As is my tradition, I thought I would review my progress at my 2010 goals.

• Gain Weight … Err, Eat Better and Exercise – As of this morning, I have lost four pounds. My progress to actually gain weight has been a roller coaster. I was up about ten pounds pretty quickly. When I started biking, I lost 15 pounds in three weeks. I have gained that back in my leg mostly. I probably wont fight to get to my, now, 27 pounds by the end of the year. I will keep trying though.

  My real goal of eating better and exercise is working though. I virtually bike everywhere. I lift weights. I could be better at this though. I eat like crazy. Without being anal, I have almost cut red meat, pop, and candy out of my diet.

  I feel great. I think there are two times in my life I have been in better shape. The first was late in my high school running career (about 16-7 years old) when I was running 60 miles a week. The second was my last summer working construction (20 years old). I was lifting, carrying, pushing, pulling, jack hammering, etc 30-50 pounds for 60 hours a week.

• Updated Net Worth – I am a little behind the original 126.3158%. I have a 55% change thus far which puts me at 110% by the end of the year. I had a couple large purchases which impacted the progress – bike, rain gear, and Wisconsin trip. I might be able to cut some costs in the last half of the year to catch up.
• No House – I have not bought a house, but I did move to NE Portland. Double win. I do want to own a home but still do not know if Portland is where that will be.

The rest of my life is going well. I am still working at Conducive Technology and our FlightStats project is growing like crazy. I still have the life goal to start my own company and Conducive is teaching me some powerful knowledge which will pay off one day. Unless a business opportunity comes a knocking, I plan to stay where I am.

Although I find finance fascinating, I am no expert. I do know there is some ambiguity between how GAAP applies to derivatives. This miscommunication causes investors and the public to be unaware of the true state of a company’s assets and debts. AIG is a good example of this. At its peak, it was 11 times leverages. That means $11 of debt for every $1 of assets. I personally do not feel all debt is bad. There becomes a point where my investment becomes hindered.

Chris Dodd thinks would we should publicly trade derivatives. Rather I would vote we get them completely on balance sheets. This get the numbers in the hands of investors quarterly. Public traded assets get forgot; quarterly reminders puts pressure of executives.

Going into the day, I was still leaning toward actually attending the auction. Yes, yes, I know I said I would not buy a house this year. Looking at the possible purchase prices of some of these units, I was curious enough to get more information.

The building was open to the public, so we went through about a dozen units. I found two units I was really, really, really interested in 1618 and 2018. Both are the same floor plan – one bed, bath, and study – facing Southwest.

I spoke with two realtors while traversing the building. One basically told me I would be an idiot to not – at my age – buy one of the units. The other thought anybody who bought was an idiot since purchase prices were expected to be 60% of the minimum auction price. This person also told me unit 1218 – same floor plan as I liked – was a short sale she was trying to sell. The most recent offer on that until was $215k, putting it at ~40% increase.

Those purchase prices plus huge taxes and larger HOA convinced me to not buy – again. Although it is a lovely place in an area of town that is most likely going to boom, I still should not buy.

First of all, many companies have similar positions. A company with large cash holdings can either pay it to its shareholders, give out bonuses, increase its infrastructure, or invest it. I am sure you could classify other categories, but you get the point.

The question I have: Why are you attacking Google? Is it because they know more about you than other companies? Possibly. Can you do much about it? Not yet – well not use their services.

Why not attack, say, GE? Their healthcare unit creates MRI machines while GE Capital is one of the largest ‘banks’ in the country. Their bond traders must be using all that MRI data to trade foreign government bonds and destroy our lives. The list of medium and large size companies who try to increase their cash through investing could continue.

The Google “Don’t be evil” Achilles Heel might be an easy target to sell magazines though.

The last purchase you made on Amazon was saved and reused to better predict what you might (or will) purchase next. Facebook knows who you are, your age, what you enjoy, who your friends are, what they like to do, who you hang out with most often. Each of the Facebook Apps you have installed can see these characteristics too. Your emails, phone calls, location – this list goes on – can be logged by many organizations.

Heck even this site has some of these controls. Its analytics system will collect when you came to the site and how you got here. It does not know that you are Bob, but it does know any generic information a marketer might want to know. Added a comment becomes worse. Assuming you do not lie, your name, email, web address, and location are forever stored.

My point is not that this is good or bad. Rather, it exists. I would like to stay neutral on the accumulation of such data.

Instead, I would like to promote a new web standard called OpenData. For those of you who are not knee deep in how the web is created, there are many ‘open’ standards. OpenID and OpenSocial to name some, but the list could continue.

A quick search on the Internets will not produce the ‘open data’ I am referencing. Open Data is more commonly referred to as making some information open to the public – patents, legislation, etc – without restriction.

My goal is different. I would like a standard to help me as a consumer of these data collecting services to control the information they know about me. Once the OpenData standards and structure are in place, I could use a third-party app to control (add, modify, delete) the amount or types of data these services know about me.

At a technical level, this would be a non-trivial process. Even getting around a companies data backup policy could be a huge bottleneck since in many cases this data is not easily accessible. Auditing (internal or external) procedures would also limit the ability for a company to remove, say, purchasing records.

Either way, the world would probably benefit from this type of standard.

Thoughts?

As you are probably aware, many banks and online stores allow you to use some type of electronic bill pay. Simply put, this allows you to specify a payee, amount, and date to make a payment. The bank will then send a (physical) check on your behalf to the payee on that date. Pretty nifty.

I use these for everything: rent, credit card payments, transfers to savings, etc. In fact, I have even used these to pay friends and family back when I owe them money. For example, my sister and I will buy gifts for our parents and I will pay her back using this method. Quite easy. I do not think I have actually written a check in three years since I started completely using this system.

Ok, history over, now rant time.

When creating a payment I have noticed banks, institutions, and otherwise will allow you to choose the date to send it. For one-time or manual payments this works groovy. It will show you (normally on a calendar) how long it takes to mail, including weekends and holidays and when it will arrive. Perfect.

Recurring payments are not as nice. I will use my rent as an example. It is due on the first of every month. It takes five business days to mail. This means it must be mailed the prior week for every month that the first is not on a Friday. Given, month lengths I have specified to have it sent on the 26th of each month. This makes it late, but my apartment does not count late payments until the fourth.

Now, image this is December with super holiday time. If the 26th is Christmas Day Observed, then the payment is not processed or mailed. Ugg. Results equal late payment. (I did not do the math, so this might be a bad example. Point is, holidays screw it up. Moving on.)

Currently, I monitor these months and manually modify their schedule. I am assuming there are a couple days a year where money is transfered earlier than needed because others follow a similar system.

Better Solution. Can I specify a due date (last day of month)? The system would then determine how many days ahead it needs to send the payment – considering holidays, USPS schedule, and such – and send accordingly.

This is a win for the consumer and the bank. The customer gets money in their account longer and more accurate payment processing. The bank gets more money in their accounts and less headache from missed payments.

Alternatively, actually using an ETF process would be even faster and accurate.

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?

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.

My office is inside what used to be a house. In the back, we have an ‘employee’ entrance which is just next to a carport. This can all be nicely viewed from Google Maps. Ok, nicely is relative since you cannot see the back door. Let’s just say it is in the NW corner of centered building. You will have to trust me.

Now for the fun part.

This morning I was walking South on Washington (the street on the left), when I noticed the parking meter which is normally right outside from the rear door was replaced with hole. There was also a dirt trail down the sidewalk which splits my office and the carport (in the shadow area on the map) for about 20 feet. At the end of the dirt crumb trail was the parking meter which – without drawing conclusions – might have filled the hole nicely. There were a few quarters on the ground and the meter’s head was not to be seen. It may have been kicked off in a fit of joy, but I am no detective.

My guess, if I was to try to come up with what kind of situation would cause such a horrific disaster, would be that the ground was so mad at the parking meter – they may have been fighting – it threw it up. So forcefully in fact splattered the sidewalk and cut its head off. The head was probably eaten by the carport to never be seen again. I hope I never piss of that ground or carport.