Investment

We had good discussion of investment at Chris' after the dinner. As I have posted in the previous post, I will share the findings from Cambridge House investment conference Billy and I attended.

Many thank you to Billy who put together this list:

• Energy Metals Corporation - EMC-T - buy at $7 - 7.50
• KHAN Resources Inc. - KRI-T - good but very new
• Commander Resources Ltd. - CMD-X

And some good stock and dividend fund:

• Pengrowth Energy Trust - PGF.UN-T - pays you about 15% dividend
• Clarington Canadian Dividend Fund - pays you 8 cents per month per share you have and it's designed to stay around $8 to $12 (0.08 / 7.875 X 12 = 12.2%)

Chris' B-Day

We celebrated Chris' 30th birth day at Shabusen, where we use to gathered and celebrate. It was just like good old days. Asfter the dinner with our stomach full of sushi and bbq, we gathered at Chris' and guys end up playing video games while girls chit chat. And it was just like good old days when Chris used to be in his basement :-).

Flickr upped the monthly limit from 20 Mb to 100 Mb. I can now afford to upload original high resolution pictures (pictures taken from XTi is probably too high resolution for 100 Mb limit....). I have uploaded pictures from Josie's Christmas party and Chris' birthday party to my Flickr account. Enjoy :-).

Canon XTi

I finally pulled the trigger and purchased a Canon XTi DSLR camera from SEARS. And also picked up a 4Gb Sandisk Ultra II Compact Flash fro eBay.

I read the review that 18 - 55 mm kit lens is disappointing so hopefully down the road, I can pick up a nice lens kit. And along with many camera accessories. But for a starter, I think this will do :-). Was checking out the nice lens and they cost as much, if not more than the actual camera body.... Scary stuff....

Was thinking about Nikon D40 but lack of auto focus motor and less mega-pixel turn me off. Plus with extra $100 or so, I got a full featured DSLR.

Kim, let me know how your photograph course is doing so Chris and I can take the course.

Resource Investment Conference

Billy and I went to this investment conference called Cambridge House yesterday. Most, if not all, of the companies at the conference were mining companies and most of them specialize in gold. The domain name pretty much says all (goldreshow.ca) for this Cambridge House conference.

After this conference, Billy and I walked out with some stock symbols that may perform well in the future and because all the companies are junior (meaning their stocks are really cheap), many of you who doesn't have a lot of money to invest doesn't have to have a lot to invest in these companies. Plus we walked out with really good free soup/steak/dessert lunch from Pan Pacific Hotel.

If any of you are interested, Billy and I can share what we found and recommend the stocks and what price to buy at.

Annual India Trip

Well my parents are off to their annual trip to India. Apparently this year will be their last trip to India. They told me that they pretty much went every where in India and my mom doesn't want to go visit places she already gone.

Their next destination will somewhere South Asia.

Hopefully this time nothing bad will happen to any of my parents just like what happened in Iran...

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to my friends who’s reading my blog online. May this year be your best year ;-).

Free Security Apps

I was using AVG as my anti-virus but I guess they’re no longer free any more and keep bugging me to purchase it as of January 15^th. I loved AVG’s clean interface with real time virus detection feature but I refuse to pay for the subscription. So I decided to try out this free anti virus called ClamWin. Since I’m doing an security upgrade, I guess it’s a good opportunity to list free security software I and other utilities use.

• Ad-Aware SE Personal – popular adware removable software
• CCleaner – good cleaning utility to remove unused registry entries, any issues, and uninstalling and deleting software (a nice pointer as my Add/Remove Program in Control Panel takes forever to populate the entries)
• ClamWin – good clean interface and good virus definition (found a virus AVG completely missed) but sucky real time virus detection (failed to detect suspicious exe file while I was extracting file) and definition update (don’t know if it’s due to network outage during the scheduled update but seems like it’s failing quite often)
• Firefox – not a security software or utility but a good browser from protecting form spyware and adaware
• Spybot – popular spyware removable software
• SpywareBlaster – another good free anti-spyware software
• Zone Alarm - excellent free firewall (even IBM uses enterprise version of this firewall!)