Thursday, April 15, 2004My B-day extravaganza and poker until one in the morningOoh, I should have blogged about Maggie's awesome housewarming/bday extravaganza that she threw for me, Chris, Charlton, and Vicki. Maggie's place is *really* nice, I spent some time talking with her about it since I'm considering purchasing property as well. The party was great! We had several cakes, lots of great food/desserts. Soju & Coke and rum flowed like water and we ended the night with a semi-druken game of CashFlow. That's a *really* fun game and I was surprised by the intensity at which everyone seemed to play. The premise is that you choose at random a card which denotes your occupation, earnings, savings, and cost of living and then try to get your way out of the "Rat Race" by creating passive income streams to equal your debt. When this occurs, you no longer need to have any active income to live day-to-day. Its a bit like monopoly, with more accounting and financial choice. The game took about 3 hours and was pretty fun. One of the things that I was a bit disappointed with was the simplification that was done in the game-- but I can understand that it was done to reduce the "gameplay" time. Aside from this, the only other minor irk was that the game heavily favors cashflows for businesses. In fact, businesses in the game produce very high cash flows with very little risk. It's a bit weird because the business cards have huge "liabilities", but the game doesn't punish you for having them. But again, I think its for the sake of simplicity and "gameplay" time. The next time I play the game I think my strategy will be to buy property, sell it at higher ROI and then trade in for business cashflows for my "big deals" instead of trying to purchase "big deal" property that produces passive income streams. Two reasons: 1. Property in the game seems to have some negative cards that make you lose the property while maintaining the mortgage and debt, whereas businesses didn't seem to suffer from this "achilles heel." 2. Business tend to have outlandish cash flows (several multiples) relative to property for nearly the same downpayment amounts. Thanks a bunch Maggie! She threw the part on the 10th and I haven't really had time to blog about it until just recently. I'm actually a bit tired. Wendy and I went to go play poker with John, Jeff, Ed, Charlton, and Chao last night. We've finally started weaning ourselves from straight out hold-em. Last night we played variations of Anaconda, Ebay, Stud, and Hold 'Em. Ended up $5 for the night. It was great fun, but we didn't finish until 1ish in the morning (yawn). Anyhow I'm gonna get some rest and take off. I still need to finish up some "paperwork" :) posted @ 08:26 PM PST [link] Sunday, April 11, 2004New car, old carSo I went in to buy the G35 coupe on Saturday and spent a good part of the day trying to find a good price on it. Ended up getting about 800 over invoice which isn't too bad I suppose. It's a Diamond Graphite/Graphite Black with leather/AT & the performance wheels & tires (18"). The car is a blast to drive and makes me wonder about my Audi! There are a ton of pro's to the car -- it's quick and makes triple digit speed driving effortless -- it handles and takes turns like nothing else I've driven -- it's got a fairly decent interior The cons are: -- no trunk space. -- strictly a two seater (making an adult sit in the back for more than a 10 min drive is akin to torture). -- interior design isn't as nice as bmw, audi, tsx. In any case, I was trying to charge my phone in my audi today when I noticed that the brake handle interior was peeling! This was after I just took the car in for servicing the air conditioner. I didn't know the interior was *that* fragile. I've also noticed discoloration on the seats. I'll need to really be careful where I park it in the future. It looks like the car's interior needs to be babied or it melts. I'm hoping that this isn't the start of a whole host of problems with the car. Maybe I should have gotten the G35 and saved myself the trouble of all these maintenance issues. It's time to get phone insurance. After reading several forums, I've realized that the Treo was a flaky design. Insurance is only $4 and my phone is almost runnig out of its initial warranty. posted @ 02:29 PM PST [link] |
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