Music Review - Be As You Are by Kenny Chesney

If the you love Jimmy Buffett, you will love this album.
This is the first country music album I've ever purchased. Being an almost-30 Southern male, that says something. By pure chance, especially for someone who usually runs from "country" music, I saw Kenny Chesney's acoustical performance on TV of several songs on this album, and the Jimmy Buffett similarities in his songs was immediately obvious. This is not "country" music. It's "island" music through and through. Kenny talked about spending time in the islands on his boat and writing these songs about the people he's met while in the Caribbean. Simply put, if the you love Jimmy Buffett, you will love this album. By that I don't mean the two or three Jimmy Buffett songs that the radio stations play. I mean the "real" Buffett music. Many artists try to recreate the magic of Jimmy Buffet's work but never come close. Kenny Chesney has done it. His music is honest, true, transporting, and played with a heart that is almost non-existent from musical artists today. To really get a feel for the album listen to the online samples for "Island Boy", "Somewhere in the Sun", and "Sherry's Living in Paradise".

Buy it on Amazon

Book Review - Hot Commodities: How Anyone Can Invest Profitably in the World's Best Market by Jim Rogers

Worth its weight in pork bellies...

Jim Rogers is one of few individuals on the planet whose investment advice is worth listening to. And that's an understatement. Jim co-founded the Quantum Fund with George Soros, later retired at age 37, and has traveled around the world twice, each time collecting even more investment wisdom from each of the hundreds of countries that he's visited.

In Hot Commodities Jim Rogers parlays his travel and investment experience into investment advice for now and the coming next ten years. As he says on page 10, "Most investors could use some mental deprogramming. At certain points in history, stocks (and bonds) are not the best investments to make." Of course, he's talking about investing in commodities. Jim goes on to soundly counter all the false beliefs most of us have about commodities investing. He provides a short history of commodities trading and then gives an excellent tutorial on commodities trading and termonology. Why not just buy stock in commodity-related companies? A recent and thorough Yale study found that returns from commodities were triple those of companies producing those commodities.

Besides sugar and corn, you'll also find the book filled with Jim's thoughts on gold, oil, and markets like Brazil and China. Here's one of my favorite Roger's quotes: "Spain was the greatest economic power in the world in the sixteenth century; the rich and the powerful of the eighteenth-century world spoke French; the nineteenth century belonged to Britain; and the twentieth was the American century. The twenty-first will belong to China. History has not been kind to empires."

If you're interested in turning current world events into money, you'll love this book.

You might also be interested in http://www.jimrogers.com/ as well as my review of Jim's previous book Adventure Capitalist: The Ultimate Road Trip.

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Portfolio Blues

Just when I thought my investments were doing well.... Adobe is up 666,233.75 points this morning according to CNBC MSN Money!!! And I don't own it! How can you compete with that?

Voice over IP Horror Stories

If you have any interest in using Voice over IP as your home phone (which I've considered several times), check out this great article by Philip Greenspun. It will make you think twice:
http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/voice-over-ip

It also goes to show that any phone company in the United States could take over total market share from all their competitors if they simply had great customer service and could take technical support calls without putting people on hold and if answered by staff that knew what they're talking about. My own horrible experiences with SBC's DSL service, which I would love to dump, is my own proof of that.

Book Review - The River at the Center of the World : A Journey Up the Yangtze, and Back in Chinese Time by Simon Winchester

Disappointing...
Simon Winchester's journey up the Yangtze river is often poetic and overruns with historical detail every eddie of the way up the river. If anything, this is an incredible historical text of China. The author's research is impeccable and undeniable. However, every word of the way through this book I couldn't help but feel a profound disappointment in what could have been, but clearly is not, one of the the most epic journeys of our time. Mr. Winchester's timing was perfect, a trip up the Yangtze before the Three Gorges dam would change it forever and as the country is experiencing a rebirth that will soon make it the largest economic superpower in the world where it is destined to stay for the next century.

Yet with all his research, all the planning, and all the help he received along the way, we're left with only a few hundred pages of text. Where are the thousands of pictures? Where are the video clips of his journey? Where is the interactive website? He mentions in the opening pages that he packed a Leica M6 camera but, at least in the paperback edition, there is not a single picture in the book. From a man who successfully sued the Defense Department over the Freedom of Information Action in order to get the Pentagon's most detailed maps of the river, I expected more. Instead, we are left with a very long-winded account of the author's journey, but not a deserving account of China's journey.

Buy it on Amazon

Universal Access to All Knowledge

Does the idea of universal access to all human knowledge--all books, every sound recording, every video or movie, everything... interest you? If so, then you check out Brewster Khale's talk about the Internet Archive on itconversations.com. You can stream or download the audio. Then checkout the Internet Archive itself: http://archive.org. Brewster still has a long way to go and can't do it without more help, but he is doing it. For example, India has volunteered to scan 100,000 books that are out of copyright simply because they need to educate their 1+ billion people. In return, the text of the books will soon be available on the Internet Archive. There is overlap and mutual cross-sharing here with the Million Book Project and Project Gutenberg. For example, here's a section from Project Gutenberg's collection, Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven, housed on archive.org

The Wayback Machine is particularly cool because you can view what websites looked like in the past, a virtual time machine. Here's a link to a snapshot page from June 7, 1997 showing that I was a member of the World Wide Web Internet Interest Group at the University of Arkansas. (I had already graduated by then but was a member for the previous years.) Unfortunately, (and the reason I looked this up in the first place) the link to my old college homepage doesn't work. It wasn't indexed. Ah well... Brewster Khale was the founder of Alexa which is where this historical data comes from (the Internet Archive gets Alexa's data with a six-month time delay for archiving purposes) and is also, having sold Alexa to Amazon a few years ago, where Brewster gets his money for financing the archiving to this point.

Jeff Bezos plans Spaceport

Jeff Bezos, billionaire founder and CEO of Amazon.com, is planning to build a spaceport in Van Horn, Texas with his sights set on the ultimate goal of space colonization.

Here's the original article:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2005/03/12/national/a172414S53.DTL&type=printable

If you're an engineer with spaceship experience, you might apply for at job at Blue Origin, the company that will be building the spaceport and motherships. They're hiring.