Turkey Day Blues

The past week was disrupted by a holiday Americans call Thanksgiving. Since this holiday always falls on a Thursday, it's hard to visit relatives when you have to work the next day. Not that I had to work, but my girlfriend did. Anyway, we would have had to drive across Wisconsin at night to get to the closest relative. With gas prices hovering around $3.20 per gallon, the 440 mile round trip would cost about $88 bucks in my truck. We would get better gas mileage with our car, but a deer jumped out in front of us a few weeks back and put an end to that ride for a while. In Wisconsin if you hit a deer, the first thing they ask you after they find out you are all right, is if you want to keep the deer. Screw the deer! Look at the damage to my car.

This year everyone around here has noticed more dead deer on the side of the road than in past years. I suppose it has been a good if you are in the auto body business. My repair bill was well over three thousand dollars, just shy of the resale value of the car. Now I'm going to be even more careful when I drive on the highway at night. A lower night speed limit, or a few more lights and fences out there, would make a big difference. Next time you are driving through Wisconsin make sure you keep an eye on the road ahead, you never know when a 180 lb doe will be standing in your way. I've never been a big fan of deer hunting, but now I'm all for thinning the herd.

Etrade and small investors

Back in 2000 at the height of the dot com bubble, I opened an Etrade account and populated it with 10k of my hard earned money. Unlike many postings I have read on the Internet about Etrade, I found them to be a fairly decent provider of stock trading services. Trade executions have always been fast and accurate. Unfortunately, my stock picking skills have not always been the best. As the funds in my account began to erode through transaction fees and poor stock picks, I decided to try a "buy and hold" strategy. It wasn't until I noticed the first inactivity fee that I realized that Etrade was no longer a good place for a small investor.

The small print says that if you do not make a trade during a quarter and have less than ten thousand in your account, Etrade will deduct $40 from your account. I noticed the deduction as soon as I received my statement. But other small investors who did not notice the charge have lost hundreds of dollars. This week I closed my Etrade account. The inactivity fee was not the only reason I had for closing the account. Obviously, if things had gone more in my favor with the stocks that I owned, I wouldn't have had to think about closing the account in the first place.

Linksys Wireless Troubles

I recently moved my Linksys wireless router to a central location in the house in hopes that it would give me a more stable connection to my laptop. Unfortunately it didn't make that much of a difference. Searching on the web I found dozens of postings from people having problems with their wireless equipment. I am running windows XP and have enabled shared WEP encryption. The thing I have noticed is that sometimes when I can't get a connection, I have to cycle the power on the router. So, you can't assume that the problem is on your computer, it might be that the router isn't allowing wireless connections. The other thing I noticed is that the connection is better if the computer isn't sitting on a low table.

Microsoft has some good information on their web site about how to get a wireless network working. I found WiFi_SOHO_Tshoot.doc very helpful. This document will solve or at least help you identify most wireless problems. There is a chance that interference could be playing a role in my wireless connection problems. It isn't unusual to see other networks show up on my available networks list and who knows how many cordless phones and microwaves are in my neighborhood. I suspect that this could be the true source of my wireless connection problems.