I've had to fly coast-to-coast twice this month so far for work, and am glad I woke up this morning at home.

I meant to trim my position in MSFT yesterday before its quarterly announcement, but I wasn't able to do so due to travel. MSFT missed but I was able to close my position today with a small profit. The YHOO saga is not over yet, but I'd like to switch to another name before it announces on Apr 30, following Cramer's advice. That name is OI (Owens Illinois).

CVTX received another piece of good news this week. The European Medicines Agency has recommended approval of CVTX' Latixa, and the EU is now expected to endorse this approval in the next couple of months. CVTX is now above my cost basis, but I expect it to double within the next 8 to 12 months. Of course, if it gets acquired, the doubling will happen much sooner.

Ford had a positive surprise for the quarter and my preferred stock (F-S on Google finance) is up a nice 15% now from my cost basis. And this does not count the ~11% annual dividend it pays (relative to my cost basis). Now I regret not having bought more. But I viewed it as a very speculative play, and it's not a bad idea to be prudent.

I noticed that my portfolio has turned positive for the year today (2.5%), which is good. The S&P and Nasdaq are still both negative. I however expect some profit taking next week and therefore a minor pull back. I may set up some short positions accordingly over the weekend.

I will have to fly to the East Coast again in early May for Sapphire in Orlando, but until then I expect to be able to stay put at home, working on a few proposals and accounts.

CVTX just sold half of its North America royalties for the recently FDA approved drug (Lexiscan) to TPG for 175M, and the stock is up more than 20% after hours. I think this is a very balanced move. CVTX is not giving up all the upside by selling only 50% (note it still owns 100% of the marketing rights outside the U.S.), and yet it's getting sufficient cash for its debt obligations due in year 2010. I still think the bigger upside will come in the summer. The timing of this 20% jump however is not that perfect for me as I sold covered calls ($10 expiring this Friday) a week ago when the price was less than $7.5. I may see my calls assigned this weekend (happily, btw). If that's the case, I'll probably rebuild a position in CVTX in anticipation of the summer FDA approval.

WaMu's numbers today are largely inline with expectation, and the market even moved its price up almost 5% (including after hours). This gives me more confidence that the bottom is near, if not already here. I'll hold on to my WM shares for now.

After a busy week out of town, things have slowed down a bit. And weather has become much warmer.

One of CVTX's drug applications was approved by the FDA last week. Even though the price hasn't moved up in response, I'm confident it's helped put in a solid support. CVTX already sold the North America marketing rights of this drug to Astella, and will receive royalty payments as a result. The major catalyst to this stock will remain the FDA approval of CVTX's current drug for first line use, expected in the summer.

I bought puts on WM after its big run-up in response to the TPG cash infusion. I may have sold the puts a bit too early as the stock went down another 4+% today. I believe however WM has a limited downside at around $10/share. Depending on tomorrow's quarterly earnings announcement, I'll decide whether I want to take the loss in my long WM position. Unlike C and FNM, WM has recently cut its dividend to almost nothing (1 cent), so I may not want to hold on to it for a recovery.

FWLT looks over sold during the last few sessions, and I bought some Aug 62.50 calls today. At this point I'm long on AUY, ACH, BP, C, CVTX, HAL, MO, PM, MSFT, SGP, WM, MCD, EPD, PWE, F-S, and FNM. My portfolio's year-to-date performance is -3.2%, much better than S&P500 (-9.3%), and Cramer's portfolio (-11%). However I still don't like it, because it's negative.

I spent some time again at the de Saisset museum at Santa Clara University this afternoon. Some 1960s works are on exhibition there. What caught my attention the most, though, was the cell phone based audio playback mechanism. Rather than hand out a playback device with a number keypad, visitors are asked to call a phone number and enter the corresponding key. A simple IVR system does this, but I wonder why I haven't seen it elsewhere.

The Asian stock markets took a nosedive again on the first trading day of the week. German export number for January however beat expectation by a wide margin despite the strong euro. I'm long on ACH, AUY, MO, MSFT, BP, HAL, EPD, FWLT, CVTX, SGP, MCD, and, unfortunately, C, WM, and FNM. I believe the three financials I own will come back, except possibly WM, which could be acquired for a cheap price just like Countrywide. I prefer WM to remain independent, as I think its savings business is strong and the Fed's rate cuts will eventually help turn it around. In the meantime, the financials' dividends are decent. I apparently got into the financials too early in the cycle. Next time around, I should give it some more thoughts before acting.

I renewed my subscription service to Jim Cramer's ActionAlertsPlus.com. I signed up with him initially for a few reasons. 1) He was very successful running his own hedge fund; 2) He still runs a charity portfolio, of his own money, successfully; 3) He seems to know what he is talking about on CNBC. Putting your own money where your mouth is is important, imho, for those who make a living out of managing other people's investment money.

I sold ENTU after its recent run-up, but CVTX will likely take longer to rise to its true value. It has several phases II and III applications with the FDA and/or the EU. In the meantime its sole FDA-approved drug is selling relatively well, offsetting a large portion of its expenses.

MSFT dropped further with the overall IT sector, while YHOO moved up. YHOO's board rejected MSFT's offer. It seems the market believes this deal will eventually happen, and probably at a slightly higher price from MSFT. I continue to believe that MSFT doesn't deserve to go down due to this offer and will continue to hold the shares I bought the day the $31/share offer was announced. Based on what happened with Oracle's offers for PeopleSoft, Siebel, and BEA, the final price could either go up, or down, primarily based on the target company's financial performance in the interim. I don't see any obvious catalyst improving YHOO's performance in the near term, although as a Valley resident I do hope YHOO will do well (and that MSFT will drop its offer, sending MSFT share price up.)

Microsoft announced an unsolicited offer for Yahoo last Friday. I first longed Yahoo because its market price was $2 below MSFT's offer price. I soon closed the position for a small profit and longed MSFT instead, which was down almost 10%. The risk/reward ratio for YHOO just seems much higher than MSFT. This move would almost surely help MSFT in the long run, and if the offer was turned down by Yahoo or the acquisition was rejected by the regulatory bodies, MSFT would almost surely see a short term bounce.

The consolidation tide continues in the software industry, with Oracle leading the way so far. MSFT would top Oracle in total amount if this deal were to go through. Who is still around standing alone in the Valley? Tibco, VMware (still majority owned by EMC), Intuit (MSFT tried to acquire it earlier but failed), Adobe, Salesforce.com, and NetSuite.

I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years there are only Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, IBM, HP, and, who else, Google, left as legitimate players in the enterprise software market.

With the recent introductions of Unbreakable Linux, and Oracle VM, Oracle has effectively completed its software stack. Anybody who says Oracle is just a database vendor is just, well, outdated.

SAP has been growing a lot more slowly than Oracle in applications license growth, and its NetWeaver platform, although improving steadily, is probably never short listed unless a customer is already running SAP applications. But it's still twice as large as Oracle in apps market share even after Oracle acquired PSFT and SEBL, and we all know that install base is mostly gonna be there for the foreseeable future.

HP's acquisition of Mercury Interactive seems to have made a lot of sense. Systinet seems to be the market leader in SOA governance. Will HP screw up Mercury? It might. Will Sun screw up MySQL?

The top 3 BI vendors have been gobbled up recently. Who's next? BPM and BRM vendors?

My recent experience with Zecco Trading, a "zero commission online brokerage firm," has prompted me to close my Zecco account after transferring out everything in-kind. Zecco is yet another example of a startup that provides an unreliable product along with terrible customer services. Since Zecco deals with customers' money, such gross sloppiness is absolutely unacceptable.

I signed up with Zecco shortly after it's debut on CNBC. I was unimpressed with the website's features, but those free trades were certainly appealing. In addition, having been involved with
a few startups, I wanted to give Zecco more time to develop. I even referred a couple friends who later signed up with it. Probably because I was one of the first customers it got, I was invited to sit on its customer advisory board, which consisted of I think about 12 people. The company held two conference calls with us, where we raised a lot of issues and feature requests. It suffices to say that none of my requests have been worked out, after more than a year. The Zecco app has a 10 minute session timeout. I wanted it to be longer, or more user configurable. Zecco said it was too hard to synchronize the timeout with its backend trading system from Penson. Another issue is that the investment records for downloads don't include dividend payouts. By the way, the customer advisory board went dormant after the first two calls.

Although I didn't give Zecco up for such "inconveniences," over time I grew quite irritated by the site's unreliability. Sometimes I wouldn't be able to login. Another time I couldn't sell a holding called NYX, and it turned out the recent NYSE/Euronext merger confused Zecco's system. By the time a customer rep from Zecco called me a few days later, NYX had already dropped a few points, and I changed my mind. Recently, another holding of mine was acquired, and Zecco's system showed a zero cost basis for the new ticker symbol (PWE). I had to call them to have my cost basis updated. The issues list goes on...

And what really put me off tilt, to borrow a term from poker players, was Zecco's star customer service team. Zecco doesn't provide a secure messaging system for customers to email them with, instead one has to email, in plain text, a generic customer service address.

Anyway, to make the long story short, I closed my Zecco IRA account in Nov. 2007, when Zecco unexpectedly charged me a total of $70 (so much for zero commission...). Recently I was thinking about closing my regular account as well, but I decided to first find out how much it would cost me to close it. I emailed Zecco my questions. I got a reply from a rep saying I was over charged by $20, and that a fee reversal request was put in for me. I thought, OK, at least they were honest. The next day I received another message saying that they put in a request to close my regular account. I was very confused, as I never asked to have it closed. Besides, there are positions in the account. What is Zecco gonna do about them? I certainly don't want them liquidated. I emailed back, in no uncertain terms, asking them not to close my account. One day later, I received an email apologizing for the confusion, and saying my account would not be closed. The same evening, I lost access to my trading account... I'm now trying to transfer out of Zecco just as quickly as I possibly can.

Morale of this true story. First, you get what you pay for. Second, most startups are unfortunately very sloppy and provide terrible products and/or services. Third, you should avoid a startup, in terms of seeking a job or doing business together, if you feel its employees are below-average and don't know what they are doing. There is a limited number of competent people out there available for hire, and if a startup can't get some of those while it's small, it won't get any of them if it ever manages to grow bigger (and that growth probably would have been achieved by burning investor money anyway.)

Stock markets around the world have been very volatile recently, and I'm getting into a few highly speculative plays. ENTU and CVTX. Both have a product (or a few products) that are selling. Both are very small cap. And both may be acquired by larger players in their respective industry.

My fish porno video... two of my sunset gouramis kissing

Spent three nights at Sapphire Atlanta. Didn't see or hear anything impressive, frankly, but SAP was, unsurprisingly, able to rally many partners and customers. Atlanta was better than I had expected. My first trip to a Southern city, St. Louis, didn't leave me with a whole lot of sweet memories, but that was more than 10 years ago. I had really good seafood at Atlanta every night. First at the Holiday Inn Select hotel's Grille restaurant, then the Atlanta Fish Market at Buckhead, and finally the Bluepointe at Buckhead again. The Bluepointe requires business casual so don't go there in shorts which could be tempting under the Southern weather.

The Georgia World Congress Center is huge, but a pain in the neck to navigate in. Every day we had to walk down 4 escalators from the main entrance to the conference hall, and then back. The third afternoon I went to the CNN buliding next door and took a "CNN Inside" tour. For $12, though, I didn't get to see as much as I had expected, and some of the tour equipment wasn't working. All in all, Atlanta's food really impressed me.

I spent two hours at home "deep cleaning" my aquarium. In the process the zebra botia jumped out of the bowl I temporarily put it in while cleaning the tank, and when I rescued it from the carpet this darn fella bit me. I don't know how, but I felt two sharp stings. No blood though. I don't know if it will survive a whole tank of new water, but it's been strong. It will have survived 5 full years in this tank this August. In a few days I'll start adding a few new neighbors in the tank for it.

I was an early adopter of the Treo phones. Was using a Treo 270 until I lost it in an airport shuttle to Pudong in Shanghai (in 2004?), which gave me an excuse to buy a Treo 600. Almost two years later, just when its screen was starting to act up, my then-employer gave everybody a smartphone, except it was running Windows Mobile. My current employer didn't get me a Blackberry as I had thought they would, but they did get me a data package along with the free Motorola L2.

I had thought my life would be miserable without a smartphone which over the years I've grown so accustomed to. I did lots of things with my smartphones. First and foremost I would use them as a PDA. I couldn't live without the calendar on them, and I would take notes on them. Then I would use them as a networked computer to read news, check stock quotes, do instant messaging, etc., especially when I was waiting for a plane, a train, or a bus (or sitting in a bathroom, for that matter). I would install third party programs on them, for example Realplayer for PalmOS, which turned my Treo 600 into an MP3 player.

Life so far with a Motorola L2 and a data package, however, has been OK. I've installed third party J2ME software such as Gmail and Google Maps from Google, and Phonetop from Tellme (which was recently acquired by Microsoft). I've been using Google calendar to plan out my days, and having it text me the notifications via SMS. I can still access the Web, although the sites must be WAP compliant. It even has a few instant messengers preinstalled (J2ME), but again, I'm not a big fan of inputting text using a phone without a full qwerty keyboard.

Better yet, the L2 feels like a mobile phone, while all the smartphones I had felt like, a brick. I constantly felt their existence in my pocket, and I didn't like that.

Actually I forgot another thing I'd do with my smartphones. Taking photos. Not the type I'd print out, but sometimes it helped capture the moment. The L2 doesn't have a camera which is kind of a bummer. But apparently I've grown used to it now after almost 10 months.

So I survived not having a full blown smartphone. I was tempted to get a Treo 680 but in the end I decided against the idea, partly because the new Treo, although slimmer than its predecessors, still felt like a brick, albeit a smaller brick.

Last but not least I think I should mention this: there is no difference in voice quality, except with a smartphone, especially one running Windows Mobile, calls were more likely to drop when the bloated OS acted up.

All said, though, I think I wouldn't mind going back to a smart phone if I didn't have to pay for it myself, despite its bulkiness. But I can certainly make do with an L2 and a data package.

When will the mobile phones truly become the only device we need to carry. A PDA, a phone, a networked computer, an ID, a business card, a camera, a GPS receiver, and a wallet? And what else? And all that stuffed into a device that still feels like a slim mobile phone?

I start to get the feeling that mobile is indeed the next growth driver. I should think a bit more about it. I'm not sure which vendors will truly benefit from it. The phone manufacturers like Nokia and Motorola? The carriers like Verizon, Vodafone, and China Mobile? The mobile applications providers? The mobile application developers? The mobile application development tool vendors? SIs? Will the next big thing come from some startup or the existing giants?

中国行

确切地说是上海行. 总体感觉和去年一样,人多,天冷潮湿,吸烟者多,似乎机会也不少.

除了家人外,见了些新老朋友,似乎都忙得不亦乐乎. 两个侄子都大了一岁, 小的话特别多, 部分记载如下:

你们大家坐好听我讲恐龙. 最厉害的恐龙是霸王龙, 牙齿很锋利...(此处省去X字)

嫂子: 你把裤子拉链先拉好,好吗?

(不悦)我在忙着讲恐龙呢.

奶奶: 人家大学教授讲课也是拉链拉好的.

(不耐烦地拉上拉链) 现在继续讲.

霸王龙和人类基本没有生活在一起,不过它快灭绝的时候,人类出现了.

(WHAT???)

霸王龙和人打仗的时候,一口就把人给咬断了.

嫂子: 你肯定霸王龙和人在同一个时代吗?

(深思…) 我是说, 如果霸王龙和人打仗,它一口就把人给咬断了.

(原来如此…)

奶奶: 霸王龙出现在哪个时代?

霸王龙出现在很老早, 很老早, 很老早 (此处省去X字)的时候, 在人类出现前就灭绝了. (此处省去X字)

讲完了,下次再见!

And away he jumps.

Why Don't We Do It In Our Sleeves?

Send your doctor, school nurse, or workplace health supervisor to coughsafe.com to buy the DVD. Let's get the whole world coughing and sneezing properly! ---Made by some friends of Joe's mom...

今晚与上一家公司同事聚会,抽了有生以来的第一根雪茄,特此纪念. 味道很差,不过首次对着别人吞云吐雾,心中有种莫名的满足感. 下不为例.

昨天带着两位刚到美国不久的访问学者，沿着一号公路从Half Moon Bay开到Santa Cruz。沿途看了几个海滩。 一些对话记录于此.

１）关于日本：
Ｆ教授：　我搬家了，所以得买车．
Ｃ博士：　千万别买日本车．有些车一撞就从中间断开．
什么都不是：　（心情紧张，生怕开着的尼桑出事）
Ｃ博士：　我想买新车，本来在丰田佳美和大众帕萨特之间摇摆不定．我姐夫说，如果我买日本车，就给我砸了．
什么都不是：　原来姐夫在两个轴心国中间偏向德国．
Ｆ教授：　小日本认罪态度不好．

２）关于美国与中国：
Ｃ博士：　加州就是房子贵，其他都不贵．
什么都不是：　是啊．车便宜；食品绝对价格也不高，相对收入而言更便宜；电器也便宜．
Ｃ博士：　不过我觉得，只要国内政局稳定，还是住在国内好．


Ｆ教授（看着残旧的Pigeon Point Light House): 美国的历史真是短，连这么个破灯塔也当作一个景点．

这两周手术后一直在家休息，重新变成了影评家。接医疗保险公司通知说德国医生的费用全部付清了，又沟起了对德国之行的回忆,选了些风景照．

整个月都住在Ｈｅｉｄｅｌｂｅｒｇ。有德国最古老的大学,和在二战期间幸免于盟军轰炸的城堡.著名的印刷器材公司海德堡也是从此地出家的.海明威在灵感暂时枯竭时在此住了几个月,又给小镇增添了些荣誉.我甚至看到一个Village of Hemingway,不过细看才发现是驻地美军建造的.



去新天鹅堡与柏林的计划不幸夭折.朝南只去了一百公里远的巴登巴登(Baden-Baden).据说海明威在享受了此地的温泉后曾感叹, no other countryhas been blessed with so many hot medicinal springs as Germany. 也许吧,不过当时36摄氏度的高温下,我丧失了泡温泉的兴趣.小镇的中心赛过海德堡,还碰巧遇上了一场露天音乐会.德语歌,载歌载舞的,听着挺舒服.边上是一家赌场.不过需要衬衫领带才能入内.欧洲人的formality可见一斑.



朝北则去了也是一百公里左右的法兰克福,以及首府Wiesbaden. Frankfurt是德国航空枢纽,除此之外似乎没有什么特别.音乐厅前的喷泉似乎是孩子们的乐园.Wiesbaden就在莱茵河边,很悠闲,还有世界上最大的Coo-koo clock.


















另外就是有机械博物馆的Speyer and Sinsheim,都离Walldorf三十公里左右. 记得在Sinsheim找博物馆时迷路,随便停车敲门问路.一个老太太出来,一听我用英文说博物馆,立刻回答6 kilometers.当时我想,德国人是精确. 掉转车头,马上看到一个路牌,上书"technik museum - 6km"...

在德国,不懂德语确实不方便,尽管不少人能讲英语.另外,高速公路的出口标志只有地区名,不象美国那样具体到马路名,刚开始有些不适应.然而与英国左边开车相比,德国简直是天堂.终于也在出名的Autobahn上没有限速地开了些路程.但是租的SMART two door convertible只能开到140公里,而且车身震动的厉害.


总的感觉,德国南部很美,也很悠闲(夏天也很热). 贝多芬的故居也没去成,有点遗憾.下次吧.

记得小时候听大哥说他的朋友的上海牌手表不慎掉在地上被重型卡车碾碎.他朋友开玩笑说,如果手表厂给他换一块,他愿意在广告中声称上海牌手表十吨卡车压不坏.

昨晚我按下烘干机的start button,听到烘干机里有硬物撞击声,以为是硬币,转身就去睡觉了.早上从中先是找出一节AAA电池,觉得奇怪. 接着找出了我的Motorola bluetooth headset.恍然大悟...

此物在dryer的高温中大概经历了一小时,之前又在washer中(warm and cold setting)洗了大概45分钟. 估计是大大超出设计指标的. 换上新电池,按下电钮,居然马上和手机接通了. 试打一个电话,也没问题.

如果Motorola愿意, 我可以在广告中声称...

OK. It's the third "technik museum" I've been to during the last few months I supose, and the second during the last, ah, two weeks. I decided to postpone my drive to Baden-Baden to tomorrow, and to the Neuschwanstein next weekend, so today I had to go somewhere else. Where else? There is a bigger technik museum at Sinsheim, in probably the same distance from Heidelberg as Speyer. In fact, the Speyer museum came in second, as expansion in the Sinsheim museum ran out of space.

The Sinsheim museum offered some surprises. I knew I'd see both supersonic airliners for real there, the Concord and the Tu-144, but I didn't expect such a feast of tanks, WWII and (shortly) beyond, including the highly reconigzed German Leopard. I couldn't find the Tiger tank, though, although the American Shermans and many different German panzers were there. And, of course, some Soviet tanks like the T34.

Apart from that, Formula I race cars. Mercedez-Benz, Ferrari, Lamborghini, Porsche, Rolls-Royce, Caddilacs, you name it.

Overall, I think the Speyer musuem focuses more on planes (and ships), and the Sinsheim museum on land vehicles.
I think I've had enough of the German "techniks", so I'll skip the Mercedez-Benz museum in Stuttgart that I had planned to visit before. I'm looking forward to seeing Baden-Baden tomorrow. 

住在海德堡的第二个周末,仍然酷热. 懒得出远门,就近参观了位于Speyer的Technik Museum.
除了许多古董车,居然发现了国货火车头,1968年出厂.

另外的收获之一,大概是亲临了一艘U-boat, 发现鱼雷发射管原来是这般地粗. 然后就是U的出处,大概是德语Unterseeboot.

足球世界杯又进行得如火如荼. 不过小时候好似过节的心情却无影无踪了. 美国倒是进步了,仍然全部直播, 同02年一样. 98年时我还不得不从西语台Univision看些比赛, 妄想借机学Spanish.

记得94年时曾心血来潮,申请做世界杯志愿者.可惜未能如愿(好象是因为要自行解决住宿,于是我暑假回上海探亲了.)

上周正值我新公司第一周,仍然在等着各种人事的setup,从而得以冠冕堂皇地在家看球. 时间也不错. 早六,九点,和中午. 比赛间隙, 上网/电话地干些正经事,再顺便去一下办公室. 周五老板开始催我办赴德国的paperwork. 那是要去合作伙伴总部培训兼谈业务. 不知是否能赶上一场球呢?

周六应一个ex-manager之邀在他家看US vs. Italy. 美国居然9打10平了Italy, 保留了理论上的一线生机. McBribe还被人砸得满脸是血. 突然想, Who am I rooting for? 其实这个问题对中国人通用, thanks to our incompetent man's soccer team. 难道是美国队吗?