I had to play basketball
today because Woo didn't get my email in time. Well, I sent the email
kind of late, at about 15:00. Pretty much as soon as I knew that I had
work to do and could have used the extra couple of hours. But then he
calls me at 17:45 and he and Eric are there so I go over there and we
play basketball. Then I go home and take a shower and I'm tired and go
to sleep. Basketball is more time consuming than the actual play time
because it makes me tired and sore and the next day I'm pretty sluggish.
So Donald suggested some sort of Christmas party at his place Monday or
Tuesday. Kind of short notice so I'm not sure if anybody is going to
make it. Myself I don't know. I'd guess I would go if Sweet is going.
But I'm not really in the mood to hang out with my friends. And I do
have work to do though I always seem to put it off.
So I gave in and bought a copy of Virtual PC 5.0 with Windows 2000 from
eBay. It was $55 with shipping and the guy was kind enough to point me
to a page for getting such an old version of VPC to work on Mac OS X. I
bought it because I'm going to upgrade it to 7.0 which is $80 at Amazon
and with my sister's 25% coupon it'll be $60 and a lot cheaper than
buying VPC 7.0 with Windows 2000 (I need Windows 2000 to run some
programs, not XP which is not a workstation OS).
Since I'm getting Virtual PC that means I can buy PC programs. Not
games since most games work on XP not 2000 and they would run really
slow under emulation. Theoretically Microsoft will add graphics card
support for VPC so graphics intensive games should run better. In any
case, the programs I'm thinking off, like GURPS Character Assistant,
are not graphics intensive.
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I keep thinking that I have
a long way to go to pay off my mortgage. And I do. At $2000 a month I
have 21 years or so left. Now that the PeopleSoft acquisition is going
through I expect Oracle stock to start going up a bit and more in a
couple of years when the merger is done and people are assured that we
didn't bungle it. If Oracle stock goes to $20 I can sell my options for
$90k or so which means mabe $70k after taxes.
That's not going to make much impact on my mortgage. Ok, it will have
an impact but we're still looking at 15 years to pay it off, maybe 13
by then. If the stock goes up to $25 I can get maybe $100k and get my
mortage down to $175k or so and maybe 10 or 11 years to pay it off.
It's probably not work waiting for Oracle stock to get higher since the
returns are less dramatic.
It's still free money to me. So if I sell my stock options at $20 it's
not as if I was counting on it for anything. And getting my mortgage
down sooner rather than later is good since interest will be much less.
The whole thing about investing the money and making more than you're
paying in mortgage interest is true but doesn't really suit my
temperament. I just want to pay off this gigantic debt I have.
I'm even toying with the idea of charging Christopher for rent
(assuming he gets a job). But that's just wrong. I'm his big brother,
I'm supposed to be helping him not the other way around. I will make
sure that he sets aside money for his own house instead of paying rent.
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