At 15 months, Lucas is doing well. He’s a happy, active baby. He’s not very picky about food and he sleeps 11 hours most nights so we’re pretty lucky. He’s been walking around pretty well for quite a while, though he doesn’t get much practice with stairs. He went to the doctor and we learned that he’s in the 95th percentile for height but only the 20th percentile for weight. I’m pretty sure that this means he’ll be at least 6′4″ and only about 160 pounds when he grows up. We’re trying to encourage him to talk more and be a bit more communicative. He understands plenty I think, he just doesn’t verbalize that much. He’s also very cute still though obviously my opinion is biased.

I’m pretty happy with our decision to use day care instead of a nanny. Everyone I know who has used a nanny seems to have some sort of issue with theirs, and has had to fire one or two of them. There seem to be frequent problems with unreliable nannies. Last minute cancelling, moving out of the area/country, language issues(most of the nannies are immigrants). Those problems are in addition to the need to feel comfortable with the person taking care of your child.

I’m not sure why, but a lot of the things I’ve read in the past few days since the killings at Virginia Tech have been anti-gun control. There’s a prevailing belief that people are safer when guns are in the hands of more people. Of course there will be some specific situations where a person will be significantly better off because they had a gun, but its pretty hard to imagine that more lives will be saved. I saw a stat that said in 2000, 26k people died from gun wounds 110k were injured. Of those killed. More than 13k were suicides, 10k were homicides, the rest were accidents and a few legal law enforcement killings. This was actually kind of surprising to me because I figured the accidents would be higher. I think easing gun control laws would make those suicides balloon.

This article shows what happened in the UK due to pretty stringent laws against carrying weapons. I think there’s validity in allowing people to carry weapons, but there is a pretty big difference between a gun and other types of weapons. I have no problem with someone carrying a taser, but there are several differences between a gun most other weapons.

• Guns require only a split second to use. This is not necessarily a bad quality, because many self defense situations require this.
• Guns are lethal, nothing can cause as much damage as quickly. This is obviously why they are so feared. A knife requires much more skill, time, or force to inflict a lethal wound. A taser is designed as non-lethal force.
• A gun is a ranged weapon. When you are in a confrontation with someone with a gun and you reduce the ability for people to run away. Left without an option someone will need to actually take the offensive against a gun wielder which is more dangerous for all involved. Against a taser or a knife you can lengthen the confrontation by trying to run away.

To sum it up, carrying weapons should be allowed as long as they are not instant, lethal and ranged.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that today Google Spreadsheets has added charts. Just hit the new Chart icon and it brings up a dialog box very similar to Excel’s Chart Wizard

I changed my mind and decided to put my money into the Wisdom Tree International MidCap Dividend Fund(Ticker symbol: DIM). The reasons include:

• a continued general wariness of US markets
• a belief that the dividend based indices that Wisdom Tree sells will perform better than typical market cap based indices
• this fund’s eye popping theoretical returns. %34.5 over one year(ending Mar 30), and %16.7 10-year return

So after searching through the variety of ETFs available today, I saw a few things that I hadn’t ever seen before including leveraged ETFs. Among them, the ProShares Ultra S&P 500(Ticker: SSO) does 2x the S&P 500. The article linked here has a good suggestion: instead of putting all your money into an S&P 500 fund, put 1/2 into the Ultra S&P 500 and then the rest into a money market.

I’ve always felt like the average investor isn’t able to take advantage of leverage as well as they they should be able to. The most common tools to use are margin which tends to be too expensive and options which are probably too complex.

I am not sure what the cost of leveraging is, but I’m sure that a big mutual fund company with professional money managers and hundreds of millions of dollars to use can get a better borrowing rate than myself or any average investor.

This article from the the Motley Fool points to some of the dangers of the Ultra shares which include below expected performance in flat markets and high expense ratios.

I’m thinking I’ll put a bit of money into the Ultra Shares and maybe some money into one of the Wisdom Tree Earnings Funds.

I have a bit of extra money so I have been shopping around new potential investments. Because ETF’s are all the rage, I looked around and saw a slew of ETFs based on a series of indexes I’d never heard before from a company called Wisdom Tree. They have designed a couple of different indexes and ETFs for them.

They have a series of dividend based indexes and a few based on Core Earnings. Dividend based ETFs aren’t really that innovative, but the ETFs based on core earnings calculations are. I’ve never heard of core earnings before this, but I like it and I’m kind of intrigued by combining it with some new ETFs so I’m going to be digging into them some more. The problem is that these things have no history of actual performance, when in theory historical performance should be easy to calculate.

Here’s a new business idea: With all these companies offering new ETFs based on formulaic indexes, someone should start an investment analytics company which produces unbiased, third party assessments of what the historical performance of an index would have been. Sort of like a Morningstar for theoretical historical index performance. Maybe such a company already exists, if so tell me. I want to figure out what all these indexes would have done over 50 years.

Here are some software companies that I’ve seen interesting products from.

• VMWare: The first and still best virtualization
• Atlassian: Makers of JIRA and Confluence both very good products.
• Alfresco: Impressive looking open source content management package
• Zenoss: Open source Zope based monitoring
• OpenQRM: Interesting data center virtualization with full linux process migration