My Trip Around the World

One of the reasons that I am writing this blog is to chronicle my journey across the globe. I will be embarking on my most ambitious journey to date: a trip around the world. How would you prepare for such a trip, you may ask? Well, let me give you a peek inside my world and how I have prepared thus far for my forthcoming adventure.

It has been tough to find free time to really get all of my plans set so I quit my 16 hour/2 day a week job so that I could have more time to focus on planning, because my 5 day weekend just was not enough. Now that all of my pesky obligations are out of the way I have ample time to get ready to go, which is quite a relief because I don't think people realize how taxing a weekend job sitting in an office alone can truly be. The stress was really getting to me.

Being gainfully unemployed has really freed up my schedule, which has been a big help in preparation for my trip. I now have time to: get in an extra game of racquetball with my friend Matt, stand on the front lawn in my bath robe with a cup of tea, wander aimlessly in shopping centers and look at things that I can't buy because I have no job, call people while they are at work, and sell everything I own on Ebay because I have no stream of income. As you can see, I just simply could not accomplish all of this while I was plugged into the working world.

So where was I? Ah, yes, planning for my most ambitious journey to date. Well, I bought my plane tickets. That is really about all of the planning that I have done. At first I thought, "I have an idea, why not just buy a one-way ticket to anywhere then see where I can go from there?". As thought of how crazy and asinine that sounded even for me, I came up with a better idea, one that fit my thirst for adventure, my desire to go around the world, as well as my uncanny ability to plan as little as as possible for large undertakings such as this; I would just buy plane tickets to a few destinations and not book hotels. I can't wait to see where the world will take me.

My "Around the World Extravaganza" technically begins on July 4th. On June 4th, however, I leave for an opportunity that arose that I could not pass up. I will be the staff mechanic for a company called America by Bicycle. This company runs a guided tour group across America, from San Francisco to New Hampshire, by, you guessed it, bicycle. I realize that most sane persons would not dole out thousands of dollars in order to punish themselves by dragging their bodies over the entire 3847 miles from coast to coast under their own power, but cyclists are a different breed and my job will be to ensure that all of the bicycles function properly. I will keep this blog updated and try to jot down every tidbit and observation that I can and I hope that you all enjoy it. I know that regardless of where I go, or who I run into, there is always a story to be told and I will share as many as I can.

Great TV Quote

Quote of the Day:

"Looking at the Big Board of stocks today...some up...aaa...some down...whatever."
-CNBC anchor Mark Haines giving an update of the stock market

The Stock Market

I began investing yesterday. If this were twenty years ago I would be fine. Most likely I would have gone to a brokers office in person, consulted with a professional, then forked over my embarrassingly small investment capital (it barely breaks triple digits) so that the "professional" could put my money to work. This is 2009, though, and I have an infinite amount of information at my fingertips and an unreasonable amount of free time with which to accessit so now my life is consumed by watching three different screens that are constantly bombarding me with information. I turn on the television to watch CNBC, which instantly gives me access to a split screen of nine different stock analysts yelling at each other while the sidebars and ticker information flickers and rotates around their talking heads. Then I nestle in and flip up my laptop so that I can log in to my internet trading account, because although there is enough information jumping out of the television at me with the nine pundits and eight million ticker flickers, they never talk about the meager options that I have cast my fortune upon (which begs the obvious question of "why do you even have the TV on?" to which I have no answer other than the standard "because it's there"). My laptop warms up and I login to my account, but it is not just one account, that would be ridiculous, it is four. I have my actual investing account, my google finance portfolio, which I had to open because my investing account has a fifteen minute delay on what my stocks are doing (fifteen minutes!! they might as well send me the information in a bottle!!) then I have to login to my two email accounts where I receive news and stock updates via email. Oh, right, I almost forgot door number three; my Phone! My phone blinks, beeps, and calls for my attention to let me know, well, basically what I could have found out from any one of the other sources. In fact I quickly came to the realization that I can learn all of the information in a reasonable manner by reading the newspaper tomorrow. For some reason I feel like my $200 is going to make or break the stock market, which trades trillions of dollars each day and has existed for over a century, and I need up to the second reports on how my investments are doing. The best part about this is that I am investing for the long term, I have no intention to take any money out, move it around, or really do anything with it other than let it sit there. I think I would have a heart attack if there were a power outage.

Anonymous Critics

I have to thank the internet yet again for another one of it's entertaining side effects; the arrogant, overly harsh, anonymous critic. I recently got an Android based phone which is an open-source operating system meaning that anyone with the spare time and knowledge can make whatever program they can imagine and make it available to end users like myself at no cost. In the monetizing, capitalist world we live in I found this quite surprising and, really, pretty cool. People who have spent their free time developing programs for less tech-savvy folks like myself should be congratulated, yet there are those out there who are a bit less, umm, appreciative should I say? Before downloading each application from a marketplace I am able to read a description of the program, what it does, how much memory it takes up, as well as comments from others who have downloaded the program. In the comment box there is space for the three most recent comments and without fail there is always at least one that rips the designer a new one. Some of my favorites are listed below.

This is a comment left for a virtual craps game.
"This app should be called CRAP, not Craps"

This is a comment left for a memory management application.
"I took it upon myself to manage my memory content, by deleting this app."

A few good one-liners include.
"delete"
"thanks for waisting my time, delete"
"this application would be better if it didn't suck so much"