Love-Hate Part Deux

As you may recall, I posted about my expierence with my Xbox 360 breaking and the long time until I saw it again. Well I hope that it doesn't take that long again, because I have to send it in......again. This time games are freezing when I'm trying to play with no error messages or anything. It just freezes. After calling Microsoft and explaining to them what was happening they sounded confident in saying it was a hardware problem and that they would fix it. I'm glad they will fix it but I'm getting more and more concered that it might break after the warrenty is up on it and then they wil charge me money to fix it, which would be unacceptable. What are the odds of getting 2 xboxs that are faulty in some way? Anyway, I called them on Friday and they said they would overnight a box to me, and I thought that by monday at the latest I would receive the box. Well tuesday has come and gone and still no box here. So if this slow shipment of the inital box is any indication of the time it wil take to fix, its going to take awhile. I doubt this time they will lose my xbox and send me a new one. I would rather have that happen so I can get some more free stuff. The Love-Hate of microsoft continues. Actually it should be more like the "kind of like-midly dislike" realtionship. Since I don't hate to many things, except minorities.

Silver and Gold

Ok, it may be a bit past the Christmas season to be talking about silver and gold. However my post will not be its place as a decoration, rather on my opinion on its investment potential this year.
I started investing in stocks a few years ago. I didn't have to much money to use but I had enough to make it work and most of all, learn from it. I don't have what you call a "balanced" porftolio at the moment. I have to admit I kind of like the speculative "penny" stocks. Lets just say that it hasn't gone well and that i lost 99.5% of my value on 2 of the stocks, so I'm trying to regain these losses and get my portfolio back in the black again. Basically I'm putting all my money (not that much) into different gold mining companies. I believe that gold and other precious metals are going to see record breaking prices as foreign demand for them increases. Gold has already broken 20 year highs ( near $550 an ounce) and I think that it will easily break $600 this spring.

I have investd some in a great gold company called GoldCorp as well as a couple other speculative mining companies that will hopefully do well this year with the price of gold continue rise. I could go on for awhile about different reasons I think gold will go up so ill just say a few quickly. With the rise in the asian demand for precious metals will boost the price of gold to a never before seen high. As demand for jewelery (and other goods that gold is used in production) rises, the price of gold will continue going up.

Gold has always been used as a place to park your money to protect it from inflation. It has held intrinsic value to people since the beginning of civilizations. If the economy goes to hell(I hope it doesn't) or inflation runs rampent or a host of other things happens, gold will be the place investors turn.

On a completley unrelated topic: I've came in 4th place in a poker tourney where the top 3 payout, it was a long drawn out battle for 3rd place and I came on the losing end twice. Not a happy camper, but hey thats poker.

Ok...It's Getting A Bit Out of Hand

I enjoy watching most sports. When it comes to football, you will usually see me watching Pro football and maybe occasionally catching a college game. I'll usually watch a college game when the Bowl games come on. This year is the first year that I really noticed these bowl games getting out of control. I know this trend may have started awhile ago but I think its getting ridiculous. What trend you ask? The trend of the college Bowl games starting to look like NASCAR.

There are around 30 bowl games that are played, some more "important" than others. Almost everybody has heard of "The Rose Bowl" and "The Orange Bowl". But now you will see these games be announced as "The Rose Bowl Presented by Citi" and "The Fedex Orange Bowl". It can't be just the Orange Bowl it has to be the Fedex Orange Bowl because they spent millions of dollars to sponser it. I thought it was bad enough when companies were paying hundreds of millions of dollars to put their name on sports stadiums (I will always call it Comisky Park, not U.S. Cellular Field). I feel bad for the teams that played in the "Gaylord Hotels Music City Bowl" or the prestigues "San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl". I fear that soon the uniforms that players wear will be full of advertisments for Tide Bleach and Old Spice while a team like the New York Giants become the Phillip Morris New York Giants. I find it all to re-goddamn-diculous.


Ok I'm done ranting about this. I'm going to go watch either the "Master Card Alamo Bowl" or the "Chick-fil-a Peach Bowl".