Old Friends

Lunch again...just called my old bud Bruce from my SFU days. He's doing well, as usual, and now a VP at the firm he's with. Seems those I know are getting older too; good to know, I guess. As for me, I'm getting into this licensing course now...looks pretty cut-n-dry (as I've been in the industry for 10+ years now)...we'll see. I have a couple of exams in February then we're off to the races.

Man, this is getting pretty boring, eh? Been studying insurance a fair bit and having meetings with the major firms to get a handle on how their products have changed over the last 2 years (they've also had a few mergers here in that time, too). Yesterday I bought a 'crazy carpet' (it's essentially a piece of plastic that lessens the friction coefficient between you and the snow--it can go real fast if you want it to!) so I'd like to try it out tonight with Spencer if the snow is still on the sledding hills. It's been cold lately but not much fresh snow at all. Would be a shame to miss it as I looked for a week to even find this one.

Ok, back to studying!

UPDATE: This is unreal...only in Korea. It seems that the credit card binge that Koreans went through in the late 1990s is still around. The government offered great tax incentives to use plastic (10% tax credit for all amounts charged if you charged over 10% of your income--that means 2%+ lower tax rate!) got the need to charge it ingrained quickly. However, 1997 punched the stuffing out of the economy and most consumers pocketbooks, but they continue to rack up the bills. So what does the government do: offers them civil service jobs to help pay down their debts and even subsidize their housing! Um, I thought North Korea was the Socialist state.