Abhi Yerra

I plan on investing now since I will probably have a little bit more money. I don’t plan on going crazy and investing my life’s savings in the next “Google.” I plan on taking it slow and long term because I am in no rush to be rich. I just want whatever I’m earning to work for me.

I’m reading the Intelligent Investor and currently just going to follow the Defensive Investor route. I hope to put 25% in Treasury Bills and short term bonds as money that will be useful in case of an emergency. Then 60% will go into a mixture of S&P 500 and International Index Funds. The rest I will use for speculation (yes I still want to have a bit of fun with stocks).

My plan is to first attempt to max out my IRA then move anything else to a normal brokerage account. I will definitely keep my speculation account separate and won’t keep more then 15% of my savings there.

Once I feel more well prepared to trade individual stocks I will do so in the future within the 60% account. So time to start planning…

I love going to Barnes and Nobles and finding some random book to find and just sit down and read. However, there is a problem with this picture which is Barnes and Nobles can only contain a finite amount of books at any one time. This causes the problem of say a book I wanted to check out not being there.

I think this is where Amazon’s Kindle is most probably going to succeed and most likely targeting. Whenever I go on Amazon there is usually always a book that I wish I could just read then and there and avoid the hassle of ordering it (if I ever do since I’m a poor college student for a little while anyways) or if I have time going to Barnes and Nobles to check out.

This will probably sound like a long advertisment for the Kindle, but I think it is probably the iPod of eBook readers (they could still improve upon the design a bit, then again it took Apple several revisions to update their design as well). However, what we are looking at is the Apple format of online music taken to books and print publishing.

However, this is still two-sided coin especially when the book itself is a work of art or is describing art. For content like that the Kindle is not ready, however, for most text like history textbooks with very simple graphics this can be a godsend since we won’t have to lug around all those textbooks (and I’ve always been lazy to resell my books).

All in all, there are a few other things that could be done like say a subscription based service where you can read as many books are you want a month, etc. However, for their first release I think it is decent especially since it doesn’t really require a computer.I haven’t yet bought one, but I am waiting to get enough money to make the investment.

I’ve long been a slave to Apache. I mean it’s a great server, but it is just so bloated. However, lately I’ve been noticing that I only really use my server for Rails and static file hosting both of which do not need a full blown Apache install. This is especially true since I have yet to get Rails and Apache to play nice.

So I have started using a different solution which basically is Perlbal and Mongrel. Perlbal is a reverse proxy and simple web server written by the guy who did LiveJournal. So far it is working well for what I am using it for and things seem to be running a lot faster.

A cool feature of Perlbal is it can dynamically add or remove nodes. So for example you can use EC2 to dynamically start instances as loads increase and just forward requests to those EC2 instances from Perlbal. Thought this might not work well with SSL, for most insecure connections it works absolutely fine.

Update: I have stopped using the built in webserver and have moved to using lighttpd. I assume I just need a full blown web server for somethings which just can’t be handled by Perlbal so I have added it.

I landed a new gig as a Web Developer for i5labs and fynspire run the by Jason Wong and Scott Thorpe respectively. It is a refreshing change and I get to play with Ruby on Rails as a full time gig. It is nice to also be able to work in San Francisco and right next to Union Square nonetheless.

Besides that I am working on a startup with a couple of friends. Our code is coming along and the design is nice. I’ll write more as we come closer to launch.