Lighting with Ikea & buy stocks online

DIODER lights.

Last week I bought LED multi-colour lights (DIODER lights from IKEA - €59.00) for the back of my 32" mounted LCD TV. I wished to create the appearance of the Philips Ambilight TVs without breaking my budget. It was my first purchase from the IKEA in Dublin and I was quite pleased with the service. The store itself seems to be always full of people wandering if not buying. The store seems to be laid out in such a way that you have to walk through every single section to find anything. This means that you must zig zag through this massive store even if your looking for no more than a light bulb. I find this aspect of the store quite annoying, but I guess it has probably worked for them in numerous other countries so guess don't fix something that ain't broke.

The lights themselves are very well made and well-thought out. There are a number of different set ups which you can have. They can be set up in a row or seperately and have a number of settings, you can pick one of seven colours, set them to flash from colour to colour or to slowly merge from colour to colour which is quite atmospheric and relaxing. All in all I am very happy with these lights and are worth their price. I plan to have photos of this in my next post.

Watched an exciting if rather poor game between Man City and Burnley which ended 3-3 over the weekend. Burnley well-deserved their draw against an opponent who appeared at times to want to be in a cosy living room rather than brave the November rain in Manchester. It seems Man City's 'Galacticos' were lacking enthusiasm and hunger however they still managed to claw back a two nil deficit. It seemed Adebayor didn't want to get his jersey dirty and was lackadaisical at best. Man city's defence, especially Lescott, was left in no man's land for Burnley's 87th minute equaliser. All in all Mark Hughes needs to instil in his side some organisation and cohesion. As a team they only play as individuals and will not enter into the top 4 without playing as more of a team.

I found the kaching website in a post on lifehacker. Kaching is "an investing talent marketplace where individuals investors can get access to the best investing talent". I have been playing with my own virtual portfolio and am currently $9,000 up at the end of this week. While this sounds impressive, I have bought well over $1.5 million in shares so it is only a 0.1% gain. But of course this is only in over a week so at least it is still a positive.

I have had a distant interest in stocks and shares but never really a great understanding of theory behind them. I hope that buying and selling virtual stock will help me to learn the basics (without losing my hard earned cash). I have been following a couple of geniuses and this seems to help me choose my stock. I haven't really decided on a strategy at the moment I am only trying to keep my virtual stocks floating. Anyone interested or studying stocks or business should consider joining this site. The Lifehacker website as mentioned above is a very useful site with some interesting posts every week.

The Kaching website is free to join and it is also possible to invest real cash in the stock market. The website has an option where you can follow 'geniuses' with your cash, buying the stocks they buy at the same time and selling them at the same time as your 'genius'. A user is made a 'genius' if they have logged a year trading on the kaching website and have an Investing IQ of at least 140 (this is calculated using a variety of business metrics). This seems an interesting and innovative idea but I would be cautious at investing similar to another user as if you were not extremely careful who you picked you could be left penniless. I understand that the minimum amount you can invest using the website is $3000 so I guess this would mean that it would attract serious investors who have probably invested heavily in the stock markets before.

Juventus had a rather tentative victory midweek in the Champions League away to Macabi Haifa. Haifa have a great ability to prevent skilful teams from playing and that is certainly what they achieved against the 'Old Lady'. Only with the help of a lucky deflection did Camoranesi manage to put the ball in the net. Juventus were also assisted by a fine performance by Buffon who had to pull off some fantastic saves to keep his clean sheet. Juventus should confirm their place in the last 16 if they beat Bayern Munich in the upcoming games, although they have a chance to overtake Bordeaux if they to beat them in France.

Juventus did up their performance against Atalanta however last night, with a commanding 5-2 victory. Camoranesi had another fine performance, scoring two goals in two minutes, and may be emerging finally as one of the leaders in the team. Mauro scored with his head, in a similar fashion to hurt-breaking goal against Ireland. While many see this as surprising I do not. Camoranesi has always been great in the air even with his diminutive stature and has a great ability to lose his marker in the box. Admittedly perhaps his size means that he is not given the defensive attention in the air that his ability deserves. It was an all round good performance with Diego and Trezeguet getting on the score sheet, Trezeguet reaching fourth in the overall all-time top scorers for Juventus.

I still feel however that they still require some additional players in the January transfer window perhaps another attacking fullback and a winger. For these positions my favoured choices would be Sagna (or even Rafinha) and Aguero although both will come at a price. Certainly Aguero will if the rumours that Chelsea are planning are bid are true. Although he did some two crackers versus Chelsea midweek. The new-comer Cacaeres, who arrived from Barcelona in the Summer, has shown potential and hopefully will continue to affirm his place in the squad. Grosso has been a solid addition also. Juventus as a team is lacking a leader in central midfield, someone who can control the pace of a game and to pull the strings, especially with Del Piero continuously injured and the retirement of Pavel Nedved.

I will also hopefully receive an invite to the Beta session of Google Wave in a couple of days.

From what I have read it seems that this may be a very interesting addition to Google's portfolio of apps. Google Wave attempts to improve on the email standard with live replies and live collaboration. It is becoming understood as the what email would look like if it had been invented today. It could in fact eventually take over from twitter. In contrast to twitter it is open source and therefore can be used by any other website or company which wants to use it, while twitter is confined to just one website.

For more information click on Google Wave.

I am also hoping to get a laptop in the near future, I am looking at the DELL Studio XPS 13. Is a lovely designed laptop and seems to have a good level of specs and of course a backlit keyboard. I am looking forward to trying Windows 7 on a high spec notebook as I currently am only running it on a notebook 5 years old. It is quite impressive that Windows 7 can work on this notebook at all, I would bet that Windows Vista would not.

I will continue my blog sometime next week. I plan to embed photos of my study area (you can see other people's here) and hopefully to update you on Google Wave.