Clio has been itching so much that I finally took her to the vet. They said she had fleas, but I thought that was impossible since I hadn’t seen any fleas on her and I was giving her monthly applications of flea medicine. They gave her some steroids to relieve the itching which worked but made her drink so much water that she wound up ruining the carpet in the Estonians’ room (forcing me to remove that carpet which was a good thing anyway).
HDTV DVR
Even though I already bought a HDTV decoder box, Dish Network is now selling their HDTV Digital Video Recorder Model 921 for $550 whereas last year at this time it was $1000 if you could find it (it had just come out). Because the HDTV signal has 5 times as much information as a regular signal, recording HDTV programs takes much more disk space and processing power. The 921 has a 250 GB hard drive in it and it still only lets you store about 25 hours of HDTV programming (or 180 hours of regular programming; that’s more than 5 times, but satellite signals are compressed). Dish itself only broadcasts a limited number of HDTV stations because it takes up a lot of bandwidth on their satellites too. They have HD versions of Discovery, ESPN, and TNT as well as a HD movie channel and HDNet with various HD offerings for $10 a month. Broadcasting hundreds or thousands of local channels in HDTV would take so many satellites that it may never happen. So Dish made sure the 921 could receive HDTV signals through an antenna and record them.
Sunnipaev
I’ve gotten a couple of e-mails from Martti since he went back to Estonia. For my birthday he sent me the following birthday card:
That crazy Garfield!!!
U2’s iPod Song
Apple has a new iPod song featuring U2 doing the song “Vertigo” from their album to be released this week. They said there was no way they could do a $20 million ad campaign promoting their album, but Apple didn’t mind so much apparently.
Exchange Traded Funds
Today I bought my first Exchange Traded Fund (ETF). These are like mutual funds which invest in a bunch of different companies, but ETF’s are sold on the market like a stock with their prices changing throughout the day. For the most part ETF’s reflect some kind of index like the S&P 500 or, in the case of the one I bought, the Nasdaq 100. They are similar to closed-end mutual funds where an investment company would gather a bunch of money and buy a portfolio of stocks and then sell shares on a market. The problem with closed end funds is they usually sold at a discount to the value of the assets in the portfolio because the people running the fund would take out expenses each year and over a long enough period of time the fund would be worth nothing. The price and value could get out of sync by 10% or more.