Mental Blabberings

So I've picked up reading again, and this time I'm focusing on reading (and buying) books about investing and business. I feel that even though I've been trying to break the family trend of starting and owning businesses, I have that entrepreneurial knack in my blood. I'm thinking instead of trying to fight it, I'm going to learn more about it and maybe someday tough it out as an entrepreneur myself. To arm myself with knowledge I know I will need to someday be that entrepreneur and to cushion myself (and eventual family perhaps) by securing my financial status (in the present and in the future), I went to the nearest PowerBooks and got myself the following books this weekend: The Little Book on Common Sense Investing by John Bogle The One Minute Entrepreneur by Ken Blanchard, et al The Long Tail by Chris Anderson So far I've read both "The Little Book on Common Sense Investing" and "The One Minute Entrepreneur" and I've...

It's really hard to stop spending. When you get started, it's like a disease. You don't stop until it hurts. It starts with a couple of books, then you go on to make bigger and bigger purchases, and you don't stop until it really hurts. And only when we've been burnt that we learn -- you don't know what hurts until you feel it. Now I mark the last day I keep spending. Starting tomorrow, I will track my spending and make sure I don't spend more than 100 pesos a day. That means I'll do my groceries during the start of the week and keep the food I eat per day under 100 pesos, stop eating the junk food, and start saving more money each month to put into an equity fund I already have money in. I vow to put in Php 1000 pesos a month to the equity fund. Starting Monday next week, I will only drink water, will take my daily vitamins, and eat at most 70 pesos per day (that's 20 pesos a meal plus 10 pesos for merienda). I'll put in 30 pesos a day for other...

I have been mulling around with this idea: what if people didn't have to buy powerful computers but instead just buy a computer good enough that connects to a powerful time sharing system which can pretty much be located somewhere else in the world? Will the concept fly? What changes will it bring to the PC consumer industry? What will it mean to software vendors who target the end-user market? First off, let's consider the proposition: what if you can have your data hosted in a data center which has all the failover and redundancy technology you can only dream about, with bandwidth that you can only wish you could have, and with the most powerful computers you can only wish will fit in your pocket. Now what if you can do that for a recurring cost like how you pay for your electricity, water, bandwidth? Personal computers are getting cheaper and cheaper, and it would certainly be very easy for some well-off companies/individuals to set up a cluster of computers from these perso...

Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business. Google Co-Founder speaks in UC Berkeley.

After a conversation with Clair , I came to think about getting my own domain name for my other blog which is very centered on a simple topic: C++. I thought, if I will get a domain name and hosting services, I'd like to be able to make money out of it too somehow. Clair and I bounced some ideas around, and we came up with the following Sell some sort of service -- perhaps a newsletter, with content specifically targeted for C++ hobbyists, programmers, and user submitted content. Mugs! Soup Bowls! -- Great Idea Clair! Pens Shirts Recipes? Code snippets, articles, techniques, etc. Now to get people on board to actually help me out on this is another thing. I'm not a web design guru, and I don't pretend to be one. But I think investing time into blogging makes me want to write _and_ make money out of it somehow. I don't expect it to make me loads and loads of money, just enough to help me pay for the domain and hosting -- and maybe to help me have incredibly expensive co...