Microsoft:
valued at $230 Bn
revenues of $50 Bn
profits of $14 Bn
p/e: 17, forward 14.
ratio of price to projected 5 year growth rate (PEG): 1.31
- Just spent all of its cash ($44 Bn) acquiring a company that is basically crap and has flat growth. Yahoo PEG 2.7 (!), earns 600M on 7Bn in revenue. Yahoo p/e is something like 80.

Google:
valued at $155 Bn
revenues of $17 Bn
profits of $4Bn
P/E: 38, forward 19.7
PEG: .74 !!!

thoughtful questions:
- which one bought youtube?
- which one bought yahoo?
- which of those do you use more?
- Which company makes Vista? How are mac sales in the last five years, again? How about the adoption of linux?
- Which company do you use every day? Which company do you hate? Which company do all the computer people hate?
- which company is the "smart" one? that seems to understand issues like open source, DRM, user experience, innovation, etc?
- which seems more likely to double its revenues and profits in the next 10 years & beyond?

google is so frikkin cheap. i'll buy a beer for anyone who can convince me otherwise. if only my bull put spreads got filled!

( blah blah )

bla bla bla, i haven't done any metcon so my wind is crap, so i've been doing crossfit & boxing to address it. I haven't played disc in a long time, and I'd like to go back and not be winded immediately.

I went out looking for a pullup bar to do "Cindy" today (as many rounds as possible in 20 minutes of 5 pull-ups, 10 push-ups, 15 squats). I was really excited. This was one i could do! I had nailed 16 rounds at the house in I-town, and i was hoping to break 20 (ha!). Now, what was I gonna do for a pullup bar?

I remembered a set of monkey bars at the park by my house, so i thought i'd go there. Oops, they're gone, replaced by those plastic crappy jungle gyms no one likes. So i try a different park, with older-school equipment, but it's gone, same story, same plastic crap. A third park, same problem. It's a little ridiculous. What's a guy got to do to find a pull-up bar? I'm getting a little frustrated: the pull-up is one of the movements our muscles are DESIGNED FOR, we should be doing them every day! We are MONKEYS! So WHERE ARE OUR MONKEY BARS? Hell, even Alison's gym -- one of the only apartment gyms i've seen that has a freestanding punching bag -- doesn't even have one.

I finally found some on an old, forgotten "fitness trail," at Mason District park, but they were so worn that they spun in their blocks, and they were at least 2" in diameter. Sad :(

( reasoning, goals, blah blah crap )

these are from the last sunset cruise of the season.

i keep writing entries, not finishing them, and saving them. So now there's an irritating flaky buildup of old dead memories that i can't remember enough to finish. Bad journaler! bad! no cookie!

(actually, cookies and milk have become one of my regular staples, because they make me happy)

So here's a day:
i got up at 6:45. I drive to the winery. Four of us fit in a van with two seats and drive to Geneva, where the masts are stored. The masts need varnish. Actually, they've gotten 5 coats of it already, but they need 9 or 10 coats total. We scuff the old coat, varnish, drink a beer in the morning sun, varnish again, then have another beer, say "great, let's do that again tomorrow" , and head back to the winery. I work in and near the shop for the rest of the afternoon, sanding little wooden bits and getting them ready for -- varnish. Other winery workers wander in and out, hitting the keg set up in the shop-corner with increasing frequency as the clock marches towards 5. Nice place to work.

I leave and get home at 6ish. Jared is just about to head out sailing on his 420. Instead of building the rudder (which i desparately need to do), i change boots for sandals and he and i bop about for a few hours as he relaxes after his day in an office, and we get in just as pre-sunset is killing the southwest breezes. You know its summer when you can be sailing in a t-shirt and bare-feet without freezing.

we get in and Matt's got some guests over for a barbeque -- ithacans lisa, arley, robin -- friends who've been traveling since october and are back for the summer. I go "swimming" (read: jump in and bounce out as fast as i can) - jump off the rope swing, take a shower, and eat delicious food. I fall asleep around 10. The party continues. I wake up at midnight and its still going on. I write this.

sounds great. let's do it again tomorrow.

(The boat will go thru the canal on saturday, be rigged up saturday morning, and with all good luck, sail down the lake Sunday. The mainmast is 70 feet long, the mizzen is about 58ish, so we need to reserve some big cranes for Saturday. They say i'll have plenty of opportunities to climb them this summer.)

I just got a copy of my housemate on the banjo and myself on the harmonica at open mic night a few weeks ago. The atrocity can be found here

My first ever recording! :) It'd probably have gone better if, y'know, i'd heard the song before. As it was, my part was entirely, entirely improvised. I was happy my licks stayed more or less in line with the progression. In fact, i didn't even know it was called the judge harsh blues until just now. In fact again, it was also the first time i'd played a harmonica with a microphone, so i was wandering forward and back & there's some nasty feedback in there at the beginning. Third caveat, the fiddle player just randomly jumped up to play with us too, so, hey, that was cool too. Wowee! I had no idea what it sounded like...

Still up. I'm really sleeping whenever i like and its putting me on an afternoon nap & few hours in the early night schedule. St. Patrick's day celebrations were moderate, but surreal, with the snowstorm making everything quiet and the bars turning into little nuclei of warmth. It was Matt's birthday, so he led, beginning with Felicia's, where we ran into Satya and friends, and then another walk thru the snow to another bar, and then another trip to end up at a hotel room in the hilton with hippies and fiddle players and guitars and greyhairs and youngsters, an absolutely packed tiny hotel room, with music until around 3ish.

I was going to say something else, but the snow is falling outside, and there's really nothing as complete as the big puffy flakes making all the streetlights touchable and halo'd. Really beautiful stuff, it is. (Here i was talking about cleaning off the boat and bustin' out the bikes! Momma nature says Patience, patience). Also, its distinctive hush noise is truly unrivaled.

Anyway, i'm off in an hour for a weeklong camping trip in Kentucky. There'll be a bunch of people whose sole purpose is climbing rocks, but it's my first time climbing outside (or, "for real"), so i'm hedging with watercolors and books.

It has been way, way too long since i've been camping for a real amount of time. weekenders just don't do it!

I also polished off "Mr. Midshipman Hornblower" and "Hornblower and the Hotspur" in the last three days. O'Brian is better, but these are great too.

so we got a foot and a half of snow up here. specifically, we got it on the day i was flying back from Mexico. i actually found it quite a lot of fun to get totally derailed because -- i don't know. for me, i know that in a week it really won't be important, so why get really bent out of shape about it now? What's the big rush? I got a 2 hour drive in a blizzard with a kick-ass chill cab driver and an uptight economics junior (fresh from job interviews on wall street (GS, LEH, CS, etc) , still decked out in his suit doncha know, but he won't let that stop him from letting us know he was for realz, and he balled etc.) out of it, and it was awesome. i mean, they challenged each other to a moonwalk contest.


So today.

I started with cooking breakfast for me and a friend. Bacon, oatmeal and blueberries, clementines and yogurt. Yum!
Then off to make wonderful fresh bread with the breadheads. We baked about 30-40 loaves and delivered them to happy people, the proceeds go to charity, and a good time was had. Fresh bread & goodies for lunch too.
Then SNOW FRISBEE. Foot and a half of beautiful powder. made some wonderfully fun layouts. Got very, very tired. Can't really run fast in that much snow, so the game is compressed, slowed down, and... hilarious.

Home for a few minutes before...
SLEDDING! On the locally famous hill (Rice hill?). The top of the hill has a vista out on the lake that i found unparallelled, in my meagre experience. That hill is so long, it could easily be a half-hour walk up it. If you didn't run.

And it's only 7:00. I know there's more to come.

( you've heard it )

Ohhh baby, i was bound -- for Mexico!
Ohhh baby, i was bound, to let - you - goooo. oh wo whoaaa

So, i'm bound for Mexico today. I have no idea what'll happen, but ohh sweet vacation you're long overdue.