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Last night I was out at Dublin Pub to play poker. After losing, I hung around a while to watch a buddy of mine also lose. This was followed with flat out getting up and leaving. I forgot one thing: to close my tab. I was buying lunch today and realized my credit card was not in my wallet. My first thought was well poop, then frustration, then feeling a bit stupid. So tonight I had to drive out there again and pay my bill. It was starting to snow too, making it more entertaining.

Luckily, there was no ‘late fee’ like I have heard happens to some people.

Today at work one of my coworkers asked if I was an owner of a specific company and what I thought about the company. I told him I was, and we talked for quite a while giving our thoughts on its qualities and failures as a stock. While talking to him I was trying to decide whether or not his question was too personal.

Is telling somebody the securities in your portfolio at the same level of invasion of privacy as telling them how much money you make? Or your age? Your shoe size? I have actually been trying to decide if sharing this information was out of my comfort level for quite some time. I guess since I continue to answer these questions means I am ok with it for now. I refuse to answer what my purchase price was or how large of a stake I own though. Where do I draw the line?

These questions are some what hard to answer since I love personal finance and investing oh so much. I would love to sit down and talk out these issues with somebody and learn more about them, their securities, their methods, their successes, and their failures. For now, I guess I must make my decision.

I was also thinking if there was a point where a person should be morally responsible for sharing this information. For example, if one was a Senator or running for Senate (state or federal), would it be advantages to reveal this information publicly? Doing so or not has many implications. I am fairly certain American Presidents and candidates have to do so by law. What about senior exec for corporations? Would this information reveal their loyalty to the shareholders? What about a fiance?

What about all of you?

When I was in school I worked on campus for what we called Telecom. We fixed the phones and Internets when they were not working properly. It was a great experience as a first technical job. I met some interesting individuals many of which are my friends still to this day. It was one of those interesting work environments where if you left the room for more than 15 seconds without locking your computer, when you got back a picture from uglypeople.com would be on your desktop. The ‘Oh my God’s were priceless.

On of those interesting young chaps I met there was Tri (Steve) Nguyen. Steve has become a finalist in BusinessWeek’s Best Young Entrepreneur in Asia. This is pretty funny for me because last time my friends talked about him, we were remembering how he was trying to show his Karate dominance over a concrete wall (the wall one by the way).

Congrats Steve and best of luck on your businesses.

Tomorrow morning I have the privilege to start a fabulous vacation. Ok, technically I am home from work, so I am already on holiday. Time for a beer…

… and back.

I was starting to get things together and looked at my itinerary which has been booked since July. This schedule sucks hardcore. (Notice the reference to all the spam)

Here is what I go through:

I leave PDX at 11:35 PST tomorrow morning bound for Cincinnati, OH. After a two and a half hour layover, I leave there at 9:15 EST. I end up in Green Bay, WI at 9:40 CST. Just a four hour flight followed with a hour and a half. Not too bad.

On the way back is another story. I leave Green Bay at 10:00 am CST to land in Atlanta, GA at 1:11 EST, a two hour flight. My layover is longer than this flight: three hours. I then come back to Portland with a magical and stupendous five hour flight. I might be tired after all that.

By now you may have found out I am going to Green Bay, WI. I am actually really excited. I have a few cousins who live in GB as well as an aunt and uncle. One of those cousins has become my favorite cousin of all time because she works for the Packers. A perk of working there is what else but season tickets. Moral of the story is: I am going to a Packers game. Woohoo!

I also haven’t been to Wisconsin in a few years. This is semi depressing. Wisconsin, being my native state, is one of the three places I call home. The other two being Gig Harbor, WA (where I grew up) and Portcouver, WA/OR (where I reside). Anybody who has known me for more than two weeks is bound to find out I have a ton of respect for my past and heritage. This trip will help me remember that fact.

If you read many of the comments coming into this site, you have noticed there is a bit of spam sneaking through. I apologize first off. Secondly, I am trying to do something about it.

Ideally, Akismet would never have false positives or false negatives, but that just isn’t very likely, especially when my friends host their sites on wacky domains *cough* Brandon *cough*.

The next hope is to make sure nothing ‘ugly’ or ‘hardcore’ gets through as well as no ham being marked as spam.

Enter moderation. Today I started another step in moderating the spam on this site. Before I let Akismet deal with whether a comment should be: ham, moderated, or spam. All commenters must have a comment previously marked as ham to be automatically approved as ham, otherwise they will be moderated.

FYI this can be done by going to Options -> Discussion -> Comment author must have a previously approved comment.

I would also like to see the opposite situation be an option here. If a commenter has been approved before, any comments thought to be spam should then be moderated.

So how about we do some testing folks? Place comments below.