Japan Loves Dudo509

A couple weeks ago I wrote a blog on how my name was so generic that I didn't have to worry about getting "googled". Well, it turns out that if you go to the Japanese Yahoo! search and type in "Joe Chen", my first blog is the first result that returns. Pretty wild isn't it? Try it if you'd like:

Yahoo! Japan - type in "Joe Chen" and click Search

In regular Yahoo (U.S), I'm only the 3rd result. Not as impressive, but still way higher than I would have guessed. Looks like Google still does not recognize me within its first couple pages, which I consider a good thing.

Anyways, I guess that's one thing I have in common with Uncle Jesse from Full House. Underappreciated in his home country, but a superstar in the Land of the Rising Sun.

For loyal American readers of this blog, don't worry. I won't sell out to my Japanese demographic and turn this page into a bunch of weird obstacle course game shows, or hidden camera shows where they rig Port-o-Potties with hydraulics.

If you're curious to what I'm talking about though, here are a couple links (c/o Brian and Grace):

http://www.ebaumsworld.com/videos/false-wall-prank.html

http://www.noob.us/humor/japanese-game-show-public-bathroom-prank/

1 Down, 29 To Go

This month marks 1 year since I closed on my townhouse. Which, of course, also means that I have now completed my first full year of mortgage payments - out of 30.

There's about a 0% chance that I will end up living here through the entire course of my 30-year loan. And I would like to think that I will be able to progress career and salary-wise to the point that I can pay off the mortgage earlier than that. But it's still a demoralizing thought that after all the work saving up for a down payment, and then the last 12 months of paying mortgage bills, I'm still so far from being able to say I truly "own" my house.

I used to think of a year as a long time. Now it's just a small step in a long climb back up to a debt-free life. Worse yet, if I look at how it breaks down in the amortization table, only about 20% of what I paid to the bank in the last year went to the house - the rest was just to pay off interest. Technically, the title of this blog shouldn't be "1 down, 29 to go", it should be more like "1.4% down, 98.6% to go".



On the plus side, I love home-ownership and I have no regrets whatsoever about signing my life away last year. It was scary at first, and sometimes still is. But overall, I do feel a good sense of accomplishment to get this far in my life. I can't recommend it enough to friends who are still deciding whether or not to take the plunge themselves, as long as you feel like you will be stable for a few years.

And for those of you who recently bought your first place, congratulations and welcome to the club!

*****

Edit: Link to article from DLo about what to consider when deciding between renting/buying

http://www.investorgeeks.com/articles/2006/05/23/renting-is-for-suckers/

Tools

I think my brain was a little fried at work today, but I was staring at my Internet Explorer browser, and noticed for the first time that one of the menus was called "Tools".

Well I mean, I always knew there was the "Tools" menu, but for the first time it amused me. I imagined clicking on the menu, and it opening up a list of names of people who are tools. Maybe it would look something like:

Job Fair Stuff

Don't really have a point to this entry, but I noticed that I still have a lot of the stuff I got at those college job fairs we used to go to.

I've got a deck of playing cards from Motorola, a bunch of t-shirts from Compaq and AMD, and a whole bunch of pens or highlighters from small companies I don't even remember talking to.

Raytheon gave me this cool little digital (as in electronic) clock/calendar thing, while Honda gave me a stopwatch, which I actually still use. Kinda impressive that these electronic things still work, 6 years later.

I wonder what happened to those little rubber balls that flash when you bounce them though, those were the coolest.