stlplace

link to 2009 PDF annual shareholder letter here.

Buffett CNBC interview
(part 1 here, following the link from part 1 to get to part 2 to 8 )

Recommend reading by Buffett
Keynes’s *General Theory*, chapter 12

Intelligent Investor Chapter 8 and 20

My Notes

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1. Come up with products that is consistent (not sometimes work, sometimes don’t, see this old post from PreCentral guys).

2. Also come up with some smart ads (with Sprint and Verizon), something like this one from German carrier O2.

O2 has about 11% market share in Germany per Yahoo Answers.

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The average age of your credit history is one factor that goes into determining your credit score. At fifteen percent of your score, having a longer credit history can make a big difference. This is one reason why it makes sense to start building credit as a student; the younger you are when you get your first card, the longer your credit history will be. You may also need to start building credit as a student so you’ll have a good credit history when it comes time to make all those adult purchases, such as buying a car or a house.

While building credit as a student is a great idea, your efforts can also backfire if you don’t go about them properly. Fortunately, with a little bit of research and effort, you can start building your credit responsibly. Start with these five tips to help you out.

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How to deal with 401k when leaving a job?
Some options:
1) Take it out, with 10% penalty, and potential income tax later on. This is usually not recommended.

2) Rollover to an Rollover IRA; or Rollover to the new employer’s 401k.
I did this once: not because of change of job, but because of change of company ownership, I have opportunity to rollover some of the 401k money into Vanguard Rollover IRA in year 2007. That money didn’t recover to the initial value so far.

3) Leave it alone (until 59 1/2 years old).
I did this when I left my former employer in Oct. 2008 (the middle of financial crisis), it turns out to be a good move (or no-op), as the value recovered from the crisis.

Should I open a traditional IRA or Roth IRA?
Tax deduction: IRS publication here.

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Particularly in the IT (software development) field. Obviously the No. 1 thing is “never give up”. I started looking about 9 months ago when I felt “the need to look”: both for defense (fear of lay off) and offense (opportunities better matching my interest and skill). I had to admit finding a job is not an easy thing in this environment. Why look for another job while one still has a job (besides the main reason behind the change)? The simple answer is, only when a person still has a job or other sources of income, he/she will have the space to look for something better.

(Source: Brandies U.)

Strategy and Job search sites I used

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First want to say “Happy Chinese New Year” to my readers. Chinese (lunar) New Year, the year of tiger, starts on Feb 14, 2010.

Today is my last working day with my current employer. I switched to my current job about 15.5 months ago, in the middle of financial crisis (what an co-incident). I recall in last Chinese New Year’s day I was on road for business (the downside of consultant job). Obviously there is upside of working as consultant too (see different people and places; working from home, again Pros and Cons there).

I will start my new job on Monday Feb 15. Another co-incidence is my next employer and my first employer starts with same syllabus.

BTW, an excellent YouTube video on “how to quit with class” (saw it from Workopolis first).

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It appears to me iPhone TV ads are more effective than Palm TV ads.

First iPhone ads

There’s an app for that

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Got opportunity to play with Palm Pre for couple minutes in the weekend. Sprint kiosk at Chesterfield Mall has the real Pre (instead of the faked phones at many other places). I was very impressed by the screen, both the (multi) touch and the display. Surfed the web: amazon, ESPN etc. Zooming in and out is very similar to iPhone (using two fingers). Checked out the tiny keyboard, it feels OK. Initially I thought it’s not “qwerty” keyboard, I was wrong: it was just different from the keyboard of my Blackberry 8800, as you can see from this picture at PreCentral: .

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One big complaints on the new iPad is its lack of multitasking support. From technical perspective, I think that’s because iPad will be use iPhone OS, currently at 3.2 beta, and it does not support multitasking. It does support iPod (listening to music) and another task such as browsing web though. Some developers speculate Apple will support multitask in its iPhone OS 4.0.

Oh well, my point here is not just about iPhone/iPad multitasking. My point is trying to discuss whether multitasking, work both for us human beings and for the computers (ultimately controlled by us and supposed to help us work more efficiently). To be honest I don’t have the answer. But I read one interesting article when I google “multitasking makes you stupid”. I did not intensionally typed in those words, it just stands out when I typed “multitasking” in my browser google toolbar (another one is multitasking myth). Anyway, here are an interesting article from the Atlantic (2007)

The Autumn of the Multitaskers
and here an review article on the Atlantic article.
Multitasking Makes You Slow and Stupid…(I would read this one after the Long Atlantic article).

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Saw the Palm Pre Plus ads by Verizon at PreCentral.

I installed the GMail on my Nokia 5800. I could not remember why it did not work last year when I bought it first. The software on my Nokia 5800 is the same, but the GMail client may have changed. The user interface is kind of funky, but it works.

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