Make sure its a merlot

When was the last time you finished a bottle of red on your own alone at home?

I highly recommend it.

Great view optional.

How well have you thought about your future?

I admit, I am not as young as I hope I am. Five years ago, fresh out of college, I haven't thought that I had to start saving for my retirement. That's right, I am now concerned on how I am going to live post-retirement. It is a big thing here in the US that you have to save up for your retirement as early as possible. You have to worry about 401k, bonds, stocks, mutual funds, blah, blah, blah.

One reason KC and I decided to move here is that we see the US as a better place to raise our children (or presently just "child") and save money and probably one day go back home and have enough money that we don't have to worry about our financial future. Just save a few hundred thousand dollars and go home and live off the interest. Sounds great, right?

That plan still sounds realistic but what if somewhere along the way we decide to stay here for good? Where will that put us financially? Good advice is that you put aside at least 5% of your income to your 401k and maybe another 10% on savings and other investments, that way when you reach 65, you have enough money to live comfortably until you reach 95 years.

But is saving money mean that you don't enjoy your money? Or is it to leave to your children and let them enjoy the fruit of your hard labor? Or will you be like Warren Buffett and just leave your money to charity?

Right now, thinking about all of these options and decisions are a big load on our backs. Sure, we would like to spend some of the money we earn now and maybe leave some for the future but risking that we would not be ready financially when we retire. But on the other hand we can save as much as we can and just enjoy it when we're 65.

Crap! I miss having my parents just handing me my allowance and not worry about this.

I guess I'm just growing up.

Things observed from the NBA Playoffs

1. D-Wade is the best player in the league right now.
   
2. Shaq isn't as dominating as he once was. Actually, at 34, most players would not even play the number of minutes as he does.
3. Dirk Nowitski is the greatest flopper in the league. He would fall even if nobody was touching him.
   
4. Kobe Bryant is still an ass. He will never win an NBA title ever again.
   
5. The referees have gone soft. Never had I seen as much offensive fouls called ever.
6. Watch out for Lebron and the Cavs next season. They were a game away from beating the Pistons in the Eastern Conference semifinals and go against Wade and the Heat (In my opinion the best matchup in the league since Larry and Magic).
7. The league needs somebody like Mark Cuban to keep things exciting. That is what the league need more of - owners who really like their teams and not just the dollars and cents.

Cleaning it up

It's been a while since I did anything drastic to this blog and I felt that changing the whole template might liven things up a bit here.

Right now, I have just installed both Windows XP Home and Office 2003 to my computer and got rid of all that Vista crap out of my system. It is not worth loading your computer with beta software as things just mysteriously crash and hang up on you. Although the new OS does show some promise, I wouldn't load it up again on my system until they come up with the first service pack for it.

Tonight, it is Game 6 of Miami against Dallas for the NBA Finals, in case you live in a cave and didn't follow that last 3 games in Miami, you missed the Jordanesque performace of D-Wade (or probably in the future you can call it Wadesque? :) ). I haven't seen anybody perform this well on the Finals since Jordan, and back then, I always rooted for the Bulls' opponents to win but now, I hope the Heat brings it all back to Florida, barring a total meltdown of D-Wade!

Speaking of meltdowns, anybody saw Phil Mickelson choke on the final hole of the US Open? Bwahahaha! Serves you right!

Ghana 2 - Czech 0

Wow! What an unbelievable match! It always feels good to see the underdog win in such a huge tournament as well as see the white boys get their asses whipped. The game is a lot more lopsided than the score represents as Ghana had a lot of chances to score more goals (including a missed penalty shot) but the Czechs goalkeeper did an outstanding job.

I still liked Senegal beating France in the last World Cup better though.

Testing Windows Vista

I have just finished installing Windows Vista on my computer and everything looks good so far - although there are some drivers and software that the OS won't let me install and thus I am unable to use.

I could not install Adobe Flash for some weird reason (is it because Adobe has recently filed a suit against Microsoft? Hmm...) and Zonealarm's installation also hanged midway. My new webcam has also refused to work and so on and so forth.

Microsoft has recently installed a WGA which verifies if the user uses a legal or pirated copy of Windows and is pinging Microsoft servers and locks in your IP address. So just in case you become paranoid that MS might catch you using pirated Windows or Office software, using the beta version (of both Vista and Office 2007) might be a good option for you and gives you enough time to save up for the new software instead of buying XP and Office 2003, both which will become obsolete faster that Windows boots up.

I read this article on this week's Time Magazine and it kinda strikes a chord with me. Being a new father, it raises the question, "Does it really make me happy?"

Does Fatherhood Make You Happy?

By DANIEL GILBERT

Sonora Smart Dodd was listening to a sermon on self-sacrifice when she decided that her father, a widower who had raised six children, deserved his very own national holiday. Almost a century later, people all over the world spend the third Sunday in June honoring their fathers with ritual offerings of aftershave and neckties, which leads millions of fathers to have precisely the same thought at precisely the same moment: "My children," they think in unison, "make me happy."

Could all those dads be wrong?

Studies reveal that most married couples start out happy and then become progressively less satisfied over the course of their lives, becoming especially disconsolate when their children are in diapers and in adolescence, and returning to their initial levels of happiness only after their children have had the decency to grow up and go away. When the popular press invented a malady called "empty-nest syndrome," it failed to mention that its primary symptom is a marked increase in smiling.

Psychologists have measured how people feel as they go about their daily activities, and have found that people are less happy when they are interacting with their children than when they are eating, exercising, shopping or watching television. Indeed, an act of parenting makes most people about as happy as an act of housework. Economists have modeled the impact of many variables on people's overall happiness and have consistently found that children have only a small impact. A small negative impact.

Those findings are hard to swallow because they fly in the face of our most compelling intuitions. We love our children! We talk about them to anyone who will listen, show their photographs to anyone who will look and hide our refrigerators behind vast collages of their drawings, notes, pictures and report cards. We feel confident that we are happy with our kids, about our kids, for our kids and because of our kids--so why is our personal experience at odds with the scientific data?

Three reasons.

First, when something makes us happy we are willing to pay a lot for it, which is why the worst Belgian chocolate is more expensive than the best Belgian tofu. But that process can work in reverse: when we pay a lot for something, we assume it makes us happy, which is why we swear to the wonders of bottled water and Armani socks. The compulsion to care for our children was long ago written into our DNA, so we toil and sweat, lose sleep and hair, play nurse, housekeeper, chauffeur and cook, and we do all that because nature just won't have it any other way. Given the high price we pay, it isn't surprising that we rationalize those costs and conclude that our children must be repaying us with happiness.

Second, if the Red Sox and the Yankees were scoreless until Manny Ramirez hit a grand slam in the bottom of the ninth, you can be sure that Boston fans would remember it as the best game of the season. Memories are dominated by their most powerful--and not their most typical--instances. Just as a glorious game-winning homer can erase our memory of 812 dull innings, the sublime moment when our 3-year-old looks up from the mess she is making with her mashed potatoes and says, "I wub you, Daddy," can erase eight hours of no, not yet, not now and stop asking. Children may not make us happy very often, but when they do, that happiness is both transcendent and amnesic.

Third, although most of us think of heroin as a source of human misery, shooting heroin doesn't actually make people feel miserable. It makes them feel really, really good--so good, in fact, that it crowds out every other source of pleasure. Family, friends, work, play, food, sex--none can compete with the narcotic experience; hence all fall by the wayside. The analogy to children is all too clear. Even if their company were an unremitting pleasure, the fact that they require so much company means that other sources of pleasure will all but disappear. Movies, theater, parties, travel--those are just a few of the English nouns that parents of young children quickly forget how to pronounce. We believe our children are our greatest joy, and we're absolutely right. When you have one joy, it's bound to be the greatest.

Our children give us many things, but an increase in our average daily happiness is probably not among them. Rather than deny that fact, we should celebrate it. Our ability to love beyond all measure those who try our patience and weary our bones is at once our most noble and most human quality. The fact that children don't always make us happy--and that we're happy to have them nonetheless--is the fact for which Sonora Smart Dodd was so grateful. She thought we would all do well to remember it, every third Sunday in June.

The World Cup is back!!!

Germany just dismantled Costa Rica for the World Cup opener.

Wow, it has been 4 years since the last World Cup, the first one i actually followed and where Asian teams actually did good. This World Cup, I am still routing for the Asian teams to do well but there is a side of me that wishes England to win. I remember during the last World Cup, with beer in hand in the middle of the workday where some colleagues and I went to a pub (yes, it was an actual British-type pub in the middle of the red light district in Makati) and watched Brazil ate the English up.

Whatever happened to Senegal? Are my eyes deceiving me or are they not part of this year's Cup? They did a very good job the last time that I thought they would be a shoo-in for this year. I guess there are a lot of good teams from Africa that the competition is stiff.

It is also a good thing that the US did well in the last Cup as they are broadcasting all the games live in 3 separate channels (ABC, ESPN and ESPN2).

Time to go to the grocery later and pick up that Guiness 6-pack.

Free Phone Numbers

I just found a very cool website by AOL which offers free US local phone numbers - www.aimphoneline.com. This is very useful for people outside the US to have a "local US number" in which friends and family in the US can call at no extra cost to them. This is VOIP at its best. All you need is a broadband connection and an AIM screen name (which you can easily obtain on the website) and viola! A local number will be supplied to you instantly.

There are however a few downsides to the service. One is that you have to register a valid US address, so put your friend's or family member's address in there. Another is that you have to install yet another instant messaging software into your already crowded taskbar. But other than those 2 minor inconviniences, it is a very useful product, if you ask me.

So instead of paying an extra $4.99 for the same service in Skype, just download this and save that money.