Sunday, January 28, 2007

Got distracted by my day job

I've had my head so deep into my day job lately that I haven't done much in the way of personal stuff. Last week I added a quick post to Control-Escape about CSS Layouts with YUI Grids. It's not very detailed, but it doesn't really have to be, the documentation provided by Yahoo is plenty good. This week all I managed to do was tweak a couple of links and fix an environment bug that wasn't detecting Windows clients correctly. Just the same, page views look to be up about 20% over last month, and revenues are following. There's a possibility that the site will actually pay for its own hosting this month, an historical first.


I didn't post anything at Media Brothers this week. Mikey took up my slack with a nice review of Band of Brothers. I've got a few ideas floating around, but I can't seem to organize any of them into a coherent article.


Meanwhile, the post office can't seem to keep my Netflix queue turning over. I've been reduced to actually reading things on paper. If I ever finish one, I'll put a review on Media Brothers.

Monday, January 15, 2007

Had a multi-post week

Just couldn't stop myself this past week. I've been pouring content onto Media Brothers. I made a post about the AppleTV that The Steve announced at Macworld Expo. That's been getting some traffic from del.icio.us. Then I wrote a review of Ladyhawke, for no particular reason. Then I finally got inspired to drop a post about network neutrality. And according to FeedBurner, Media Brothers actually has some subscribers now too!


And yet, I still have not had time to write about my cataloging project, nor to write those articles for Control-Escape that I keep putting off. I don't get how so many "bloggers" have time to write ten posts a day. I really don't.

Thursday, January 4, 2007

Beat the Market - Sort of

I just did the math on my meager 401k investments to see how I did in 2006. The answer: not bad, and better than 2005 by a lot. My annual return on capital came in at 15.97%, a very respectable return. The Nasdaq 100 gained only 6.93%. The S&P 500 came in at 15.85%, so I just squeaked past it. But the Dow Jones Industrial Average whupped me at 18.91% return.


On the other hand, if you count 401k company matching funds as gains rather than contributions, that would give me a return on investment of 38.75%. Now that's what I call a return! And since contributions are made with pre-tax dollars, only about two-thirds of the investment is mine, the rest is a loan from Uncle Sam. He'll get his in the end, though. He always does.


My play-money portfolio actually dropped a bit this year (Texas Instruments, you big slacker!), but has a 50% return over two years, so I'm not complaining. I figure it picks back up this year.


If only that decimal place were moved to the right a couple of digits, I'd be rolling in money. Oh well. Time compounds all accounts.