My Stock Market...

Since moving to Los Angeles in 1993 to go to school, I have not missed a Christmas in Hawai'i yet. I've missed a few New Year Eve's, but that's always been for work. Even flew out to a gig on Christmas day. But opening presents on Christmas morning and being with family, I've not missed yet.

This year is no exception. It's always expensive to fly to Hawai'i during the holidays. But last year it started getting really expensive since we now buy a third seat for Sean Patrick. Yes, we could put him in our laps and fly with him that way, but it's just more comfortable for everyone if we strap his car seat into the window seat and pull him out only when necessary.

We were supposed to go to Hawai'i for Sean Patrick's birthday, but I ended up getting on the Maxwell tour, so we took the tickets we bought for that trip and applied them to are tickets for Christmas.

The beginning of October is not the optimal time to be buying plane tickets to Hawai'i. Airlines tend to jack the prices right about then since that's right about the time everyone is thinking, "I wanna go to Hawai'i for Christmas."

So this year, I went to Kayak.com and put in a search for the possible dates that we'd be flying to Hawai'i. And it's sort of become my stock market.You'll probably have to click on the above picture to enlarge it, but as you can see, there's a little graph on the top of the page that shows you the fluctuation for the price of the plane tickets to Hawai'i. The current price you see, is more than what I paid (and don't ask, I'm not telling you what I paid). There was a few days where the price dipped below and I was kicking myself a bit, but so far, I've paid less than the average.

We did have to buy our tickets on Continental since I had the credit to apply from Sean Patrick's birthday tickets. And that was a tough one since Continental is often not the cheapest airlines.

I look at each airline as a different stock. And like the stock market, you have to guess when it's "buy low" and so far, I think I've guess right.

If you don't play the stock market, this may be a safe way for you to have some similar fun. Try it!

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Lost - One Camera, No Memories.

Gone. Don't know where it is, don't know how I lost it. It was in the car one moment, and gone the next. All I can think is, it fell out at one of the stores.

Someone in Freeport Illinois just got themselves a really nice camera. I was hoping that the good people of a quaint small town in middle America would be decent enough to turn the camera into the lost and found at the store that I may have dropped it at. But I guess when you get a Super WalMart, it's no longer a quaint town.

Thankfully, I was able to dump all but the pictures I took the day I lost the camera onto my computer. Here is the last official photo I got off the cameraThat's our friend Geno chasing Sean Patrick around the Irish Pub we had dinner at with them.

It was a good camera, and with any luck, I'll be able to buy a new one with the crazy holiday sales coming up. If not, oh well.

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Design Fee = New Toy.

Where do I fly in February? I was looking at my Continental Airlines frequent flier account and after our trip to Hawai'i this Christmas, I'm going to be roughly 4000 miles short of keeping my elite status. I want to fly to their hub in Newark, that way, if I'm wrong on the mileage count, I've put in the most possible miles at the cheapest fare. I'd fly back to Hawai'i, but somehow I don't think that'll be as cheap as flying to Newark.

The only reason I speak of this is because I'm sitting in the Presidents Lounge at LAX waiting for my flight to Washington D.C. in a couple of hours. Going to do a Robin Williams special for HBO. Look for it in December.

This is also the first blog on the new toy. With my design fee that I got from Eminem in New Orleans, I was able to get a new MacBook Pro 17" laptop. It was much needed. I've had a G4 for years, and it just became time to move on up. So far.... I like it.

We the design fee I got for the 48 hours I spent in New Orleans with Eminem, I was able to get the new toy. People always joke that when you buy a new computer it's obsolete the moment it goes leaves the store. Which is sort of true, that's why I like to buy the latest and greatest just to make sure. I souped it up with the fastest available chip and the most RAM I could stuff into it. Should be a reasonable computer for at least 4 years (fingers crossed)

Although I am a little perturbed at Apple for what I think was an "up-sell". I went to a couple of Mac stores in the area to find out about transferring all my data from my old G4 to my new MacBook. The first store wasn't very helpful, I think I caught the salesman off guard since I know a little bit about Mac and he's probably used to spending his day trying to convince PC users to convert. The second store's salesman told me that in order for me to transfer my information over, I had to sign up for their "One-To-One" service, which is like personalized classes that you can take with a single instructor.

When I bought the computer online (we got money sent to Upromise because of it) I also signed up for the one-to-one since I thought I needed it. I signed up for my class to transfer my information. The only day I had to do it was yesterday, before today's flight.

I got to the store, sat down with the instructor "kid". I say kid because now that I'm 40, I'm middle aged and everyone else is a "kid". Although this guy was really a kid. He couldn't have been over 22. I told him the entire reason I signed up was to get my data transferred over and for him to show me how.

Turns out, they don't show you how, they do it for you by taking your computer for up to 48 hours. Seeing as I'm flying today, I couldn't leave my computer for that long. He went and searched out a manager to see if there was anything they could do to help. As they hemmed and hawed, I said, "Is there anyway you can just show me how to do it?" They looked at each other and said, "Sure, it's really easy," you just need to buy this $35 cable.

Want to know how easy? Plug the cable into both computers. Turn on the old computer and hold down "t" until it the firewire symbol comes up. Then turn on your new computer and follow the set up instructions until, get this, it asks you, "Do you want to transfer data from an old computer?" Click yes, follow instructions to choose data, wait an hour or so and... ta da! All your old files and applications are on the new computer.

Yep, didn't need the one-to-one classes, just needed the cable and someone to tell me how to do it. I also noticed when I cracked open the box for the first time during my one-to-one session, it tells me right there in the "quick start" guide, how to do it! UGH. Well, at least I have these sessions and I may use them for advanced classes on some of the applications I don't know well. Stay tuned.

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