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This post is courtesy of guest author Cheryl Eng.  Cheryl is a co-worker of mine and believes strongly in being prepared for emergency situations.  She recently completed the NERT training and certification process and is here to share her learnings with our readers.  Cheryl is a USC alumni and graduated from the University of Chicago MBA program in 2008.  Feel free to ask any questions in the comments.

In the wake of the recent earthquakes in Haiti and Chile and the threat of the tsunami in Hawaii we have been confronted with the devastation of natural disasters.   While it is impossible to accurately predict the date and time of the next earthquake we can all take action to prepare.  Being prepared does not mitigate all of the risks of an earthquake but it can certainly improve our chances of survival and reduce the potential damage that an earthquake can create.   For those of us who live in the Bay Area, here are some concerning statistics:

• 8: faults in the Bay Area capable of producing an earthquake with a 6.7 or higher magnitude
• 99.7%: chance that an earthquake with a magnitude greater than 6.7 will occur before 2040
• <10%: householders that have disaster plans
• <50%: households that have disaster supply kits

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John Doerr:

The rest of the 90’s were a ONCE-in-a-lifetime experience. Entrepreneurs created the Web, and great ventures – Netscape, Amazon, Ebay, Google, and others. And they changed our lives. Silicon Valley became the Florence of the New, Networked Economy.

The advent of the iPad feels like deja-vu, like it’s happening all over again. Not once, but TWICE-in-a-lifetime.

Exciting times for someone like John Doerr to be considering this like a Renaissance.

LINK

I have been incredibly busy the last few weeks and haven’t had time to write anything new. But the good news is a very talented co-worker has written a post for PerfectMike.com that she thinks (and I agree) will be very valuable to our readership. I don’t want to give too much of it away, but it’s the kind of article that you will learn a lot from, and hopefully be able to apply it if and when you need to.

If all goes well, this post will be up later this week or this weekend.

So now that March is here, I wanted to give an update on my new “portfolio”, which is really more of a savings vehicle than a portfolio when you think about it. By using my debit card instead of my airline rewards card, I “saved” $9.32 in February via Keep the Change transfers in my Bank of America account. I rounded this up to $10 and initiated a transfer to my Lending Club account this morning. This money will be invested in a new loan note as soon as I have $25 in cash available.

Now to the even better news. Based on my first month of investing at Lending Club, I am currently earning a Net Annualized Return of 13.74%!

All ten of my notes are issued and current, and I have roughly $9 in cash in the account. Combined with next month’s payments and March’s transfers from Keep the Change, I should be able to invest in a new note next month.

This graph makes me feel pretty good about how things are going so far:

As long as I continue to stay on the right side of this distribution I will be satisfied, and continue to invest more and more money into the Lending Club system.

See my original review of Lending Club here.

So I was looking forward to Final Fantasy for the iPhone ever since Square announced that it would be coming out, as well as Final Fantasy II. I’ve been playing it since the day it was released, although I haven’t been able to really dedicate a lot of time to it.

In the interest of time, I figured I would try and find a walk through for Final Fantasy to make sure my memory was as good as I think it is. After all, when I played the original on NES, I wasn’t even in high school yet.

So it appears that no one has created a walkthrough for this specific version of the game, but luckily, I found an original that should work just fine since the content of the game is the same.

Click here for the Final Fantasy walkthrough

In case you are wondering, my part is made up of:

Fighter/Monk/Thief/Red Mage

Here is a shot of my party in Elfheim.

I wish you all good luck in the battle against Chaos.

The past few weeks I have been completely swamped with the end of another session of business school, sending out all of the auctions, and work being, well, work. Maybe I’ll elaborate on that some day. Anyways, I have a few blog posts that I would like to write this week and next as I ease into the next session of classes. This session will be another double session for me, as I will be taking:

• BUS 270: Financial management
• BUS 260: Decision making analysis

I don’t want to jynx anything, but I think 260 should be fairly easy for me, since it is basically what I do for a living. Until next time, stay well.