Zaskoda

A little while back I talked about my surfing history. There’s not much to it. This last trip was my third real surf trip. I only rode a few waves on my first trip, which was also to Sayulita. I didn’t completely stand on any waves my second trip. That second trip was to Santa Cruz, which is far more challenging than Sayulita. Going back to Sayulita, my confidence was strong because not only were the waves easier to ride – but I was also familiar with them.

In just two days, I got a lot of good rides in. I rode a 10′ board most of the first day and an 8′ 6″ board most of the second day. The 10′ was much easier to sit on and to paddle on; but the 8′ 6″ was easier to control once I was standing up and generally speaking – more fun to ride.

For the first time, I kind of feel like a ‘real’ surfer! I’m not sure how to describe the difference. In a nutshell, I know I can catch a wave now. I’ve got so much to learn, but I’ve got a handle on the basics now. I have no idea how long it will be before I can ride again, hopefully not long.

Beyond surfing, Sayulita was a good time. Good friends, good food, and lots to see and do. I see lots of trips to Sayulita in my future.

Surfing

I’m getting bad about off topic posts. I really should start up another blog somewhere. For now, I’ll rant here. Today’s rant is about Ameriprise Financial. Back in 2004, a friend of a friend went to work at what was then American Express Financial Services or something like that. She called herself an advisor and promised to help me invest my money for a small (re: huge) fee. I wanted to support her, so I jumped in. It turned out to be a front to sell a bunch of their own investment options. She would promise to research other “options” I brought to the table, but she never seemed to really even know what she was talking about. She just gave me a sales pitch.

Since then, I’ve met many of these financial advisors. They throw little get togethers where they will buy a group lunch or drinks if they’ll listen to the company line. I’ve been to meetups where one person in the group used his turn to introduce himself as an opportunity to pitch the group on Ameriprise, dropped off some business cards, and bolted for the door.

Used car sales tactics aside, I thought I would blog about the actual performance of my investments. Every single Ameriprise investment I put money into performed extremely poorly. I only have two left – the VUL I’m locked into and the SIRA that my last company was matching me on (instead of a 401k). You can read more about what a VUL is on wikipedia. Let me tell you how well it has performed.

I bought into the VUL in early 2004. I’ve made 27 investment payments of $350 each. In addition to those payments, I paid $52.33 a month for the insurance policy. (note: there was one more oddball payment in there.) The idea is that once the balance of the investment gets high enough, it will yield more than $52 in interest and the insurance policy will begin to pay for itself. So, how’s that working out?

Gross Invested: $11,255.60
Cost of Insurance: $1412.91
Net Invested: $9842.69

Here’s the kicker… Current value: $9058.86

That’s right, the investment itself has lost almost $800! That’s not accounting for the $1412.91 I’ve put into an overpriced life insurance policy. That’s over $11k that I could have been investing in an account that gained interest. The part that confuses me is how Ameriprise investments have continued to perform so poorly in a market that is supposed to be doing so very well.

This has been the case with every investment I’ve made with them. Additionally, there are a variety of hidden fees. Everyone gets their cut. My account was mismanaged by my first advisor costing me about $150 in overdraft fees. She quit weeks after I made my yearly payment of over $500. The new advisor was better, but relatively unresponsive. Through him, I was able to close out most of my short term investments and consolidate some of the loss.

Now I’m faced with what I need to do with the failing VUL. Do I keep investing hoping it will turn around? Do I just continue to pay the minimum for the insurance? Do I take the penalty, close it out now, and reinvest elsewhere? I need a new advisor who can actually advise me! Recommendations would be appreciated.

My advise to everyone, read sites like the Motley Fool and invest your money by yourself.

Uncategorized

I love any company that’s willing to self deprecate a little. It shows they have enough confidence that they don’t have to try to spin public opinion. Check out comment number 11 on this blues news thread. After you’ve read it, swing over to the official Gearbox Forums and look at the header. Gotta love it!

Uncategorized

I’m slowly starting to like surfing. So much so, I’ve created a surfing category here on iRide. I’m about to go on my third ‘real’ trip. Tomorrow I get on a plane headed for Sayulita Mexico. We’ll only get two good days of surfing in before we have to come back. We will, however, be right on the beach. Last time we went, it was just before the season started. The place was under populated and the waves were just starting to kick up. This time, we’re going late in the season. I’ve read that by now, most of the summer sitters have gone home to avoid spring breakers and most of the spring breakers have come and gone… making this a great time to vacation there. It’s also still the surf season so we should get even better waves than we got before. Honestly, that spooks me a bit. I’m still not very good at this surfing thing so I like the little tiny baby waves! Sure, laugh at me now… Unless you’ve tried surfing, I can almost guarantee that you underestimate the amount of weight and force behind those waves. The big wave surfing you see on television is simply insane. Anyway, I can’t wait to get back to Sayulita. It was blowing up (in terms of growth) when we were there before. I’m curious how much it’s grown. Since I have so many great photos from the last trip, I posted a bit of a montage. If you wanna see more, I’ve got a photo album posted here… (that is, until we redesign the site and break all the urls)

Surfing

I’ve been to Winter Park a total of 3 times. The first trip was back in 2004. It was a bit of a romantic Thanksgiving trip with my girlfriend at the time. The snow conditions were fairly good. We had accomodations across the main road from the resort. It was just far enough that we took the free shuttle. My second trip happened on New Years of 06. This was a great trip with good friends. Seven of us drove out in a rented van and crammed into a tiny motel room. Again we had fairly good snow conditions. Our little motel room was in the town of Winter Park. My most recent trip was this past season. I went with 3 friends on a locally organized bus trip for Thanksgiving 06. The snow conditions were not very good. We got very little fresh snow and the existing snow as packed hard.

Winter Park is connected to another mountain called Marry Jane. You’ll see bumper stickers proudly explaining Mary Jane “is a hooker, not a drug” often followed by “and I ride her every day.” The main mountain has lots of enjoyable runs and is well designed for beginners. It drops about 1700 feet and has roughly the same amount of beginner, intermediate, and advanced runs. Mary Jane, on the other hand, drops over 2600 feet and is 80 percent advanced runs.

The mountain has a handful of terrain parks and usually sports a nice half pipe. Some of the larger jumps I’ve ever tried were during the new years trip at Winter Park. There are usually a variety of jumps, big and small. They did have some rails, although not a lot. The locals are good riders and can be really fun to watch. I did notice, however, that the locals aren’t very eager to give riding advice to Texans.

One of my favorite things about Winter Park is the base camp area. They’ve got a nice fire pit, lots of stores, and a nice open area to hang out in and compare stories with your friends. All of the staff I’ve interacted with have been great – some of them just down right fun. Unfortunately, I’ve never stayed in one of the rooms on the slopes, so I can’t really comment on them. I know the whole area is currently under heavy renovation so I’m sure things are getting even better. Apparently the company doing a lot of the improvements is the same company that did Whistler.

I think, for the most part, Winter Park is known for getting good snow. I have found resorts such as Wolf Creek that simply have better average conditions. My biggest complaint about Winter Park has to be the crowds. Even if you get away from the base camp area, you’re still likely to see lines on the lifts – especially around holidays. They do have some nice high speed lifts.

The most interesting thing I’ve heard about at Winter Park are the hidden huts. I’ve yet to look for them. They are apparently out of bounds and often stocked with emergency… medical?… supplies by the locals. I’ve seen photos of these huts so I’m sure they exist. I might try looking for one on my next trip out.

All in all, it’s one of the better places I’ve been. If you don’t mind a very commercial experience, you’ll probably love Winter Park. If you hate commercial, maybe you can just try and stay on the Marry Jane side of things. If you find a hut, give me directions! On a scale of 1 to 10, I give Winter Park an 8.5.

Resort Reviews

I just read this quote after following a reddit link:

“I’d just like to see thinking come back in style. I haven’t heard a new idea in eight years. Let’s get ordinary people arguing and talking again. I want to trigger new circuits in their nervous systems. That’s the philosopher’s job and I am the most important philosopher at this time.”
- Timothy Leary

I’ve long held and idea I wanted to execute on, but like so many good ideas, I never got around to it. I’ve decided, since I probably will never get around to doing anything about it, I’d just talk about it instead.

In a nutshell, the idea is a virtual community built around the one thing everyone loves to do on the interweb – argue.

Debate was one of my favorite UIL events in high school. It was a structured way of having an argument and the victor was decided by a third party. I suppose high school debate is the breeding ground for many would-be politicians. Anyway, unlike your typical interweb argument, debate has structure.

Personally, I would model a debate site after the structure I used in high school UIL debate and modify the format a bit. This structure included opening remarks, rebuttals, cross examinations, and closing remarks. Where UIL limited participants in time, a good online tool would also limit them in word count. I suppose it would be even more interesting if such a site allowed for the use of video, but that’s a tangent I haven’t considered much.

All debates would be tied to topics. Just like UIL, each topic would be binary in that it would have two predefined sides. In UIL, the pro would support a notion such as, for example, the need to reduce the homeless population in the US. The pro would also be responsible for presenting a plan to do so. The other side can attack from any direction – either directly against the notion or just the proposed plan.

I would rank winners and losers in a typical tournament method with winners moving on and losers starting over. I think I might use a reddit style public (registered users public, that is) voting system to pick winners.

The weakness would be the bias for voters to vote their hearts on the issue, and not the debate skills of the participants. However, that might not be such a bad thing. The real motivation for a site like this isn’t to find people who can argue well. The motivation is to create a virtual community where ideas are refined and the best ideas can float to the top. The dream is that something like this could spawn real change in the world. After all, we can’t really change until we build consensus for change. We can’t build consensus unless we have a way of sharing and refining ideas together.

Uncategorized

Last year I posted about a pavement board with a snowboarding like ride called the T Board. I was really stoked about the idea. Not long after, Froggie posted to DallasSnowboarders.com about the Freebord. It seems to be a much better option. Another member of the site, Sublivious, actually bought one and tried it out. It was a painful reminder of the lack of big hills in the DFW area! Still, he was able to get his groove on in various parking garages. Here’s the promo vid on the product:

It seems that the Freebord is the off-snow ride of choice. The biggest improvement of the Freebord over the T Board is the addition of side wheels what allow the board to lock in and hold a carve. It seems that it allows for a more natural carving motion – although I’ve not had a chance to try either. I do recommend watching the above video – it gives an awesome overview. The only thing I can’t get out of my head are the high speed wipeouts on pavement. Yeouch! Check out more on the official Freebord website.

Product Callouts

A little bit ago, I posted a color render of Bearfire that Charlie sent me. Since then, a lot of news has popped up around the Interwebs about the venture. I’m just now posting the other render he sent along. I’m not the first to post it so nothing special here… I do have a slightly higher resolution version than the others I’ve seen online. Anyway, here it is – enjoy it. If and when I learn more, I’ll update. BTW – If you hadn’t noticed, I’ve started tagging these posts as “Texas Snowpark“. That’ll keep em all in one nice place.

Texas Snowpark

It’s been a crazy couple of weeks. I quit my job after 3 years of hard work. Tonight I’m unemployed and having a spot of trouble sleeping. I’m facing a variety of decisions and I’m running out of “think about it” time. One of those decisions has the potential to land me in Colorado. For the first time in my life, I might be able to snowboard all season long.

The company who’d have me flew me up for an interview. I decided to hang out for a couple of extra days and explore. It was one of those experiences where everything just kept going right. I felt peaceful. To my surprise, I’ve yet to feel excited. Locally, other opportunities have come up, including a window that would allow me to start my own business. I’ve got options.

I don’t know where all this is taking me.

56 Days in 07/08