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Showing posts from August, 2011

Amsterdam, Netherlands

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After our trip to Helsinki, we went to Amsterdam for a night. We stayed in a hostel that was movie themed. Our room was Star Wars themed, and had a huge picture of Darth Vader on the wall. We went to the Anne Frank house, and looked at some of the older buildings along the way. One of them was an old church that had a really weird Roman numeral on it. It looked like cbbc, but for real it was C I backwards C = M, I backwards C = D, C which adds up to 1600. Wikipedia has a close-up image . At the Anne Frank house we saw a lot of cool stuff. I didn’t really know anything about her before going, so I’m glad I could go. We went to an Indian restaurant that was really good, and then we returned to our hostel for our last night in Europe. This square was nearby:

Helsinki, Finland

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Our ferry to Helsinki from Tallinn was canceled because of rough seas and they sent us over to another ferry, but we had to wait another two and a half hours so we walked around Tallinn for a while. Finally we got on the ferry and there we met these two Finnish guys who didn’t speak any English at all. They didn’t even understand hello. Dad thought they were speaking Estonian at first and kept trying to communicate with them using our phrase book. Finally one of the people next to us asked us if we wanted them to translate for us. After that little adventure, we went to our hotel. We just stayed in there because it was late. The next morning was Sunday. We went to church at a building about a quarter mile down the street. A lot of the people there spoke English, and missionaries translated for us. After church, we walked around in the bay area for a while, then went to a ferry to go to the fortress island Suomenlinna . That was awesome. It was probably a ten or twenty minute ferry

Tallinn, Estonia

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Thursday, 18th August 2011 We went for a walk around Riga for one last time before we went to Tallinn. Then we went to the bus station. There we met a guy who went to YAPC::EU. (We could tell by his t-shirt.) His name was Sergey and he lives in Tallinn. He rode the same bus as us there and was nice enough to show us how to get to our hostel. Our hostel is awesome. We are in a six person bedroom with four Germans. After that we walked around town for a while, seeing some of the sights. Here's a building by our hostel: It’s really a nice place. We went into the Alexander Nevsky Orthodox Cathedral, and saw some of the inside. After that we went back to the hostel and hung out in the lounge. They have guitars and other musical instruments that you can play in there. After a while we went to bed. Friday, 19th August 2011 So after a good night’s rest, we went to a bookstore in the old town that sold some old magazines, and stuff. We went to a free walking tour that lasted two h

More photos from Rīga

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The weekend is over now, and tomorrow morning the YAPC::EU conference (Yet Another Perl Conference, Europe) begins. We'll be busy for the next three days with the conference, so we won't have much time for sightseeing. Here are some more photos from our trip so far, in chronological order. A balcony of The Powder Tower and Latvian War Museum : Jacob a short distance from the central market area: Views of the Riga central train station, Rīgas centrālā dzelzceļa stacija : A neighborhood of Communist-era Neubau apartments seen from the train en route back from the beach at Jūrmala: A street in Vecrīga , old town Riga: This morning Jacob and I went to church at one of the two Latvian Latter-day Saint (aka Mormon) branches in Rīga. There are also two Russian-language branches here. It was conveniently located just a few blocks from our hotel, on the appropriately named Baznīcas iela (Church Street), though of course named not for the LDS church but rather for

Trip to Rīga, Latvia

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August 10th–13th, 2011, Rīga, Latvia We woke up at 5:30 to go to the Jackson Hole Airport. We then proceeded to fly to Minneapolis. The Minneapolis Airport is pretty much a mall. We went to a burger restaurant there that was pretty good. We then flew to Amsterdam. I watched Green Hornet on the plane. In Amsterdam we had a seven hour layover. We didn’t leave the airport for that. Finally we got on our plane to Rīga and arrived about 3 hours later. Dad bought a SIM card for his phone, but it partly doesn’t work. We then rode a bus from the airport to the old town. There were a lot of street musicians performing on corners. Some people playing accordions, Two girls playing the cello and flute together, some other stuff. We walked about half an hour to the Albert Hotel. The Albert Hotel is themed on Albert Einstein. I don’t really get how it’s themed after him, but it has quotes from him in our room, which works for me. Our room is really nice, we have special place you have to put

Jason Zweig on Wall Street ethics

A funny but sadly true note: Wall Street may have higher ethical standards than some businesses (smuggling, prostitution, Congressional lobbying, and journalism come to mind) but the investment world nevertheless has enough liars, cheaters, and thieves to keep Satan's check-in clerks frantically busy for decades to come. --Jason Zweig That's in a footnote on page 262 of the 2003 revised edition of Benjamin Graham's classic book The Intelligent Investor . Graham first published the book in 1934 and revised it several times, publishing his final edition in 1973. Graham died in 1976. A new edition was published in 2003, with the original text of Graham's last edition left intact, but surrounded with Talmudic-style treatment by Jason Zweig. Jason's new commentary appears after each chapter and in footnotes. This brings the book up to date and adds some perspective and humor, and notes cases where Graham has been vindicated or (rarely) disproven by history.