Ted's Blog – Page 107 – Can't tell you more than I told you already?

Pandas

This morning Susan and I got up early to see the new baby panda, Xi Lan (pronounced shee lahn, which means “Atlanta’s joy” where Lan is short for Atlanta). Born in August and briefly rejected by its mother, Lun Lun, Xi Lan was named on December 8 after 100 days, and only went on exhibit in the last week or so, and only for short times in the mornings. We got to the zoo shortly after it opened at 9:30 and got to the Panda area before 10:00 when they typically would let Lun Lun and Xi Lan into a glassed in area. We got to see the father Yang Yang who is kept in a separate area (though he can see Lun Lun and Xi Lan through the glass, but doesn’t seem to care; in the wild male pandas don’t take part in raising the cubs and rarely see their mates). Also the earlier panda baby, Mei Lan, is in her own area. At two years old, she looks fully grown and will probably leave the zoo this year. It was very cold (in the 30’s) but the pandas didn’t seem to mind. Xi Lan came out, but seemed to want to go back into the off-exhibit area except that Lun Lun would go and drag him back so that she could keep an eye on him while she ate the fresh bamboo in the public area. The zoo staff was pretty good about keeping people quiet and saying that if people made a lot of noise the pandas would go back inside.

Afterwards we went to see Susan’s favorite, the red panda. What I didn’t realize was this red panda is new, named Shandy. The previous red panda, Izzy, left in November to go to St. Louis to find a boyfriend.

One nickname for a red panda is firefox. They do look a lot like a fox. But in the logo below they went with an actual fox instead of a red panda:

Q4 Report

The website enterprise has been reeling lately. In May I moved copies of the money-making web pages back to Speedfactory, my dialup provider even though in January I switched to DSL. This gave me a bump in traffic and I also got page rank back, including at the new iGirder site. But in September, Speedfactory took the web page down and haven’t brought it back after months of me asking and them promising they would do it.

So anyway, traffic has come back a little, but it hasn’t been great. Around 100 visitors a day. In 2007 Sitemeter counted 137,000 visitors and in 2008 I got only 61,000. Extrapolate 100 visitors a day and I will be down to 36,500 in 2009. Amazon revenues have been way off too: $581 in sales in the 4th quarter, generating only $27.70 in commissions for me. In November I actually lost money, selling two small items, but getting a return on a more expensive item. Amazon will send a payment each month as long as you have more than $10 in earnings, so some months I don’t make that. In December someone placed an order of about 12 items, so it turned into a decent month with $15 in earnings (though by comparison the previous December saw $53 in earnings).

The best seller was the Turbo iPod charger with 3 sold, displacing the Maxell iPod battery pack, with 3 sales, but one return. The most expensive item sold was an $89 iPod to car stereo adapter. The most unusual thing sold was a pound of almonds.

AdSense has been off too, which is to be expected since I only have ads on the Sony and DeJumbler pages. So for the quarter I had revenues of $8 and it will be years before I see another $100 payment from Google. The nice thing is my advertising deal continues to pay $52 per month.

2009 Roth IRA

In January 2008 I put my Roth IRA contribution with Fidelity because they always have big taxable distributions on their funds and I thought it would be better to put any investments with them in an account that wouldn’t be taxed on those distributions. I still think that is a good idea, but my choices on where to put the money certainly didn’t work out. Last year I put money in a Small Cap Growth fund which proceeded to lose 42% of its value. The other part went to Fidelity Value Discovery which lost 37% of its value.

Continue reading “2009 Roth IRA”

Sundog

This evening at work Paul was visiting a couple of the groups and looked out my window at the sunset. He pointed out a sundog. I usually kind of ignore stuff like that, but he asked if I knew what a sundog is. I didn’t. He said I should look it up, so I went to Wikipedia really quickly and found an article about them. Only then did I actually look out the window, and there in the clouds about 20 degrees to the left of the setting sun was a bright spot. He said that was the sundog and it was caused by ice crystals in the cloud refracting the sunlight back towards us. The hexagonal shape of a snow crystal bends the light, similar to a rainbow (except rainbows are on the other side of the sky from the sun). Today’s sundog showed a little bit of color refraction, reddish on one side and bluer on the other side. He said there was probably one on the other side of the sun too, so we walked around to another side of the building to go look. Not quite as bright, but there was a spot in the clouds on the right also.

Heroes

I’ve been looking for stuff to watch on Netflix and one neat thing is they have lots of TV series on DVD. Two shows I’ve been thinking about are the Sci Fi channel’s remake of Battlestar Gallactica and NBC’s Heroes, which I never watched despite good reviews and word of mouth (I remember Kathy saying she liked it). I watched the first part of BSG this weekend, which was the opening miniseries (3 hours). It was good, so I’ll go ahead and get the rest of the disks. But this Sunday Target had Heroes on sale for $20, so I figured that was a pretty good deal. There are 7 disks and 23 episodes, so that’s less than a dollar an episode and now I can watch them on the train if I want. I watched the first two episodes and it seems like it could be pretty good. Season 2 was available as well, but because of the writers’ strike there were only 11 episodes, but it was the same price. So maybe eventually I’ll get those disks from Netflix.

Not worth it’s own blog entry, but this weekend I watched a documentary online from Netflix called Helvetica. Yes, it is a whole feature-length film about the font Helvetica. Made in 2007 on the 50th anniversary of the font, it covered the origins of the font in a modernist Swiss workshop, the impact it had and still has, and different graphic designers’ opinions about it. Some like its simplicity and the fact that it doesn’t draw attention to itself, others hate its ubiquity and how generic it is.