Fail-Safe Investing

There are a couple premises in this book. One is that nobody can predict the future. Even advisors that have a stellar track record could fall flat tomorrow. Speculative investing should be avoided, or limited to money you are not afraid to lose. Instead, a four part investment technique can keep you gaining over the long haul with minimal risk.

Browne thinks you should split your investment into complementary areas such as gold, treasury bills, stocks, and bonds. Any one of those could be falling. But usually the complementary ones would be rising at that time. And vice versa. You can take advantage of occasional big gains from any one of those categories. These are holdings you can acquire and forget.

Browne also has some side notes. You should keep some funds in a foreign account. Don't make any money overseas so you don't have to report the earnings. Don't leave a trail or link that account to your other current accounts. And don't get any regular correspondence from the foreign bank holding your funds.

Lessons From a Third Grade Dropout

I saw a video of a college commencement ceremony. It was by Rick Rigsby. Previously I had never heard of this guy. But he was very inspirational. So I decided to buy his book. Rigsby explains the philosophy of his late father. While his dad only made it to the third grade, he had wisdom.

There were several useful ideas from Rigsby's dad. One of them was to always be an hour early. Another was to always do the very best job. A theme of his actions was to always be helping people. These are all signs of great integrity.

Rigsby needed the lessons from his dad as his wife died and left him with two young sons. His dad had little to say to him - "Just stand." Rigsby's father passed away shortly after his wife. I am not sure if I wholeheartedly recommend this book. You should definitely look up his commencement video on YoutTube.

Nine Inches

Nine Inches is a set of short stories told by one Tom Perrotta. It was kind of nice ready a lot of different unrelated tales. I will focus on one of the later ones. Dude is a high school student. He got a job illegally taking SAT tests for other students. He worked for a boss that set up the tests.

Normally this dude would be taking tests for strangers. But this time around, it was for a kid in his school. Obviously the kid came from money. The boss paid our guy $500 to pass the SAT test for his clients. Passing the test was easy. He also had to go to sleep early the prior night, not drink any alcohol, etc.

There was one other problem with the current dude he was taking the test for. The guy went to a party the night before, and hooked up with the girl our guy had the hots for. Oops. You know what that means? Even though our guy knew all the answers to the SAT test, he made sure the client failed the exam miserably.

Now there was a lot more to this story. But that was the crux. The true genius of the stories like this one in the book were the details. It is hard to convey these details in a summary book report. I know I will be looking for more books by Tom Perrotta. Hopefully they will be short story anthologies too.

Where Wizards Stay Up Late

This book was subtitled "The Origins of the Internet". It was a tough read, as they covered a lot of detail. The origins trace back to the Arpanet. ARPA was a department of defense division that looked into future technologies. They initially set out to connect a few computer sites. The contract was won by a small company that did a lot of due diligence for their bid.


Once the few sites were connected across the USA, many others wanted to join. The hardware was expensive. And it took the contractor time to debug the hardware produced by the manufacturer. But they got computers networked. Programs such as email needed to be developed to work with the networked computers.


As more and more sites needed to be connected, and sometimes the sites had different computers and/or networks, there was a need to figure out how to connect disparate networks. That was researched performed by more scientists. And a little after that, local networks needed to be connected. This gave rise to Ethernet networking.


The original contractor for the first work arranged for an anniversary to celebrate everyone involved. They had to invite around 25 different people based on all the work done at different times. One of the principals had already passed away. Others were joining or creating companies to make money off the Internet. This is all prior to the invention of the world wide web. That is a story for a different book.

Emily the Strange - the Lost Days

In this story we meet Earwig. She seems to have lost her memory. She is in a strange town. When she gets hungry, she goes to a diner and ends up doing odd jobs for food. She sleeps in a makeshift box behind the café.


Earwig gets evidence that her real name is Molly. She goes back home in the middle of the book to meet her two parents. They have lot of documentation, including pictures and video, of Molly growing up with them. Somehow all this sounds wrong to Earwig. Eventually she figures she cannot be Molly.


Later Earwig gets in touch with the real Molly. She also returned to the town she woke up in with her memory gone. She then finds out she is related to the original owner of the diner, who is deceased. Things heat up when we find out that owner and some rich kids in town were from two different fighting clans.


Earwig needs to find a way to protect the ownership of the diner. One of the rich kids is trying to take possession of it by any means necessary. And it seems in this town, bribes help get things done. I need to read some more books about this Earwig, or as she is properly known, Emily the Strange.

Can You Ever Forgive Me

I saw the movie first in this instance. It starred Melissa McCarthy. It was based on an autobiographical book by Lee Isreal. I just read the book. While the content of the book is producing and selling forged letters by celebrities, it feels like that is just a backdrop to give you a peek into Israel's life.

Israel started out good as a New York Times bestseller. But them she came upon hard times. She used her research skills to figure out what type of letters celebrities may have written. Then she wrote then and passed them off as originals. She made sure to use old paper to make them look authentic.

After a while, people began to catch onto the fakes. So Israel started stealing actual letters. She would leave fake copies behind in the libraries. She would sometimes add content to the originals to make them more interesting (and more valuable).

The collectors got wise again. So Israel used a co-conspirator to pawn off the forgeries. Even that was discovered. The FBI got involved. Israel feared jail time. She destroyed all evidence, and obtained help from a lawyer. She did plead guilty and only received house arrest.

After this debacle, Israel got a job as a copyeditor for children's books. Her co-conspirator died before being sent to jail.

Hatching Twitter

This book chronicles the early days of Twitter. There were many founder and CEOs that came and went. Most departures were not voluntary. One early employee was Noah Glass. Apparently he got a bit crazy and was fired early on. Then Jack Dorsey became CEO. He would later go on to found Square, a mobile payments company.

Jack was not prepared to be a CEO. It became obvious, and he was moved out to a non-voting board member. He ceased being a Twitter employee and lost all influence initially. He did continue to do interviews, and self proclaimed himself inventor of Twitter.

Evan Williams was the money behind Twitter. He owned the company that initially developed Twitter. He succeeded Jack as the CEO of Twitter. He had some shortcomings, such as not being able to make decisions quickly and hiring his friends for top positions in the company. He was essentially fired when Jack returned to the company.

The book chronicled the earlier days of Twitter, when they had problems keeping the site up. It also covered many attempts at people trying to purchase the company. Stories of original employees, especially those in high positions at the company were discussed. In the end, the assorted CEOs got rich (billionaires) from the company.