My first observation after only a few days here is that I have a lot more time to do the things that I want or need to do. It’s only 7 pm and I’ve already accomplished everything I set out to do today and had dinner. There is an empowering feeling that the evening is my oyster to enrich myself through reading and writing in my journal or to do any other of myriad activities. To be clear, I don’t think that television programs are a bad thing - I enjoy watching several, including almost nightly viewings of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. I do, however, want to do away with the notion of surfing the channels to pass the time until bed. My Tivo has already helped a great deal to reduce my surfing, but some of it has been replaced with watching reruns or “suggestions” that the Tivo picks up for me.

I think one of the first things I do when I get back to San Francisco will be to turn off Tivo Suggestions to rid myself of the temptation of low-hanging entertainment fruit. Similarly, shows like House that I Tivo could just as easily be picked up on DVD and watched in a binge on a sick day. My hope is that one day I won’t be scared of the prospect of not having a dedicated device in my house to record television for me - I’m getting steadily more confident that I’m not missing out on anything other than life.

• Walt Mossberg (WSJ): Leopard Faster, Easier than Vista
• David Pogue (NYT): Apple Offers New Goodies in Leopard System
• Edward C. Baig (USA Today): Leopard, Apple’s new Mac operating system, hits all the right spots

Something that touched me was to have the work that my team is responsible in part for called out in Walt Mossberg’s review:

“In fact, every piece of software and hardware I tried on two Leopard-equipped Macs — a loaned laptop from Apple and my own upgraded iMac — worked fine, exhibiting none of the compatibility problems that continue to plague Vista. My old Hewlett-Packard inkjet printer, for which Vista lacks the proper software, worked instantly in Leopard, even over the network. And, unlike with Vista, it was able to print on both sides of the page. I popped my old Verizon cellphone modem card into the test Leopard laptop and it worked, too, with no software installation or tweaking.”

I can’t be prouder of my colleagues and all of their hard work and dedication to excellence.

So I need a break.

So I am taking one.

On 9 December, I’m flying to Tokyo to travel around southeast Asia for four weeks. My plan is still coming together, but the countries that I am expecting to visit are Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and possibly Laos and/or the Phillippines. I suspect I’ll do Japan last, as I’d like to partake in the New Year’s celebrations in Tokyo before flying back to San Francisco on 4 January.

In the two months leading up to my trip, I’ll be planning a rough itinerary and securing the necessary visas and innoculations. Generally speaking, though, I’m expecting to more or less bum around, going from place to place following my interests on my own schedule. I dislike “destination tourism,” in which people write down a list of things they plan to see in between meals at places that serve American food before leaving a country in which they never spoke to someone outside of a consumer context. Rather, I like to wander around and take in the people and their culture, customs, and cuisine. My style will be faciliated by the fact that I’ll be traveling alone for most if not all of the trip.

Thailand is probably the place I’m most excited to visit, as I’ve heard nothing but good stories about the beautiful environment and friendly people. There are myriad possibilities there, ranging from partying with the European and Oceanic visitors to scuba diving to trekking in the wilderness. I suppose I’ll need to pick up a camera.

More details to come…

The bank also automatically transferred $25 from my checking to my savings, untold to me when setting up the account (and I read everything!). This seems like a nefarious scheme concocted to make people bounce checks… I only keep what I need for a check to clear in my low-interest checking, leaving my savings, well, in savings. Here they go moving $25 out of checking into savings as some sort of favor to me, and had I written a check it would have bounced, leading to fees and hassles. As a further kick in the stomach, WF deducts any fees from your checking instead of your savings, also in an apparent effort to get you to bounce a check.

Now that I’ve been bitten by them three times to me in as many months, I will no longer do banking with Wells Fargo. That’s their loss, particularly when I leave before they recouped their investment in me, and warn potential customers in this review. I’m moving to E*Trade bank after next month’s rent check is taken care of. E*Trade will reimburse my ATM fees anywhere, and has the highest checking (3.25 APY) and savings (5.05 APY) interest rates in town. I guess I’ll be moving my ING account, which hasn’t kept up interest-rate-wise into E*Trade as well. At this point I have no idea how brick-and-mortar banks will survive much longer now that online banks are better across the board.

Off the top of my paycheck, 10% of the money goes into Apple’s Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP). Every six months, I get to buy Apple’s well-performing stock at a nice discount, 15% off of the stock price at the beginning or end of the period, whichever is lower. There are different tax issues depending on when I sell the stock, and it is favorable tax-wise to hold onto it for at least a year. The plan for stock sale proceeds is to use some of them to treat myself to the occasional vacation and to roll the rest into other investments.

The next 12.5% of my paycheck goes into my 401k. At my age, I can afford to be fairly aggressive with my investing, and have divided my investments between a number of mutual funds.

40% of money is divided into two blended fund investments, which do all the work for me based on when I will be retiring or on a general notion of balanced investing. 10% goes into real-estate, which I figure I am buying into low given the subprime collapse. The other half is in investments I picked out to do a similar thing to what the BGI Lifepath 2045 (retirement year) plan does. Of that half, 54% goes into large cap stocks, 10% into mid cap, 6% into small cap, 22% into foreign, and 8% into bonds.

My total IRA allocation is:

20% FBALX - Fidelity Balanced Fund (Moderate Allocation)
20% BGI LifePath 2045 N Fund (Professionally-Managed Retirement-Year-Based Fund)

10% TAREX - Third Avenue Real Estate Value (Speciality Real-Estate)

14% FCNTX - Fidelity Contrafund (Large-Cap Growth)
5% VIIIX - Vanguard Institutional Index Fund Institutional Plus (Large-Cap Blend)
4% VITSX - Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund Institutional Class (Large-Cap Blend)
2% FGRIX - Fidelity Growth & Income Portfolio (Large-Cap Blend)
2% LSGRX - Loomis Sayles Growth Y (Large-Cap Growth)

5% VEXRX - Vanguard Explorer Fund Admiral Class (Mid-Cap Growth)

2% VSCIX - Vanguard Small-Cap Index Fund Institutional Class (Small-Cap Blend)
1% NSCRX - Nuveen NWQ Small Cap Value Fund R (Small-Cap Value)

7% DODFX - Dodge & Cox International Stock (Foreign Large-Cap Value)
4% VIDMX - Vanguard Institutional Developed Markets Index Fund (Foreign Large-Cap Blend)

2% GSHIX - Goldman Sachs High Yield Institutional (High-Yield Bond)
2% VBTIX - Vanguard Total Bond Market Index Fund Institutional Class (Intermediate-Term Bond)

Here’s the last year of data (where we bear in mind that you should only really mess with your 401K mutuals once a year):

Daily closing prices for my portfolio can be viewed here.