Warren Buffet Quote

I think this is a wonderful quote on the bubbles in the housing, gold and other markets -

'Once a price history develops, and people hear that their neighbor made a lot of money on something, that impulse takes over, and we're seeing that in commodities and housing...Orgies tend to be wildest toward the end. It's like being Cinderella at the ball. You know that at midnight everything's going to turn back to pumpkins & mice. But you look around and say, 'one more dance,' and so does everyone else. The party does get to be more fun -- and besides, there are no clocks on the wall. And then suddenly the clock strikes 12, and everything turns back to pumpkins and mice.'

Carcissism

Here's photos of my new pride and joy, my new car, a BMW 2-door coupe in Titanium Silver ! A 'Bimmer' as some call it. Notice that these photos were taken when it had no plates.

And my old(er) car, the black Honda Accord, is right next to it.

A 5' 8" snowman

Ever seen so much snow that you could keep rolling 6 foot tall snowmen all over the place ?
Here's one snowman (which is taller than my 5' 7") and I'm on my way to building another one...was easy, I just rolled them down a gentle slope.
I couldn't drive anywhere (because of the snowstorm, of course), so this served as a good distraction.

More photos of the snowstorm aftereffects here

EzPass in New Hampshire

I was on 93 N yesterday and noticed that New Hampshire has now gotten on board the EzPass system which has been in use all over the North East for years.
However, I chose NOT to use my EZ-Pass...why, you ask ?

Because, the toll is 75 cents but if you use New Hampshire tokens, it is only 37.5 cents ! I stuck my transponder in the glove box and paid with tokens.

Why the difference of a 100% between the tokens and using the EzPass ?

War of the Worlds

The movie stinks, it is just another of those epic arty movies that Spielberg has been spewing out for the past few years...he's a good director, but the storyline was too thin.

A white belt

I now have a white belt in Taekwondo - all it means is that I can do some clumsy kicks and punches, it won't really help me in a real life situation. Yet.
I need to get a year or two of Taekwondo training before I can instinctively deploy the fancy flying kicks and punches that they're teaching us. For now, I have to stop for a second and think about which foot and which arm needs to go where before I can make a move.
We also got to break a board with our fists, I have a nice photo of my A+ board ! :-)

Photos back online

The good old webserver - http://kalele.homelinux.com:8080/gallery - is back online again.
I didn't like the Smugmug interface, plus it had really slow upload speeds and limited me to upload 100 MB at one time.

New photos at girish.smugmug.com

I finally got a new place to put all my digital camera photos.

http://girish.smugmug.com

Unlimited storage space, but limited to 2 GB/month. I don't think I'll be using up that much.
It was 25$ for 1 year, but I figure that if I get more people to signup using my email address as the referral, it could end up costing me less.

"You can save a friend $5 on a smugmug subscription and earn $10! It's simple: have your friend enter the coupon code MLoWVZtQIzXG2 in the 'Referred by' field on the signup form. We can credit your smugmug account right now, or soon, we hope to have PayPal payments. It’s your choice. "

Long term reliability

After my recent filesystem corruption issues on my linux web server, I've decided to try and find hosting for my 2+ GB of photos elsewhere. Not only is it better from the long term reliability standpoint, but also it will cost the same as the electricity that I use up keeping the machine running.
There are 3 options -
1. Get a SmugMug account (for 30$/year you get unlimited storage and 2 GB/month).
2. Get an iPowerWeb domain name hosting account (for 96$/year you get 2 GB storage and 30 GB traffic/month, not to mention SSL/PHP/SQL/CGI/POP accounts etc) with my own domain name.
3. Move to my friend's home linux server (which will be free).

Reliability-wise, SmugMug seems to be the best (zero maintenance) option for the photos, but there's only 2 GB/month and no other features.
Thinking feature-wise, the iPowerWeb account gives me a sandbox to play in. But, I'll have to 'administer' it myself.
If I move to my friend's server, I am spared these expenses, but since it's a favour, there is no accountability for downtime or failures.

Decisions, decisions...