This year some friends from work invited me to join them in finding an xmas tree. No, I'm not talking about going to the closest parking lot and picking one up, I'm talking about driving up into the middle of the woods and finding the perfect tree and cutting it down. I was excited because not only was I getting out of town for a while, we were going to do some off roading and I planned on using my new snow shoes.
After getting a late start, we left town around 8:30pm yesterday evening and headed for the mountains. Our caravan was awesome, involving two Jeeps and a big ass truck. Needless to say, it was a great time! After some off roading, Travis's truck was stuck in a 4-5 ft drift with a flat tire and we still hadn't started looking for the perfect tree yet. Now, I've changed a few tires, but never in temperatures hovering around 0 degrees. It wasn't that bad though, just keep moving to keep warm.
After having the Jeeps pull us out of the ditch we got the tire changed, chained back up and we were out! Now the hunt was beginning. After finding a great spot that had a ton of good sized trees, I got out and tested the snow shoes (Atlas 1025). I must say, they sure do make it easier to get around in the snow for sure. So, we found three trees that were looking great! I decided not to cut one, since I won't be around for xmas (yay Mexico!!), but next year could be a different story!
As some know, I am a fairly religious viewer of Mad Money. It's an investing/stock show on CNBC put on by Jim Cramer. I usually watch the show to get ideas, since I won't ever just act on a recommendation without first doing my own research. One of the recommendations I heard a couple months ago was for GameStop (GME). Cramer made the recommendation based on the fact they are a good company but most importantly because they were going to be one of the Microsoft Xbox 360 retailers.
Anyways, I had looked into the stock, and decided against buying it. Seeing now that the demand for the Xbox 360 is so high, I thought I might have made a mistake. However, today, I read that while demand is high, GameStop has already sold their their inventory. The problem is that there is also limited supplies for the console over the next few weeks. Because of this GameStop is only forecasting an Q4 sales growth between 0% - 2%.
This can't be good, especially after their Q3 earnings, which were released on November 29th. The 10 analysts that were surveyed predicted an average gain of $0.14 per share, however they ended up reporting a loss of $0.04 per share. The loss wasn't related to how their sales went though, but rather their merger with Electronics Boutique. Before they reported their Q3 earnings, analysts were predicting a gain of $1.02 per share in Q4 (60% of their expected earnings for the year). With this recent development, it will be interesting to see how this plays out. Bottom line, I'm still glad I didn't buy. Maybe I will though in Q1 2006; they ARE a good company, just looks like they hit a rough patch.
I've been a long time user of Google's GMail service, and I am constantly impressed as they continue to add more and more features. This latest update involves adding anti-virus protection. This works for both incoming and outgoing messages. If you receive a file that contains a virus, GMail will attempt to clean the file. If that is unsuccessful, you will not be able to access the file.
If you sending an email and you attach a file that contains a virus, the file will not be sent with your message. You will also receive a visual notification informing you which attachment is infected as well as one at the top of the compose window.
On a side note, another recent update I've noticed is http://mail.google.com automatically re-directs to https://mail.google.com. YAY SSL is good!! I've had wondered why it wasn't doing that before. I guess I don't need that GreaseMonkey script to do it for me anymore. =)
This week sure has been long, and it's only Wednesday. Thankfully though, it is Wednesday and that means it's Pretentious Prick Night; I've been looking forward to it since I woke up this morning. Essentially, Pretentious Prick Night was started by three of my good friends, Robbie, Justin and Peach. We really aren't pretentious pricks, but the evening involves going out for a nice sushi dinner at Jadre's, then heading over to Plonk where we toast off a bottle of wine. Basically, we go out and drop some cash in places that are normally crowded with yuppies or other pretentious pricks.
To make things more interesting, each Pretentious Prick Night involves a "cork sucker". The cork sucker is the person who gets stuck buying the bottle of wine at Plonk. The benefit is that they not only get to select the bottle, but they get to do the tasting. The only rule being that if your new blood, you must be the cork sucker. It's a great way to rope 'em in for at least a few weeks, since they won't have to be the cork sucker again for a while. If there is no new blood, it's a round robin in order of when you joined. Can 7pm come soon enough?
This weekend was great news for Montana State Bobcat fans as they blew a crushing defect to the University of Montana Grizzlies. This marks two wins in the last nineteen years. Hopefully we will see many more victories in the upcoming years! It's nice to see them win, especially in their home town!
After going to the game last year, I decided this year I would watch it on TV. There was far less bullshit, and I wasn't staggering drunk by 11am either! I must be getting responsible or something... err, nah, probably not. =) After going downtown to meet up with some friends I quickly decided to call it a night and head to a friends house to party. It didn't matter which bar I went to, it would have taken 30 minutes to get a drink, *sigh*. Hell, even the Eagles had a $5 cover!