It's raining heavily and all the parties I've been invited to are far enough away that I can't be bothered to drive.

So I decided to indulge myself a bit at home.

Tried a can of the Chocolate flavor from these guys, found at my local gourmet market.

Pretty unique stuff. For starters it comes in a really nice can. Yes, a can. No cheap cardboard containers and plastic tops for these guys. This is really high-end.

The stuff inside is really good. Really good. Some of the best I've had. On par with, maybe even a bit better than the Godiva Belgian Dark Chocolate ice cream, and a far richer than the various Haagen Dazs flavors. A good friend of mine who is a chef used to make similarly good stuff in his own kitchen, but that's the only time I think I've had anything quite as good.

And of course, the can is a nice little souvenir that will most likely soon be filled with my spare change.

That said, at more than double the price of anything else, it's not something I'm likely to be buying often.

-btc

There's a guy around here in LA that my friends and I joke about alot. He's a bit older, and shows up to just about every event you can imagine. It's the holiday period and I've been invited to lots of professional organizations' celbrations, so I've run into him a lot.

I don't even remember the guy's name, which should say something. My friends and I often refer to him as "Charlie Brown," because he has that sort of look.

His MO is unchanged for several years. He'll ask you what you do, then tell you how he does something in some related field, and list the organizations he's a member of that are associated with that business in some way. I can't remember him telling me about something he actually did or was doing, just the ever-changing laundry-list of organizations and associations that he's joined.

When I first met him he was regularly proclaiming himself as an "Executive Member of VIC" (the now-defunct Venice Interactive Community, which you could become an "Executive Member" of in exchange for $200). He continued to remind people of that meaningless "title" for at least two years after the organization died. More recently he's talking up his involvement in a few entertainment-focused professional groups.

Last night, at a party I attended briefly, he approached me and asked me -- for the fiftieth time, more or less -- what I do. I told him "it hasn't changed since last week." He was surprised. "Did we talk last week?" he asked. I said that yes we had and told him where. I also mentioned that he's introduced himself to me dozens of times in recent years, and that if he wanted to make an impression, he might want to bother remembering people.

After all that, I still don't know what he does.

As I'm feeling finally free of a family situation that has dominated my life for more than a year, I'm now looking for full-time work and rebuilding my somewhat dormant network.

Fellow Anderson Alum Josh Li has started a networking blog. In addition to running our informal Anderson jobs list, he's also a terrific networker.

If you're in a similar situation, his comments are worth checking out here, and also in my blog list at the left.

-btc

A few days ago I was invited to hear a presentation at the Milken Institute by two of the authors of Rethinking Bank Regulation: Till Angels Govern. Over the course of several years, the authors assembled information from over 200 countries to try to identify the effectiveness of various regulation schemes around the world.

They're concern was that various international banking groups were promulgating standards and "best practices" for the developing world, including the standards of the Basel Committee, but that the effectiveness of those practices and standards had really not been tested outside a few large, well-developed and well-governed countries.

The data they assembled and presented are exhaustive, but several key themes emerge.

The first key observations they noted relate to the structure of banking in various countries. They note that even in major industrialized nations, the size, scope and relative importance of banking systems vary greatly, as does the percentage of foreign ownership and the ease of entry by offshore banks. They note that regulatory schemes tend to vary based on the nature of the systems in each country.

The second set of observations relate to the effectiveness of different regulatory schemes. They note that the vast bulk of the Basel II recommendations, for example, are focused on the activities of supervisory agencies, the second largest section deals with capital requirements, and only 23 our of thousands of pages dealt with regulations to promote transparency.

Their findings suggest that the correct approach, in most cases, is exactly the opposite of that which the experts suggest.

I have spent much of the past two days figuring out the optimum technique for applying eye drops to a cat.

I have discovered that there is no such thing as an optimum technique for applying eye drops to a cat.

Wrap in a towel, hold down body with right arm, push up head with right hand while simultaneously pulling down the eyelid and applying drops from bottle in left hand seems to work best.

"Best" being a relative term.

Sorry for the lack of posts to this blog lately. Family matters intervened and I was away from home, the cats and the markets for a couple of weeks.

Now back on schedule and moving forward.

There's been a lot written about Microsoft (NasdaqNM:MSFT) lately, and the stock has certainly been performing nicely, up from a low just below $24, to a recent high above $28.

But I've begun to sense quite a bit of hyperbole and unrealistic expectations built into much of the recent analysis. Much of this has to do with the impact of the realease of the upcoming "Vista" operating system and the presumed impact on an upgrade cycle.

At the present time, two factors appear to be pushing Microsoft.

1) The excitement over the release of the XBox 360.
2) The excitement over the potential of the upcoming release of Vista on 2006 earnings.

I can't comment much on the XBOX impact, and will leave this to others, but it's clear that this business will always be dominated by profits from the games themselves, not from the consoles which by many accounts are actually sold at a loss.

However, I can comment about the likely impact of Vista, and I think many of the analysts are overstating the likely impact on both Microsoft and on a corporate upgrade cycle in general. Those who have followed my opinions on this realize that this is nothing new. And until Microsoft comes up with something really new themselves, it's likely to remain my take on things.