Chan's Personal Blog

Two weeks ago I saw the movie, The New World starring Colin Farrell. I saw the trailer for it initially and thought it'd be okay. It looked like a movie where European explorers land in America and begin exploring the new world. The story revolves around the love story of Pocahontas. The trailers did show some war scenes, so I thought, okay, a chick flick but with a little action. Once in a while, we have to rent a chick flick to appease the ladies, so we thought this would be the best of a bad situation .

The first half hour of the film was fair enough, and then it went down hill from there. After that, you will honestly see Colin Farrell frollick in the fields with Pocahontas for about an hour. Then, when Pocahontas loses her lover, she then frollicks with another dude for another hour. We get a few skirmishes between the natives and the Europeans, but that's about it, no epic battles.

There were also a lot of wierd scenes in the movie. For example, there's a sequence where you see a pot cooking something over a fire, then you see chickens in the field, and then you see frollicking in the fields, then the scene cuts to black. I normally would expect these random sequences low budget, black and white independent films. I joked that there must be some hidden symbolism in these scenes.

In either case, you know a chick flick is bad when even the ladies hated the movie. The New World is without a doubt the worst movie of the year. Two thumbs WAY DOWN.

Last year's worst movie for me was Alexander, and the previous year's was Daredevil. What's common between all these crappy films? Colin Farrell was in all of them. Alexander sucked because they jump around in time to tell the story. For example, one scene will be 3 years ago, and another will be 10 years in the future, etc, so the movie didn't flow at all. In addition, there was no character development of the enemies that Alexander fought. There was no background about them at all. For all I know, Alexander invaded Babylon because he didn't like the beards that the Babylonians had.

Before you label me as someone who blindly hates Colin Farrell, I did like the movie S.W.A.T.

Anyway, save yourself and avoid The New World like the plague!

On Wednesday we had our first board games night for the year at my boss' house. It had been a while since our last one because everyone was either super busy with school (me) or everyone was addicted to World of Warcraft (everyone else).

In either case, we started off with the game Flea Circus which is a quick and easy game, perfect for starting or ending a games night. It's also a good starter game because people can easily join-in the action as they arrive.

Once the last of the people arrived, we had 7 people. We decided to break out Shadows Over Camelot which is a co-operative 7 player game. You assume the role as one of the Knights of The Round Table, and you move throughout the land fighting evil and finishing quests. The twist to the game is, one person plays as the traitor and their goal is to screw over the knights. This adds an interesting dimension to the game because you end up second guessing everyone's motives, and you accuse others of being the traitor. Everytime you accuse someone as the traitor, and they turn out to be loyal, bad things happen. If you don't find the traitor by the end of the game, bad stuff happens. So, the traitor and loyalty cards are dealt out at random at the beginning of the game; there is the potential that there's no traitor at all, so you have to be careful who you accuse. Anyway, this is a fairly epic game which takes a few hours to finish.

Then at 10:30pm, we hear a knock on the door. Graeme goes and answers it and goes, uh Chan, there's a bunch of girls at the door for you. I thought, haha, that's pretty funny stuff. And then, I heard Sarah's voice. It was Sarah, Bethany, Laura, and Alicia at the door, and they were just 3 hours late for games night .

The girls originally said they couldn't come because they had wedding stuff to plan, but here they were. So, they broke out Cranium while we were still in the heat of battle in Camelot. That's quite the contrast of games. On one side, we have careful sober strategizing, and on the other, you have the a bunch of gleeful giggles.

In either case, Patrick turned out to be the traitor (shakes fist at him), but he didn't do a very good job of getting us killed in the game. His "evil action" that he did against us actually caused us to win the game.

So yeah, biggest turn out on games night so far this year. Good times. See you all at the next games night.... on time .

So one of my regular viewers has posted this question - what is my motivation for giving out financial advice? That's an excellent question. Why do I blog about financial matters? Am I trying to hype up a stock that I own, so it will go up? Am I being paid for recommending a service from a certain financial institution? Do I like to brag about success? No. No. And No.

I don't recommend stocks, services, or mutual funds in order to hype them up and profit from them. I just recommend things where I think it can make you some money because that's where my money is at. I always disclose whether I currently hold a certain stock or mutual fund that I'm recommending so there's no conflict of interest. In addition, you get the mutually assured destruction guarentee. This means that if buy a fund or stock that I hold, then it means we're in it together. If you get absolutely destroyed by it, then I get absolutely destroyed by it as well. If it brings riches and glory, then I get riches and glory. Obviously this isn't reason enough to own a stock or a fund because you have to do the research before acting, but it does have the Chan Stamp of Approval™.

Anyway, I write not to brag about success, but I write to educate people because investing is a lot easier than it appears. There's a lot of free money to be had that people aren't aware of. From experience, a lot of people that I know who are in their early 20s don't have a lot of knowledge or experience about investing, so this blog is a perfect venue for this sort of thing since they're my primary demographic.

My initial motivation for writing articles about investing came from an experience I had with a colleague at work. He asked, "Chan, when do you think you'll have a networth of $100,000?" I told him I had no clue because I was still a student, and $100,000 seems very distant. However, I did ask him when he thought he would reach the $100,000 mark. He said he wanted to reach that goal by the time he was 30 years old. I then asked him how he was going to reach that goal, and he said that he was investing his money.

This answer intrigued me, so I dug a little deeper. I asked him how he was investing his money. He said that he currently had $25,000 in a bank account, and he was making 0.5%. He seemed pretty smug about it because he said most banks don't even give interest any more, and he was getting 0.5%. So, he thought he was a savvy investor because he was getting interest. At this point, I was ready to curl up into a ball on the ground and die. I was shocked that he believed money sitting in a bank account getting 0.5% even counted as investing. From that point on, I heard the war cry to educate people my age about REAL investing.

Firstly, I'd like to apologize for the lack of blog updates and e-mail responses. My internet was down for two days due to some software problems, and I've finally fixed the issue, so I'm back online. Dang Windows.

Anyway, last week I was ranting on about what I was going to do after I graduate, and there has been several important developments since. The first big one is that the dream co-op job that I was interested in doesn't hire this term. It looks like they did all their interviews and such long before this new term started. That was kind of unexpected. I could wait for the Fall to try to apply again, but that's wasting a lot of time. So, this was the only co-op job that I really wanted, so this door is firmly shut.

Also, on Tuesday, I met with the war council, which consists primarily of my supervising professor, and we talked about the end game for my master's degree. This was the first time in 6 months that I've seen him because he has been on sabbatical.

In either case, I told him about my two potential paths. A) Graduate at the end of summer and find a job. B) Go into co-op to find a job. He eluded to the fact that at this point, a co-op job or a real job really has no difference for me, except the co-op job will pay much less, so he didn't understand why I was interested in doing co-op. He also said that his other grad students did co-op only because they lacked communication skills or technical skills, and that they would have problems trying to find work out there; however, I shouldn't have any problems since I've got a fairly solid skill set. He also nicely said that I was using co-op and academia as a crutch, and I should get out there. This was exactly what I needed to hear, and a gentle prod to just graduate and go into the real world.

He also suggested that I was thinking too small for dream jobs. He said to dream bigger, and to not let things like geography dictate where I ended up. The reality is, it would be fairly unlikely to find a job in town that would make full use of my academic potential. He said to dream big while I was young and not tied down by anything.

So, the end game plan is to finish the two courses that I'm currently taking, and write up my thesis all in the same term. It's going to be a blitz to the finish line.

At this point, the 5 year plan is completely out the window because I have no visibility of where I will end up. I have visibility of 4 months ahead, and that's it. Everything else is variable. It is both freaky and exciting at the same time.

This is going to be an interesting transitional period. In either case, thank you all for your prayers and comments. It really helps.