Day 191

I'm growing increasingly frustrated at my inability to control my investments. The market has become so random and capricious lately that flipping a coin would probably provide me with the same results as all my carefully thought out plans. It's hard to know what to do. If I had ignored my last financial adviser and kept my Apple stock instead of selling to avoid the dreaded "double dip" that never happened, I would own twice as many shares today. Why? Because I wouldn't have had to buy the stock back later at a much higher price. On the other hand, if I hadn't sold everything on my broker's doom and gloom advice, I would still have owned Halliburton and Transocean when the Deepwater Horizon exploded causing the world's biggest oil spill and the shares of these two stocks to plummet. Basically, nothing is predictable anymore. You can still get lucky in the market, but you can still get lucky in Las Vegas too.

I finally found some free time to update my own websites today. Typically, my own sites are woefully out of date. By the time I've finished with my clients websites, I'm usually so sick of using Dreamweaver that I don't even care what's on my own sites. There's still a lot of work to be done, but at least I've corrected some of the most glaring errors and omissions.

The June bugs have returned for the Summer. I don't know what it is about June bugs, but Dalmatians seem to love them. Spot, our first Dalmatian, developed a taste for the critters when he was still a puppy and most of the dogs we have had since pursue the bugs as well. The larvae of these beetles live in the soil until they mature and Dash has made it his mission to dig them up. I wish he'd just wait until the bugs grew up and started flying around. I'm having a hard enough time getting grass to grow in the back yard as it is. With Dash digging holes every few feet, it's just about hopeless.

I discovered a new form of tech-support torture today. I'm having trouble with some software I bought recently and the only way I can contact tech support is by using e-mail. This particular company only responds to tech-support questions once a day. If their response doesn't answer your question, you've got to send them a follow-up e-mail and wait at least 24-hours to hear anything from them again. At this rate, it's going to be August before I get the software working properly. I bought the application to help me with a deadline too. Silly me.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day