MichaelandChrissy.com

Aiden got a wood shelf with his name on it for his birthday.  Aunt Paula has been having these made for the grandbabies in the family, and I was hoping that Aiden would get one because they’re very well done.  The shelves come “naked” though, so I decided to finish the shelf before putting it in Aiden’s room.   It took a while to find some free time (Aiden got the shelf in August), but I finally got around to it.

There’s a fine art to finishing wood. I started last weekend by removing the letters and sanding each individual part.  I then stained the shelf and the letters in two different colors.  I went with a dark stain for the shelf, and a lighter stain for the letters.  This turned out pretty nicely, but the shelf didn’t stain as nicely as the letters.  This usually cleans up once you apply a coat of polyurethane.

Everything got two coats of polyurethane, with a light steel wool sanding in between coats. Drying takes the most time out of the whole process. After the pieces dried for the last time, I put all the shelf back together.  I finished a lot of wood for our oak baseboard, window and door trim, so this was a fun little exercise.  The shelf turned out very nicely for Aiden, and we’ll hang it in his room soon.

I haven’t thought about my stock in Playboy in quite a while, but I recently found out that it’s down below $5! I have about 30 shares from back when I used to work there. It was my first job in Chicago, and one of the benefits was a discount on company stock. It was the first time that I had even owned securities, so I excitedly scooped some up. I should have merged them with the rest of my stocks by now, but I’ve never gotten around to it.

With the stock valued so low, it’s not really worth doing that right now. I’m waiting for Hef to kick the bucket. That should help the stock price. Some would say that Hef dying would kill the company and nuke the stock, but I think that Christie Hefner will rally the troops with new ideas to save the day. Ideas that would not fly while Hef was alive. I was really impressed with Christie the few times that I heard her speak.  I’m betting that she’s been waiting a very long time to take the company in a more profitable direction.

For example: imagine selling the Playboy Mansion and moving all operations back to Chicago. This would be a very cost-effective move that Hef would never agree to. Or better yet: move all operations from Chicago to New York, where the marketing team is currently located. That’s where most world-renown publications are headquartered anyway. In “an historic move”, Playboy relocates to NYC after selling the Mansion, leaving only their Playboy TV branch in Los Angeles as a satellite office. Bold new move, stocks soar.

And by soar, I mean at least to $30 per share, where I will sell my holdings for $1000. These were at $30 when I bought them, back in the height of the internet bubble with playboy.com about to go public (we were all going to be rich). In the end, I and my paltry sum of profit will claim vengeance over Playboy Enterprises for being snubbed so many years ago (but I won’t get into that story right now).

I was driving down the Borman Expressway when I noticed a new billboard ad with the Indiana University logo splashed across it.  I graduated from IU (twice) and occasionally teach at the Northwest branch, so I’m drawn to this stuff.  The advertisement said something along the lines of “Get Your MBA In Twelve Months”. You only have to go to classes on Saturdays and the degree is AACSB accredited.

What the hell?! I spent two and a half years at Indiana University to get my MBA.  I took night classes twice a week, after commuting back from my full-time job in Chicago. There were no Saturday courses back then.  To add insult to injury, Indiana University Northwest lost their AACSB accreditation a year into my studies and didn’t get it back until two years after I had graduated.

I called my mentor professor to complain a bit.  He said that the twelve month program was new and included many internet-based classes.  He also said that it cost $25,000 for all of the classes.  That’s cheap by “Ivy League” standards, but I only paid about a thousand per semester for my degree (a lot less).  So, there’s a trade-off for the quick degree.

I understand that the business school has to stay competitive, since there are now thirteen other MBA degree programs in Indiana, but I’m still aggravated by this.  I can’t say whether the degrees earned under this new program are less deserved than the one that I received, but it seems like I could have waited six years and gotten an MBA far more easily.  Where’s my “quick and easy” PhD program?

Chrissy heard somewhere that it’s important to have a “favicon” on your web site. She noticed that many other sites have little icons next to their URL (and on the page tabs in Internet Explorer 7), but our site did not.  I told her that this was fairly easy to do, but I didn’t know what we would use as a favicon image.  She didn’t have any suggestions, and it’s not like we have a family “Coat of Arms” or logo or mascot or anything, so I left it at that.

Today I decided to try to shrink the header image of our site down to fifty pixels.  The result, a little maroon splotch on a blueish background, is a passable site icon.  The approximation is close enough that you can see the resemblance when held side-by-side.  Adding it to our WordPress template was easy.  I think the icon is cute, even if a heavily bundled Aiden surrounded by snow isn’t very representative of the current summer weather.  Maybe I should update the site header to something less seasonal and match the favicon image to that?

After hearing about the Xobni plug-in for Outlook from Misty Khan on Twitter, I went over to the site to get a guest invitation. I was surprised to get one within a few hours (beta test invites are usually hard to score). Xobni creates a new box in your Outlook client that spotlights contact information and relationships for each email. The install was quick and painless, and the plug-in itself is smart and intuitive, but I have a few issues.

Although the implementation is fantastic, the color scheme is very distracting. It’s bright purple and bright orange, with a hint of light green.  It embeds itself in the middle of Outlook, so I can’t focus on the sea of pale blues around it.  I’m too distracted to read my mail! I sent the Xobni developers a suggestion to add a CSS color scheme changer (or something like it). We could have a light blue version to blend in better with Outlook, as well as seasonal colors for the more festive users.

However, my email habits are a little different from others. Ninety percent of my email comes from or goes to about half a dozen people in my office.  The Xobni plug-in would be great for people who need a free customer relationship manager built into Outlook, but I’ve only got six contacts, each with 500 conversation threads and eighty attached files. Xobni can identify related threads and attachments for each email author, but I’ll still have to manually search through each of my contacts for that data.

I’ve suggested it to many coworkers though, and they enjoy it. Our licensee management team here at the University of Chicago is putting it to great use.  They have about two hundred inventors to track and dozens of licensees to keep in touch with, so they are putting Xobni to use as it was intended. The ability to access message statistics and monitor email use is ideal for them. As it is, I may uninstall it within the week. I still have some invites if you’d like to try it though.

I work on Chicago’s South side in a neighborhood called “Hyde Park“.  I miss working downtown, but this is a nice place, with Lake Michigan to the East and the University of Chicago Hospitals to the West.  The Museum of Science and Industry is here too.  Unfortunately, what it doesn’t have is adequate parking.  Regular commuters to the area tend to call it “Hyde No-You-Can’t-Park”.

The problem is that Hyde Park is a university neighborhood, so parking becomes difficult to find whenever classes are in session.  You have to get here pretty early to beat all of the students who drive in (parking is a cakewalk during winter break).  Incidentally, I recently changed my work hours so that I could get in at 8AM.  I used to have to drive around the block twenty times to find someplace to pull in, so I was amazed at how much easier it was to park when you come in extra early.

Until it gets relatively warm, which is when the street cleaners come out of their wintery hibernation.  About once a month, the city blocks off half of each side street for cleaning.  Street cleaning usually lasts for about a week, during which time the amount of parking in the area is effectively cut by half. Competition for parking suddenly becomes fierce. I had to park a mile away from my office this morning, and I was none too happy about it.

I’m sure that this is an elaborate plot to bring more money into the city coffers. First, they post temporary “No Parking” signs everywhere.  Then, when you park somewhere illegally, they swoop in to ticket you.  I got two tickets in two days once during street cleaning week.  They’re quick too, they’ll get you within ten minutes of the posted time.  All of this may soon be a moot point, however, since I’ll most likely be taking the train in once the price of gasoline hits $5 a gallon this summer.

I was very happy to come home after my week away at programming class.  I missed Chrissy and Aiden, but I could think of worse places to be stuck by myself for a week.  The hotel accommodations at the Quality Inn in Schaumburg were very good: free breakfast, workout room, and complimentary drinks in the lounge every night.  I was within walking distance of the training facility, and another block away from the Woodfield Mall.  Because I was staying only two minutes away, I was able to sleep in and still have time for breakfast and show up early for class.  The whole area is covered with great places to eat as well.  I met a bunch of other programmers in class, and we often ate together.  It was a very comfortable week.

I brought along my CPAP machine, so I slept pretty well, which helped me to stay wide awake for the daily training sessions.  I’ve been through some very sleepy training programs in the past.  Training lasted from 8:30 AM until 5:00 PM, with an hour for lunch, so it was a long day.  My brain was pretty mushy by the end of the day, but then we would all talk about coding over dinner.  The facility offered unlimited free pop and Hershey’s chocolate, and the instructors brought in donuts every morning.  I spent a goodly chunk of time on a sugar rush with a caffeine chaser.  I don’t normally do that, but I was tossing good eating practices out the window completely for the duration of the training. 

And best of all, I learned a lot about C# programming and ASP.NET.  C# is very similar to Java, so I would have been a little lost without my Java experience.  ASP.NET is unlike anything that I’ve ever used.  I had a little ASP under my belt, but ASP.NET relies heavily on pre-generated code from Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2005.  I understand the basics though, so it was just a matter of covering the .NET framework to get a feel for how ASP.NET works with the concepts that I’m already familiar with.  I think that I would have been happier with more detail on some of the things that were covered, but the hands-on labs answered many of my questions.  Overall, it was a good experience, and I would definitely do this again.

This is the weekend for Chrissy’s three-day scrapbooking retreat, so I’m at home alone with Aiden until Sunday.  This shouldn’t be a big deal, since we’ve done this before.  Aiden is now seventeen months old (last time he was only five months old), so this weekend should be much more enjoyable (last time it was nerve-racking and overwhelming).  It’s relatively easy to spend the entire day with Aiden now, reading his counting books to him or playing with his blocks.  I’m a good dad (last time I was a new dad), so I’m actually looking forward to the next few days.

The unfortunate part is that I will need to leave as soon as Chrissy gets back on Sunday afternoon.  Leave and not come home for a week.  It’s not like I want to stay away from home, but I’ve got a five-day training class up in Schaumburg.  It’s easily a three-hour drive during a snowy rush-hour, so I’m just going to stay in a hotel for the five days.  Sadly, that means that I won’t see Chrissy or Aiden for nearly a week.  At least I’ll get to hang out with the boy for a few days before I go.

I started teaching again today. Every so often, I’m asked to teach an Introduction to E-Commerce class at Indiana University Northwest. I don’t do it often enough to count on it as income, but I do enjoy the experience. Since I got my MBA in 2002 (a Master’s degree is required to join the faculty), I’ve taught the K221 class four times, usually only when the regular professor leaves on sabbatical or has too many classes himself. I like to bring real-world examples to the table, so the entire lecture isn’t about droning through the book material.

This semester will be a little screwy though, because the class is on Mondays only. Normally, a class will be an hour and a half for two days per week. However, this class is for three hours on only one day of the week. This will make for a very long Monday, since I leave for work at 7:30 AM but won’t get home until 10 PM. It’s only for fifteen weeks though — to put it in perspective, the last day of class is on December 3rd.

There are seventeen people registered for the class, but only fifteen showed up on the first day. None of them had any IT background aside from the basic knowledge of Windows and Office provided in A106 and A285. This just means that I’ll have to make a conscious effort to explain more and ramble less. I tend to ramble sometimes… We’ll just have to see how this semester one turns out, but I’m optimistic.

Summer is usually bad for mining stocks, since the Canadian mining companies are usually doing their thing while it’s warm. The mergers and discovery reports that drive stock prices higher don’t usually happen until the fall or winter. Typically, the stocks drop around April and don’t come back until after September. I thought that I would hang on until then, but I’m not happy with the results.

The stocks started falling in late April, but I was up almost 50% at the time. I figured that they would probably go down 25%, which would leave me up by 25%. However, I had not anticipated a drop in the Uranium spot price from $140 per pound to $90 per pound. Uranium consumers are conspiring to reduce the spot price, which is causing panic selling. As of now, I’m 20% in the hole.

Historically, the Uranium stocks see new highs by January or February. It would be foolish to sell now when the stocks should recover by September or October. The only option now is to hold tight and wait for the recovery in the next month or so. Next year, I’m going to sell everything in April and buy back low in August.