Today was the twentieth anniversary of my meeting my darling wife, M. We share a love of travel, literature, cinema, food, wine, technology and (hopefully) each other. She complements and supplements me. Here is an excerpt of one of her favourite poems Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti.
Taste them and try:
Currants and gooseberries,
Bright-fire-like barberries,
Figs to fill your mouth,
Citrons from the South,
Sweet to tongue and sound to eye;
Come buy, come buy.”
This week I signed up for the CFA Level 2 exams. See CFA Program. The material arrived on Friday and I have unpacked the six lofty tomes; Financial Statement Analysis, Corporate Finance, Asset Evaluation and Equity, Fixed Income, Derivatives and Portfolio Management, and Ethics and Professional Standards, Quantitative Methods and Economics. I sat and failed the examination this June. This was through a combination of factors; lack of study, illness and poor preparation. The training company that had been very strong in identifying what areas of the syllabus would be tested in the Level 1 exam were much less accurate in their predictions of what would be tested in Level 2. There were a couple of exam questions in the Portfolio Management section where I had no clue. The next exam is June 2008 so I have nine months’ preparation this time instead of the three and a half months I had last time round. This year, rather than use the Stalla reading notes, I have signed up with Schweser’s CFA Level 2 premium product offering. Schweser are thought to be more concise and the market leader in this field.
I will do a large part of my study on trains between Exeter and London, a journey which takes between 2 and 3 hours according to the day and time of travel. I much prefer train over car: better use of time, less environmental impact and no stress. I will commence my studies this evening on the London train. You will find me in Carriage G with my head in a large blue book with a red stripe. (not a Red Stripe)
It is the weekend and have I have just walked the dogs around the ponds and am settling down to spend an hour on my blog. My accompaniment is two deep rounds of snoring with the odd pathetic yelp as the youngest one dreams of some hot pursuit of a squirrel. I have just downloaded and installed a free RSS feed reader at feedreader download. I then went to www.feedburner.com, set up an account, then used the Publicize menu and then the chicklet chooser to set up the small link beneath the calendar by pasting their text into a Text widget. By clicking the link you can subscribe to this blog with your RSS feed reader. There is also a cool facility where you can paste a RSS blog headline scroller into your email signature. Yet another way to bring traffic to the blog.
Well I must eat my words of my previous post as the Bank Of England makes a U-turn and injects £10 billion into the market in an attempt to bring down short term interbank lending rates, see ft.com – BOE U-Turn
Mervin King will have some interesting explaining to do this morning in front of the Treasury Select Committee.
The other surprise this morning was the sudden departure of Jose Mourinho from Chelsea, see Mourinho departs Chelsea; the low crowd of 25,000 for their last 1-1 home Champions League draw with Rosenberg and their mediocre position in the Premiership is simply too weak a level of performance for Abramovich. No doubt Mourinho will move on the Real Madrid or Barcelona. The toughest job in football is vacant. Anyone interested?
Alistair Darling, made a good call today by shoring up the British banking industry with some guarantees that will not need to be fulfilled: a good balance of protecting depositors while sending out a message that investors need to take the bad times along with the good times. Even Norman Lamont on Newsnight had praise for BofE and Government in handling the crisis.
Not the catchiest of titles but this was the problem I spent most of the day struggling with.
Try passing a java object to an oracle stored procedure and and it won’t work if you use a JDBC driver with pooled connections. However, call the DriverManager directly and it works.
For more detailed solutions please look at velocityreviews.com or forums.oracle.com
Well, that was a bit of an effort getting started. I am about 2 hours in. I have installed Word press, set up a MYSQL database for the content, chosen a theme, downloaded a ‘Now Reading’ plugin, added a book review.
So why am I doing this? A couple of reasons, one is using the blog as a communication vehicle with my wife. We live apart during the week and I come home on Thursday and work from home on Friday, typically returning back to London on Sunday evening or early Monday morning. I much prefer written to verbal communication so the blog provides a more structured flow of consciousness then chat or email.
The second reason is one of self publicity. In the digital age, everyone in business need to build a personal brand. If all you represent is a skill set that can be replaced at lower cost by equally talented individuals in India, China, Eastern Europe, etc., then your shelf life is limited. So to continue to compete in a free market, you need to deliver, but with a distinctive style, that your clients appreciate. Nobody is going to look after you but yourself. So better get good at it.
And finally, what will be the theme of this blog: separation, remote working, technology, travel, philosophy, politics and poetry.
Or did misfortune’s bitter storms
Aroond thee blaw, aroond thee blaw,
Thy bield should be my bosom
To share it a’ to share it a’.Robert Burns
