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JerseySmarts.com

Brief Thoughts on Christmas and Vacation Plans

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Can it be Monday again already? Geez… It seems like the holidays come quicker and quicker each year and they fly by just as fast. It’s amazing, really. I had a great Christmas this year which started with my Mom’s annual Christmas Eve Party with the family and into a great Christmas morning with my Mom and brothers. My younger cousin’s baby girl was at the Christmas Eve Party (she’s one and a half years old). She was opening presents that my Mom and the family got for her and she seemed to love it. You know, no one appreciates or enjoys the thrill of opening a present on Christmas morning (or in this case, Christmas Eve), than a young kid. They just love it and it’s fun to watch their excitement!

I’m on vacation from work this week (actually, my vacation started after work this past Tuesday night, but who’s keeping track anyway?). I don’t have to be back in the office until next Monday, January 4th, 2010. Including today, that leaves me with seven more days of vacation before going back to the office and I plan on doing as little as possible during the next seven days!

Last year during this same time frame I went on a “staycation” and it was the only time during the entire year that I actually relaxed and unwound from the office. While I have some preparatory work to do for the new class that I created and am now teaching at the local college this spring, I hope to achieve the same level of rest and relaxation that I achieved last year at this time. Between teaching the new class at the local college, accepting an online teaching position at a statewide online college, running my website company, serving as a Trustee on the national board of my fraternity’s foundation, and my day job – I’ve got a big spring season ahead of me. When factoring that I might have to pickup and move to a new place at the end of my current lease, everything becomes all the more complicated.

But hey, if you’re not busy, then you’re not living – right? 🙂

I have a bunch of backlogged entries to upload to the blog (last I counted there were some 20 entries waiting to be uploaded). So be sure that you stick around this week and see what’s going on at JerseySmarts.com!

Heading Down to Nashville

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At some point this afternoon I’ll be getting on a plane and heading south to beautiful Nashville, Tennessee. This is the trip I take every other year to Sigma Pi Fraternity, International’s Sigma Pi University event. Of course this year I’ll be attending for the Sigma Pi Educational Foundation as a Trustee.

In any event, this will be the third time that I’ve gone down to Nashville and I really like it down there. It’s a great city with a wonderful night life and the people are all really nice and laid back down there (which is a dramatic change from the northern part of the East Coast).

I’ll be back Sunday afternoon, but don’t worry – I have entries ready to be auto-uploaded to the blog for every day that I won’t be around. So you can get your fix of Joe’s Journal on JerseySmarts.com every day!

What To Do With Madoff’s Assets

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Bernie Madoff has instructed his lawyers to prevent any seizing and monetizing of his assets. The suggestion is that these assets are in his wife’s name and thus they are unrelated to the ponzi scheme that Madoff was running. What hubris on the part of Madoff! This man is the lowest form of life on the planet. Not only is he the largest individual criminal in the history of the world (think about that for a minute – he’s stolen more money than any other person ever born), but now he wants to be flagrant about using loopholes in the law to keep those assets. What a disgusting pig.

The request was acknowledged, but not granted, in court documents filed on Monday both by federal prosecutors and the trustee overseeing the liquidation of Mr. Madoff’s estate for the benefit of customers who say they have lost billions they entrusted to Mr. Madoff over many years.

Mr. Madoff’s assets were frozen in December after he was arrested on charges of operating a worldwide Ponzi scheme, with losses he allegedly said were as high as $50 billion. In January, his wife agreed to a voluntary asset freeze when prosecutors, citing the couple’s effort to mail out expensive jewelry to family and friends, sought to revoke her husband’s bail.

The New York Times’ Deal Book blog posted the above piece in the story about Madoff. My suggestion is to liquidate the assets and give them back to the folks that this disgusting human being ripped off. Giving the money back might actually be a hard case since you have to figure out who gets the money first, but I would probably err on the side of giving the dollars back to the elderly first, then the foundations, and then the rest of his investors. Granted, no one will be receiving the entire value of their deposits. However, if you’re in your 80’s and you went from $50 million in assets to $0, then I’m sure you’ll take even $50 thousand if it comes your way.

I hope they throw this Madoff character in jail for the rest of his life.

No Longer the Province Archon for New Jersey

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Last month I made the decision to step down from my biggest volunteer role with Sigma Pi Fraternity. Since August 2006 I’ve served as the Province Archon (Regional Director) for New Jersey for Sigma Pi Fraternity. It is a huge job that has so many details and points of interest that to list them all here would take forever. Briefly, a Province Archon has to visit his chapters once per semester (there are 8 groups in New Jersey), hold a workshop for the entire state each year, organize regional alumni events, attend nationwide events, and (of course) help to mentor the young leaders around the state.

It was a very rewarding job, but a very time consuming one. I really liked giving presentations at the workshops and making the visits to my chapters, but with increased responsibility at my job and the local college assigning me more courses to teach as an Adjunct Professor, I was no longer able to give this volunteer position the attention that I feel it deserves.

There is a great new Province Archon in New Jersey and he’s going to do an amazing job. I’m still involved with my fraternity as a Trustee on our national Educational Foundation. The goal, as always, is to rise to the top of the Foundation and serve as its Chairman at some point in the near future. It is in this position that I believe I can affect the greatest change on the fraternity as I work to increase donations and build our national endowment to a level where we can begin to reverse the recent trend in national fraternities of raising their membership fees. I want my fraternity to stay affordable for all of the current undergraduates and all of the potential new members who have yet to enter college. It’s going to be fun!