I already have the EF-S 18-55mm IS kit lens and this new lens should give me more zooming power. The 55-250mm lens features Image Stabilization (IS) and according to many people who bought this lens it’s one of the best you can get in its price class.

I hope it arrives in time for my holiday to Italy

If you want to achieve great things, you have to set bold goals and then do your best to meet them. Mercedes now has the first part of the equation down, lets hope they can deliver on the execution.

Their plan is to make their whole car lineup petroleum free in 7 years. To do that, they’re looking at battery electric cars, fuel cells, and more efficient combustion engines that can run on biofuels (lets hope that by then we have truly sustainable ethanol and biodiesel). “The company have already spent £2million on their new long-term Sustainable Mobility plan and are set to invest a further £7billion before 2014.” Of course, there’s a catch: A car that can run on biofuels can still run on fossil fuels, so without a good supply of sustainable biofuels, that’s probably how they’re going to be used. But still, a step in the right direction.

I tried to access my blog two hours ago and all I saw were a bunch of ads. I hadn’t received any domain expiration e-mails from Namecheap - perhaps they were accidentally caught by my spam filter - but fortunately I could buy back the domain name from Namecheap at no extra cost.

I’ll definitely need to keep better track of this so this won’t happen again. Fortunately this domain is just my personal blog and it doesn’t really make any money, all my important domain names are payed up front for many years.

Savings accounts at the big banks give you a return of about 2% to 2.5% per year if you leave your money untouched and that’s a lot less than inflation these days. There are many ways to get a higher return on your money, you can take more risk by investing a percentage of your savings into the stock market, invest in real estate, put money in a CD account for one or more years and the list goes on and on.

An easy way to get a higher return on your money without taking more risk is to shop around for a high interest savings account. Many of the smaller banks in Flanders like Rabobank, Keytrade, Deutsche Bank, Kaupthing and others have high interest savings accounts that offer you much more interest than the big banks (but don’t forget to read the fine print!).

For instance, a big bank like Dexia gives you 2% if you let your money rest in one of their savings accounts for one year while Deutsche Bank gives 5%. If you don’t have a lot of money it may not be worth the hassle but if you have 25 000EUR sitting in a savings account the difference will be pretty big, a bank that gives 2% will give you just 500EUR while a bank that gives 5% intrest will give you 1250EUR - that’s a 750EUR gain the first year and the years thereafter it will be even more due to compound intrest!

One stock I own dropped 14% since mid-May and NVIDIA (NVDA) dropped from around $25 a couple of weeks ago to $19.76 on Friday.

Perhaps I should have sold most of my stock at $25 so I could buy back ~20% more shares at around $20 but it’s too late to sell now. It’s frustrating to see a chunk of your money go up in smoke but I think this firm will do pretty well over the next couple of years. NVIDIA has growing steady, trying to get into several new markets with lots of growth opportunities,  they have good margins and no debt at all. Unless something drastic happens I think NVDA will be trading over $50 per share within a year or two.