I'm starting another challenging day on a positive tone with a tip o' the hat to the StL Redbird's for their win last night in their series with Pittsburgh. Its not like a World Series win or anything, but ya gotta get through the opening rounds before you can go for the brass ring.
All of baseball admires the StL organization. Good front office. Good management. A sound "system" for player drafting and development. Players who know how to play. A baseball-first town. The fam needs to get back there for FFF.
(Actually, there are quite a few folks in this area ...read: Cub's fans...who won't root for the Cardinals. Another example of your enemies enemies being your friends?)
(Actually, there are quite a few folks in this area ...read: Cub's fans...who won't root for the Cardinals. Another example of your enemies enemies being your friends?)
That computer problem yesterday was not an isolated incident. I had "lock-up's" at least a couple more times last night. But I kept "saving" my input, and never lost any long string of data. Really not sure what gremlin has taken up residence in my desktop. I do have an extra layer of spam-filtering and email-capturing on my machine for my securities compliance reasons. The IT folks always say that they can do all this special partitioning work with no problems. Maybe the extra loop-d-loops that they put in to do those jobs causes these hiccups. Whatever. Welcome to my world.
Moving on...
My total 3% foreign transaction charge on my recent Visa statement was a little over $60. Which means that I "spent" around $2,000 on the trip with that card. This does not include the car which was on AmEx for around $1,000 and one charge on a Mastercard for $50 or so. Which means the credit card companies took in an additional $100 for allowing me to use the cards in Europe. Like their marginal costs were any different.
Relatedly, AmEx gave me notice last week that the annual fee for my "Small Business Gold Card" was going from $75 per year to $175 per year. A nice percentage increase, eh? Actually, I do think I was "making" money on the $75 rate. Between my use of that card for car rentals and air fares, as well as some recurring monthly business bills that I have gone to auto-pay, I was getting discount "points" that I converted to cash that had to exceed the annual fee. The egg-heads at AmEx probably did the math. Can you say, "Bait-n-Switch"?
But I close with the note that yesterday was RCL day on Maplecrest. Always a treat to walk into my place after her 4-hour week. It even smells clean! Life's small pleasures.
Make Thursday a good one in your neighborhood.
BCOT
Moving on...
My total 3% foreign transaction charge on my recent Visa statement was a little over $60. Which means that I "spent" around $2,000 on the trip with that card. This does not include the car which was on AmEx for around $1,000 and one charge on a Mastercard for $50 or so. Which means the credit card companies took in an additional $100 for allowing me to use the cards in Europe. Like their marginal costs were any different.
Relatedly, AmEx gave me notice last week that the annual fee for my "Small Business Gold Card" was going from $75 per year to $175 per year. A nice percentage increase, eh? Actually, I do think I was "making" money on the $75 rate. Between my use of that card for car rentals and air fares, as well as some recurring monthly business bills that I have gone to auto-pay, I was getting discount "points" that I converted to cash that had to exceed the annual fee. The egg-heads at AmEx probably did the math. Can you say, "Bait-n-Switch"?
But I close with the note that yesterday was RCL day on Maplecrest. Always a treat to walk into my place after her 4-hour week. It even smells clean! Life's small pleasures.
Make Thursday a good one in your neighborhood.
BCOT
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