Tony K's Blog

Me taking Mini Cooper off a ski jump.

Dear Saint Mary's Professional MBA students, I am looking forward to meeting you in class. Here is a brief description of my background. I am Manager of Portfolio and Planning for Chevron Corporate Business Development. I have a BSc in Geophysical Engineering from Colorado School of Mines. I did exploration work for many years, but found myself attracted to the business side. I received an MBA from the University of St. Thomas in 1999, effectively completing a long gradual shift from the technical to the commercial and financial side of the business. In the late 1990s, I built the cash flow model that we used in our new country entry into Brazil. I transferred to San Ramon in 2001, and since then, have been an advocate of portfolio methods and improved planning and decision methods at Chevron. My current position is responsible for ensuring that asset and corporate acquisitions will be a good fit with our corporate strategies. Overview Monte Carlo and Portfolio Management...

November 27, 2008 was Thanksgiving Day and unfortunately a sad one. Our family pet of 10 years, a 15 year old greyhound died. We think he was born in about February, 1994. He raced in Tampa in the mid-1990s as "Armed and Dangerou s." He was a good racer, big at 75 lbs. The problem he had is that he would tend to get injured from trying too hard or something. Maybe his connective tissues were not robust enough for a dog his size. They retired him from racing and he lived on the farm for a few years to father some more racers before sending him to the greyhound adoption people. Sparky was a good as pet as one could hope for. He was playful, mellow, eager to please, and naively intelligent. Greyhounds Like a dragster, he was built for straight-line speed. He had no flexibility in his joints except back and forth. Sitting like most dogs do was a chore for him. Contrary to what many people think, greyhounds are not hyperactive. Owners call them "40 mile per hour couch potatoe...

Not since the day before we went into Iraq have I been so proud to be American. Obama is such a picture of class and grace. At last, we can leave the idiocy of the last 6 years behind us. My mother would have called and sad, "He's from Chicago you know. But he's a Sox fan." Yes we freaking can!!!!!

The Economist magazine has a "World Electoral Vote Simulation" going on right now. http://www.economist.com/vote2008/?sa_campaign=publisher/september/gec/ The outcome will be fascinating I'm sure.

The following article appeared in Business Week magazine recently. I tried to write to them, but their website did not work for me. Here's the link to the original article. Here's the text. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SAVING MORE (It was called "Short-term Thinking May Be A Saver's Best Friend" in the print version) Financial planners often suggest clients figure out how much they'll need to retire and save toward that huge number. Utpal "Paul" Dholakia, associate professor of management at Houston's Rice University, thinks people would do better to think about how much they'll save next month. A paper he co-wrote with Leona Tam of Old Dominion University found that those who planned savings for the next month did far better than those who tried to plan further out. In one experiment, people said they'd save an average $287 next month but saved $440. When asked to plan ahead four months, they said they'd save an average $946, but put aside jus...

This video is amzing and inspiring. If you watch it you will come away a better person. Guaranteed.

BMI is such a bad metric for measuring obesity. Better would be FMI which instead of the weight/ht^2 is weight*body fat%/ht^2 or BMI * body fat %. Or how about simply body fat percentage. It is a lot more relevant to the measure of obesity. There has been some recent press about how people with high BMIs might be healthy and people with low BMIs might be unhealthy. Well duh!!! The following article talks about people who are "skinny fat." Normal Weight Obesity: An Emerging Risk Factor For Heart And Metabolic Problems More than half of American adults considered to have normal body weight in America have high body fat percentages -- greater than 20 percent for men and 30 percent for women -- as well as heart and metabolic disturbances, new Mayo Clinic research shows. The finding conflicts with the widely held belief that maintaining a normal weight automatically guards against disorders such as high levels of circulating blood fats and a tendency to develop metabolic s...

Here is my current weight loss progress. It has been going great, but in early May I hit a bit of a plateau, so I decided to shock my system with a PSMF diet as outlined in the Rapid Fat Loss Handbook . You can see from the chart that it restarted my weight loss and I hit 200 in the first week of June. I am now tapering off that diet and I will work towards a more moderate loss of about 0.5 - 1 lb per week while working harder on my fitness regimen. I hope to get down to about 180 by the end of the year. I think a good target weight range for me is 180 to 185 lbs. I had a physical about a month ago and had a lot of good news. My blood pressure had been in the high range, pushing hypertension for several years. It was in the 140-150 over 90-100 range. In early May it was 124/70. That is darn close to good on the systolic and the lowest diastolic I have ever had. I also did the full blood workup and those results were very encouraging too. My triglycerides, which had been extremely hig...

Previously, in January 2008, I reported that I was at 219 lbs and about 20% bodyfat. Last week I weighed in at 211.8 and somewhere around 15% bodyfat. My rate of weight loss is not huge, but the decrease in bodyfat is really encouraging. Given the inaccuracies of bodyfat measurement, it is really hard to know if I went from 20% to 15% of 19% to 17%, or some other combination, but the main thing is to see the decrease over time. I am hoping to be down around 13% by mid-year. I recently read Good Calories, Bad calories by Gary Taubes. It is hard to read, but has led me to believe that the US Government guidelines for low-fat eating are completely out of whack. I have been following a regimen similar to what is laid out in Emotions for Engineers . I am continuing to work hard at the gym and my weightlifts are actually increasing (very slightly), rather than decreasing with my weight loss. This is really sweet. The good news is that I appear to not be losing my hard-earned muscle mass. I...

Seth Roberts of Shangri-La diet fame interviewed Gary Taubes who wrote Good Calories, Bad Calories . Fascinating stuff. http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dhm4f3rg_36gg4956dm&pli=1 GARY TAUBES Interviewed November 30, 2007 by Seth Roberts [part 1] INTERVIEWER I just spoke to someone who reduced the carbohydrate in his diet, for various reasons, including your book. He found that his performance on mental problems started improving again. It had stopped improving; it had been constant for a long time, and then he started getting better. So it may be that when you reduce the carbohydrate in your diet, your brain starts working better. TAUBES Well there is evidence that your brain works more efficiently on ketones, as does your heart. So if he reduced his carbohydrate consumption sufficiently, he probably increased the level of ketones in his blood. But I'm just speculating here. INTERVIEWER: The book seems to have had an unusual beginning. You’d been writing about salt, and ...