As software continues to eat the world, we’re slowly becoming slaves to subscriptions. I don’t remember when I started thinking about this but it must’ve come up when I looked at our family budget. I realized that we as a family and I, are paying so much on monthly or yearly subscriptions that it just gives me great pause. What am I paying? On the surface, it doesn’t look like much but then you dig deeper and you realize you are hooked! Here are some subscriptions in our household: ...

If you’ve been reading this blog for some time you’d know that I like to try different CMS’s. I made some mistakes over the years and I transferred my posts between different CMS. This ended up killing a lot of my backlinks, but that’s ok. I ended up settling on using Markdown to write my posts (love it) and a static CMS generator. Originally I used Pelican and it was pretty good. It was based on Python and had some really neat ways to slice and dice your posts, leverage SEO, and do cool things with it. ...

I’m a reader of Reddit and I found a subreddit that makes me sad. It’s called r/WallStreetBets. Everyone is posting on how much money they make or lose from trading ‘stonks’ using put or call options. I ruminated about this in a video that I’m going to post soon. Everyone get’s making money confused with the real thing, time. You can’t make more time, you can always make more money. ...

We all went on our first cruise last year on Norwegian Cruise Lines (NCLH). S and I had a great time, our kids were bored. When my wife first proposed the idea of going on a cruise, I rejected it. I was like “why do I want to be cooped up on a floating metal coffin?” I was wrong, I had a blast of a time. The food was fantastic. There was so much to do for entertainment, and different port of calls were great too. Overall S and I had a fun time and we decided to do another cruise again. We were planning something for this or the next year when Covid19 hit. With a few cruise lines having infected passengers, the near halting of travel, and the Covid19 pandemic, it’s not hard to imagine these companies ’taking on water.' ...

I haven’t play Go in a very long time but I came across this short video of a Master making a major blunder. I don’t understand Japanese but you can hear the gasps and comments about it. What happened was the Master placed a black stone and created a cross shape. This effectively gave him 1 liberty (you always want two liberties) for survival. This is called ‘atari.’ ...

It’s Saturday and the month of April is almost over. It WAS Saturday when I started writing this but now it’s the last day of April. It’s been especially cold this April and the leaves aren’t even out on the trees where I live. That’s been a big bummer. There have been a few days this month that have been perfect Spring days and my body is ready for the warm weather. I just want to get out and work out in my yard. For the most part, Mother Nature took my place, the cool weather and rain has done wonders for my front lawn. ...

Some of yesterday’s winners or most active should be no news to any who looks at the markets. Gilead Sciences announced some positive results working on Covid19 related drugs. Good, we need more stuff like this to get our lives back to normal. I don’t know about you but I’m getting stir crazy after being in ’lockdown’ for two months now. My chart generator is showing me that there’s only a support line down at $64, so congrats to all the stock pickers. ...

I don’t know where the market is going. Will it shrug off all this Covid19 pandemic or will it fall apart? I really don’t know. That’s the thing with the Markets, you can try to build all these decision support systems to predict if the market is going to go up or down, but that always remains such a futile effort. The only thing you can really do is protect yourself in down times and invest smartly for the long term. ...

Just looking through some Stocks and ETFs that are crashing and burning. Airlines and Oil have really taking it on the chin. Speaking of chin, people are self improving themselves and their smiles. I like that. Tech and Health will be the winner coming out of this.

Two years ago we moved to a new house in a very active social community. We were going to dinner parties at least once a month and my wife would usually bring a small dish and I would bring wine. This has been a lot of fun for everyone but I always hated running out to the store to get one or two bottles of wine. My new gig keeps me very busy and on the road, so the last thing I want to do run around looking for a good wine. So, I decided to join a monthly wine club. ...