The other two Bit-Char G I ordered from Hobby Link Japan finally arrived. The race track in Steven’s cubicle is offically opened to bussiness. The range of the remote control is very limited, so I have to close off the far end section of the track. To make things worse, the motor from my old car is dying and become very slow. On of that, one of the new remote has really limited range. Those two are not race ready. I swaped the motor of those two cars, and end up with two racable cars. I am going to order several 16000 rpm motors make the cars go faster. I am still waiting for a sales on one running on the 57MHz band to add another car to the track. People in my project team loves the racing track. It is a welcome break when you are so frustrated debugging some really messy code.
Today the fleet of 24″ widescreen LCD finally arrived. Almost everyone in the project get a new monitor, the rest of the team will have it in the next shipment. After I had made my suggestion about bigger display has a positive impact productivity to the CEO, finally the fruit prevail. I miss my dual 19″ display a bit, there are some unique advantages two 19″ compare to one 24″. However, there is an option to add another 19″ along side to my 24″. I am no longer the previliaged guy with dual monitor in the company, but I am glad that the everyone’s work environment is improved because of my suggestion. Everyone loves the better bigger display, I doubt who would go back to the tiny 19″ monitor. The IT department has create a survey on the preformance increase due to the bigger display. The guy who come up with questions is a complete idiot. The question ask how many percentage of productivity increase you will have from a bigger display, and the options are 25%, 50%, 75% and 100%. Realistic number from other research shows anywhere from 10-40%. Having options higher than 50% is just plain stupid. On top of that, the special treatment in our department having big monitors makes other department jealous. Some of my friends downstairs complaining they are still using CRT. I think the company better speed up the deployment of 24″ to the whole company or it will hurt the morale of those who havn’t get it.
This weekend I finally have the time to organize my investments. I havn’t keep an eye on it for a few months and I didn’t even keep a good track of record of my profits and losses. I spent a whole afternoon entering all my transaction records into my yahoo profile and determine which stock I should hold and what new stocks I should get. I find my performance is just ok, on average I have about 8% of return per year. I had made some good stock picks and a few bad picks. The best peformer is Advanced Medical Optics (EYE), I got it when it first IPO at $9, after 3 years I sold it at $36 making a 400% profit. I could have hold it longer since it went up to $47 now. Oh well, I should not be too greedy. I found that picking what stock to buy is the easier part in investing, deciding when to sell much more important. Almost every stock I owned had went up at a certain time after I bought it. The key is selling it while having a profit. I have held on some stocks for too long and its value drop so much I had to take a loss. I don’t buy stock for short term gain, my goal for each stock I pick having a 50% return in 2-3 years. I don’t look at market news or charts trying to speculate the price change. It is too hard to read accurately and you can never beat the pro-traders. My approach is reading the big picture on market trends, then invest in the top companies in the industry with growth potential. My primary source of information is the Economist. I have keep track of stocks picks from the Economist, so far the record is quote impressive. Most of them goes up with a half year lag after the article is published. Too bad that I don’t have the principle or the guts to invest in all of my own stock picks. Here are some of my stock pick at the moment: RSA Security (RSAS), TVIA Inc (TVIA), Avaya (AV), Titanium Metals Corp (TIE), Monsanto (MON), Apache Corp (APA)
We have another farewell lunch today. The boss has joked it has become a monthly feature and he even nominate the lesser boss for next month’s farewell lunch. Sometimes I really doubt what is the point behind farewell lunch. In the lunch with a big group of people, you won’t have much chance to talk to the one who is leaving. You end up talking to whoever happens sitting next to you. People comes mostly because they can’t think of a reason not to come. I see it as a occasion to socialize with other colleagues, especially I have lunch with my own group of friends instead of people from the same project. The guy who is leaving belongs to my lunch group, so we will have another farewell party with him tomorrow. This will be a real party and we will have fun, unlike today’s formalized bussiness lunch. Today before I went home, I turned the cubicle of this guy, who sits next to me, into a racing track for my Bit Char-G. The only problem is my other 2 Bit Char-G havn’t arrived yet.
Today at lunch, I heard a rumour from the usual source of all information. The rumour is about a secret admirer to another girl. According to the rumour, there is guy thinks that the girl likes him, because he found she glanced at him many times. The girl seems to have no impression about that guy, neither do us. Whether the rumour is true or not is not my concern. I would like to point out one obvious fact. If the guy is not looking at the girl, how does he know that she is glancing at him? If glancing imply a crush and from the fact that the guy glanced at the girl, it implies the guy likes the girl. It is natural for man to fantasy about girls. He may imagine his crush actually likes him, try to read traces from thin air to justify his emotion. It is acceptable if he hide all of this in his heart or take action to turn it into reality with his own hand. However, what good can it do by telling this to a friend of that girl? Unless the guy is a total loser in love, it makes absolutely no sense to confirm whether the girl likes him or not from a third party. I think this rumour is just a creation aims to bring us some good laughs.