stlplaceI stopped by the Ted Drewes today, the best Ice Cream place in St. Louis. Surprisingly, it only has two stores in St. Louis, and the owners intentionly kept it that way. In other words, they don’t want to grow into Hagen Dazs, or something like that. By keeping it small and community-involved, they provided ice creams for St. Louisans and visitors since 1931. Today I saw the sign, where the Mayor of St. Louis declared Feb 17 as “Ted Drewes’ Day”. WOW.
I used to love new cars and gadgets. Some evidences: I can call out the make and model of most cars on the street; I bought the Dell 1st generation Pocket PC Axim, later returned it because it’s too bulky, bought the Palm Tungsten E instead.
These days I was looking for a LCD photo frame. I noticed this thing for a while, but it was until now I found this is a very lucrative business at this time. The reason? It’s still kind expensive. For a decent 7″ philips, it’s about $199 at sharper image. For comparison purpose, I found LCD monitor is very cheap these days, e.g., this Acer 22″ LCD display only costs $190 at Bestbuy.
I went to mall again during this weekend. There are many malls in St. Louis, the closest (to my home) also the most expensive one, is the Plaza Frontenac. When I first visited there years ago, I was amazed to see the price tags of stuff there, things such as Boss, Gucci, stores like Saks Fifth Ave., and Nieman Marcus. It made me think St. Louis is not a small town. The shopping experience is in deep contrast to other malls such as Galleria, which is meant for average people.
Anyway I only buy stuff at one store at Frontenac, that’s J. Crew., and I only buy when things are on sale and I found they fit me well. For instance, today I bought a broken-in zip fly chino for 14.99 (plus 1.14 sales tax), the listed price was 64.50.
I mean, you can put in the code for Chinese stocks, such as 600000 (Pu Fa Bank), etc. One good feature is they have names for you to choose from (along with the code).
Cool stuff, huh?
A while ago Amazon launched Endless, its shoes and hand bags division. To promote its web site, Endless is giving away $5 for Overnight shipping. Maybe guys at Amazon learned that from Google Checkout promotion?
Zappos, the largest shoe store on the web, is continuing gain momentum. I used their service and was satisfied with them.
I got some more Home Inns (HMIN) today. Nothing fundamental has changed at Home Inns, as I said in my previous post.
Separately, Ma Yun, the big mouth at Alibaba, speaks again. We all know he likes to brag about how great will Alibaba become, but this time he is saying “China does not have a pure Internet company”. Duh? How about Baidu?
Mr. Greenspan (former US Fed chief), Jim Rogers (legendary investor), or Shang Fu Lin (Chairman, China Securities Regulation Committee)?
For me this is an easy pick (the latter two). But it seems people in the west believe in Mr. Greenspan better. Now after making comments in Feb (which partially caused the Feb. 27 crash), the old man speaks again. Don’t get me wrong, I have a lot respect for Mr. Greenspan regarding economy indicators, monetary policy, all the good stuffs, but not on the Chinese stock market.
His name is “Dai Tou Da Ge”, here is his blog at Netease (163.com). According to many sources, his blog was more popular than Ms. Xu Jinglei’s blog at Sina, although he only blogged for three months. Not surprisingly his topic is Stock Market. I read his first page, interestingly everyday he started first sentence with “the market did exactly as I expected,…”. I did not verify his claims but it seems many people believed it.
Anyway, I think the music in his blog is pretty good. Oh, that “Si Le Dou Yao Ai” is very popular in Shanghai these days 🙂
So $3 gas is back. Last time it was Katrina, this time I heard it was because some of the refineries were taken offline for maintainence. For us average consumers, since we can not trade in current (regular) car for hybrid, nor can we buy cheaper gas and store it somewhere. We have to fill up when the gas price is cheap (relatively). I found a good sign of gas price going up. There are two gas stations near my house: Shell and Exxon. Usually they don’t raise the price at the same time. So…when I saw one gas station already changed the price (up), I would go to the other one and fill up.
