Antony’s Personal Opinion

Yesterday I had a very long discussion with my girl friend about investment. The discussion began because I wanted to invest my money in stock options. She didn’t agree because I’ve just invested some of my money in mutual funds and their price have been going down in the last few days.
Like many Indonesian people, my girl friend thinks that investing in stocks is actually gambling. We can lose our money within 1 day! My mother has the same opinion too, she said don’t put your money in stock options; it’s like betting your money in a casino. Investing in stock options is not so common in Asian countries.

I have to admit that for some people “stocks = gambling”. Some of my friends had lost a lot of money about 5 years after the economic bubble in the US exploded. Many IT companies at that time didn’t have any value although they had a very high capital value a few months back. That’s why Warren Buffett didn’t want to invest his money in the IT companies during that period.

For me, buying stocks is actually another way of investment; just like cash deposit, real estate, gold, etc. It is a way where we can put our money to work for us; I mean we can get a profit from our money after some time. Investing in stocks is not easy, of course (if this would have been easy, then it would be easy to be rich). We have to perform thorough analysis to the company we want to invest. Looking at the financial report only sometimes is not sufficient.

As a final word, everyone has his/her own way of investing. Some people don’t like stocks because it is too risky; some others like it because they can get higher profit. My advice, invest your money in a way that you feel comfortable with….

A few days ago, one of my colleagues sent an email about Adobe Acrobat Reader. Like me, and may be also all of you, he was very frustrated using this software because it takes a couple of seconds to start-up. Finally he found a very useful trick to launch Acrobat Reader within 1 second! Yes, may be less than 1 second on a relatively fast machine. I’ve tried this trick and the result is very amazing.

What’s the trick? Very simple…. Open your Windows Explorer and go to c:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Reader\plug_ins folder. Remove all files except EWH32.api, Search.api and Search5.api. Just for safety, backup this folder before you kill them… That’s it; now try to run your Acrobat Reader…

After I got this trick, I was wondering, why do the software companies give a lot of features that the users don’t really need? Acrobat Reader is one example; there are many plug-ins that we never actually used. Basically plug-ins concept is very good; we can extend software easily. This is good for the users and for the software companies as well. What I am thinking of is, isn’t it possible to load plug-ins when they are needed only? Not loading all of them during start-up…

I had the same experience with my mobile phones too. When I was using my old mobile phone (Series 30 phone from Nokia), I can switch it on in less than 10 seconds. Now I am using Symbian-based phone (Series 60 phone from Nokia too), and it takes almost 30 seconds to reboot. Unfortunately, I don’t have any tricks yet to speed this up…

Blogging is really booming now! A lot of companies are offering blogging services, including all big players like Google, Microsoft, and even Nokia.

As far as I remember, the blogging era was popular after Google bought a small company Pyra Labs, the creator of Blogger, about 2 years ago. After that, all big players, one by one, jumped into this business. Nokia, the largest mobile phone company, launched their service, LifeBlog, last year to allow us blogging via mobile phones. Friendster, the most popular social network site, just launched a blogging service beginning of this year. The competition is becoming more interesting because Microsoft launched “another blog service” in their MSN Spaces. What is MSN Spaces? It is a brand new service from Microsoft which is like a personal web site where we can share personal data, photos, music, opinions, etc.

The next interesting question is, who will be the winner in this competition? Who doesn’t know Microsoft? They have killed many of their competitors in the history. They have killed Netscape Navigator, the most popular web browser a few years ago. They have made ICQ users migrate to MSN Messenger. On the other hand, everyone knows Google too. They have a very good competence and are very creative in building good services. Remember they’ve just announced video blogging service last week.

Let’s see what will happen in this industry. From my opinion, this would be very interesting…