Archive for category Preston’s Personal Life
My Daughter’s 2nd Grade “Warrior Cats” Play
Posted by Preston Poulter in Preston's Personal Life on June 23rd, 2010
My daughter has fallen in love with the Warrior Cats series of books by Erin Hunter. For those of you who haven’t heard of it (which I expect is all of you), it’s basically a tribal warfare storyline using anthropomorphic cats. It’s certainly not my favorite subject matter, but the books are far more complex and dense than anything else she’s shown an interest in and pursuing them has caused her reading to excel. She now reads at a level far above that of the average 2nd or 3rd grader.
She’s also shown an interest in being a writer, and wrote a play inspired by the Erin Hunter novels. Her 2nd grade class agreed to perform it (well, half of it anyway) during the last week of school. Here it is.
Goldfinger’s Evil Plot
Posted by Preston Poulter in Investing and Financial Doomsday, Preston's Personal Life on June 4th, 2009
I was raised by a single mom who had to care for three children. As the youngest of three brothers, I was put in their care a lot of the time, and that meant I watched whatever they watched. Which meant, instead of watching cartoons, I was raised on John Wayne Westerns and James Bond. It was an unusual childhood full of sex, violence, and Sean Connery.
Many people say he was the best Bond there ever was. Personally, I really like Daniel Craig, but it’s hard to compare the two. In hindsight, it’s interesting to note the similarities I have between the fiction I was exposed to as a child and who I became as an adult:
- My favorite bond movie as a child was the Japanese centered You Only Live Twice
and I took up Judo as a teenager and was strongly influenced by Sensei Vince Tamura during my formative high-school years. - Peter Parker (a chemist) was the fictional character with whom I identified the most, and I later got a degree in Chemistry.
- Neither John Wayne nor James Bond showed any fear in the face of gunplay, and, as it turns out from a real life incident, neither do I. Read the rest of this entry »
Dollar Falls Sharply as Gold Approaches It’s All Time High… Again
Posted by Preston Poulter in Conversations, Investing and Financial Doomsday, Preston's Personal Life on May 26th, 2009
As my personal friends know, I’m a gamer geek. My collectible card game (CCG) of choice is Vampire: the Eternal Struggle (VTES). It’s Richard Garfield’s (the designer of Magic: the Gathering) second CCG and he designed it for multiple players. It’s a game I enjoy playing competitively.
Every year, White Wolf (the company that publishes VTES has a North American Championship. In order to play in this tournament, you first have to do well in a qualifier tournament which every region has. This weekend, Los Angeles had its qualifier tournament and I enjoyed playing in it (I didn’t qualify). Since VTES has a small but loyal player base compared to other CCGs, you get to know everyone pretty well who competes on a national level. We’ve become a pretty close knit group despite the fact that we all live in different regions; our willingness to travel and our love of the game brings us together.
Well known members of this tight-knit circle include Ben Peal, and a married couple, Robin and David Tatu. They have all purchased my book and found it a good read. Both of the Tatu’s were at the tournament this weekend, and I commented to them that my investments were up some 50% over the last six months. They recommended that I sell my gold investments before they crashed. Now, I found it a bit peculiar that two people who told me that they learned a great deal about how the economy works from the book that I wrote would then tell me to sell gold.
It does make sense in a human nature kind of way. The knee jerk response I’ve gotten when I tell people how much money I’ve made off of my gold investments is “Sell!” It’s a bit of conventional wisdom that has its roots in reality. After all, trees don’t grow to the sky and what goes up must come down. If something’s up 50%, then it must be time to sell it.
Well, yes and no. Read the rest of this entry »