Year: 2015

One of the things I really liked about my old iPod touch was an app called Wiki Offline that included a download of Wikipedia (3 to 4.5 GB, it is constantly growing). I could update the download for 99 cents, but on my DSL lite connection it took all night to download such a huge file. And still it was missing some things. Images were out because that would greatly expand the file size, but so were tables, info boxes at the top right of most articles, as well as some types of links and numbers with units. Still, most everything that mattered was there even if I was in a subway tunnel or out on the open seas, far away from wifi or cellular service (the touch can’t get data over cellular service, but iPhones can). When I got the Nexus 7, I looked into getting a similar app, but didn’t find anything at first. Then eventually I found Kiwix, but it involved a 16 GB download of Wikipedia (on a 32 GB Nexus 7 I didn’t have room at first, but recently I wiped out the memory to speed it up and it would just fit).
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I’ve had my iPod touch for almost 5 years. It still works fine, but is getting slower and I’ve started having problems getting new apps since it will only run iOS 6 and they are now on iOS 8. If they had introduced a new improved version of the iPod touch last year when they rolled out the iPhone 6, I probably would have bought it, but Apple doesn’t sell too many iPods anymore and so they don’t refresh them very often. In fact, in the nearly five years I have had it, the only improvement is the 5G version introduced in 2012. I like the larger screen of the iPhone 6 and hoped maybe this Fall they would come out with a larger screen version of the iPod touch. Instead, Apple came out with a new iPod in July. That’s perfect because I broke the screen in June and was going to wait until September to see if there was a product refresh or if I should just have the screen repaired (again, I also broke it a couple of years ago).

Apple didn’t go with a bigger screen on the 6G iPod touch, but they did improve the camera, already greatly improved over the camera in my 4G. And they have dramatically improved the processor speed. The screen is about a half inch taller, so there is a slight improvement there. And they also lowered the price of the 64 GB version by $100. So pretty much I knew I would buy one that day. The only question was the color. They have space gray, silver, gold, blue, pink, and red. If you buy the red version, they make a donation to fight AIDS in Africa and I bought a red iPod nano a few years ago. The silver, gold, and gray versions are all too stately, so I bought the blue one. If you buy from Apple’s website you get free engraving, so I had it engraved with my name and phone number in case I lose it. That meant it took another week to arrive, but it arrived from Shanghai on Wednesday.
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While on vacation I was able to play Risk 2210 A.D. with my brother and nephews. Andrew brought the game board, which originally came out in 2001, but it was new to me. This variation of Risk adds underwater territories and continents (2 or 3 territories per continent) and the moon with 3 additional continents, plus there are small changes to the land territories including most of the names of territories. Using energy tokens that you earn by controlling territories at the beginning of your turn, you can buy specialized commanders which are required if you want to take over water or moon territories. The commander also lets you use an 8-sided die for attacking and they always defend with an 8-sided die. An opponent with a 6-sided die can never roll a 7 or 8, so this is a pretty good advantage. There are also cards that you purchase with energy credits that allow you to do special things like reinforce a territory when it is attacked, give you points at the end of the game, and other things, some of which can completely change the game, like stop an opponent from attacking you (or stop an opponent from using cards against you, both big changes on the last turn).
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After a week of family vacation in St. Augustine, Michael is now officially on his fifth grade trip. As part of that Mom bought tickets for him to go to Busch Gardens and said if I tagged along, she would get me a ticket too (I never got a fifth grade trip, but I got to go to Busch Gardens in Williamsburg with Andrew, too). We got a 2-day ticket for not much more than a single day ticket and it includes lunch both days. We went to the first day today by ourselves, but Mom and Don will join us tomorrow.

Busch Gardens has some of the best roller coasters in Florida, but I wasn’t sure how Michael would do on them. He said he would try out Cheetah Hunt first, their newest roller coaster. Since we got there right at the opening, there was only about a 5-minute wait. As he saw how high the track goes and how fast the cars flew by, he started getting a little nervous. We sat about halfway back so we couldn’t get the front row view of the drops and loops. Once we were in our seats and buckled in I asked him if he wanted to get off and he said yes. I tried to get the attention of an attendant, but they have a procedure they follow. Michael raised his hand to get off. Too late. He was very nervous, but during the ride he seemed pretty calm. After it was over, he said he wanted to go home immediately and never wanted to come back to Busch Gardens. I said we could take the cable car ride over the animal habitat to at least see some more of the park and again there was hardly any waiting. He resisted at first, but liked that ride. That took us to part of the park with a log flume ride, so we rode that. It was such a big hit we got back in line and rode it again. At some point we came across an area where one of the biggest roller coasters, Sheikra, causes a huge splash that soaks people standing nearby, so Michael stood there and got soaked a few times. He tried to get me to come over, but there was no way I was going to be soaking wet for the rest of the day.

While we were walking, we came across a bird enclosure where you could feed birds nectar, so we stopped in there, bought a tiny cup of nectar and the guides showed Michael how to stand so that the birds would feel comfortable landing on him and walking down his arm to the nectar he was holding. He had three birds on him at once. In the picture he is still soaking wet from Sheikra’s splashes.
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Last year I put my Roth 2014 contribution in to Vanguard’s Total International Stock Index, which wound up losing money. International stocks haven’t recovered as quickly as the US market, so last year I figured they were due, but instead the US continued to outperform the rest of the world. As I watched all of this unfold, I started to realize I was probably too heavily weighted in international stocks anyway. Still, in a market lull during October, I took a little money I had in a short-term bond fund (cash, essentially) and put it in Vanguard’s European Index. This went up about 10% almost immediately, but by December was back down to near where I bought it. I wound up selling it as well as my domestic small cap value fund to buy Vanguard’s Total Stock Market Index fund, which invests in the whole US stock market (instead of just the S&P 500 large caps). Some of that is too late because small caps dragged in 2014 as well, but now I have only two Vanguard investments: total US market and total foreign markets. So that’s everything! I still have more than I should in the international fund, so I am putting some of my 2015 contribution into the domestic fund.
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