Stocks at all time high

Makes me feel good, maybe I don't have to work as hard, but then the US$ is depreciating, so really I will need more money since things will cost more in the forseeable future. The Chinese are investing in equities now, not just tresuries, this seems like a good thing for others who are in the stock market as it will give us more power to buy. I am happy with my sales of EBAY and YHOO but am considering perhaps repurchasing them again at the lower prices just to get rid of my cash, it is so high these days I am worried that Sell in May go AWAY could happen again this year, but so far so good. Last year was painful, but we had that pain this year when the Shanghai market went down 9% earlier this year, could that make it stay now? Who knows... Maybe not.

Now to my technogeek stuff, I was asking LuLA.org to add LALUGS.org to its front page as they don't meet anymore and I want to capture those hits and redirect them to other groups. In doing so I realize that I am really behind the updating of LALUGs, but whatelse is new, always been the case, it is a timeconsuming thing, still haven't been able to figure out how to get all the group leaders in a room to setup the RSS solution to autoupdate the site, don't even understand how that works as it is Peter's idea, but it does seem to make lots of sense, this cutting, reformating and pasting that I have done should be automated.

In looking over http://lalugs.org/I saw that it had some cool links like http://opensource.region-stuttgart.de/ which I hadn't explored. So I tried out the Open Source Demo on XP and it worked, logged me into a KDE session on what looks like SuSE in German. Kind of neat, I would guess the .EXE I downloaded setup a VNC client on my end or some kind of LTSP magic that I don't need to understand now, but it is a very easy way to show a Linux machine to Windows or maybe even Mac users, but it seemed harder to do it on a Mac. I will have to figure out who to talk to in Suttgard about visiting us someday here at UUASC or LiLAX, they have it together.

Silk Road

Hami gave me the idea of following the Silk Road to China, I like the idea seems the Stern had a similar articule and Herbert mentioned it. Could be a great adventure someday.

Back home

I am not on my computer and the Internet I pay for in the USA, feels good to be back home after spending 12 days on ICEs and relatives. I was greeted by a letter from the IRS wanting more paperwork yuck! 20 days to comply and I thought that I was done with taxes, I figured 40 hours of my time have been unproductively used for this crap, now it will be more. Makes me wonder how much the nation uses to comply with tax law, there is a very big hidden cost in this country of people preparing taxes, even when you have help, which I didn't get, you still have to do lots of work.
Still haven't gotten TurboTax/Quicken to work right, but feel that I would rather try GNUCash and some open source tax software. Wouldn't trust it as much, after all there is no one to sue, but I feel pretty confident that something open source has been at least revised as much as the Wikipedia which is very high quality.
Now I wish I had some picture of our return, but the camera stayed secure and empty in my backpack through he whole excitement of if I was able to catch the next flight home on standby. I didn't mind getting stuck in either FRA or DFW since I had a train ticket to Fulda, would be easy to do or in the case of DFW, I used to live there and would rent a car to see the city before coming home, I bet in 10 years it has changed. I rather liked my years there, it was the first apartment I ever rented. I never furnished it though, only some garage sale items in there.

Took the city tour, the guy spoke so much I couldn't follow, but it was not bad, I had done it once before 3 years ago, it is a very nice town. I even recorded part of the guides talk on the Zen I bought the day before the trip.

Sleepless in Germany

4am here, lots of pictures and adventures. We got to LAX much to early due to a schedule change, wasn't printed in the old email, we left 25 min early as well. So we arrive in Dallas and the next flight leaves late, arrive in FRA late, go to the post office get a telephone card, go to the train validate ticket and then walk on a wild goose chase for a while, take the S-Bahn back to the Hbhf and go to Fulda on the ICE arriving at 12:15, slightly late, but otherwise we would probably have missed the train.

Time at uncle's was really lovely. He showed us the town and we talked at dinner and all meals. He is really cool and I looks a bit like Paul McCartny. So after 2 sleepless nights in Fulda we plan to go to Berlin-Hamburg, to meet Christan and Glady.

Ich bin noch ein bischen neue zu diesem blogging, muss mal rausfinden wie man Fotos macht.

Sleepless in Germany

4am here, lots of pictures and adventures. We got to LAX much to early due to a schedule change, wasn't printed in the old email, we left 25 min early as well. So we arrive in Dallas and the next flight leaves late, arrive in FRA late, go to the post office get a telephone card, go to the train validate ticket and then walk on a wild goose chase for a while, take the S-Bahn back to the Hbhf and go to Fulda on the ICE arriving at 12:15, slightly late, but otherwise we would probably have missed the train.

Time at uncle's was really lovely. He showed us the town and we talked at dinner and all meals. He is really cool and I looks a bit like Paul McCartny. So after 2 sleepless nights in Fulda we plan to go to Berlin-Hamburg, to meet Christan and Glady.

Taxes

OK, so taxes are mostly done now, with all the trading I and my wife did last year it was 20 hours of work, geez... they should pay us, but we pay them.... I am going to Germany on April 9th, will be back May 9, meanwhile I do want a google job when I return. Trip close by, damn, don't bug me. Should turn phones off....