Year: 2014

I feel like I have a lot of experience with wikis and Wikipedia, having run my Flashlight Wiki for several years now, plus editing a few Wikipedia articles, sometimes pretty extensively. Wikipedia is more challenging than my own wiki because there are a lot of rules there requiring you to cite sources, use proper formatting, proper grammar, proper commas, etc. I always feel like someone on Wikipedia will flag something I write as being bad, though I don’t think it has ever happened. With all of that oversight and rules, it is interesting that Wikipedia tells people to “Be bold” when editing.

Lately I’ve been dabbling in precious metals investing, starting out with the purchase of a gold coin, then a silver exchange traded fund, and then some individual silver coins. The coins are fun because they are tangible whereas stocks, mutual funds, and exchange traded funds are really just numbers. Those numbers represent real money, but it is kind of abstract. The coins are little pieces of artwork, with some national culture thrown in. And they are the most basic form of money. You can’t really do anything with them, and it will probably be a pain to sell them, but it’s like having a small supply of buried treasure.

My gold and silver coin purchases have included Vienna Philharmonic coins minted by Austria. These are popular due to the their low cost over the market price of silver, and the design, featuring musical instruments, is attractive (more attractive than Queen Elizabeth who appears on all of the coins minted by Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). The Philharmonics aren’t often the best-selling bullion coin in the world, but they are in the top 5 for sure (lately Canada sells the most gold coins and the United States sells the most silver coins). There are Wikipedia articles about a lot of the different bullion coins, but the Philharmonics were tucked into a very long article about all of the different coins minted in Austria, which include a number of commemorative coins printed every year. Some of them are very pretty, but they are for coin collectors, not investors (maybe). People who are just interested in bullion coins would probably rather see a separate article, but there wasn’t an article about the Philharmonics. Sort of. There was an article that I found later on about the silver Philharmonics, and there was an article in the German language Wikipedia about both the gold and silver Philharmonics, which makes sense because they feature the exact same artwork. I had Google translate the German article so I could read it, and there was a lot of good information there. I thought it would be good to start a new article on the Philharmonics in English.
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Austin has been pretty lonely during the day since Katie died. He doesn’t really do much, so Katie’s constant barking at the postman or whoever else is walking by was a big source of activity for him. Plus I like the idea of having two dogs anyway. Since Eric had worked at the animal shelter nearby, I figured he would be a good resource to pick out a new friend for Austin. He gave me a list of names and I took it over there yesterday. They had the head dog guy talk to me and I said I probably was leaning away from a puppy since Austin is 10 years old and doesn’t want to play that much. I showed him my list, but instead he brought me Rosa, an older female mutt with a tan coat (they said she is a labrador retriever mix, but she’s probably more pit bull terrier than anything), a little smaller than Austin. I didn’t bring Austin on this trip, but brought him by a little later and the two of them seemed to do pretty well on a walk. Rosa was used to being around another male, having arrived at the shelter with her son, then paired up later with another male. Rosa herself had been at the shelter for almost five years and is now about 10 years old. She and her son were given up when their owners’ house was foreclosed on in 2009. Her medical records say she had heartworms then too. They said she is very scared of thunder, and she has a chipped tooth and some damage to one of her ears. She won’t win any beauty contests, but she is still pretty cute. The shelter brought her by yesterday so they could also do a home inspection, which I think is good.

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I got a thing in the mail that AT&T Uverse is now available in my neighborhood. I’m reasonably happy with Dish Network’s TV lineup, though they went up recently and are now costing me $53 per month. My very slow high speed internet connection (1.5 Mbps) is through AT&T’s DSL line for $26 per month, but for a limited time. So I’m paying $79 per month for TV and internet. Uverse said they have a TV and Internet plan for $49 per month. But there are a few catches. One is that the price is only good for 12 months and then it goes way up. But there are even more catches. If you want internet, you will need a modem which you can rent from AT&T for $7 per month. And if you want HDTV, you need to pay $10 per month extra (which is ridiculous, this is like selling hamburgers without the bun and charging a bun surcharge). I also have a second TV near the elliptical machine that I watch when I exercise. This is connected to my Dish receiver and costs nothing, but for Uverse I will be charged an extra $8 per month for a second TV. Also the channel package included in the $49/month plan includes local broadcast networks, some garbage, and a few decent additional channels like Animal Planet, Discovery, Disney, HGTV, History, National Geographic, Nickelodeon, and the Weather Channel, but not CNN, Comedy Central, ESPN, Learning Channel, MTV, TBS, TNT, USA, or VH1. I would like CNN and TBS and need Comedy Central so I can watch The Daily Show. Upgrading the package from Ufamily to U200 is $15 per month. So now the plan is $49 per month + $7 + $10 + $8 + $15 and I’m up to $89 per month, and that’s just the introductory rate.
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A few years ago, Breyers started downsizing their ice cream cartons from the traditional half gallon (2 quarts) to 1.75 quarts and then 1.5 quarts. A lot of ice cream now is in the 1.5 quart size (and orange juice went from 64 oz. to 59 oz.). They also started whipping it up with air so that the weight of ice cream was down too and they were selling you more air. I don’t buy Breyers ice cream that often, but it was half price recently so I bought some chocolate chip. I didn’t notice until I got home that it is isn’t even ice cream anymore. It is now “frozen dairy dessert” and while Breyers was famous for having simple all-natural ingredients like cream and sugar, now the second ingredient is corn syrup. I looked this up, and apparently they introduced this fake ice cream in 2012, but I hadn’t paid attention. Not all the flavors have been converted to ice cream substitute yet, so I will have to pay closer attention next time.

Recently I wrote about gold, so it seems to make sense I would also write about silver. Buying or investing in silver works a lot the same way as with gold, but silver is much, much cheaper. Right now gold costs about 66 times as much per ounce as silver, so you get a lot more silver for your money. There are exchange traded funds (ETFs) with billions of dollars invested in bars of silver, but the bars of silver are bigger (1000 ounces instead of the standard 400 ounces for gold bars) and there are a lot more of them to store. Plus silver is not as heavy, so the silver takes up more room per ounce. Because silver had gone down 40% last year, it seemed like a good contrarian investment and more likely to go up than the stock market, which went up 30% last year and seemed pricey. So I bought some shares of the ETF iShares Silver Trust (SLV) last month around the same time I bought the gold coins. Silver has continued to go down since that time and I am down about 8%. It could be a bumpy ride. While silver hit a high around $40 per ounce 3 years ago and is now trading at around $20 an ounce, back in 2004 it was only $5 an ounce. It will never be worthless, but there is probably more downside than likely upside. Sometimes when the stock market does poorly, metals go up in value as people look for a tangible investment that will still protect them from inflation. But a lot of the demand for the metal is based on strong economic activity so in 2008, the price of precious metals went down just like the stock market did.

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