Bicyling in Greeley

I’ve been trying to take advantage of my new status as a retiree and enjoy it for as long as it lasts. I haven’t acquired the skill at doing nothing for more than a day or so and so I’ve been distracted every time I hear of some new job opportunity. I attended an orientation session on Wednesday for career counseling services that are part of the EER deal and I have a limited time in which to take advantage of it. Several points they made were how long it can take to find a job (several months from the time someone starts looking) and the importance of networking in finding positions. On Tuesday I visited a networking meeting in Fort Collins to hear about what’s going on locally in the Biotech and Renewable Energy industries in Colorado and there seems to be quite a lot of activity in those areas. I ran into some people I hadn’t seen in several years.

Terri also found out last week that she’ll need to find another job in the next few months. Our plan was to have one of us working for a few more years so as not to draw on savings before we’re really ready to retire. So I’m trying to enjoy this time off while it lasts and not worry too much about my productivity or lack thereof; yet at the same time, I’m trying to network as much as practical to keep abreast of any opportunities that look interesting.

I hadn’t ridden my bicycle much in a long time, several years actually, so on Monday I filled the tires and took it out for a short ride through the neighborhood down toward the HP plant which is now for sale. During my last year working at that location, I rode the 4 mile distance nearly every day in the summer on my bicycle. It was nice way to get about 40 minutes of daily exercise. Commuting to work by bicycle was pretty much out of the question after my job moved to Fort Collins. It wasn’t just because of the distance, which is about 22 miles, but because of the lack of bicycle lanes on the roads along the way. I had hoped that a paved trail along the Poudre River would have been completed by now so that at least once I could have ridden my bicycle the distance from Greeley to Fort Collins, but its progress has been slow and it only goes to Windsor at this time, about half the distance to Fort Collins. On Monday I rode about 10 miles, much of it on bicycle trails that have been constructed in the past 2 years. Had the Greeley plant still been in operation, these new trails would have allowed me to get to work without the need to share a narrow shoulder on the roads with fast-moving cars. Since the population of Greeley has increased about 15% in the past 7 years, with much of it in neighborhoods that have sprung up between my house and the HP site, the new bicycle trails are a welcome addition to avoid the increase in traffic the growth has caused.

I’d been curious to see how much more of the Poudre trail had been finished since I last bicycled on it about 3 years ago so on Wednesday I explored the sections between west Greeley and Windsor and then on Thursday I went eastward on it toward downtown Greeley. I live about 5 miles from the trail, so just to get there and back, it takes 10 miles of bicycling. Wednesday’s ride was a total of 25 miles and I could feel it when I got home since I hadn’t ridden that far in a very long time. Thursday’s ride was 26 miles but I took time off in the middle of it tour Centennial Village. The trail section from west Greeley to Windsor is quite picturesque, meandering along the river and through farms and fields with a beautiful view of the Rocky Mountains to the west. The east section has some nice sections on it, but a lot of it parallels a series of sand and gravel pits and so it’s not quite as nice as the western section. It’s also missing about 1.2 miles in the center of it, which requires sharing the narrow shoulder of a few roads with cars. As I got to the end of the trail on Thursday, I entered Island Grove Park and got to see a lot of activity as the town gets ready setting up the park for the Greeley Stampede, a carnival and rodeo that runs for 2 weeks, starting today, and culminating in the world’s largest 4th of July Rodeo.

Centennial Village is a historical museum park located near Island Grove Park on the northeast side of Greeley. It’s been in operation since 1976 and I had never visited it, despite having lived in Greeley for more than 18 years. I decided that it was a good time for a break and paid the $4 entrance fee to take a tour of it. The park is made up of a number of attractions that have been gathered from all over Weld County and brought into a small village that represents the historical period during Greeley’s settlement. There are several houses, a church, a store, a firehouse, a blacksmith shop, a train depot, and farm buildings. Some of them were moved to the village from various surrounding locations and some are replicas and are representative of the architecture from around the time Greeley was settled. There are tours every hour that take you through the interior of several of the houses all of which are furnished very much like they were when they were inhabited. I was quite impressed with it and I can certainly see how it earned the title of the ‘best place in Greeley to take guests.’

If I can keep up this level of exercise, I’d be back in shape in no time. It’s enjoyable and I am able to listen to podcasts and audio books, so I feel like I’m actually getting several things done to help alleviate the feeling of not being productive.

Canceling an XBOX Live Gold membership

I got an Xbox 360 about a year ago with the hope of using it as a media player for my HP Media Vault because it is supposed to be a DLNA-compliant media server. It’s not. You can get it to work by installing Twonkyvision’s server on the Media Vault (which costs another $40), but it won’t stream Divx/xvid-encoded videos, which pretty much renders it useless as a media player in my opinion.

I’m not much of a gamer myself, and so the Xbox 360 hasn’t gotten much use. For some reason that I cannot recall, I decided to upgrade my Xbox 360 silver membership (which is free) to an Xbox Live Gold membership which costs about $7.99/month. I figured I could always just switch back to the free membership if I didn’t use the Gold membership features. After a while of seeing that monthly charge appear on the credit card, I decided to cancel it. I first tried canceling it on-line via the webpage for Live, then through the Xbox console, and wasted at least a half hour before searching on the Internet only to find out that that only way to cancel it is to call up 1-800-4MY-XBOX (1-800-469-9269) to wait to talk to an operator. And that took an additional 18 minutes, most of which time I was on hold.

I really hate it when a company makes such an obvious attempt to hang on to subscription fees that it causes that level of inconvenience when attempting to cancel a service. Signing up took a few minutes and I didn’t need to call anyone, but canceling took 48 minutes from my life. So I’ll post this here for three reasons:

Google bookmarks

Since I’m shilling for Google today, I’d like to also recommend the bookmark feature that they offer in the latest version Google toolbar. I use 3 different computers at home and keeping bookmarks synchronized on them was just about impossible. Two of the computers are dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu Linux, so that makes it even harder. I also use IE as well as Firefox and so that means I have 6 different browsers I can use just on these 3 computers. It was even more complicated when I had 2 additional work computers because then I had 6 more browsers because one computer was a triple boot, XP, Vista, and Ubuntu. About 2 months ago I decided to give the latest Google toolbar bookmarking feature a try and now that I’ve used it I find that I absolutely love it. No matter which computer or browser I’m using, the bookmarks are properly organized and accessible.

If you use it, you will come to see this image in the toolbar as the most frequently used real estate on your screen

Even if you’re on a borrowed computer without the Google Toolbar, you can still access your bookmarks in a webpage by going to http://www.google.com/bookmarks

I should mention that Google Bookmarks use ‘tags’ for organization, so a single bookmark can be listed under several tags. Traditionally, bookmarks could be stored in a hierarchical order, which somewhat defeats the purpose of a bookmark, because you have to go searching through a directory-like structure for it instead of having nearly instant access to it. Unlike organizational tools that are heirarchical, tags are flat, so when you store a bookmark and can’t think of where it belongs, you can put it under several tags. I mention this because if you import your bookmarks and you have multiple levels of categories, Google will make up unique tags for each level. I found that to be a distraction, so I reorganized afterward by editing those tags.

Reading RSS feeds

I’ve been reading RSS feeds for several years. I think that most people, probably 90% of people who use the Internet, still don’t know what RSS feeds are used for. They are a way to keep track of websites that change frequently without having to go visit them all the time. This is done with a news aggregator.

There are a lot of competing services for aggregating your RSS feeds and I’ve experimented with most of them over time and have finally decided that Google’s works best for me. I’ve used Newsgator, Bloglines, and Yahoo at one time or another and none of them have the features or ease-of-use that the Google Reader offers.

So if you have been seeing RSS feed logos on web pages, particularly blogs, go ahead and sign up for Google Reader and start reading your web sites through an RSS feed and you’ll never go back to the old way again.

June update

It’s hard to believe that it’s been nearly 3 weeks since I wrote anything in the weblog. I’ve been staying busy, primarily working on finance-related activities. After 24 years of working at HP, I decided to take an early retirement package and left the company a few weeks ago. I was ready for a break and felt that the offer was good, so now I’m in the middle of moving money around and organizing my finances. Yesterday I computed the basis for HP stock that I had accumulated over a 23 year period that had undergone 3 splits and 2 company spinoffs. I had been dreading that excercize, but in the end, all the numbers added up and it wasn’t too painful. Thankfully, the HP Alumni association had a spreadsheet I used as a starting point that kept track of the price of HP and spin off stocks all the way back to HP’s IPO. I realized that if someone had the foresight to buy $1000 worth of HP stock when it went public in 1959, today it would be worth well over $600,000 in a combination of HP, Agilent, and Verigy stock. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t get started that early .

A while ago I experimented with purchasing individual stocks and experienced pretty good gains, even though I had a few of my stocks lose most of their value. Having picked those losers led me to wonder if I had the temperament for purchasing stocks individually. It seemed too much like gambling. In retrospect, even with those losers, my net gains were still over 20% a year, and so I couldn’t complain too much. I decided that if I were ever to try investing in individual stocks again, I’d do a much more thorough job of analyzing the companies. The worst kind of investing is where you buy a stock after hearing a ‘hot tip’ from some dubious source about a company that is ‘about to explode.’ Often times, the company implodes instead. I can see by the amount of ‘pump and dump‘ spam email I get that it must still be popular to speculate in companies with no real earnings. Now the spam messages don’t even make any pretenses about the company having any potential, instead tacitly inviting investors to engage in a game of the greater fool theory.

I’ve heard several horror stories about people who are suckered into handing over control of their money to seemingly trustworthy individuals only to be cheated, sometimes out of their entire life savings. Fortunately, I’ve not had this experience myself with investment counselors, but it’s certainly not for lack of trying on their part. I used to get calls from boiler room operations promising “30, 40, or 50% annual returns” but I never took the bait. I even had a guy tormenting me with voicemails every night at home, eventually resorting to insulting me with comments such as ‘anyone with a modicum of intelligence would be able to tell that this is a great investment’. Yeah, I want to give my money to someone who would talk to potential clients like that… I will never buy an investment from someone trying to sell it to me over the phone. Anyone ‘selling’ you an investment probably does not have your best interests in mind.

Lately I’ve been reading investing books and studying a lot of companies using analytical tools geared toward value investing. I would never have the temperament to be a day trader but I do plan to have a more active role in investing now that I have the time to do it.