BagOfNothing.com

• Yesterday morning I decided to get a breakfast taco at Fuzzy’s Taco Shop, which is a fast food kind of place.  The guy helping at the register just finished taking a phone order from TXU that totaled just under $9,000.  That’s a bunch of tacos.
• Did anyone on the original Dream Team have any tattoos?
• I use to say “shoot me an email” way too much.
• I had a coworker that complained about strangers knocking on our office door trying to sell stuff, but this person also brought his daughter’s fundraising efforts to the office.
• One of my more favorite coworkers would bring her daughter into the office and have her do a little presentation with notecards as a crutch.  I think her last line was “it’s OK to say no.”  I actually thought that was cool.
• Romney had a big zinger toward Gov Good Hair last night, accusing him of not writing his own book.  And it appears our good haired governor misspoke: Perry Misstated Relationship With Dying Woman
• When Romney and Gov Good Hair are going at it, it’s entertaining to see the facial expressions of the one who isn’t speaking.
• That scene in one of the Superman movies where Superman takes a lump of coal and squeezes it so hard that it becomes a diamond came up in a conversation on day.  That would be a pretty cool party trick.
• Google’s Code of Conduct states that they prefer dogs over cats (item e).
• I hope all those unprotected Libyan weapons don’t end up in terrorist hands.
• An eBay auction where you can buy a can of New Coke.
• A father took his kids to Sequoia National Park in California where the scenes involving the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi were filmed.  The kids are big fans of Star Wars, and during their trip they tried to spot Ewoks in the forest but came up empty, after all, the father told them that Ewoks are really shy and hide all the time.  But when they got back home, the father edited their pictures to include pictures of Ewoks hidden in the background.  Read more about it and see the pics here.
• WFAA anchor/reporter Debbie Denmon is filing a discrimination suit against the station because of her weight.  In that same article, I learned that Dale Hansenis 63 – I wonder how much longer he sticks around?
• An island in which there’s between one and five snakes per square meter.
• No more special last meals for Texas death row inmates.
• HP fired their CEO and gave him $25 million to go away.  I guess that’s the new American dream, to perform so poor at your job that you get paid enough money to live many lifetimes to leave.  I guess that’s why it’s important to coddle corporations with tax cuts, so they can hire workers instead of giving a huge payout to a single person they are letting go.  Wait, what?
• I saw a report in which about a dozen Southwest Airlines’ planes have been vandalized, that you can see Arabic writing, but only when the auxiliary power is turned on due to some kind of chemical process.
• 46 Mothers Shave Their Heads for Childhood Cancer Awareness

If you ever read the Malcolm Gladwell book Outliers, then you know that some people were just born at the right place at the right time.  The one example that sticks in my mind was Bill Gates, who was born to a family that was pretty well off where he could attend private school, which had a connection with the University of Washington, which allowed him access to their mainframe computers, and when he didn’t have access he ‘cracked the code” and would routinely sneak out of his room in the middle of night just to code.  And lucky for him, he was born at the time when the computer age was going to take off.

All of that came to mind when I started to look at my 401(k) and wondered if I entered the workforce a few years earlier or later, would I be better off?

I started my first job out of college (well, out of Abilene) on October 18, 1999.  If I use the Dow as a measure of market performance for a my 401(k), my rate of return would be 6.54%.

If I would have started the workforce four years earlier in 1995, my rate of return would have been 122.68% – and increase of 116.14%.

Yup, I totally missed out on that nice dot-com bubble, but how would things be if I started working four years later, in Oct 2003?  Well, it turns out my rate of return would have been 10.34%,  which is 3.8% higher than my current rate of return – nothing great, but definitely better.

You can’t help when you are born, you can just try to play with the cards you are dealt, but sometimes it’s fun and interesting to take a look at such things.

#firstworldpains