part of me still resides in Edmonton though, a more rambunctious and raw form of me.  If my Ottawa friends think I’m an asshole, they haven’t seen me in my truest form.  I miss it.

There’s another part that lives there too; a bit that’s more spiritual, contemplative, and introspective.  Those qualities seem to serve a lesser purpose out East while I live in the plastic world of cookie-cutter homes, dinner parties, and white collared conservatives.  Suburbia is not as bad as I make it out to be, and I don’t really dislike it all that much.  It’s really really comfortable after all.  It just feels, well… a little shallow.

In the end of it all, it felt nice to be back in my home in Ottawa.  Definitely an enjoyable trip out West, but I really feel like my life in Ottawa is now really where I belong.  Selling out?  Maybe I’m just growing up.

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Uneventful Programming Vacation

So Renata had to go in for surgery last week.  Being the good boyfriend that I am, I took the week off to stay home to take care of her.

She recovered really fast, and so we had a nice relaxing week together.  She’s been pretty tired and sleeping has been a hassle for her, so she gets in one to two hour naps every now and then.

This gave me a lot of nice free time to spend on some things I’ve left on the back-burner lately.  I’ve been putting off learning Drupal for awhile now, as I’ve been so busy.  And to be honest, it’s hard to go code some more after coding all day at work.

Learning more about Drupal has given me a new perspective on my own career that I hadn’t really thought of.  I know a lot of people telecommute for work.  But the Drupal community has a lot of job posting that are in geographically disparate places.  So this really puts an emphasis on telecommuting.  What’s nice though, is that these jobs will pay much higher than jobs that I can find here, simply for the fact that the cost of living is a lot different.

I saw a job posting that pays between $60k - $90k for a entry level PHP/Drupal developer in New York.  A $90k job in New York is supposedly equivalent to a job that pays only $40k or so here in Ottawa.  Yet, telecommuting will give the perks of a really high salary minus the high cost of living that comes with living in a place like New York.

Anyways, aside from this insight, I’m finding Drupal to be a really well designed framework.  Drupal is an open-source content management system, that allows you to create powerful web pages really quickly.  Unlike a lot of other CMS’s, it does take a little bit of time to get things to work the way you want them too, but investment seems to be well worth it.   As an example, with Drupal, you could quickly create something similar to a basic version of Facebook.  There are a lot of new social networking niche sites popping up that use Drupal.

I’ve also returned to do a few more problems on ProjectEuler.  For you developers out there, definitely check out ProjectEuler.net.  ProjectEuler is a site that contains 150 or so computer-science problems.  The problems are straightforward, but require a bit of math, critical thinking, and programming to solve.

What’s nice is that as you solve problems on the site, it unlocks forums that discuss solutions to problems that you solve.  A lot of people on the site are brilliant and provide ways of solving things that I could never come up with.

After graduating from University I have found that I’m using less of the solid Computer Science skills (more of the math and algorithmic related skills) and using more of “software engineering” skills.  Not that one is less than another, but those math and problem solving skills do come in handy, and they keep skill sets sharp.  Anyways, all the really interesting skills are in the computer science domain anyhow.

So, for a vacation I found myself at home relaxing, spending time with Renata, and coding up things out of my own interest.  It wasn’t a vacation that I wouldn’t take often, but it was quite nice.

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2007 in Review

Yes, another year, another late recap of the previous.

I’ve finally had the will and time to write something on my slowing blog space.  Why?  Well, life in Suburbia has sucked the creative life out of me:

• Yes, 2007 is the year that I moved in with my girlfriend Renata.  It is the first time that I’ve moved in with a significant other (other than Tin of course :-)), and it is also the first time that I have lived in the suburbs on an indefinite basis.  Yes, it is a scary thought, and this switch has changed my life for better or worse.  Gone are the late nights getting drunk in the city and doing more spontaneous things.  In place of that, life is more structured, more focused, and filled with mundane repetitive tasks.

  You see, I’ve always been lazy, and that lazy lifestyle just clashes with suburbia.  Lawns need to get mowed, the drive needs to get shoveled, and seasonal holiday decorations ebb and flow in our home.  It’s been tough to adjust to its repetitive nature.  But with it comes nice things like more focus to do things that I generally procrastinate on, a better and more healthy lifestyle.

• A healthy lifestyle is one that involves eating better.  Through this, I’ve discovered the joys of cooking and all the wondrous possibilities that it entails.  I’ve sorta become a foodie in some ways, a pretentious snob when it comes to finding the tastiest and best meals.  I’ve also become a grill master of sorts, as I hone my skills on the BBQ almost daily in the summertime.
• I finally graduated this year, after a long stretch of over 4 years plus an internship.  Emerging from all that academia I find myself in a career that I oddly have a ton of passion for.  The sort of passion that I hadn’t seen in myself when I started this journey, but as of late it has really grown in me.  I love learning and writing about software.  I read books on it in my spare time and am totally addicted to tech blog sites that keep me updated, like programming.reddit.com, slashdot.org, and dugg sites.  Trips to the bookstore have been costly ventures, as I come back with more books on programming than I could possibly read and digest in any time soon.

  It’s not hard to understand why computing is so great when you think about it.  As Fred Brooks wrote in the “Mythical Man-Month”, the joys of this craft is the joy we get when we create something tangible from pure mental abstractions, turning what’s in our mind into something useful.  It’s the marriage of logic and creativity, and it creates something tangible and useful.  It’s not easy stuff though, as I don’t see myself mastering this craft anytime soon, so I think I’m stuck with it for life.

• I’ve been fairly active this past year too.  Well, actually, all of that is concentrated in 6 months during summer and half of fall.  The rest of the time I’ve been living like a sloth… but perhaps I’ll return to this once spring comes by.  During the warm months, I was able to go out and hike the West Coast Trail for a second time, spending another 7 grueling days living on freeze-dried meals and finding that sparse and elusive moment of connecting with nature.  I also did a small trip out to the Adirondack Mountains in New York, which made me realize how spoiled I am with the Rockies, and how I probably won’t be able to find anything like it out East.

  Ultimate Frisbee dominated my life for 6 months.  Playing almost 3 days a week constantly for half a year will do that.  I love it, and totally suck at it at the same time.  It’s a very deep and enjoyable game, and is a team sport that I have finally found love for.  If you haven’t tried it, do so!  What are you waiting for?

Here’s hoping that 2008 is just as awesome as 2007.  Who knows, maybe I’ll post on here a little more often too!

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Pornographer No More

After my little experiment in the internet porn business, I have shut down my domain and website due to lack of interest.

I started my internet porn website less than a year ago, first launching it sometime back in March/April.  It was a get rich quick scheme.  Well, to be honest, I never thought getting rich from it would be a quick process.  It was more of a “generate money independently” scheme.  I hate working for other people.

Anyways, the gist of my operation is to act as a middle-man and get referrals to porn sites.  In return, I get 50% of the subscription for the initial payment and for all subsequent subscription payments.  Sounds pretty sweet hey? It is for the most part.

I admit that I watch smut.  Yes, like many other men out there, I take pleasure in the viewing of beautiful naked women.  So why not take something that I enjoy, and have it generate money for me?

For one thing, the demand for porn is something that will never decrease.  Men will always want it, in large quantities, in all varieties and types.  The internet is an amazing method of distribution too, as I wouldn’t have to sell physical copies of porn.  Meaning I’d never have to invest much in the business.

All I had to do to setup “shop”, was to build a website, grab the free teaser porn from the major porn distributors, and advertise my site.  Those who goto my site will hopefully like the first few sample photos enough to pay for more of it and get a subscription.

Of course, the hurdle of it all is the advertising bit and the fact that the internet is over-saturated with porn.  There are millions of other sites just like mine, and it takes quite a bit of effort to push traffic to my site.  I had devised all sorts of schemes to write automated programs and web-bots to scour the net to spam my site.  I had some pretty neat ideas, and employing them would definitely push me above the rest of the smut-mongers out there.  I’d use my comp. sci. abilities for the nefarious business of selling pornography.

The first phase of my program was to automate the updates to my website.  I wrote a little script that would pull from a cache of pre-packaged photo-shoots and it would automatically update my site every day with a new girl.  Of course, I’d have to find and package those photos… but having the automated script saved me oodles of time.

The next hurdle is the constant maintenance of the site. Guys have short attention span, and they want to wank to as many different pictures of women as possible.  So the site has to be constantly updated, almost daily, to get return traffic and new traffic.  This means that I have to sift through tons of crappy smut to post to my site as good smut.   Now being a fellow porn watcher, you would think that I wouldn’t have any problems with this, but when it becomes a chore it grows tiresome quite quickly.

So, I eventually lost interest in running the site.  What didn’t help too, was the fact that I had graduated from University and got a real job, where I quickly found that I actually enjoy computing and should probably better spend my time developing a skill… rather than maintaining an empire of pornography.

SxxyGirls.com had doubled my initial investment of $30.  As I write this, it is also the first hit on Google when you query sxxygirls (surprise!), but also is listed on a ton of other sites that refer to it.  It also shows up when query the names of some of the lovely beauties that I had posted up on the site.  If anything, the site gave me a better understanding of what it takes to increase your site’s Google page rank.

In the end, I ask “was it worth it?”  Sure, I enjoyed learning about the world of internet pornography.  There is surprisingly a lot to learn about it, and it is an interesting venture to be in.  It just wasn’t my cup of tea.

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TV

I’ve signed up at the Goodlife gym nearby work. After over 3 weeks off without any physical activity due to the lack of Ultimate, I figured I should probably get some exercise every now and then to clear up the arteries.

I was at the gym last night for the first time. The gym I goto is pretty good, tons of equipment, and best of all it has TV’s in front of all the cardio machines. This makes me all giddy, as I haven’t had raw unadulterated television in over half a year.

Renata and I don’t have cable TV at home, as we download the shows we watch through the internet. There’s so much crap out on TV these days that having cable simply isn’t worth the time and cost. Why would I want to pay some company to spend 25% of my TV watching time staring at commercials? Despite this, raw cable TV brings back fond childhood memories of sitting in front of the tube and zoning out.

So anyways, I hop on an elliptical machine, plug in my headphones, and start working away like the little hamster-in-a-wheel that I am. There are banks of TV’s on the wall, and each elliptical lets you control which station you want to listen to. My choices tonight? New Hampshire local news, Entertainment Tonight, some TSN show about hockey, and more shitty local news. Now these channels do not represent all that is TV, but it doesn’t remove from the conclusions of my survey: TV is shit.

Entertainment Tonight is just awful. I’ve known it to be awful forever, but I don’t recall it ever being this bad. Who cares about Dancing with the Stars? I don’t know what’s worse, watching commercials or watching the actual show. So I’m left with shitty local news and TSN. I couldn’t really care what some old guy thinks about hockey teams on TSN, so that’s out. I’m just not a hockey fan, it’s never really appealed to me.

So local news here we go. After a somewhat interesting story on “Wet Cleaning” at the Dry Cleaners (using eco-friendly soap to dry clean) I find myself watching a story on how a police cruiser almost hits a deer on the side of the road. Yes… the news broadcast spent 30 seconds describing a downtown homicide, and spent the remaining 5 minutes of the broadcast showing chase cam footage of a deer jumping over the cops hood. Cool footage, but that maybe should be omitted and posted on YouTube instead? Which brings me another pet peeve… why is it that news stations are starting to broadcast YouTube clips?

It’s retarded. It’s completely the opposite of HD… it’s like super LD. If I wanted to watch YouTube, I would’ve just watched YouTube.

So anyways, after surfing through 4 shitty programs on the elliptical I’ve concluded that I need to bring in a magazine to read while I work out, like the Economist, and that TV is absolute crap. The people who watch cable for hours a day, and blow a fair chunk of money paying for it, deserve their existence in the purgatory that is television.

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Free Stuff!

I’m embarrassed to say that I googled for an ebook for one I wanted to buy at Amazon, instead of actually purchasing said book since I felt shafted that I couldn’t get free shipping as a Canadian. I swear, I’ve gotten free shipping from them before. I *could* get free shipping from the Canadian site at Amazon.ca, but prices haven’t been adjusted for Canadian dollar spike. Why pay $50 CAD for a book when it’s going price is $30US. Forget Chapters/Indigo for that matter, as the same book is like $60-$70 CAD. With the Candian dollar stronger than the American, why let myself get lynched?

Anyways, I actually found that very ebook. It was the first hit I got from Google. The site that serves it is www.scribd.com, and they’re basically like a youtube of documents. You post a document, and they host it publicly for everyone. I don’t know who takes the time to get the pdf versions of these books up, but a lot of popular books are indeed up on scribd.

The books I’m reading on their right now are:

The Mythical Man Month - A classic in software engineering that outlines the process of software development.

Code Complete, 2nd Edition - A book on how to write better and more complete code. Kinda like the bushcraft of software. Coding is a craft, and as a software developer who is always trying to continually get better, it’s a book that I quite like.

Anyways, both books are ones that I will purchase as soon as the list value for us Canadians matches the American price. Otherwise I can’t bring myself to buy the books when they’re almost twice the cost simply because I’m a Canadian.

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Another note along the lines of free internet stuff. This is pretty late news, but I finally downloaded the new Radiohead album. No, I didn’t pirate their music, but I got it from their official website.

If you goto www.radiohead.com, you can purchase their new album online for the low low price of whatever you want to pay for it. Entering $0.00 is a valid price, and will allow you to download their album. You can also buy their fancy box set for $80, and it’ll get shipped to you. I’m listening to it as I type this, and it’s an amazing album so far. If you’re a radiohead fan, go out and get it if you haven’t already. If you’re not a radiohead fan, go out and get it anyways. Hell, I would pay for it if I had to.

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