This morning, I took a picture of a river near our apartment. This river is now frozen and covered with snow. Yes… winter is coming. Then, I realized that I have taken pictures of that same river on each season, starting from spring to winter.

Enjoy the pictures below… started with winter, followed by fall, summer and spring (all of them are from this year).

WINTER 2009

FALL 2009

SUMMER 2009

SPRING 2009

Anyway, yesterday we visited Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto. I saw a very interesting show from Daryl Maddeaux. He’s stacking rock on rock without glue, gums, nails or anything. He’s just using the law of gravity. Just look at the picture below. It’s amazing, isn’t it?

This is another picture, which looks impossible.

I just read Fortune’s 100 fastest growing companies 2009 and a little bit surprised knowing that Research in Motion is in number 1 position. I don’t have much to say; but here is the top 10 list:

1. Research in Motion (Canada)
2. Sigma Designs (US)
3. Sohu.com (China)
4. Ebix (US)
5. DG Fast Channel (US)
6. CF Industries Holdings (US)
7. Shanda Interactive Entertainment (China)
8. Arena Resources (US)
9. Bruker (US)
10. Potash Corp./Saskatchewan (Canada)

The first picture that I took is a kid who got very excited after seeing a killer whale. Perhaps… just like me, he just saw killer whale for the first time in his life. Hug me, please….

The second picture is just people watching, taking pictures, shooting videos of 2 killer whales.

• The US has made a new weapon that destroys people but keeps the building standing,. Its called the stock market.  – Jay Leno
• Do you have any idea how cheap stocks are ?? Wall Street is now being called Wal Mart Street. – Jay Leno
• What’s the difference between a guy who lost everything in Las Vegas and an investment banker?  A tie!
• What worries me most about the credit crunch, is that if one of my cheques is returned stamped ‘insufficient funds’. I won’t know whether that refers to mine or the bank’s.
• more quotes… visit The Disciplined Investor.

I have this one also in my Google Reader’s bookmark for a while; but haven’t had a chance to post it.

BusinessWeek always publishes “The Most Innovative Companies” list every year. Here is the top 10 companies who made to the list this year.

1. Apple (USA)
2. Google (USA)
3. Toyota Motor (Japan)
4. Microsoft (USA)
5. Nintendo (Japan)
6. IBM (USA)
7. Hewlett-Packard (USA)
8. Research in Motion (Canada)
9. Nokia (Finland)
10. Wal-mart Stores (USA)

Although I’m not a Canadian (yet); it’s nice to see a Canadian company made to the list.

It is from BusinessWeek web site, showing the history of McDonald packaging over the past 32 years. It’s pretty interesting, isn’t it?

Before continue reading…. this is just a random posting from a programmer. If you are non-programmer, you might not understand this posting at all.

Recently, I read about The Tao of Programming and found some interesting ’doctrine’ or ‘principles’ for programmers. I just want to share some of them here. For complete list of Tao of Programming, you can either read Geoffrey James’ book or visit the online version.

After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless.

Let the programmers be many and the managers few — then all will be productive.

You can demonstrate a program for a corporate executive, but you can’t make him computer literate.

Without the wind, the grass does not move. Without software, hardware is useless.

Chris Umiastowski from TD Newcrest has just released a video about BlackBerry Growth in Indonesia. Here is the summary:

• There are currently about 200,000 BlackBerry subscribers in Indonesia.
• BlackBerry subscribers grew ~450% in 2008.
• Indonesia could have +1 million BlackBerry subscribers by end of this year.

The $1 million question is: where do we go from here? Are we going to test March low? Nobody knows… (I guess). What we can do is comparing the current recession with previous ones. New York Times has a very nice interactive chart to compare current bear market with 1932, 1942, 1974, 1987 and 2002.

Bespoke Investment Group also has released another nice chart about 2 weeks ago comparing current bear market with 1938.

What’s my prediction? Based on the picture from Bespoke, I think we still have to test our low.