Hand trauma

Originally uploaded by Surfactant

Ouch…

You still want to make that firecracker video?

I’ve been meaning to write a few posts about the environment. Global warming is on everyone’s minds, its a hot topic for the presidential election in 2008 and as some would say, if we don’t stop Global Warming. We are all gonna die!

Well I’m not so sure about all that. I’m not sure that if I change my light bulbs to energy efficient light bulbs I will make any impact on Global Warming. I do know though that for the most part most of humanity treats the environment like shit. I’ve been guilty of mistreating our planet myself and thus I can’t stand here and be a judge or point fingers. Continue Reading “Doing my part on the enviroment issue” »

pretty damn cool IMO. slowly 3rd world countries are starting to get into technology. It is interesting to see what new uses, current or “old” technology serves when it reaches people that are generally not exposed to high-tech stuff.

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Its been a while since I mentioned Prosper. If you don’t know what it is, check out some of my previous posts about it. I don’t have a whole lot to report, but I did want to share some of the details of the experiences.

I started back in May, my account is around 1600 bucks right now and I’ve “made” 83 and change. There is a reason why I put the word made in quotes. The reason is, after poking around and checking out my loans and progress and all that good stuff, I found that I have one loan that is now overdue. The guy has skiped the first payment, the account shows as being in collections right now. This is a bummer for me because this happens to be one of my biggest loans. In average I lend out 50 - 100 at a time. My goal for this money is to make an average of 20%, this means that I must find loan requests that will fund with a rate of 20% or higher. Now that, is a good return, well unfortunately this return comes with a higher risk. For this particular loan, I ended up with some extra cash at the end of the month and I ended up puting 180 into a single loan.

I wanted to put the money to work right away and I wanted to go high on this one, but I didn’t have a lot of time to split the 180 into 3 loans so I went to my watched list and I picked the best one I had. I spotted this particular request shortly after it went live, a few days before . It looked promising and all the information on it checked out, so I bid and put it all in there. So, I stand to loose that money now, which would make those 83 dollars in profit basically an 83 dollar cushion to ofset the 180 loss. Hopefully the collections agency will be able to get most of it if not all of it back, this would certainly minimize the impact for me. Ideally, the guy just missed the first payment and he’ll pay promptly and get back to speed. Realistically, I doubt this will happen. Hopefully I have split the money in such way that enough little loans can and will collectively compensate for any losses and turn a profit.

So what’s next? Well I have another bunch of cash waiting to be put into at least 8 new loans. I think this round of loans I’ll do all within the same period of a few days. This will allow me to get a better overview of “old loans” vs “new loans” in addition to this, I will also take a more conservative approach. My average % for these will be 14-19. I also need to make sometime to watch the Prosper webinars, I’ve missed all the scheduled times and dates but I think they have them available somewhere.

And lastly… I knew it wouldn’t be long before someone else came up with their version of the lending model that prosper is following. I will post back with any interesting info about LendingClub in another post. Oh yeah and check out the tshirt Prosper sent me for refering a friend.

Another great video.
Some guys bring in a big snake into the locker rooms. I believe they are speaking portugese. It doesn’t really matter, the prank is hilarious and you don’t need to understand their language to see how funny it is. I was pretty much rolling on the floor when I saw it.

Its pretty much SFW, and the funniest part is around 2:05

I thought this was pretty amazing stuff. The coordination these kids have is extraordinary. They move from scene to scene with precision. I wonder how long it takes the team to practice enough to be able to show this. They move almost as fast as real sports displays from 20 years ago or so.

Must take a lot of discipline and late after school practices to get that down. The most impressive part for me is around 2:00 - 2:30 with the Zoomin to the Tiger’s eyes.