I subscribe to Google’s investing email subscription and saw someone posted that Google is now the 5th highest-valued company in the U.S.

It’s time once again to step back, pause, and marvel at the growth of Google. As of the close of trading today, 10/30/2007, a company that is roughly a decade old and that has been a publicly traded company
for only a little over 3 years is now the *5th* largest company in the US by market cap.

A couple months ago we were roughly 15th. Companies this large don’t
usually shift around in the list this quickly, especially in the upward direction. We’ve grown and much of the rest of the market has shrunk recently. In trading today we went up over 2% and closed with a market cap of $216.86B (according to Yahoo Finance) while Proctor and Gamble, the previous #5 went down 4%, closing at $215.18B (after hours the gap continued to widen). Some of the other companies we’ve passed recently include Walmart, Johnson and Johnson, Chevron, Cisco, Citigroup, and Bank of America. The only larger US companies by market cap are now AT&T, Microsoft, GE, and Exxon.

Worldwide, Google appears to have just broken into the top 20 based on data from a recent article, but I don’t know how far in. (It’s harder to get a good up-to-date list of top companies by market cap worldwide. If someone knows a good site to do this, let me know.)

Wow!

That’s the amount of dollars the Board of Trustees have agreed to pay if they asked her to resign. Obviously, it’s going to take a lot to convince the BoTs to see if it’s worth two million dollars to replace her. Or the FSSA (facuty, staff, students and alumni) finds a way to come up with that amount of money and they can say “Look, we have two million dollars. Please step down.” but that’s just me and my radical thinking. I got this information from where else? Ridorlive.com. Look below about Jane’s contract.

This post isn’t going to be of a Pulitizer’s prize material but a curious observation and opinion by a person who was once a Gallaudet student during his first year of college in 1999 and has been following the protest closely.

The volcano has erupted once again. The protest first started in last May when students were unhappy with the selection of the next University president in Jane K. Fernandes and felt that the presidential search process was unfair and flawed. They also felt that JKF was pampered by I. King Jordan as they both hold a close friendship and JKF has risen all the way from her first job as a Vice President of the Laurent Clerc National Center (which is ironic, that I will explain a moment later), then became a Provost and now she is set to be the next President.

Students feel that with the close relationship between Jordan and she, Jordan would still have some voice/input/control in the future Gallaudet decision-making and isn’t completely out of the picture, basically leaving the current administration intact without going through a big change that would leave him behind the ship. It isn’t very hard to see this because last weekend, two Gallaudet buildings were already named after him and his wife. Perhaps Jordan felt that he deserved some kind of a special party (how does a lobster bisque soup sound to you?) and two buildings being honored after him and his wife for all his hard work, fund-raising skills and one deaf quote that has made him famous, “Deaf people can do anything but hear.” This only enables students to disagree further from him and his administration, feeling that there is an oppression and a suspected fiscal management—-a corruption at play. Gallaudet probably would need more than ten professional CPAs or positions equivalent of IRS agents to audit every cent that has come into the university. Something is sure to find there.

Now, back to the protest, it seems that the protest has caught on a wild fire when someone had an idea of locking out the HMB building where most classes and professors’ classes are. This is strategic because it doesn’t require as many people as it would need to block the whole campus. As in most other protests, they are like a fire or a car engine; all they need is a spark to get them going. Gallaudet students got that spark when DSP decided to get physical with students as one DSP officer tried to choke a student after students kept standing in his way. This was caught on the video. Another DSP officer used a mace spray in an attempt to “shoo” them away out of the HMB building. How did the Administration respond? The public office released a statement that no such accidents occurred and no one was hurt. They probably weren’t aware that those two incidents were actually caught on the videos. So, this only added more to the fire. Now, the Gallaudet Protest has found their momentum, with more people now convinced that there is something that needs to be done about the administration, starting with JKF’s resignation.

To really understand the whole protest, it isn’t as complicated as it sounds. There is a conflict in the philosophy between JKF (and IKJ too) and the FSSA. JKF has announced that in her future plans, she has a goal to include all communication modes from ASL to cued speech to pure oral. She even supports the idea of having an oral interpreter in a classroom if there are some oral students who have no knowledge of ASL and wouldn’t understand what a deaf professor may be signing. JKF sees a problem that with the declining number in unique deaf students who attend deaf schools like myself and my parents, there would be less enrollment numbers to Gallaudet. To help boost the number, she feels that she’d need to welcome ALL kinds of students who have some hearing loss or all of it regardless of what communication mode they use. Gallaudet will give them the accessibility they need when they get to the campus, making it more mainstreamed than it is now.

It may sound good and may help with the enrollment numbers but that’s not what Gallaudet is about. The founder of Gallaudet University, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, went on a ship to Europe to seek what would be the best possible education for the deaf people and in that, he discovered sign language and he personally brought Laurent Clerc, a deaf educator, to America to teach sign language to the deaf. He had to convince Clerc to come with him and there is a rumor that Gallaudet’s first deaf pupil, Alice Cosworth, was the reason why Clerc came, in which they eventually did get married.

With a language that all deaf people can understand, they began to communicate their thoughts better, thus, education is possible. However, the sign language, now known as American Sign Language (ASL), have been going through so much oppression that black slaves or Jews would be embarrassed to hear. For the longest time, hearing people thought ASL was not a language and that it’s equivalent to apes making some funny gestures and in the Milan conference back in 1880, it was decided that ASL must be banned and only oral method shall be taught. As a result, Deaf teachers lost their jobs and ASL almost became extinct but who was there to save the language? None other than Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and the college he founded.

Jane K. Fernandes was a former Vice President at the Laurent Clerc National Center. Instead of promoting or encouraging ASL to be the primary language all across the campus, she does not expect a high level of fluency from each faculty, staff, or a student. Now, she is selected to be the next President and her vision is to welcome all communication modes and expects that such accessibility is to be met. In short, she does not consider ASL to be a requirement to be a student or to work at the university. A good example would be in order to apply to colleges, you’d need to write a strong good essay in English, right? At Gallaudet University, you don’t have to be. There is no specific ASL screening test for faculty, staff and students. Basically, it is possible to waltz through the university with a little knowledge of ASL. FSSA doesn’t want that. They want to see ASL to be as natural as other languages and not to take a backseat to other languages. It seems that the real problem still lies between us and hearing people that they still treat ASL as secondary language and do not want to appoint a person who is deaf-centric and use ASL solely without resorting to what they always want to see—a deaf person who can talk.

This is precisely why FSSA does not want her to be the next leader for the deaf. ASL is like oxygen; we can’t live without it.

UNITY FOR GALLAUDET!

*disclaimer - all of the above was written with speculation and does not claim to be factual or accurate.

Since last year, as I started to have a steady income by having a real job instead of applying to graduate schools, I decided to read more about finance so I bought some books: the automatic millionaire, smart couples finish rich, and the millionaire next door. Obviously you could tell that I want to be a millionaire and unlike my dad, I can’t become a millionaire by buying those lottery tickets every week.

First of all, please don’t think I have a greedy side that I want to become a millionaire. It’s because I want to be finanically independent so that I don’t have to work well into my sixties. Life is way too short for that. Besides, I’m fascinated by this idea that you don’t have to be earning six figures to be able to become a millionaire. You can earn as little as 40k to achieve a million dollars in your savings.

After reading those books, I learned quite a number of things. Most of them are pretty common sense like don’t put yourself in debt. Good thing to know that the only debt I have is my car loan, which I hope to pay off in about 2 years. I learned that being rich and being wealthy aren’t the same. They are two different things. Another thing I learned was to always pay yourself first, which means money goes into your savings immediately after you receive your paycheck. The author, David Bach, suggests that you save 20% of what you earn and you’ll be well on your way to being finanically sound. “The Next Door Millionaire” author said he found that what set them (the millionaires) apart from millon other people who are in debt more than 10k is because they simply track their money and keep a cash flow spreadsheet. After reading those words, I decided to keep a spreadsheet of my cash flow—how much I earn and how much I spend. It may turn to be the best move I have ever made in my whole life.

In the past, I thought I had a pretty good idea of where my money was going and thought I was doing a pretty good job at saving my money but I was completely wrong. After putting a large sum of my savings on buying a new car, paying off all the outstanding transactions that my college had billed me before they would send me my diploma, and moving into a place far from my hometown, my savings was pretty much blown. It didn’t help much that I was in my “college guy” mode that I thought if I’m going to get a job in the future, I’ll spend this money now and I’ll get it back later when I get a job and put it into savings. Nope, it didn’t exactly work out like that.

So, I started a spreadsheet about a year ago and I thought I would have abandoned it a long ago but thanks to online banking, it was actually easy to track my money and record every transaction in my spreadsheet. A year passed, my spreadsheet begins to look like, well, a spreadsheet, instead of a blank empty white spreadsheet. I could have sworn that it was done by a CPA, not someone like me. Maybe it’s just me but I find it fascinating to look at my spreadsheet and see how much I spent on electronic stuffs, foods, gas, clothes, etc. And realizing the mistakes I’ve made, which is a lot.

This is how my 2005 budget looks like:

• In the foods category, I spent about $3,000 or about $250 a month on groceries and eating out. Shit, I’m a hungry man with an expensive palate. (how do buffets and sushi sound?)
• I’ve withdrawn a total of $2,150 dollars out of ATM. Anyone wanna rob me?
• I paid $830 on gas. Could have been a lot worse if I owned a SUV.
• Being a golf avid player (and a wanna-be pro), I spent $855 on course fees, equipment, etc.
• I enjoy reading books, so I spent $160. Education sure comes with a price. And dammit, I need to sell these books.
• I spent $370 on clothes. Not too bad for a guy, don’t you think?
• I read somewhere that someone put “stupid mistakes” category for not paying bills on time, fines, fees, or penalities he has to pay, so I thought that was a good idea and it was a very costly one.

  So, in bank fees, I had to pay $170 and this next one, I’m not very proud of myself, I paid a whopping $825 dollars in parking tickets (lots of them), stupid speed camera tickets, and traffic tickets (for failing to stop completely and among others). I guess that’s what you get for living in DC your first year. That comes to almost one thousand dollars that I could have avoided to pay if I followed the sign, pressed on the brake more, and eased off the gas pedal a bit more. This year, my goal is to pay zero. My right foot, please behave.

• For us who own a sidekick, I paid $386 in subscriptions and extra programs like games. I can’t wait when my employer will cover my sidekick. Hehe.

Even all with those expenses I had to shell out, I was still able to save 20% of my total earnings in 2005 and I wouldn’t have done that if it wasn’t for my precious spreadsheet and by paying myself first. Now that year 2006 has started, my goal is to save 30% (large part of that will go toward housing down payment wherever I decide to settle down), pay nothing in “stupid mistakes”, and perhaps reduce my ATM withdrawls but I’ll never ever reduce my food budget. :-)

Anyone up for some sushi?