Some career advice from Elon Musk’s wife. I think it’s important to note that Mr. Musk made his first millions on one company named Zip2, that was bought by Compaq, and then a second company that turned into PayPal. What I’m thinking is that he couldn’t have started SpaceX, Tesla, and Solar City without first making those earlier millions.
Scala, Java, Unix, MacOS tutorials (page 237)
This is a list of some of the applications I (Alvin Alexander) have written. I’ve included links to places where you can find more information about each app or application.
Just Be
Just Be is a mindfulness reminder application for Android. Being an Android app, I wrote it in Java. You can learn more about it at JustBe.cc.
At the moment I don’t know if this talk is any good, but I do like the pictures/slides, and I want to come back and re-visit it at some point. The title of the presentation is, “Lean Startup for Agile Product Management.”
I just saw this cool “Fastgraph” for Apple’s stock on this Seeking Alpha page. This graphic (infographic) does a great job of highlighting a lot of data that is important to me.
This is a great little story by Charlie Munger about GEICO. He and Warren Buffett famously bought GEICO a long time ago, and apparently it was a mess.
The “cancer surgery formula” is basically what Steve Jobs did when he came back to Apple in 1997. He got rid of the Newton, their printing business, and slashed through all of the computer models until he came up with his famous grid of selling only four computer types (laptop/desktop for home-users or professionals). Once he got the company relatively stable, they were then able to create the iPod and everything else we now know. (Image from this PDF.)
I keep seeing the word “moat” lately in regard to investing, so I just looked up and found this definition. When I think of a moat, Apple comes to mind right away. I’ve been thinking about getting an Android phone recently, and then I realized that all of my friends and family use iPhones, and we use iMessage for free, and if I switch to Android, that goes away. Integrating an Android phone or tablet with iTunes also seems to be problematic, so it’s hard to get away from Apple. Facebook has a similar advantage, where it would be hard to get everyone to get up and move over to another social web service.
A good quote from Charlie Munger on owning companies (and stocks), from this Seeking Alpha article.
I just started doing some research on the stock of Exxon Mobile (XOM), and these are my notes on their stock. After some introductory notes, all of my other notes are in reverse-chronological order.
Today I’m proud announce that I’ve written an Android application named “Just Be”:
Just Be is a simple but useful “mindfulness reminders” app that helps bring you back to the present moment.
To use Just Be, all you have to do is a) configure the reminders that you want to see, b) optionally add your favorite background images, and c) set a notification schedule, and Just Be will send you notifications (mindfulness reminders) on that schedule.
I’d write more about it here, but I’ve already written about it at JustBe.cc, so please see that website for more information, including a short video.
This new article on NasaSpaceFlight.com provides more information on NASA’s EmDrive, including a new test that was conducted in a vacuum. From the article: “Paul March, an engineer at NASA Eagleworks, recently reported in NASASpaceFlight.com’s forum that NASA has successfully tested their EM Drive in a hard vacuum – the first time any organization has reported such a successful test. To this end, NASA Eagleworks has now nullified the prevailing hypothesis that thrust measurements were due to thermal convection.”
If true, this statement on emdrive.com/faq.html is pretty sensational: “The second generation engines will be capable of producing a specific thrust of 30kN/kW. Thus for 1 kilowatt (typical of the power in a microwave oven) a static thrust of 3 tonnes can be obtained, which is enough to support a large car.”
From this story on Barrons.com on April 30, 2015, Exxon is once again the “dividend king,” surpassing Apple in the amount of dividends returned to shareholders.
This article lists five Colorado ghost towns. They also state that Colorado has 1,500 ghost towns, but only 640 remain (whatever that means).
This website has a nice pictorial of nine scenic places to visit in Colorado that most people don’t know about. This particular photo reminds me of Alaska.
This Fast Company article suggests that, for a variety of reasons, the second coming of solar power is upon us.
You know you’re both old and lazy when a good “gift to self” is a vacuum cleaner that runs by itself. ;)
I’ve been looking at investing in oil/energy companies, including Exxon (XOM) and Chevron (CVX), and to do so I have to try to read things like this. (IMHO, someone at Oppenheimer needs to take a course in “clear writing,” as a few of those sentences sound like double-speak at best.)
