Hawai'i July 4th-11th, 2010

We came down for a business convention on the big island in Hawaii. This year, to hopefully recruit more customers, I was allowed to bring an additional salesman. My buddy Dave...aka Super Dave...aka Supa Deezahhh...who came along.

The flight from Charlotte to Phoenix was comfortable enough on the Airbus A321. The nightmare flight from Phoenix to Kona was another story. Super dave was lucky enough to sit 2 seats in front of me. His row had extra leg room as it was the area between coach and first class. The dolts who installed the seats took leg room from my row which amount to about 4-6 inches of leg room (a BIG deal when your stuck in your seat for 6+ hours!) Did I mention that they also decided not to leave any room behind the seats so you can't recline the seat either? Result...the boeing 757 was the equivalent of being flown over in a coffin. To boot, the punk kid who sat next to me had obviously been preparing for the flight with a steady diet of beans, effectively turning our small cabin into a gas chamber. I frequently took refuge in the bathroom, both for stretch breaks and some clean air. Finally, the plane landed, I was able to inhale again. Here's super dave climbing down the stairs...we got off directly on the tarmac!



With the time change being in our favor, we took off from Charlotte at 7:45am, and we landed in Kona at 1:45pm. The funny thing is that we weren't able to buy lunch until we landed in Hawaii, so we had a steady diet of eggs! We were definately ready for something with a little more sustenance being that it was 7:45pm back home. We picked up our rental car, and headed off to grab dinner (well lunch), after checking in to our hole in the wall, the kona seaside hotel. We went down to dinner at "The Fish Hopper". Although they have "Fish" in their name, they have some of the best damn burgers I've ever tasted. Not to mention, the burgers were on special for $10 with a schooner of beer! So far, me and supa deezahh have been there for dinner 3 nights of the 5 we've been here.

Good eats!



Cheers!



The view wasn't bad either!



Once we got settled into our hotel, we decided to have a few strategy sessions for the upcoming convention. On our second day on the island, Dave found a great local dive bar called "Coconuts". It was a second story bar with the best view I've found so far on the island, and best of all, they served dollar tacos! Now you know where we've eaten dinner the other 2 nights we've been here so far. I've gone through 12 tacos. Combine that with a cold Steinlager (a new zealand beer), and you've got another great dinner. Gonna have to go on a diet when I get home!

Our view from the comfort at a bar stool at Coconuts.





With our plans set, we took a little time for R&R, and went snorkeling! All around the hotel, there were reefs with tons of fish and sea porcupines. I pricked my finger on one. It's tough to stay on the bottom so I made mistake of trying to hold onto the reef for a picture. Doh! We even saw a huge 5 foot moray eel! It was Supa Dave's first time snorkeling. He almost drowned a few times, lol! A few shots:







We also did some touring around the Island in the convertible!



I can tell you one thing so far about Kona. We have yet to meet one sane person who wasn't working. So far we've met Joey, who was bragging about hooking up with a fat 21 year old chick, even though he was married, and his wife was currently undergoing surgery for ovarian cancer. By the way, he smuggled his wife across the canadian border, is on the run from the IRS (who he owes $20k to), and was actually in the Perfect Storm...not the movie, the actual hurricane...he hasn't seen the part in the movie where they all die.

Besides that we met a newly wed couple who was nuttier than your Aunt Fae's 10lb fruit cake. He was busy hitting on a girl that was interested in Supa, while she was in the back of the bar "dj'ing" with the bartender. The guy had a freshly split lip. Apparently the same bartender had to save the guy from getting his butt kicked the night before, only to have the guy walk down to another local bar and get knocked out by a "UFC fighter".

I can say this about Hawai'i. You can't beat the food, the sunsets, or the water. The people are down right crazy, the hotels are holes in the wall, and make sure you fly only first class if you plan on flying here.

Interview With Mark Boone of WCNC News

That's how I roll...

Pops In The Park

It's almost here! My favorite outdoor event of the year, and trust me when I say that we do it in style! The Charlotte Symphony's "Pops In The Park" is just around the corner and starts June 6th at 7pm in Southpark's Symphony Park, and runs each Sunday up until Saturday, July 3rd.

My best friends, family, and I have been annual attendees for the last few years. For the life of me, I've never been able to get the best seats in house. The concert is entirely free (though they do accept donations), and the way you reserve seats is by placing a towel, tarp, or chairs out in the location you would like to sit in. The problem is that I can't drag myself out of bed to drive 25 miles down to Symphony Park to put out our 10x10 tarp at 7am. The rule of thumb is (and I personally think people cheat all the time at this), you can't place you're tarp/towel/bear skin rug/whatever out before 7am. I think the one time I did manage to get down there by like 7:15am, the spot was already taken!

We'll see if I can get out bed in a timely fashion this year...or maybe bribe the B.O.B. since he lives a mile from there. Looking forward to another great concert series in the heart of Southpark! Hope to see everyone out there :)

The warmin done gud!

The wife done good! No I'm not talking about cleaning you chauvinist pig you (Though she did a great job making almost the entire house look squeaky clean prior to the folks coming over for dinner on Sunday...don't look at me like that...I handled the outside!) The house was definitely looking spic-n-span when the folks showed up for some grilled chicken marinated in my secret tomato basil sauce (Ad...don't you dare give away my secret recipe!) with a side of asparagus and a side salad. When we get together at my house, we don't drink that code blue garbage! No sir! We had a few 'black & tans', which is actually a combination of beers (1/2 guiness + 1/2 bass). Delicious!

I get accused of bouncing around too much on my blog, so let's get down to the point...what did the warmin do that was so heart warming, fantastic, and utterly stupendous? SHE GOT A $2000 SCHOLARSHIP! Cash, money! It was definitely a welcome (albeit, somewhat expected) bonus. What? The woman's top of her class and has a brain that would make a sponge jealous. You try winning an argument with her!

So way to go baby! I'm uber proud of you, and keep up the great work!

This picture pretty much sums up our relationship. What would I do if she wasn't there to take care of me!

Quail Hollow - No Work, Overpriced Beer and Craptastic Food, & Golf

It was good times on Wednesday. I was able to break away from work for the day to hang out with fellow chums Barr and the B.O.B. We arrived at Quail Hollow on the day of the pro/am. We saw a few of the more noteable entries like Dan Marino and Michael Jordan playing with some folks. We didn't make it out to catch the early bird, Tiger Woods, who tee'd of at 7:30 that morning. We did, however, get to see Tiger on the putting green.

After watching the man putt for 5 minutes, it was obvious he was in trouble. From five feet out, he missed most of his putts. That would be his achilles heel in the tournament, as for the 6th time in his professional career, Tiger didn't even make the cut! My personal favorite golfer, Phil Mickelson, was in it going into the final round, being 2 strokes out. Some 20 year old punk kid named Rory McIllroy won the tournament, and took the top prize of the $6.5M purse (or $1.152M for himself).

Makes me wanna take up golf full time! The kid just made in 4 days what it would take most of us 20 years to make!

Here's some snapshots of the tournament. A great time was had by all that concluded with $2.50 imports at DD's!

Barr had a good time...


Great shot looking down #3...


Barr using his advantage to get us that much closer to the action...


Phil showed up because he knew I was gonna be there...


All in all, it was an awesomely goregous day with the boys hangin out at quail hollow. Hopefully next year we can go for more than just 1 day!

Buffetisms - A collection of my favorite quotes from the mind of Warren Buffet

"It's an old principle. You don't have to make it back the way that you lost it."

"Diversification is a protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense for thoe who know what they're doing."

"Stocks are simple. All you do is buy shares in a great business for less than the business is intrinsically worth, with managers of teh highest integrity and ability. Then you own those shares forever."

"Investing Rules: #1. Never lose money. #2 Never forget rule #1."

"Imagine that you are a student, and you may choose one other student in your class, and thereafter be entitled to 10 percent of that student's earnings for life. But there's a catch. You also have to choose a student to whom you will pay 10 percent of your earnings for life....the interesting thing is, when you think about what's going on in your mind, you're not thinking about things that are impossible for you to achieve yourself. You're not thinking about who can jump 7 feet, who can throw a football 65 feet, who can recite pi to 300 digits, or whatever it might be. You're thinking about a whole lot of qualities of character. the truth is, that every one of those qualities is obtainable. they are largely a matter of habit. My old boss, Ben Graham, when he was 12 years old, wrote down all of the qualities that he admired in other people and all the qualities he found objectionable. And he looked at that list, and there wasn't anything about being able to run the 100 yard dash in 9.6 seconds or jumping 7 feet. They were all things that were simply a matter of decicding whether you were going to be that kind of person or not."

When 20 year old Buffet went to work at his father's brokerage house in Omaha, a friend asked if the company would be called Buffet 7 son. "No", replied Buffet, "Buffet & Father."

When 26 year old Buffet created his first partnership in 1956, he told investors: "What I'll do is form a partnership where I'll manage the portfolio and I'll guarantee you a 5 percent return, and I'll get 20 percent of all profits after that. And I won't tell you what we own because that's distracting. All I want to do is hand in a scorecard when I come off the golf course. I don't want you following me around and watching me shank a three-iron on this hole and leave a putt short on the next one."

In 1993, when Buffet became the richest man in America, one of the people at his annual shareholder's meeting asked, 'Now that you've acheived the status of America's richest man, do you have any other goals? Buffet replied, "Oh, that's easy. To be America's oldest man."

"Berkshire buys when the lemmings are heading the other way."

"You don't need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ eats the guy with the 130 IQ. Rationality is essential."

"Most people get intersted in stocks when everyone elses is. The time to be interested is when no one else is. You can't buy what is popular and do well."

"It doesn't have to be rock bottom to buy it. It has to be selling for less than you think the value of the business is, and it has to be run by honest and able people. But if you can buy into a business for less than it's worth today, and you're confident of the management, and you buy into a group of businesses like that, you're going to make money."

Buffet states, "I like to buy stocks when the bears are giving them away."

Mr. Market

Mr. Market was a character invented by Ben Graham to illuminate his students' minds regarding market behavior. The stock market should be viewed as an emotionally disturbed business partner. This partner, Mr. Market, shows up each day offering a price at which he will buy your share of the business or sell you his share. No matter how wild his offer is or how often you reject it, Mr. Market returns with a new offer the next day and each day thereafter. Buffet says the moral of the story is this: Mr. Market is your servant, not your guide.

"I never attempt to make money on the stock market. I buy on the assumption that they could close the market for 5 years and not reopen it for five years."

"When I worked for Graham-Newman, I asked Ben Graham, who then was my boss, 'How can an investor be sure that the price of a stock that is undervalued by the market evenutally will rise?', He just shrugged and replied that the market always evntually does. He was right in the short run, (the market is) a voting machine; in the long run, it's a weighing machine."

"(John Maynard) Keynes essentially said, don't try and figure out what the market is doing. Figure out a business you understand, and concentrate."

"For some reason, people take their cues from price action rather than from values. What doesn't work is when you start doing things that you don't understand or because they worked last week for somebody else. The dumbest reason in the world to buy a stock is because it's going up."

"The future is never clear; you pay a very high price in the stock market for a cheery concensus. Uncertainty actually is the friend of the buyer of long-term values."

"Charlies and I never have an opinion on the market because it wouldn't be any good and it might interfere with the opinions that we have that are good."


Valuing Stocks

"We like stocks that generate high returns on invested capital where there is a strong likelihood that it will continue to do so. For example, the last time we bought Coca-Cola, it was selling at about 23 times earnings. Using our purchase price and today's earnings, that makes it about 5 times earnings. It's really the interaction of capital employed, the return on that capital, and future capital gernerated versus the purchase price today."

"If the business does well, the stock eventually follows."

"Risk comes from not knowing what you are buying."

Frivolities At The Levers

There's nothing quite as relaxing as having a good little bit of bbq and having a few close friends over. As is always the case at one of our parties, the adult beverages seemed to be in over abundant supply. Last night, we ran the gauntlet - starting with yuengling and a few code blues, moving on to margi's provided by Carrie & Craig, and finishing off the night with a little scotch.

The night was not without it's bumps, as the bbq didn't spend quite enough time in the smoker or oven. I was disappointed as I had to rush through cooking it, as I got started a little bit later than I had wanted to. There's one rule to follow when it comes to great Carolina-Q - "Low & Slow". It was good, but it wasn't the 'fall off the bone, melt in your mouth' bbq I'm known for. The homemade mac n' cheese that the Barrs brought was delicious, and C&C provided some great appetizers. All was going well until boxee refused to cooperate on a few occasions. It only seemed to get worse when the warmin tried to fix the issue. Of course her wrath was directed at me (for whatever reason...I can't say!), and I was tackled for no apparent reason! So, the only movie we watched all the way through was the cult classic "Red Dawn" (one of the best movies of all time!). "The Office" wasn't streaming right, "Clash of the Titans" only made it half way through before it stopped working, and "Inglorious Bastards" was taking forever to transfer to the movie server. About that time was when the warmin tackled me (again, for NO good reason!). By the time we had "Inglorious Bastards" streaming up on the big screen, it was time for everyone to head home at around 11:30. A good time was had by all, and as always, it seems like whenever we get all our good friends together, hilarity ensues.

Perhaps one of the highlights of the night was I hear Barr lapping his whiskey and water. Hey...wait a second! That's not Barr! That's Hoser getting in on the fun. Needless to say, she enjoyed her first taste of whiskey, and pestered him for another drink for the rest of the night!













Here's a picture after Hoser learned her lesson on alcohol after waking up with quite the hangover the next morning!