Saturday Weigh In and Linkstuff

Since Mike’s stopped the Saturday posts, I figured it’d be worth giving you one last one :-).

Weight was 177.5 lbs this week. Not bad compared to Mike’s 180.5, but pretty miserable compared to my 145 lbs low. Mike’s taller than I am, so from a BMI perspective he’s kicking my ass.

You can see some of the sites / posts I recently viewed and liked at my StumbleUpon page.

Paul Graham wrote a thought provoking piece Cities and Ambition. I lived in SF, and I agree that the ambition there was power. No idea *what* Toronto’s ambition could be. Maybe envy?

I came across PF Buzz this week. It’s basically Digg for PF blogs.

I had a laugh when Thicken My Wallet worried about not spending enough on wedding gifts. I’ve been budgeting $50 for most friends who get married. TMW is increasing from $100. I guess Mr. Cheap has to loosen the purse strings a bit. A while ago I had another laugh at TMW’s site. I clicked over to Greezeo since he was answering some questions there. The by-line was a woman’s name, and for a second I thought “is TMW a woman?”. Its amusing, since a blogger’s (or any writer’s) gender doesn’t make much of a difference most of the time, and I wasn’t 100% sure whether TMW was a man or not (his writing has always seemed pretty darn masculine to me, but I couldn’t remember whether I’d read anything that definitely said he was a man). Turns out, the by-line was someone else and he is a man.

Growth in Value had some great links to info about the recent Canadian banks reports.

Million Dollar Journey has some good tips on getting discounts. I haggle like a demon when I’m traveling, but find it hard when I’m at home. His approach is pretty well what I use, so I should try it in Canada. He got a 60% discount off of WAL*MART, which is pretty damn impressive. I wonder if he’s ever convinced a store to pay him to take something away?

Money Gardener added some GE to his portfolio. Without having dug too far into the company, I really liked the looks of it right now too, so I’m jealous (I don’t mind the STARVING part of being a student, but not having extra cash to buy stock kinda sucks…)

Note – Mike added this link later.

Violent Acres wrote yet another brilliant post on gift giving on which I couldn’t agree more.  People getting married are the worst – I know people who are in their 30’s, make good money (ie $75k+ each), own their own house/condo and STILL insist on having some sort of fund raising events just because they are tying the knot.  Screw you!!