Last weekend I noticed an intriguing buying opportunity in Allied Irish Banks (NYSE: AIB). Right now, banks are cheap. For the most part, this is for good reason. Banks have made reckless loans, traded in derivatives for which they couldn’t possibly have had adequate margins of safety, and just generally been idiots. [...]

I have to say, this is a good week not to be back in Colorado.

It looks like bystanders are getting herded up, too.
And what’s up with the storm trooper look?

Today, a prospective teacher who came in to visit my first and second grade class seemed genuinely impressed with the amount of material they’ve learned so far. They came as complete beginners, and they’ve been in my EFL classes for six hours a week for just under a year, doing the Up and Away [...]

Recently, I’ve been getting more and more bogged down in my EFL curriculum work. It’s a very rough process, but even so it’s become unwieldy. The problem is the way I’m keeping track of vocabulary words.
Frequency is key
Whenever I create a new lesson, I have to choose vocabulary items to introduce. Rather [...]

There’s nothing worse than the feeling of waking up, rolling over to the side, seeing a big spider on the wall, gasping and seeing the thing motor across the wall. I swear, these things are faster than cockroaches.

Just what kind of spider is this that can move so f@#$ing fast? Is it poisonous? [...]

This, after their earnings report came out SIMO dropped by over a third of its total valuation. It was a significantly undervalued stock to begin with, and it’s still a fast growing company. The NAND problems notwithstanding, I see SIMO as a long-term grower. As usual the market has an unreasonably short-term [...]