Tuesday, December 19, 2006

The first step of starting your own business is an idea. Something about your business must be original in some way, correct? It might be something as plain as a location for a franchise store where there is a market niche, or it might be a revolutionary technology. I have yet to come up with anything ground-breaking for sure, but I thought I'd put out an idea I had to my readers. Feedback is of course welcome.

From what I've seen, there are people out there who might have no problem drinking a $2 Charles Shaw alone, but would feel awkward putting it out for guests. Yet these same people might not want to shell out the $10-15 a bottle or more when sering at their house to their 20-something year old guests who can hardly tell the difference beyond seeing an interesting label from a respectable locale such as Napa, Chianti or Bordeaux. This is where my product would step in. For a relatively low price, we would ship stickers of fictional yet exotic-sounding wines that can be easily applied onto any bottle. Sounds shameless, but in this age of anonymous online ordering, I believe there's a market!

Oh and no stealing! ;-)

Monday, December 18, 2006

Well apologies all for the lack of posts recently. I have been involved in a car crash and have been spending a lot of time dealing with the many repercussions that come along with such things. It does seem horribly unfair that even when you have done absolutely nothing wrong you still have so much to take care of. Insurance can only do so much.

The accident happened as follows: I was at a stop light which then turned green and I set off down the street, meanwhile a guy coming in the other direction decided to suddenly turn across our line making a left turn. Crazy behavior causing me to throw on my breaks all of a sudden. The big SUV behind us then ran into the back of our car.

Following the accident things didn't seem so bad, our body work in the back of the car was messed up, but the car seemed almost drivable. My wife and I both seemed fine, apparently no injuries. One of the craziest things was that the guy who turned across our lane causing the accident just drove away not stopping. Luckily we got his license and handed it over to the police. It appeared the lady behind us was to be full responsible however, she was very apologetic and exchanged details with us no problem. We sent the car into the shop and spent the remainder of the day in a good amount of shock, but otherwise fine.

Next day we awake and my wife's neck is killing her, she hadn't been able to sleep all night, my neck is similarly sore. We are advised to seek medical attention and have spent some good time now with a Chiropractor. The next brick to drop is that our car has been totaled. Weeks after spending $1500 on the clutch we are now going to be given just $3200 for our car- it's gone :-(
what seemed like a small accident has turned into a nightmare, with medical bills, neck braces, rental cars and many many decisions to be made. Life is suddenly a whole lot more complicated.

Saturday, December 09, 2006

've been doing some more reading into technical analysis with the intention of eventually day-trading some of my investments. So far most of my reading has been establishing the base of reading price action—looking for trends through support/resistance levels, patterns such as triangles and wedges, and reversal signals such as heads-and-shoulders and triple-bottoms/tops. My understanding is that these are really meant to be side-additions when interpreting signals from tools such as moving averages and oscillators which I'm just beginning to get into now. There's a fair amount of me that's still a bit skeptical of the field of technical analysis, but I know that there are people out there who are successful at it, so why not me?