Another day without Internet<\/p>\n
I begged. It’s not easy to inject urgency into a phone company. But Mike, the super-tech, is visiting this morning. My fingers are crossed.<\/p>\n
Meantime, I’m on a Verizon “Personal Hotspot,” which gives torpor (i.e. extreme slowness) a whole new meaning.<\/p>\n
What I’ve learned (not much):<\/p>\n
+ DSL really sucks, for a million reasons. Three primary reasons are its slowness, its unreliability and its difficulty to troubleshoot. Lights on a DSL modem don’t always mean what they say. My Internet light is on, but my Internet is off. And my finger hurts from rebooting.<\/p>\n
+ Backups: The personal hotspot on your smartphone lets you connect your laptop via Wi-Fi to your phone. But your phone can be deadly slow, depending on where you are — like where I am — 127 miles north of New York City.<\/p>\n
+ Some people subscribe to both cable and DSL — just to be sure. I’m tempted to get two DSL lines. But, if you can get Google Fiber, get it instantly. It’s over a hundred times as fast as DSL or cable modem line. It’s ten times as fast as Verizon FiOS which was the erstwhile speed king. Don’t even hesitate about Google. Beg to get Google Fiber.<\/p>\n
+ Some laptops connect more easily to Wi-Fi than others do. I don’t know why. But I have two on this morning. One is working with the Hotspot. The other won’t connect. I don’t know why. There’s mystery in networking that I don’t understand. Running Windows troubleshooting sometimes works — right click on your taskbar icon. I’m running Win 7.<\/p>\n
I have a few more birthday presents from readers:<\/p>\n
From Jimmy,<\/p>\n
+ SNDK (a 9 bagger for me when I prematurely sold it),<\/p>\n
+ AKAM (a 46 bagger for me which I bought when the bubble burst and I still hold, and when you’re promoting acclaim on your magazine cover, which may not be the same time I bought). One of your readers also listed this. The current world cup soccer will see AKAM utilized in its real time video streaming and will get its Q2 boost up)<\/p>\n
+ QCOM (a 27 bagger for me which I still hold- it’s a buy and hold forever on a retirement a\/c.)<\/p>\n
From Pete:<\/p>\n
+ STZ – Constellation – is tempting but 2 years run from $15 to $80 supports institutional opinion that this run has to experience some digestion and the current price is certainly about where the long-term bulls were hoping to get to in 2015-16 so it may tread water for a couple of years.<\/p>\n
+ AKAM is a strong story to a layman but I concede this is an investment where we either fin a knowledgeable person to explain the technology we would be investing in or don’t touch because I believe you buy what you know.<\/p>\n
+ LINE or Linn is a very appealing story and they have prospects out to late in this decade that make it worth considering or returning to (as we already have some).<\/p>\n
+ GPT is a stellar portfolio of triple net leased industrial facilities, the fastest growing segment of the real estate market in America, and GPT has been buying up the field and starting to pay a dividend. The case can be made that the stock will triple in 1-2 years.<\/p>\n
+ AMG Affiliated Managers Group manages over $530 billion of assets for folks who know that they need management help (like you). As they’ve grown exponentially these last few years (six-fold from share value of $28-219) they have been on a buying spree. The risk here is whether they can continue to guide such a large ship but we have been adding on recent 10% pullback.<\/p>\n
+ SLB Schlumberger is what investors in GE hope for. Superb management; incredible asset value; accelerated share repurchases; increased dividends (forever), and earnings (since 2008); and A++++ financial strength<\/p>\n
+ BX The absolute best real estate management team around. You saw Schwarzman at Robin Hood in November when the three mavens said southern Europe was the next place to buy… well who has been on a Spanish buying spree this spring? Wanna guess?<\/p>\n
OK. Today’s, yesterday’s and the day before’s birthday present stock recommendations will keep everyone busy.<\/p>\n
I’ll have comments when my cursed DSL line starts working. I have brewed coffee, hot croissants and a six-foot blonde with a bottle of Mazola ready to greet Mike, my DSL technician, when he shows this morning. Mike we love you. We really do. Mike spent 23 years in the Marines, including time in Afghanistan. He’s a super good guy.<\/p>\n
Harry<\/p>\n
See you tomorrow, when the world will, hopefully, be back to “normal.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Another day without Internet I begged. It’s not easy to inject urgency into a phone company. But Mike, the super-tech, is visiting this morning. My fingers are crossed. Meantime, I’m on a Verizon “Personal Hotspot,” which gives torpor (i.e. extreme slowness) a whole new meaning. What I’ve learned (not much): + DSL really sucks, for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26559\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}