Month: November 2009

Categories
iPhone app Software development

Objective-C: first impression

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Last Updated on April 20, 2011 by stlplace

I like Apple products: I had iPod Nano (2nd gen) since 2007, and I owned MacBook (white plastic), and bought iPhone for my wife this Jan. All bring us very good user experience. That is not to say, Apple products are flawless. IPod and iPhone will die once a while, but nothing catastrophic as it does not erase music etc. MacBook has minor problems too such as “could not come back to life after hibernate”, and the heat generated by battery. But I like both my old iPod nano and my fairly new MacBook (the user interface is just beautiful 😀

Ok, now back to the hard part. One reason I bought MacBook is I want to learn Objective C (the programming language on Mac OS X) and Cocoa (UI framework). My first impression (after almost a year, on and off) on Objective C and Cocoa (using XCode) is: very unforgiving, like Steve Jobs 🙁

Two little stories from my own study, both on Chapter 9 NSUndoManager

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Categories
Life

Happy Thanksgiving

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Last Updated on November 15, 2025 by stlplace

from the “Show me state” 😀

Obviously this is not a good year in terms of economy, we are all affected by the recession (and high unemployment rate) in some way. Last I heard, 1 out 4 mortgages in the US are under-water (yours truely got to be in the lucky 25% in this case).

But there are still many things to be thankful for, e.g., about 90% of the people (who want to work) still got jobs; thanks to Bernanke and Geithener, we are not getting Great Depression 2.0 (we are getting Great Recession instead); the stock market actually rebounded significantly (aka most of 401k got back to where it was a year ago, provided we did not jump in and jump out in the wrong time), more importantly credit market got new life (again thanks to B&G).

We still got Macy’s Parade. We still eat Turkey (oh well, although President Obama pardoned one as a symbolic move). We still got black Friday, although with the web we can do that online (pretty much).

Last but not least, we will have a baby.

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Categories
Economy

It takes a village

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Last Updated on May 3, 2025 by stlplace

the link to publisher here. author: Nomi Prins, formerly Managing Director of Goldman

Also author interview by Vermont senator Bernie Sanders (I) at After Words (C-Span). There is a video link at the right. This book reminds something I read from Ruth’s Chris (Nasdaq:RUTH) 2008 annual report, Risk factors, bullet 5 (quoted below):

Turmoil in the financial services industry, volatility in securities trading markets and general economic downturns may adversely affect our ability to access the credit and capital markets to finance a portion of our working capital requirements and support our liquidity needs.

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Categories
401k and Personal Finance

How I redeem AA award miles for someone else

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Last Updated on November 22, 2009 by stlplace

Not really someone else, but my in-law 🙂

Here are some explanations on redeem mile for someone else at About.com. I thought about this idea, because I got about 55,000 miles in my AA advantage account (mostly from my China trips, plus some business travel I did in last year), and it appears a deal to redeem the miles (rather than pay cash/credit card) for my in-law China to US air ticket. It takes 70,000 miles for a round trip ticket. So what I did was holding the ticket first, bought 15,000 miles using credit card (it cost $375 + $30 processing fee + $28.xx tax). It took a few days for AA to process (I bought miles on Friday, the miles was added to my acct on Monday). Once I got the miles, I click on “Purchase ticket” (the ticket I previously hold). At that time I paid $38.xx tax for the ticket itself.

Overall I think it’s a deal because I paid about $472 for the air ticket. Obviously saving money is secondary comparing to the joy for my wife meeting her dad. Another reason I decided to pull the trigger early was I was afraid those redeemable seats run out quickly.

Rule of thumb
Should I redeem miles or buy the ticket?

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Categories
Web

Facebook, LinkedIn & Twitter

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Last Updated on November 20, 2009 by stlplace

Blogging is declining. My friend Wang Jianshuo reminds me about this trend. Obviously Jianshuo has much more authority on this because he started blogging on Sept 11 2002 and has a large followers at his blog.

On the other hand, I have joined Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter this year (not necessarily in this order). And it seems to me all three websites are going strong. The main reason? I think it’s the networking effect. Facebook has been hot for a while, esp. among college students. LinkedIn got popular this year particularly since the recession made job search more difficult, and networking is much more important to land an interview or a job (compared to easy times). Twitter is more interesting, I noticed it changed slogan from “what’re you doing” to “what’s happening”. This precisely reflects the change of emphasis of Twitter, and the power of twitter, from Iran post-election to StockTwits (and many sites based on twitter, see 20 Twitter Apps you need to know).

Interestingly, I noticed one co-founder of Twitter, Evan Williams, is also the author of blogger. Maybe Evan already knows about this trend when he co-founded Twitter, which started a a mini-blog platform?

Categories
Stocks video

Ruth’s Chris Steak House

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Last Updated on November 20, 2009 by stlplace

My old friend, high end restaurant with family appeal, and a legendary founder (company web site). I traded it (Nasdaq:RUTH) back in 2005 shortly after its IPO. Obviously with the recession, high end was hurt badly, RUTH was no exception. To make matter worse, RUTH bought a seafood chain in early 2008 using debt. The company changed name to Ruth’s Hospitality Group to reflect the broadening of offerings. The following is a profile video of RUTH.

Valuation calculation done on a napkin:

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Categories
Stocks video

Your mind & your money

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Last Updated on November 17, 2009 by stlplace

From NBR at PBS.

Here is series one.

This is a topic of behavioral finance.

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Categories
401k and Personal Finance

The new normal

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Last Updated on November 13, 2009 by stlplace

The other day my wife asked me an interesting question: how long will the recession last? I think her implied meaning is how long the job market will be like this (with unemployment rate reach 10%)? I thought about it, and my answer is it could last 2 to 3 years. But on the other hand, I am not too worried about our lives. Because we both got our skills, and we will survive. A few weeks ago I read this article from WSJ titled “The ‘Democratization of Credit’ Is Over — Now It’s Payback Time”. Basically it’s saying the lower income consumers (borrowers) are having more trouble in terms of paying back debt, or getting new credit. The picture below (from WSJ) shows the problem well.

WSJ consumer credit default different income levels pic

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Categories
Stocks

Bought some Developers Diversified Realty DDR

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Last Updated on November 13, 2009 by stlplace

Got some Developers Diversified Realty (NYSE:DDR) shares. A bit late. But as an old saying goes “better late than never”. Why I said “late”? Because the smart money already bought a boat load of this in Feb this year (Developers Diversified Enters Into Agreement to Sell 30 Million Shares to the Otto Family). Quote:

it (DDR) has entered into a binding purchase agreement with Mr. Alexander Otto for the sale to Mr. Otto and certain members of his family (“Otto Family”) of 30 million of the Company’s common shares and warrants entitling the Otto Family to purchase an additional 10 million of the Company’s common shares. When completed, the share purchase will increase the Otto Family’s ownership from 6 million shares to 36 million shares, which is in excess of 20% of the common shares outstanding, making the family the Company’s largest individual shareholder.

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Categories
Web

How do you know about visitors to your website ?

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Last Updated on November 13, 2009 by stlplace

How much Google knows about you? The google dashboard. I found out the google search I did last Saturday on “enable root on Mac” (by going to google => “My Account” => “web history”). I believe there is a setting a google user can change to disable google to collect the data. But for me sometimes it could be useful because I want to repeat an old search I did a while back. A related question for business is:

How do you know about visitors to your website?
My title may be a bit misleading, I think a better question is how do you measure the performance of your web site? In other words, which page is highly viewed, which page gets no attention etc. Here comes web analytics (Wiki). Web analytics came of age lately as Omniture being bought by Adobe recently.

Google analytics
Google analytics is a free web analytics service offered by Google (Wiki entry here). Setup tutorial (video, link here)

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