The end of Pontiac

It's a sad day in the automotive world today, as GM announced that it's going to be killing off the Pontiac brand. :( I've had quite a few Pontiacs actually, a 93 Sunbird, 94 Grand Am GT, 95 Firebird Formula, 95 Trans Am, 97 Grand Prix GTP and my favorite Pontiac of all was my Blue Green Chameleon 98 Firebird Formula. The car was one of the best bangs for the buck out there, it was half the price of the C5 Corvette at the time, but came with the same awesome LS1 engine. With a few simple low cost modifications I had that Formula down to a 12.68 at 110.6 mph in the quarter mile. And even though I'm a huge Corvette fan and still love my 98 Corvette better than all of the cars I've owned in the past, I still have a soft spot for my old Formula. When I heard that the Camaro was coming back in 2010, I had hoped the Firebird would be revived also, and even though there were no plans in the works for that happening, the killing of Pontiac definitely puts the end to any chance of that happening. RIP Pontiac! :(

My first contest win!

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I have started entering all kinds of online contests lately, and today I got notification of my very first win! I entered Teletoon's Matchbox Treasure Quest contest in my son Alex's name, and he won! It's only worth $40 but a win is a win, and I know there will be more to come! (hopefully a big pile of cash next time!) :)

My fake portfolio April 20th

So far my fake portfolio for "day trading" is doing pretty good. I chose a new stock this morning which was priced at 2.91 and when it hit 2.99 in less than an hour I decided to sell it because the overall mood of the market today looks bleak with both the Dow and the TSX heading down over 150 points each. So I figure that making $347 today is a pretty good take, and I'm going to treat this as if it was real money and try not to be too risky. I've also decided to set up a second practice account too, with this one I will pick one stock on Monday that was the top performer for the past month, and I will hold that stock until Friday and then will sell it. I will also start this fake account at $10,000 and see how it grows. This one is probably more realistic as I doubt I would ever have what it takes to be a day trader, but if I had enough money I'd be comfortable with buying one stock per week and taking chances on that. The stock I chose was priced at 1.30 before the start of trading today, but now is down to 1.20 so it's not doing too well so far, but it's still very early in the week too.

Do people really make a living day trading?

I've been curious to see if the average person without much knowledge of the stock market could actually make a living doing day trading, so I decided to do a little experiment. I've given myself $10,000 to start off and every morning I'm going to "buy" shares in whatever was the previous day's top performer on the Toronto Stock Exchange. I'll hold those shares for an hour or two, waiting for them to rise a little bit (or selling them if they drop 5%), and start again on the next trading day with a new stock. I'll let you guys know how my picks are doing on this blog. Yesterday was the first day doing it and the stock I picked went from $1.22 to $1.31 in a few short hours, so my portfolio went from $10,000 to $10,737! That's not bad for a day's "work" :) Today's pick went from $4.25 to $5.00 in the first hour, so my portfolio is now $12,631! I sure wish I had $10,000 to play with right now! :) Obviously if one were to play the market like this for real there would be a lot of down days too, so you'd obviously have to be prepared for that too. I think I would probably do things on the safe side, and try not to get too greedy and hang onto a stock too long once it's rising, that's probably where a lot of people get into trouble. They are trying to make a million dollars in one year, where I'd just be happy making $60,000 to $70,000 a year.

How to change a turn signal bulb in a 98 Corvette

One of my front turn signal bulbs burned out this morning (the tell tale sign was when I put the signal on, the flasher was going very fast) so I thought I'd give a quick rundown on how the change went. The easiest thing to do is put the front tires up on a set of rhino ramps, then you have full access under there. There is a little plastic panel which is held on by five bolts, use a 10mm socket to take these off. Then reach in and you'll see the white connector on the left side, you just need to pinch it and turn it counterclockwise to remove it. Once it's down, just gently pull on the old bulb (you don't want to break it off in there!) and pop in the new one, and then button everything back together again. The annoying part is that the owner's manual for my 98 listed the bulb as being a 3157NAK, but in reality you need a 4157NAK! The NA part indicates it's an amber bulb, I'm sure the regular 4157 would work, but it might look different than the other one, even though the light cover itself is amber anyhow. I was lucky, I already had an extra 4157NAK bulb, and it was the long life version too. I checked my records and the previous bulb had been in there for four years, and I don't think it was a long life version either, so this long life one is supposed to last twice as long. So I'm good for 8 years hopefully.

Fun fact about July 8, 2009

At 4:05:06 in the morning on July the 8th this year, the time and date will end up being 04:05:06 07/08/09! Pretty cool eh? I thought some of you would like that! I know I will! (although I'm not crazy enough to wake up that early to see it that day!) :)

How to cook a prime rib!

This is how I like to cook a nice prime rib roast. First of all you start off by letting the roast come up to room temperature by taking it out of the fridge and letting it sit out for about an hour or two. (I never start with a frozen roast, I buy it fresh from the butcher and then put it in the fridge as soon as I get home) I like to coat it with a mixture of sea salt, fresh cracked pepper, fresh garlic (or garlic salt) and olive oil (thanks to Paul M for this recipe!) I preheat the oven to 450F and then put in the prime rib for 15 minutes, then turn the oven down to 325F and cook it until the internal temperature reaches about 120-125F (for rare) or 130-135F (for medium rare) A digital instant read thermometer is a definite must here! Depending on how big the roast is, it will be around another 90 minutes to 2 hours of cooking until it's ready to come out. When you take it out of the oven, cover it in foil and let it sit for another 10-15 minutes to lock in the juices (and it'll continue cooking and will rise in temp by another 5-10F) Then slice it up and enjoy! It goes very well with roasted potatoes and gravy! I've got one in the oven right now, and my whole house smells like meat right now! Fantastic! :)

April is one of my favorite months!

Even though I love the heat of the summer the best, I think that April is one of my favorite months of the year for the simple fact that once you get past the early April "return of winter" (like we had in Mississauga this week) then it gets to the point where we know that we won't be seeing any more snow here for at least 7 or 8 more months! Awesome! I cannot stand snow, I hate it more than anything, so once we get to about the middle of April I know for sure that I won't be seeing any snow for a very long time and that makes me super happy! If I am super lucky, someday I'll have a nice little retirement property in Florida and at the first sign of snow here in Mississauga I would head down there and wouldn't return here until April 15th every year. Now that would be sweet!

The return of winter in Mississauga?

OK, well not quite, we got pretty lucky here in Mississauga yesterday, as a lot of areas just a half hour away got hammered with a foot of snow, but we got nothing but wet snow and rain yesterday, so it's just coated the grass lightly, but hasn't affected the roads at all, and most importantly, no shovelling is needed! :) I still can't believe it, but we haven't had any major snow here since early February! We usually get at least 3 or 4 big snow storms in March and one or two in April, but this year we got spared. Probably because I wasn't driving to work during this time! If I didn't get laid off, I bet we would've had tons of major snow storms to hinder my daily commute! :) Now let's hope we have a nice warm and dry summer here!

Does my new car need paint protection?

At most dealerships, when you buy a new car they are going to try to get you to purchase something called "paint protection" or perhaps they'll call it "clear coat protection" as well. They will usually ask for about $300 to $400 for this service and it's absolutely not worth it! They claim that it will be good for the lifetime of the vehicle, but this simply is not true. There is no magic coating that they can put on your paint which will protect it for that long, the best you can hope for is six months protection and even that is extremely optimistic. All you are getting for your hundreds of dollars is one single coat of some sort of polymer sealant, which you can buy yourself for $20 or so and put it on yourself. One bottle of that stuff would do about 10-15 cars or more, and only take about an hour of your time, so you can see what a huge moneymaker this is for new car dealers! But your best bet is to just buy the product yourself, apply it to your paint every 3 months, and your paint will stay nice and shiny for many years to come!

Does my new car need rustproofing?

I remember back in 1988 when I bought my first brand new car, a 1988 Dodge Shadow ES Turbo, I immediately went to Krown and had them rustproof it for me. I then went back annually to get it redone again, as was recommended. Back then I believe it was necessary, as I don't think that new cars at that time were built well enough to resist rusting. But nowadays a lot of body panels are made from composites (plastics) or double sided galvanized steel. So IMO, the days of needing annual rustproofing are long gone. When we bought my wife's 2000 Civic in October 1999, they tried to sell us aftermarket rustproofing at the dealer, and of course we said no (they wanted something like $400) and now her car has over 160,000km on it and is still rust free, even with no rust proofing! I think the key is to make sure you get the car washed weekly in the wintertime to get that nasty road salt off it (especially the undercarriage) Besides, I always found that those oil based rustproofing treatments just made a huge mess! Oil would drip on the driveway and the engine compartment would be a dirty mess, the oil would attract all kinds of dirt to it. And if we had done annual rustproofing we would've spent over $1000 by now! This also reminds me of another unnecessary thing that new car dealers often want you to buy, and that's "paint protection", another $400 charge typically. I'll cover that topic on my next blog entry.