Will the real idiot please stand up

I have the day off from “work” and am watching President Bush at his press conference talking about the importance (or in his case, the lack of) of popularity and defending his record. I voted for this man twice and have no doubt objective historians will judge him more positively than the reporters at the major media outlets.

Speaking of reporters, Ann Compton filed a report for ABC News Radio this morning about the upcoming press conference. She said “for his entire second term, the President’s approval ratings have been in the negative territory.” I am not particularly good in math yet I know that ratings cannot be negative. My opinion of this reporter went from a “two” (on a ten point scale) to a “one.”

Blogging from Hong Kong International Airport

Local Hong Kong time Saturday 10:15am

I am at the airport waiting for my flight back to the United States and using the free Wi-Fi provided by PCCW. This marks the end of my 2008 trip to Hong Kong.

I am updating the last couple of posts with pictures and videos. Please re-check them if you have not done so recently.

Good Morning Vietnam

Local Ho Chin Minh City time Tuesday 8:01am



I can’t believe it took me so many days in Vietnam for me to come up with the most obvious title to this blog posting. It’s similar to this morning when I went to the hotel gym for the third morning in a row and finally found the remote control so I can turn up the volume and hear what they are saying on MTV Asia. I found it just in time for me to check out this afternoon and return to Hong Kong.

Visitors to Vietnam are quite fascinated by the traffic in Vietnam. There are armies after armies of motorcycles. The city is laid out very similarly to Washington DC with many traffic circles. Interestingly, both cities' road networks are designed by the French.



One USD is equal to 16,000 VND and the Vietnamese currency is quite volatiles. Often times souvenir sellers and shops prefer to be paid in either HKD or USD. I suspect this is partly because Vietnamese people prefer to put their money at home rather than in banks.



I will blog at you later this week from Hong Kong

Jane Fonda was here

Local Ho Chi Minh City time Sunday 7:54pm

Greetings from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. We landed here Friday morning and have been spending the past two days around the Ho Chin Minh City area. I took some high quality photos and videos that I hopefully will be able to share with you once we return.

First thing I learned about Vietnam is its currency. One American dollar is equal to early 16,000 dong. You often see people on the side of the street selling fruits with a sign saying “(Vietnamese word) 18,000.”



I was touring around the Mekong Delta area earlier today and our tour stopped by a fishing village. Among the people walking by I spotted a caucasian woman with a Vietnamese man, whom I quickly identified as her tour guide. There was nothing unusual about the couple except that the man was wearing a UNC hat. I later had the chance to talk to them. She is an American from Texas by way of New York City and the tour guide has never been to UNC, bought his hat at a flea market. When I told him I asked because that was the grad school that I went to he immediately offered to sell it to me. I declined since I can get better and more appropriate souvenir elsewhere.

Wheels up for Vietnam

Local Hong Kong time Thursday 3:27pm

I read two weeks ago that Cathay Pacific was rated by Zagat as having one of the best coach-class products among "large international" airlines. I will get to experience that myself tomorrow when we leave Hong Kong for Vietnam.

Unfortunately I will not be taking my laptop with me and therefore will not be able to blog until we return to Hong Kong mid next week. Hopefully I will be able to make up for it by taking some high quality shots/videos and posting them here then.

Venus and Jupiter over Hong Kong

Local Hong Kong time Monday 9:17pm

For all my readers in North America, this is a preview of something that hopefully you will get to witness ten hours from now. Two weeks ago I was in Chapel Hill looking into the early evening sky hoping to witness the flyby of the International Space Station when I noticed off in the lower Southwestern horizon two lights that uniquely stood out. I later learned that they were Venus and Jupiter.

I saw them outside my hotel window tonight, this time accompanied by a crescent moon. I later read that this is the closest the three celestial bodies will appear until 2052. Looking at the video, trio looks almost like someone had painted a smiling face into the sky.

Macau from the sky

Local Hong Kong time Saturday 10:56pm

Greetings from Hong Kong. When I was here last year I blogged about our visit to Macau, the gambling capital of China. I recognized it out the plane window last night as our Continental Boeing 777 was preparing its final descent into Hong Kong International Airport. Even though I have only been to Macau twice in my life, I recognized it from the bright lights of the casinos and the unmistakable sight of the three unique bridges that cross the bay.

Giving thanks

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. The President of the United States has a traditional Thanksgiving message to the nation; I have a traditional blog post where I give thanks to God Almighty for the progress (sometimes even lack of progress) in my life over the past year.

The past year has been extremely challenging and rewarding. I am grateful foremost for the religious faith which has helped sustained me throughout the challenging job search earlier this year. I am also grateful for the job that the search resulted in. While this is by no means the type of job I had envisioned when I quit my job for business school three years ago and thinking about the job makes it tempting to say that business school was a total waste of time and money, I am grateful that I have a job given the recent macroeconomic developments. It helps that almost every month I read about layoffs in a company that I have interviewed with and my current employer is relatively recession proof.

In addition to some of the fruitful relationships I have built in the Chapel Hill area over the past year, I am also thankful for a couple of exciting things that are happening in my life. One is I will be going to Hong Kong once again with my parents for two weeks. I am fortunate that I have enough vacation days for me to do this.

Me and my parents are leaving for the airport in about two hours. I will blog to you from the other side of the world.

Jack Bauer still has it

Listening to Rush Limbaugh during lunch today talking about 24 reminded me that I have yet to blog about Sunday night’s two hour movie. 24 Redemption gave us the classic Jack Bauer, a man willing to sacrifice his own personal interests for the benefit of those around him, and demonstrates that the 24 franchise (unlike James Bond) is alive and well.

The movie began in the middle of Africa where Bauer had been spending the past year hiding from a subpoena forcing him to appear before then American Congressional committee to answer for the complaints against him in his work at the Counter Terrorist Unit. There he found himself in the middle of a military coup and gave up his freedom to help a group of African children board one of the last helicopters leaving the American embassy.

In 24 Redemption, the writers changed certain things about the show but kept the main ingredients that made the show great. In the eighteen months since the last season ended, I became concerned about the future directions of the show because of criticism from liberals who object to its portrayal of torture. In the movie, the writers answered those critics by introducing issues that they care about such as genocide in Africa and children being forced into the military. Yet the rest of the show remained unchanged. The writers even embedded a “wink and nod” to conservatives by having Jack Bauer give a very clever response to a United Nations peacekeeper who was getting in the way of fighting the bad guys.

There was one scene, however, that I found totally absurd and I blame the product placement people and not the writers. When Jack’s friend discovered that a coup was underway and called to tell Jack to evacuate the children, both characters were speaking on cell phones with the Sprint Nextel logos displayed prominently. Somehow we are supposed to believe that these phones don’t work in major American cities and yet they work in the jungles in the middle of Africa.

For those of us who have spent more than a year waiting for Jack Bauer’s return, 24 Redemption was true redemption indeed.

A “Bourne again” James Bond

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS OF QUANTUM OF SOLACE

Last Friday I saw Quantum of Solace, the 22nd movie in the James Bond franchise and the second with Daniel Craig playing the MI6 spy. I am a huge James Bond fan and have looked forward to seeing this movie for almost an entire year.

The good news is that the first weekend’s $70 million box office opening means that James Bond will remain as the most profitable franchise in the history of the movie industry. The bad news is that for diehard fans like myself, Quantum of Solace continued the (in my opinion) downward trend started by Casino Royale with the movie becoming less like a James Bond movie and more like any of the other spy action movies you see in theaters today.

Having seen all the James Bond movies (with the exception of the recent ones staring Daniel Craig) multiple times, I consider myself qualified to comment on the evolution of this franchise. There are certain trends and themes that are consistent in many Bond movies yet absent from Quantum of Solace. Not once did I hear a sexual innuendo uttered against an unsuspecting woman and with the exception of a cell phone used to track a suspect, there was no display of the type of high tech gadgets you expect to see in a regular Bond movie. Gone are the Bond movies where the main character works in conjunction with the American Central Intelligence Agency. In this movie, the CIA is portrayed as an organization ripe with internal conflict that at some point works with the villains against Bond. This movie, taken at its entirety, resembles more Bourne Identity than James Bond.

Hopefully I will feel better tomorrow when Jack Bauer returns tomorrow in 24 Redemption.

Stocks for the long run

Recently, following the wreckage in the stock market has become a ritual every afternoon at “work.” It’s tough watching the market slide further and further everyday. I began the calendar year with six-figures in my 401k account and the account has gone down close to 50% year to date. To illustrate how bad it has gotten, if I had closed out the account on January 2 and paid all taxes and penalties involved, I would still have more money leftover than what I have now.

I am, however, reminded of something a professor (one who worked in investment banking) I had at UVA said more than ten years ago. He said that the greatest fortunes are often made by doing the exact opposite of what everyone else is doing – buying when everyone is selling and vice versa. Over the past ten years, following this maxim would have cautioned any investor from the speculative frenzy over technology equities in the late 1990s and the real estate craze in the mid 2000s.

It gives me hope today that with the S&P 500 having dropped to where they were in 1997, any investor buying the index today would have an entry point equivalent to having bought during my junior year in college. During my last semester in college and the following summer I invested significantly into Applied Materials, having bought close to 650 shares at a split adjusted price of $7.65. I sold all those shares over the next five years at profits no less than 120%. Applied Materials closed today at a price lower than what it was when I bought my first shares in 1998.

But I realize that getting into the market amidst such volatility is easier said than done. Over the past two months, I have made significant investments into various indexes and individual stocks only to see prices continue to sink. My advice for anyone who is risk adverse but interested in taking advantage of the current market level is to invest in an index mutual funds and to invest only funds that he does not need for at least five (maybe even seven) years. My believe in the efficient market theory and my experience tell me that even when you are right about timing the market, very rarely will your timing be so perfect that you will manage to buy at the very bottom (or sell a the very top).

I am not going to end by saying that me having an MBA makes me better at giving investment advice because recent developments on Wall Street cast doubts into the judgment of many of my fellow degree holders. I will simply point out that during my two years in business school and the ten months of unemployment that followed, I never had to worry about money. Hence proving that not only am I a follower of my own advice but am also a beneficiary of it.

Happy Halloween

I hope you like our new digs here at Blogger. The transition was not as smooth as anticipated. The video clips transferred (with one exception) flawlessly but many of the pictures required further formatting. The biggest problem with the transfer has to do with blog posts that link to other blog posts – while the posts transferred without a problem, the links did not update to reflect the new linked posts on Blogger.

I wish everyone a happy Halloween tomorrow. Those of you in the Chapel Hill area may want to exercise extra caution if you encounter a McCain/Pain yard sign while trick or treating. Apparently the local liberals (that’s almost a redundancy given the political persuasions of the people in this area) have been doing such a good job at targeting the signs that some owners have taken extraordinary measures to protect them.

New URL for this blog

Please redirect your web browsers to http://buckyhoo.blogspot.com. The entirety of this blog will be transferred to that site and future updates will be made there.

 

Let’s keep our fingers crossed that all contents (especially the photos and videos) will transfer smoothly. See you on the other side.

Urgent programming note

I learned recently that AOL Journal will be permanently shutdown as part of AOL’s decision to focus on services that are on the profitable side of its corporate profit and loss statement. Due to that decision, this internet address will cease to function starting November 1.

 

Fortunately the contents of this blog, including pictures, videos, and reader comments, will be migrated over to a new address hosted by Blogger. I have yet to decide when to make the migration because Blogger is still working out some bugs related to the transfer.

 

Unfortunately, it does not look like traffic will automatically be forwarded from the current address (http://journals.aol.com/buckyhoo/UNC/) onto the new one. Therefore when the new address has been determined, I will post it here.

 

Please make sure you check back prior to November 1, when the current address will be permanently disabled, to get the new address. After November 1, you can get the new address by emailing me at buckyhoo AT aol DOT com or by doing a Google Blog Search for buckyhoo.

 

Thanks for your patience. I know I have not been the most diligent blogger of late but I do appreciate the readers who continue to check back periodically.

"You really went down the toilet on that ugly b*tch"

Right before I left "work" today, I looked at the stock market to assess the wreckage on Wall Street. For some reason, regardless of how bad things get, quoting my favorite movie always makes me feel better.

Woman marries manger

Once a resume coach talk told me about the importance of not completely relying on Microsoft Word’s spell checker to spell check my resume. He said “you’d be surprised how many people have worked as a senior manger.”

I came across one such person today in the Wall Street Journal. He works for Consolidated Edison and his wife has just celebrated her fiftieth birthday.

Reversal of fortune

I apologize for having been delinquent in my blogging activities. For the past two weeks I had been so caught up in following the events of the Democrat and Republican National Conventions that I have had little time for everything else.

 

Earlier today when I was at “work,” I logged into my Roth IRA account. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the position I took last summer in the Panera Bread Company had hit my target sell price and was sold in accordance to my limit order. This was particularly good news considering that two months after I bought the stock, I blogged about not liking the direction it had gone, especially in comparison to Chipotle Mexican Grill. In the months since that blog posting, both stocks continued their trajectories. But eventually Panera staged a comeback and looking back, it was a smart move to choose Panera over Chipotle.

 

Goes to show that I am still pretty screwed about predicting financial instruments, my Tim Pawlenty prediction (previous post) notwithstanding.

Pawlenty to be McCain’s running mate, according to futures market

The major news outlets, including the Drudge Report, have yet to report the identity of Senator McCain’s vice presidential running mate but within the past hour Intrade.com has seen a spike in the futures of Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty and a parallel drop in those of Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.

This is one of the most useful demonstration of the power of information and the futures market that I have seen in a very long time. While I like Pawlenty and think it's an excellent choice, I am a bit disturbed about what Intrade.com is also telling us about the likely winner of the election in November.

Analyzing FiOS from an MBA perspective

Today’s New York Times had an article on the progress that Verizon is making in its endeavor to use fiber optics to deploy internet, video, and landline voice services to major markets around the country. The article interviewed various analysts and industry experts on whether Verizon will ever be able to recoup the $23 billion invested into the FiOS product.

 

The paper’s web site features a very detailed walkthrough of the analysis by Craig Moffett, Harvard Business School alum and analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, who has been extremely bearish on Verizon’s latest investment. Moffett carefully weights the amount invested into FiOS versus its benefits. His analysis touched on many of the major topics I learned during my first semester in business school. It talked about strategy (a disruptive innovation created a need for traditional telecom companies to respond), finance (tax shield, discounted cash flow), financial accounting (how FiOS allows Verizon to make its balance sheets look better), cost accounting (how to allocate costs to calculate a cost per customer), marketing (lifetime value per customer ), some of the major topics anyone with an MBA is expected to understand.

 

I hope the folks at the Harvard Business School Press decide to write a case on this sometime in the future.

AT&T High Speed Internet service's latest marketing ploy

A friend of mine in Chapel Hill recently called AT&T, his landline provider, and ordered the AT&T High Speed Internet service, delivered via DSL. He quickly received in the mail his Motorola DSL modem and instructions on how to hook up the service. When he was unable to get the service working after having clearly connected his devices properly, he turned to AT&T for assistance.

 

It wasn’t until after multiple phone calls and at least two appointments with a technician going out onto his property that he found an AT&T representative who told him the true reason why the last light on his modem was not blinking properly. His location was physically too far from the central office to receive the provisioning for the DSL service.

 

Even though my MBA comes with a concentration in marketing, I have yet to come across a business situation where a service provider has embarked on a strategy of marketing a service to customers who are physically unable to receive the service. Maybe that’s why I didn’t get too far during my second year in business school when I interviewed for the AT&T Management Leadership Program.