Mardy Fish kicks Federer in the pants.

It looks like this is the year to dethrone Roger Federer. Roger made it to the semifinals at Indian Wells where he was dumped by 98th ranked Mardy Fish in just over an hour. Admittedly, Fish is much better than what his ranking says, but he's never been able to get anything done against Roger. In fact, no American has cracked King Fed's code since 2003. This match was a complete role reversal. Fish was faster, he controlled points, he played with incredible confidence, and he predicted everything Federer tried. The post-match interview transcript captures the class act that Federer is. He gave all credit to Mardy, saying

I've had a great record against him, you know, always sort of had sort of controlled matches against him, but today was different. He came out playing very, very well.
Yeah, he played great today. I mean, I can only congratulate him. Fantastic.

Classiness aside, people are beginning to notice that Federer's game looks very predictable these days. Anyone notice that 95% of the second serves to his backhand side up meeting Roger's slice to the same exact spot in the court? During the whole match, Mardy attacked Federer's backhand. In the past, Roger hit winners with his backhand thereby nullifying this strategy. This match with Fish, and also in the Aussie open final against Djokovic, Federer used his backhand defensively in order to set up a forehand winner. Watching this match at 3am was unbelievable since I knew exactly what shot Roger was about to hit on almost every point. Someone on ESPN noticed this and drafted up a very good column about the rise of Djokovic. The author, Joel Drucker, notes that both Federer and Nadal need to adjust their games if they are to retain their superiority.

So now everyone is in Miami at the Sony Ericsson Open. I happened to be in Miami for business during this this week last year and was able to see Venus Williams and Roger play back to back at night. It was incredible. I bring this up because the first round started, and Djokovic just received a stomping.
It seems the chair umpire finally told Djokovic to stop bouncing the ball so much before each serve. This was enough to throw off the best player so far this year. See ya.

Since the power players in tennis seem to be shifting on the men's side, something even more important is taking place on the women's end of things. Maria Sharapova, the celebrated Russian known as much for her good looks as she is her victories may soon be dethroned as the best looking tennis player on tour. Ana Ivanovic may take the cake. Personally, I think she's better looking, but you be the judge. My guess is Ivanovic has a lucrative endorsement career ahead of her.
http://www.anaivanovic.com
http://www.mariasharapova.com

Jim Rogers

A good friend and a self described "socially irresponsible speculator and robber baron" mentioned I check out Jim Rogers. I asked him where I should put my money these days to which he replied "short all the investment banks and short the dollar." That's a dreary play, but I looked up Jim Rogers on YouTube, and he seems to echo with a little more clarity what Ron Paul always spoke about. He gives the same advice that my friend gave. Jim believes that the Bernanke and the Fed are setting up the United States for serious inflation and expresses serious moral disagreement with using the Fed as a means to bail out investment banks. Let me remind you that our Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson is the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, the most successful investment bank in recent years. I wonder if any of this is related..... It's all pretty interesting to me.

In the past, "Mr. Rogers" hit big on Wall Street, then retired at 37, bought an incredible looking Mercedes, and literally drove around the entire globe visiting foreign countries to grasp the culture and investment opportunities. He put it all in a book called "Adventure Capitalist." I found it on Amazon for pennies, so I snatched it up. If it's good, I'll let you know.

Anyway, I posted a couple of his TV appearances below. You can see more clips by searching for Jim Rogers on YouTube. I especially like where he talks about these bailouts enabling investment bankers to buy maseratis while we get screwed with the subsequent inflation.

What does the Easter Bunny do the other 364 days?

Is this what Jesus would do?

According to Wikipedia, the origins of the Easter bunny do not match what is seen in this video. I smell conspiracy.

The idea of an egg-laying bunny came to the United States in the 18th century. German immigrants in the Pennsylvania Dutch area told their children about the "Osterhas," sometimes spelled "Oschter Haws." "Hase" means "hare," not rabbit, and in Northwest European folklore the "Easter Bunny" indeed is a hare, not a rabbit. According to the legend, only good children received gifts of colored eggs in the nests that they made in their caps and bonnets before Easter.[4] In 1883, Jakob Grimm wrote of long-standing similar myths in Germany itself. Noting many related landmarks and customs, Grimm suggested that these derived from legends of Ostara.[5]

Google Analytics

Holy cow what a cool program! If you have a website, you have to sign up for this free service. I have it tracking my blog, and even though I don't have that many hits, the information I get is unbelievable. It tells you everything about the traffic to your site. Who goes where, what they click on, how long they stay there, where your visitors are located and tons of other things are tracked by the service and displayed in graph and statistical formats. In all seriousness, it's basically a program to help you tweak your Adwords ads, but like most everything with Google, it's free and pretty cool.

Boy,15, nailed to a cross in Philipines

Some people in the Philippines still nail themselves to crosses and beat themselves as part of a sick good Friday ritual. These people are fanatics and bring a bad name to the church. This article highlights a 15-year old boy who took part in the ritual. Some will admire his actions calling them an act of selfless faith and strong desire to honor God. This kid was 15 years old! A 15 year old engaging in that sort of activity in the name of his religion suggests an oppressive cultural captivity. Something tells me there are better ways to honor God than gory debasement of the body.

In this day and age, religious extremism is associated with Islam. The difference with their version of extremism is that the torture and violence are concentrated externally rather than internally. That is, they kill and torture others and not themselves. I'd be interested to know what the Catholic Church thinks about this business of self-crucifixion. The Church argues that the body is a temple of God and is something he has dominion over. I wonder if this is as great of an offense to God as the extreme acts of radical Islam. Whatever the answer is, trying to live a virtuous life is good enough for me.

Windows Mobile

There are two things that ruined my Windows Mobile experience. I use the HTC Mogul phone with Sprint. Say what you want about Sprint, but they have the best coverage in Hillsdale, the town where I reside. Their EVDO data network isn't all that bad either. I was given the phone to use for work and was quite excited to start using it. The Mogul is a HUGE upgrade from the RAZR that I used before. The Mogul has a touch screen, a slide-out keyboard, wifi capability, and great access to downloadable software. It syncs up easily with exchange and gmail. It even has a 2MP camera with a white LED bulb to use as a flash which, in a pinch, conveniently doubles as a flashlight. Needless to say, the first couple days using this phone were fantastic.

So what ruined it? First, the memory management. On Windows XP or Vista, when the little red 'x' in the top corner is clicked, the program closes and almost all the memory it used frees up for other programs to use. Not so much with Windows Mobile. If I open up my work email to check it, and then exit the email program, Windows Mobile keeps it running. The longer I use my phone, the more programs keep running. Because of this, every time I try to turn the camera on, the phone reports that there is not enough memory available. My RSS reader, a program called Viigo that was a "featured download" on Microsoft's website constantly crashes due to memory issues. So every time it does this, I have to pull up the memory manager program in order to manually stop each program from running. This is the equivalent of hitting ctrl-alt-del and clicking "end task" every time a program is to be closed in XP or Vista.

Second, let's talk about the user interface. Let's just say that unless you want to pull out a stylus every time you use the phone, the touch screen interface is impossible to use. Here are a few examples. In order to scroll, you really have to mash your finger in to the very bottom right hand corner of the screen to hit the down arrow or do the same thing to grab the scroll bar and drag it down. Each of the items on the startup page is very small. If I want to use my finger at all, I have to be very precise about exactly how much pressure to put on the screen and be extremely careful with placement. How about making a phone call? After all, the primary use of this device is to make and receive calls. Let's say I want to call my friend, Charles. Seems like a pretty simple task. Not so much. I press the phone button to bring up the dial pad. The contacts button on the screen is very small, so I have to be careful to push it exactly right. Ok, so I got that part done. Now all I have to do is find Charles in my contacts. Easy enough, right? Again, not so much. I have two options. First, I can scroll down to Charles' name. Scrolling sucks, though, so we don't want to do that. My other option is to press the button on the screen that corresponds with the first letter of his last name. Of course, this is a tiny button that is next to other tiny buttons, so I have to take great care to make sure I press the right one. After using the phone for over a month, I'd say I still only have a 70% success rate doing this. There are a number of other issues I can bring up, but what's the point? You've probably stopped reading this post by now anyway.

Normal evaluations have three points, but I assure you, after dealing with these two issues (and I assure you, there are PLENTY more aspects of the UI that are asinine) you will want to throw the phone into the wall. Instead of spending the time to create a carefully crafted gourmet meal topped off with a nice scotch and cigar, Microsoft went to GFS, grabbed the essentials and threw it all on a plate followed up with a 45 degree plastic cup of Natty Ice. No thanks!

Windows Mobile is horrible

I hate Windows Mobile with a passion. I don't have time to adequately display my rage right now, so look for an explanation later. It looks as if I will have to bite the bullet and buy an iPhone once I no longer have a free phone through work. I swore I would never buy one, but now that it works with Microsoft's Exchange Server and ActiveSync I think I just may bite. Now that I think about it, I remember something about the first Android based phones being released in early Q3. Maybe I can wait to see what those look like. Well, I'll explain why Windows Mobile really irks me a little later. It's time to head to the Elks for quesadillas and perhaps a cigar.

Goldman shines.

Looks like Goldman took Wall Street to the bank today. They reported a huge drop in profit, but it wasn't nearly as bad as the analysts expected. In other words, they beat analyst expectations... by a lot. Their stock is up 13% today. Financiers casual and professional are all keeping a keen eye out for the market to bottom. It looks like this may be the first sign.

There's nothing quite like starting a blog and pretending to be an expert on the financial markets. I have a hunch that I'm right about this one.

First Investment Post

Tomorrow is a big day for investment banks. Yes, Bear Stearns bit the dust today, but their troubles were seen looming for some time. Tomorrow, investment bank, Goldman Sachs, reports its 1st quarter earnings. Goldman is considered the strongest investment bank by Forbes because of its very low exposure to the subprime lending market. It's stock is down nearly 30% so far this year, so despite avoiding the bulk of this mess, the stock plunge leaves me scratching my head. They've written down a billion here and there but not to the scale other banks have. My best guess is that it is a result of a general distrust of the banking sector. Goldman was just roped in with everyone else. I've been looking for news about this earnings report all day with little luck - it almost seems like nobody cares. What Goldman reports tomorrow is a huge indicator of the strength of the banking sector. How good the best of any industry does speaks volumes about the health of the industry as a whole. Let's just hope their results impress.

Speaking of financial topics, this Fed issue is going to bite normal people in places that don't see the sun much. The issue of cutting rates is seemingly complicated. Cutting rates, or "providing liquidity" is code for "flooding the markets with new money." When the Fed cuts rates, it literally causes inflation by increasing the total supply of money. While the effects are complicated and, in my opinion, immeasurable, one has to admit that this can't be good for the dollar. Simple economics tells us that increased supply lowers the price. I'm pretty sure the Fed knows that it sinks its knife deeper into the dollar every time it drastically cuts rates. This is good for the banks for sure because of the non-neutrality of money. It's everyone else that gets screwed. Maybe that article is a little long, just trust me on this one.

Roger Federer's Excuse

Those who follow tennis were probably surprised at Roger Federer's poor performance at the Australian Open. He looked sluggish the whole tournament and not just during his loss to Novak Djokavic. He definitely didn't look like someone who was about to break Pete Sampras' record of 14 Grand Slam titles. Roger's fans, myself included, wondered what exactly was going on. It looked like he was sluggish and even lazy. We knew that he battled food poisoning during the days leading up to the match, but all signs pointed to a full recovery. He referred to his sluggishness in his post match interview when asked how much effect his illness had on him during the tournament.

"Well, obviously the approach has been unique this year, you know. It's the first time I've been ill before a Grand Slam. I would still rather have it before than during, that's for sure. But maybe it did have. I answered the question already before. It might have had an effect on my movement, I don't know. But I definitely didn't feel as quick, you know, as some other times. I practiced really hard. I can't practice much harder in the off‑season, you know, so I did everything the right way. And maybe I did pay the price for being a little bit ill."

Roger admits that he may not have been at 100%. Recently, he blogged that he had mono through the whole ordeal, including during the recent loss in Dubai to Andy Murray. This probably explains why he does not look like the Roger we knew over the last 5 years. Let's look for cracks in his armor during the Pacific Life Open happening right now. If he does well here, let's expect more of what we're used to. A repeat of the French Open and Wimbledon battles against Nadal is certainly something we all want to see.
If Roger performs poorly, then at least he can still beat Pete Sampras.

Speaking of the Pac Life open, check out Donald Young. It seems that the top players on tour figured out Andy Roddick, and James Blake is getting older. This young man may be the next best hope for American tennis. I've only seen him play once where he beat a 6 foot 10 Croatian named Ivo Karlovic. American tennis fans should look for hope as Don takes on the 2nd best in the world next round. This is a great chance for a coming out party.

Google Adsense

Now I know why Google makes so much cash through online advertising. It took me about 10 minutes to get google adsense posted on my blog. I don't plan making any money from their ads since my readership so far is at zero. It just looked like a cool and easy program to take part in, and though this blog is small peanuts, it will give me a decent sense of what it is like to work with google. So far, it is a cinch.

Twitter and Plaxo

I've been experimenting with Plaxo, an amazing free online service. In short, Plaxo syncs EVERYTHING I have stored online in one place. I use 4 calendars - outlook for my work computer, outlook for my home laptop, google calendar for my main email address, google calendar for my secondary email address. Plaxo syncs all of these calendars together. Plaxo also syncs your contacts the same way.

I just started looking at twitter - another great way to spam your personality. Twitter is essentially a blog that limits you to 140 characters per post. You have "followers" who are sent a message every time you "tweet." It can be synced with your mobile device so you can let people know what you are up to at all times. I've heard about twitter constantly from tech podcasts and blogs, so I suppose I have to try it. And, yes, twitter syncs up with plaxo quite nicely.

Flint's first murder of the year.

This article arrived yesterday from my sister via Gtalk. It looks like Flint, MI, my hometown chalked up its first murder of the year. Flint constantly appears in the top 10 list for most dangerous cities. A recent survey shown on aol's news site lists Flint as the third most dangerous city. In the subcategories, Flint ranked first in rape, first in assault, second in burglary, and third in murder. It seems that the outliers were robbery (35th) and car theft (28th). This is likely due to the fact that there is nothing to steal in Flint and nobody drives a nice car.

The scariest thing about this article is that the murder happened just a few blocks from my home. I grew up in a middle class neighborhood where people respected one another, supported one another, and did all the normal things that good neighbors just do (save for the fact that no bike was safe). Every time something like this happens, it makes me worry about my neighborhood and about the city as a whole.

Flint has been so bad for so long that a turn around is inevitable. In fact, if I were an investor, Flint is one place I'd explore. We have a perfect setup to be Michigan's premier city. We have a very nice airport. I69 and I75, two of the most prominent interstate highways in the nation both go through Flint. No other city in the state can say that. Flint is located right in the middle of Lansing, the Tri-Cities, Ann Arbor, and Detroit - it's the perfect central hub for Michigan commerce. Flint has a very good community college, a fantastic engineering school, and a satellite school of the University of Michigan. Some circles in Flint have a new optimism. The Downtown Flint Development Authority looks like it is up to some great things. This sounds like a great setup, but it is unarguable that people are the most crucial resource. Articles like these show that we still have a ways to go.

First Post

Welcome to my blog, and thanks for visiting. While individual blogging serves as personality spamming, I think it serves another great purpose. Blogging filled the internet with millions of different ideas about news, politics, and philosophy among others. It serves as a threat to the traditional way in which we receive information and develop opinions. I hope I can add my piece.