maynardcase.co.uk linkfest

Bored? Annoyed that I’ve not updated this for a good five days now? Why not check out the professionals, with my links to high quality photoblogs:

Maynard Case’s Photoblog bookmarks!

I can tell you’re excited. I also have a load of interesting pics from my phone and camera that I’d like to post but haven’t got time in the evenings. Hopefully tonight…

Was a most excellent weekend, and the Saturday’s activity was paintballing up in North London somewhere. Dav had decided to get engaged and foolishly agreed to come along for his stag do:

Steve and Trevor gearing up

Dav getting ready for the first battle

First blood paint on Trevor

The Hunt: The stag and the best man get the honour of getting dressed in highly reflective gear, with forty other paintballers trying to shoot them

The end result of the slaughter

Admittedly in our office foyer and therefore probably shipped over from New Zealand but there you go.

New research based on this photo suggests that the pot of gold at the bottom of the rainbow is actually located between Raynes Park and Wimbledon train stations. Estate agents were quick to back up this theory.

Bastards. I think that macho ads like this are really, really annoying. This is because of a few very simple facts:

• The stock market generally goes up (over a long period of time, where long > 5 years)
• At the moment the FTSE index has been going up steadily for about a year
• Funds that are managed by people generally don’t do any better than “tracker” funds which just invest in whatever is in an index (eg. the FTSE 100). So rather than having to make decisions about what shares to buy or sell, you just invest in all the companies in the index. Zero effort and so a lower charge. These tracker funds generally perform better than 75% of managed funds over a long period of time (ie. 5 years or more).

So these idiots can spout off about “beating the market” and many people will believe them. And the reason that they are advertising now: because the market’s going up and so any fool can give decent returns on the money (barring anything disasters). The fact that there’s only a 1 in four chance of them doing better than the trackers is obviously not very important to their marketing department.

urghnnhhhh… wake me up at waterloo

Visiting Dave in Birmingham, part 2: we get up stupidly early (like, before nine) on Sunday for some reason. By about 11 we’re down at the Rockface for a spot of climbing, which devolves into a competition to do silly moves on the bouldering wall:

Ken off to a good start

Tim hangin’ tough

Me looking silly

Joss feels the burn…

… then hits the deck!

Went up to see Dave this weekend with Joss, and met up with a couple of Dave’s Bristol friends - Tim and Ken. A large amount of booze was consumed, and it turns out that playing Jenga seriously while drunk is quite good fun…

Calvin and Hobbes is one of my favourite cartoons. If you’re a fan but you want a specific strip, have a look at the Calvin and Hobbes Extensive Strip Search.

This wonderful site is the result of many hours of painful effort, writing a description of every single strip. Very impressive.

[Added to my cartoon bookmarks]