Sunday 22 November 2009

Ideal Christmas gift ideas,

Ideal Christmas gift ideas,


for the older generation Vera Lynn sings well loved songs from the war, including that perennial favourite "Hitler's only got one ball"


or for the pet owner in your life, a life sized plastic bloodstained dismembered human hand, watch your friends gasp in surprise as their dog brings them a real human hand.


Saturday 14 November 2009

Warren Buffett

I have been reading The Snowball about Warren Buffett the investor.


http://www.amazon.co.uk/Snowball-Warren-Buffett-Business-Life/dp/0747596492/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1258270555&sr=8-1


The book is nearly a thousand pages long, and these are not small pages filled with large print! I'll allow myself to make a few observations even although I have not yet finished the book.


The first thing that impresses about Buffett is just how single minded he is, just how hard he has worked. As the title alludes to, he works on the basis that compound interest means that a little money today, can become a lot of money in the future. However to make this work you need to make a lot of good decisions, and the more money you can add to the pot the greater the reward will be. It also becomes clear that although awkward and eccentric he is a fundamentally decent person, in fact he does not seem to be motivated by material wealth or particularly by status. He is motivated by being intellectually engaged and challenged, with the accumulation of capital simply a means of keeping score in some personal challenge.


The second thing that comes across is that Buffett largely chose to live his life on the stage of professional work. That is what drove his vast fortune. And although clearly family were important to him, for much of his life he put career first and this had adverse effects that he came to regret greatly.


Although I would like to be as successful at investing as Warren Buffett, I will never have access to the capital that he does. In order to make serious money investing, you need serious capital. But I am learning all the time, and the little snowball of my own stock of capital is growing steadily so I would hope to be able to make increasing returns on my capital over the years, though enough to retire on seems unlikely!


And although I admire his single minded devotion to what he did, I am too much of a family person to ever want to make those sacrifices. At the end of the day it is for each of us to recognise where our priorities lie and try our best to reflect those in how we live our lives.

further to my website woes

by way of explanation as to why my website vanished for a week or two and has now reappeared.


I had been playing about with various settings that I did not really understand and accidentally amended where the website was getting uploaded to! All now fixed. But in future I will only publish my most recent blog postings on my website

http://www.sposh.demon.co.uk/


with the full set of blog postings appearing on

http://tallmanbaby.blogspot.com/


I might upgrade and get a php enabled account for my website, but I always hate committing to spending money on a monthly basis, so maybe not.

Sunday 8 November 2009

climbing mountains

Sometimes a job is like climbing mountains, you are never quite sure if you will reach the summit, or what you will find when you get there, but you just set off any try anyway.


With my new promotion, and new job, things are a bit like that. I have a rough idea what to do, who to ask, and how to go about things. But overall it all unfamiliar territory, so I am falling back on techniques that have worked well elsewhere, and I hope that they will work here.


But all in all, I am enjoying it, there is a real challenge about what I am doing, and how to do it. I just have to remind myself that when you are climbing new mountains you don't know what you will find and you have to rely on your wits.

website woes

For some time now the main focus of my website has been my blog. However the advice on the forums seems to be that a Rapidweaver blog will fall over eventually, and I am best to use some other approach.


That is why I switched to Rapidblog, which works with a blogger account and basically seems to paste in content from the blogger account into your page as displayed on a browser. Creating a page on the fly for you.


However this did not work. After some checking with the application support and my internet provider support, the issue seems to be that to use Rapidblog and php I need to have my website enable for php, which it is not. I would need to upgrade my website to allow this at an additional monthly cost.


I'll have a hum and a haw on whether it is worth paying monthly for webpages with php enabled, or whether I will just use blogger for my blogging, Flickr for photos, and my website for anything else.


I have no interest in crosswords for example, but trying to get a webpage working is something that I quite enjoy the challenge of, in an aggravating sort of way.


On the other hand, I have plenty of useful stuff to do, and the website is not really a major issue in the scheme of things. It is at risk of becoming a time sink, swallowing a lot of my time in doing technical support work. Watch this space, or not, as the case may be,


In the meantime, my blogger account is

http://tallmanbaby.blogspot.com/