The Bull Og

Methinks gold would have been good to start accumulating back in September of last year.

I still can’t get my head around why the stock has been going down since the start of Macworld and the announcement of the fabulous Macbook Air, especially with the quarterly call coming next Tuesday where I expect to hear great numbers given the success of the iPhone last year.

So many analysts say, AAPL’s going to go back up. I’ve heard $200 - $250.

Given the pricetag of the Air in addition to the US economy teetering on the brink of downturn, I don’t see Apple selling as many Airs this year at $1,799 a pop as it did iPhones last year for ~$400 each, at least, not in the States. For me, that begs a question: will exports make up for domestic sales thereby continuing to make AAPL attractive for the long term?

I wonder if the Apple brand didn’t get enough worldwide exposure in the last twelve months that, coupled with a weak dollar, international sales won’t offset any potential sales dips we’ll see in the States. Will Apple products continue to be considered desirable luxury (term used loosely here) items in other markets?

Just got back from an evening with Tom Cochrane. I’ll admit, I was going because I was under the impression that Brickhouse was still hosting Wii Wednesdays. When I got there, there wasn’t a Wii to be found but there were some people talking about modeling complex systems (read: space stations, space flight, missions to Mars, you know, things like that.)

NASA’s got some crazy smart people thinking about metamodeling.

Might have been even more entertaining than Wii Sports in the end.

My advice: don’t do it! (because you can’t!)

I took beer bottles to three local supermarkets and one liquor store and nowhere could I get the deposit back nor even recycle the bottles!

When I moved to Vienna a few years ago, I had the growing pains any expat experiences in getting to know a new environment; things like nothing being open on Sundays, dealing with local bureaucracy, little old ladies elbowing their way to the front of the line, you know, things like that.

When I moved to San Francisco, I thought “Hey, I’m back in my home country. I know how things work here!”

“Surprise, surprise, Mr. Michigander - we Californians don’t have your fancy 10 cent deposit on bottles!”

For a state that prides itself on recycling, I found it strange that it’s so hard to get the deposit back on bottles.

My advice: do it!

I just flew from Frankfurt to San Francisco in business class and I may never be able to fly any other way ever again. When we were already eight hours into the 11 hour flight, I thought “Woah! Only three more hours! I better watch another movie!”

Why didn’t I fly business class round trip? Let me break it down for you. Here’s how the conversation went in order to get the upgrade. Keep in mind that I swear that I read on the website of a prominent German airline that it was 60,000 miles to upgrade a roundtrip flight to Europe.

“Hello? I’d like to upgrade my flight to Austria.”

“Very good sir. I see that you have 60,000 miles. Which flight would you like to upgrade?”

“Uhhhhh… the whole one.”

“I’m sorry sir, you only have 60,000 miles. You can only upgrade one flight.”

“Uhhhhh…”

“You could do the San Francisco to Munich flight, or the Munich to Vienna flight, or …”

(Me, to myself …. “Oh, what they call ‘flight’ I call ‘leg’…”)

Lesson learned.

I’ve been saving those miles for five years now and even been using a credit card to accrue miles. In the end, I was disappointed that it really takes four times as many miles as I expected to get the upgrade for the round trip but I was happy to fly with enough leg room for a change.