January is time to think about where to put my Roth IRA contribution. Last year, I split the contribution between Fidelity Contrafund and Vanguard Total International Stock Index. Previously I had done well with small caps and emerging markets so I was afraid they wouldn’t hold up. But actually those continued to do well (two different small cap funds were up 25% and 27% and an emerging market fund was up 20%) while large caps lagged (Contrafund earned 16%) and international stocks were troubled by Europe and the continuing recession (up 10%). Still, overall 2010 was a pretty decent year and just about everything did pretty well. I was thinking about looking for some mutual funds that lagged and therefore might do better next year, but I couldn’t really find anything that did that poorly. Japan has done really poorly for a long time, so I thought about putting money there, thinking they might be insulated from US and European economic troubles. I didn’t want to load up any more on small cap stocks, so in the end I put the whole thing into Vanguard Total International Stock Index again. Hopefully it will work this time.
World of Coca Cola
This afternoon I met Nicole and Seda at CNN Center for lunch and then we went to the World of Coca Cola. I hadn’t gotten to talk to Seda at New Year’s, so I was glad to get to know her a little before she flew off to California. She and Nicole kept looking for Armenian Coke stuff in the museum, but never really found anything. I pointed out they usually make a big deal about Thailand because they have a different alphabet that Coke can use to show how international it is. And we did see a few things, plus the tasting room had several drinks from Thailand. No such luck with Armenia, but they thought maybe they found one poster from Georgia (the Georgia near Armenia), but couldn’t make out all the letters.
After we went through the exhibits (mostly about Coke advertising, but they have a working bottling plant that makes bottles of coke that they give you at the end; I think they have the bottling machine on its slowest setting), the 4D theater (about what makes Coke so wonderful), and then 2 short movies about Coke advertising, Seda observed that she had paid money to have Coca Cola advertise to her for a couple of hours. And we hadn’t even gotten to the gift shop yet! At the gift shop, I said now they will sell you things that you will wear or put in your house that will advertise Coke to everyone you know. She seemed to think this was an American phenomenon.
But I bought some Coke glasses made of iconic green glass. They weren’t the traditional soda glass shape, but a flared or trumpet shape that I thought was pretty neat. When I got outside they had a statue of Dr. John Pemberton, Coke’s inventor (he died only two years after inventing it, but not before selling the recipe; I told Nicole that maybe the Coke owners had him killed before he could sell the recipe to anyone else), serving Coke in the same kind of glass I had just bought (only his were bronze, because he was bronze).
Headphone Burn In
For Christmas, one of the things I received was a new set of headphones for my iPod. They are Klipsch S4 headphones which Consumer Reports had rated highly and reviews on Amazon seemed pretty favorable as well. There was nothing really wrong with my Sennheiser CX300 headphones I’ve had for a few years, but I felt like maybe I could do better.
Some of the reviews on Amazon said that these headphones required a “burn in” period to sound good. I had heard about that with some types of headphones, so I did some research. It’s one of those things that people don’t seem to agree on or whether it is even real. It seems like it would be pretty easy to measure the performance of headphones if you had the right equipment, but I guess a lot of headphones now actually conform to the shape of the ear and use a tight fit to produce part of the sound. So maybe it is harder than I think. Anyway, I think it is really funny that even though there isn’t much proof about burn in and what is effective, that there is a long page of instructions telling you how to do the best possible burn in of your headphones. It is posted at head-fi.org and referenced by a lot of different websites. You can actually get MP3’s with sounds recorded that are supposed to maximize burn in.
When I got the headphones, I tried them out and they didn’t sound all that great. So I left them plugged in while a playlist of normal music played at a little higher volume than I would typically listen to, but not as high as it would go. Some people recommend 40 hours of burn in, but I thought they were sounding better after only 15 minutes. I left them plugged in and would check back every now and then and over the next few hours it really did seem like the sound quality was improving. I let them run all night and then listened to them and they did sound very good, though not quite as much bass as I’m used to with the Sennheisers.
They are also very comfortable, almost like they aren’t even there. One thing is they have a Y cord instead of the asymetric cord of the Sennheisers which I had learned to like because it lets you unplug the earbuds and hang them from around your neck if you need to just take them out for a second to listen to someone or something.
Notes, Part 3
After thinking about a new notes app some more and looking at a bunch of different notes apps, now I am thinking that syncing with Google Docs might not be so bad. In particular, NoteMaster is cheap (99 cents, but has a free version you can play around with that lets you sync 8 notes), and syncs only with one folder in Google Docs, so I can keep any other docs separate. With Google in the mix, I can import notes from text files and edit them online from pretty much anywhere.
Notes, Part 2
When I first got my iPod Touch, I looked around for a program that could hold all of my notes from my Palm. Apple’s built-in Notes app wouldn’t do categories and only had magic marker font (they got rid of that in a recent iOS update, but categories are still out). So it had to be able to import the 400+ notes, categorize them (or put them in folders), and then sync with my computer so they could be backed up. I wound up paying $1.99 for MemoBook which did all of that and not much else, though actually one neat thing is it lets you assign multiple categories to a note. This was pretty helpful because I assigned a category “Most Used” to the handful of notes I use the most and they are easier to get to that way.