Sunday March 20, 2005

I'm Done!

I just finished taking the Certified Financial Planner exam. It was a two day exam, four hours on Friday and six hours with a one hour lunch break on Saturday. I've been studying a lot since the first of the year but I don't know if I passed. It is a very tough exam and the pass rate is only about 60%. Right now I am just glad to be done. I can stop thinking about S corps, QTIP trusts, AMT preference items, SEPs and bond duration for a while. If you are wondering why I'm doing this when I already have a Sun job I like I can refer you to this blog entry from a couple of months ago.

I've got a whole list of ordinary things I get to start doing again like reading, hiking, seeing friends, and playing the piano. I want to finish all the books I put on hold. The three at the top of my list are Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond,and The Book of Salt by Monique Truong.

I read an interesting article by Bill Alpert in the March 18, Barron's Technology Week. The article was titled titled Feeling the Heat from Digital River. Unfortunatly you need to be a Barrons subscriber to read the article online. In essence what Alpert said was that the company Digital River sent a letter to the Minneapolis based brokerage firm of Miller, Johnson, Steichen, Kinnard demanding that MJSK drop coverage of the company forever or be faced with a lawsuit. This happened after the brokerage firm down rated the shares to sell. The article is worth reading in full. Based on the article the actions of the Digital River people were very wrong. But what struck me was that if someone at MJSK had a blog where they discussed the threat, there would probably be an online discussion and in fact a backlash. I think it is interesting to imagine how blogs could help a relatively small company fight actions that are clearly wrong by shining the light of blogdom on them.