Allyen Speaks

Peer-to-peer Lending with Prosper

admin — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:43:40 +0000

I have been a lender with Prosper since the fall of 2007 and am glad to say things are finally going well. There were certainly some bumps in the road those early years but the system seems to have steadied considerably. Investing this way is still not a sure fire home run, great care must be exercised when selecting individuals to loan to, but a handsome return can be had with diligent effort.

I have not borrowed on Prosper but would in a heartbeat if the need arose. It sure beats dealing with banks and helps a fellow investor at the same time.

Join me on Prosper and take a small bite out of the banking system while earning safer/better returns than the stock market.

The Delmonico Cocktail

admin — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 20:24:29 +0000

I made my first Delmonico cocktail last night. I followed Robert Hess’s instructions for the Gin based drink and found it to be quite good. You can watch Robert build one up in the video below.

Prepping the Garden 2011

admin — Fri, 13 May 2011 21:00:20 +0000

Time lapse movie of the whole family out preparing the garden area for this years veggie crop.

2nd Grade Play

admin — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 23:15:50 +0000

Fall Ball 2010

admin — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 23:13:14 +0000

Target Practice with the Kids

admin — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 23:07:11 +0000

Freakonomics Radio!

admin — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 18:34:48 +0000

I just added the Freakonomics Radio feed to my sidebar (bottom right). This is the best podcast anywhere for people with inquiring minds!

Rhode Island Governor is an Idiot

admin — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 18:07:44 +0000

The Providence Journal newspaper reports that Rhode Island Governor Chafee will no longer appear on “talk radio” since it is “ratings-driven, for-profit programming.” (Read the article) He even goes so far as to forbid state employees from appearing on talk radio shows while on the job.

This is clearly an idiotic position to take. A governor needs to communicate with his constituents and instead of using a radio program to do this I guess he can spend taxpayer funds to send newsletters or send letters to answer constituent questions that otherwise could have been answered on air. After reading the article, I continued reading the comments and was struck by the following, very astute, response.

News flash Chafee camp: ALL media is “ratings driven, for-profit programming” (unless it’s tax-payer funded NPR), otherwise it would not have the funds to exist, pay salaries, etc. If media doesn’t have any ratings that means no one listens, reads, watches. So I guees we can infer that the Gov will speak to non-ratings driven media which no one cares about. Or is he just not going to talk at all? Oh, one last thing: what’s wrong with making a profit in the media business? This is pretty unbelievable.

Colorado Highways

admin — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 15:24:41 +0000

After driving 1,960 miles in 4 days across 5 states I have determined that Colorado (my home state) does the poorest job of maintaining it’s interstate highways. The miles of patched and uneven pavement are endless.

Tweet Analysis of Perlmutters District

allyenw — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 19:40:57 +0000

Today, I did a spreadsheet analysis of the public tweets that have been sent to Colorado’s district 7 U.S. Representative Ed Perlmutter regarding the current health care reform bill. The results are profound and indicate that Perlmutter is working against the will of the people.

In the last week, Perlmutter received 3 tweets urging him to vote yes on the bill. In contrast he received 144 tweets demanding a no vote. Of course, several Twitter users, (myself included) sent him multiple tweets. After a final filtering of the data I found that 3 Twitter users are for the current bill and 68 are against it.

So There you have it Ed, 4.4% support you and only 95.6% are against you. I recommend you polish your resume!