Wednesday, November 28, 2007

New Cat

Monday, November 19, turned out to be a fairly eventful day. It all started when my brother, Brian, called about 10am letting me know that he was in the neighborhood tutoring math with Aimee and they'd be happy to stop by in about an hour, if that was alright. For some reason, this didn't strike me as particularly odd, so I naturally agreed.

About an hour later, they arrive at my front door. When I open it, Aimee greets me with "We brought you an Apple," while handing me a gray kitten. She was extremely tiny, especially given that she was supposed to be about 3 and a half months old. The vet said she was probably the runt and had her food stolen, but that it shouldn't affect her overall development much. She has definitely added some weight, and so looks more normal. She no longer smells like a ferret, but still is a smelly cat.

Fiona and AppleHere are Fiona and Apple together.

Apple is very cuddly and likes to rub her face on people's faces, which is cute. However, she hasn't learned how to jump, so she claws her way up things, including legs, which is painful. She's learning, though, and is a very cute cat regardless.

Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Cat Toy - Laser

I ate at my parents' house for dinner this evening. My brother needed to get a mouse in order to feed his snake, so we went to the pet store. While we were there, I figured I'd get a cheap $2.99 laser pointer pet toy. When I finally got home, I unpackaged it and put in the included batteries. Fiona immediately chased after it and was very exited. Mouse was initially interested, but never excited about it, and quickly lost interest in favor of a crazy-hyper Fiona and the threat presented therein.

Fiona pounced and scrambled after the laser all the way upstairs and around my room. When I shut it off, she began breathing very deeply. I first thought I had run the wind out of her, but then noticed she had her head low to the ground and was breathing into corners and dark places. She was intent on finding the mysterious shiny thing! I indulged her for another minute or so, but then had to get down to installing Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance.

Fiona, however, still had nothing better to do. She began sniffing around again, pawing at everything it could be under or behind. She then began whining very loudly in addition. She has finally calmed down, but I'm not sure whether I should bring the laser back out. She loves chasing it, but it upsets her so much when it's gone. And now she's back to whining.

Small Company Earnings

HYTM was listed as releasing it's earnings yesterday, November 5. Instead, their expected earnings release date was pushed back until November 12. I think this is a phenomenon pretty much unique to small companies. I can't imagine Google, IBM, or Apple getting away with a week's delay in releasing financial information.

In fact, HYTM hasn't really gotten away with it. The past couple of days have seen HYTM drop down to $4.71 so far. Incidentally, this puts me fairly deep in the red. We'll just have to see what the implied volatility does after earnings. It may still be worth holding on to if I can still get >5% a month in options premiums. Or perhaps earnings will beat analyst estimates and I'll get my shares called away after all.

In other news, Garmin (GRMN) is down below $100 again. I think if I had $10,000 or multiples thereof, I would buy some GRMN shares and write more out of the money covered calls. Garmin seems to be down on fears of a TeleAtlas bidding war with TomTom (TOM2.as). However, I see this as both a good move and temporary. Garmin has about $1B cash on hand and is worth >$20B, while TomTom probably has less on hand and is worth ~$6.3B.

Garmin used to be in a position of having TeleAtlas in the hands of TomTom and Navteq in the hands of Nokia, meaning they might face an increase in mapping costs. Garmin has either put TomTom in this position, or forced them to go deeper in debt by upping the price of TeleAtlas. If Garmin gets stuck buying the company, they at least have the advantage of being able to afford it, and they have a longer history of acquisitions, which implies to me a better ability to integrate TeleAtlas. It will be interesting to see how this develops. Unfortunately, I'll be watching from the sidelines.