Blog archives for March, 2005

Defying the conventional wisdom

Forbes Magazine discusses how conventional wisdom can be wrong when staked against hard facts. They mostly talk about financial matters, as the society seems to establish some wide-believed myth without ever bothering to double-check. Is the housing market a bubble? Are energy stocks late-cycle winners? Does payment of dividends and buying back stock help the stock value? Are foreign stocks a good deal, since they do not start off in over-heated American IPO market? The answer, given by Laszlo Birinyi Jr. to all these questions, is a resounding no.

Wallpaper Sequencer is out

Wallpaper Sequencer is a wallpaper manager. Wallpaper Sequencer works with Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP and supports
all major image formats - BMP, JPG, JPEG, PNG, EMF, WMF, GIF, PSD, PDD, PCX, PCC, PSP, GIF, TIF, TIFF, PGM, PBM, TGA, VST, ISB, VDA, WIN, RLA, RPF, CEL, PIC, ZIP. Wallpaper Sequencer comes in three different versions - Lite, Standard and Ultra.

The Lite version comes with all essential features for wallpaper management, omitting anything else. The Standard version has some cool extra features, like a semi-transparent calendar that helps you plan your activities. The Ultra version delivers all features one can expect from a wallpaper manager, a calendar and awesome clock skins, both digital and analog.

Finished reading The Warren Buffett Way

I finished reading The Warren Buffett Way, 2dn edition by Robert G. Hagstrom. Or, rather, finished listening to it, since I bought a 2-tape set for my daily commute. The #2 person on the Forbes list and chairman of the company with the very weird name Berkshire Hathaway has cult-like followers in the investment world. Since Mr. Buffett is worth $44 bln, having started as newspaper delivery boy, he must be doing something right.

The book talks about Warren Buffett from a biographer’s point of view, so it’s not a financial title specifically, and not as jam-packed with useful tips as The Motley Fool Investment Guide. It’s a slow book teaching the principles of Warren Buffett’s investments.

Lessons learned

  • Analyze business prospectives, not current stock price. Is it a well-managed company? Do they have a room to grow? Do they have nice margins?
  • Understand the industry you’re investing in. Easier to discern hype this way. Invest in the businesses you have understanding of. You have to be able to mentally envision the flow of dollars from customers to businesses, understand where the money is spent and how profit margins are established.
  • Market is manic-depressive. Stock market tends to be either over-zealous about a given company/industry or over-pessimistic. It’s either king of the world or the dumpster, if you follow the stock market ups and downs. However, if you stick to investing in companies, not their current stock prices, you can forget about tracing your investments on day-to-day basis.
  • Avoid commodity businesses. Don’t invest in the business whose product can be easily reproduced by a lower-expense competitor.

Resource Bank offers 3.31% APY on $10,000+ accounts

As far as money market accounts, there’s a new player in the market - Resource Bank, offering 3.31% yield on accounts with a minimum of $10,000 balance. Among the quirks of the account (beyond the $10,000 minimum) is the limit of 3 withdrawals per month and a fee of $10 each time your account falls below $10,000 and each time you exceed the 3 withdrawals per month rule. Which still seems reasonable for a money market account. There’s also a $100 fee for those closing the account within 90 days.

It’s all summarized here:

  • Copy of Check: $4.00 per check.
  • Uncollected Funds Charge: $28.00 per item
  • Counter Checks: $0.10 per check.
  • Check Printing: Price depends on style & quantity ordered.
  • Telephone Transfer Service: Free of charge.
  • Copy of Statement: $2.00 per copy.
  • Non-Sufficient Funds (NSF): $28.00 per item
  • Levy, Attachment, Garnishments: $75.00 per occurrence.
  • Account Closing: $100.00 per account if closed within 90 days of opening.
  • Returned Deposit Item: $5.00 per item.
  • Research Statement Balancing: $20.00 per hour or fraction thereof.
  • Stop Payment Order: $25.00 per item.

It’s an ok deal, but considering that Emigrant Direct is offering 3.25% with no weird fees and imposed withdrawal limits, looks like the extra 0.06% is not worth it.

EndlessCompression.com

It’s a collection of links, abstracts and personal thoughts of the site author. EndlessCompression.com is a site about data compression market. Every once in a while a newcomer with egregious announcements will try to enter the market, usually to secure more funding. The site has a list of inventors and companies currently working in the field of data compression, as well as description of some algorithms.

H&R Professional Review - don’t waste your money

After you’re done with preparing a tax return with H&R TaxCut Standard (would have to be Deluxe if you’re a business), they offer professional review service for $30. For the money a tax professional will review your tax return, add any suggestions they might have and will answer the maximum of 3 questions. The questions and answers are available to you on a secure Web site, which you can get to via Help menu in TaxCut Standard.

Considering that I am faced with $3,000 tax penalty for the year 2004 due to additional income coming from running a couple of Web sites, I figured I’d opt in for the $30 review, since even if they lowered the tax bill by a $100, the service would have paid for itself.

What came back was a list of generic recommendations (yep, increase deductions off the paycheck, but I already knew that) and all the answers to my questions were responded in the manner “Please check the following IRS publication…” without concrete tips as for where I might look to decrease the tax load. Frankly, I ended up with the same information I had before I started compiling my tax return for 2004, and, moreover, with the same tax bill as before.

I don’t see how “a review by professional” added to my return or opened my eyes to something that their TaxCut program with help files didn’t.

Conclusion? Don’t bother with their $30 online reviews.

Work search engines

This is my response to Slashdot discussion of compiling job opps into RSS feed.

I’ve seen RSS results on recently launched work search engines, which mostly parse the sites like Monster.com and Yahoo! HotJobs, scraping the results into their database. You can mostly subscribe to the searches, not to the feed of jobs directly (since for national searches probably wouldn’t do you much good).

RSS search results is supported by:
http://www.indeed.com/
http://www.workzoo.com/
http://hotjobs.yahoo.com

Not supported:
http://www.simplyhired.com/

The practicality of job searches as RSS feeds is pretty good for both active and passive job seekers. Adding a feed to My Yahoo! or local RSS aggregator can always provide pointers when a new job arrives.

New identity theft scenarios

This one got forwarded to me by a co-worker.

Just wanted to let in all of my friends and family on a secret a learned while attending an Identity Theft class put on at the Ontario Convention Center on March 22, 2005.

While in the class we did a little experiment…we took a blank check and wrote on it with just a regular pen and then for the signature we used a “gel” pen. When you soak the check in some acetone (aka: nail polish remover) the regular ink disappears but not the “gel” pen ink. (If you don’t believe me, try it yourself) This is one of the easiest ways a “crook” can get money from your account. Beware that they don’t always soak the entire check, they leave your signature, and dab out the amount or just the amount area.

Another thing, if you drop your mail off into the designated “blue” U.S. Postal mailboxes, you are making a mistake. Crooks will take “rat trap paper” and fish it into the mailboxes and are able to get your bills with your checks in them out. “They” don’t always want to erase your checks, they just want your checking account number. I hope by now you have figured out not to use the “red” flags on your regular roadside mailboxes, instead drop off all of your mail inside the actual post office or do online banking.

This goes for incoming mail too. Don’t leave your mail for too long after mail has been delivered, especially at a curb mailbox or a community mailbox. A community mailbox, just one pull on the back and the crook has everyone’s mail on the block. Yahoo for crooks. The best thing to have is a locking mailbox, a mail slot that goes into a house, or a postal mailbox at the post office.

One other important tip. Please get a cross-cut shredders, not one of those long one way strip shredders. Believe it or not, Crack heads (aka: meth users, crank users) do not sleep!! They stay up all night and piece those papers together just hoping to find a social security number, account number, or anything to find out an identity. “They” don’t want it necessarily, because they are addicts, but a “profile” on the streets will give them more of what they live for…Methamphetamine.

I tell you all this not to scare you, but to make you think twice about everything that you do. Protect yourself, no one else is going to do it. Never think that you will never be the “victim”. If this does happen to you, it takes at least 400 hours to correct this. This is time that none of us have nor want to spend on fixing something, like credit, especially when you might possibly been able to prevent it from happening.

AllofMP3.com legality explained in Slate

Slate magazine answers one of the AllofMP3.com FAQ questioning legality. According to them, selling the music to the US customers would not be legal.

The discussion above about what Allofmp3.com is allowed to do with international distribution rights assumes the site actually owns those rights. It doesn’t—at least not according to the recording industry. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry is the worldwide organization of recording companies, and it claims that Allofmp3.com has not been licensed to distribute its members’ “repertoire” in Russia or anywhere else. While Allofmp3.com claims it owns distribution rights from the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society, the record companies say, “Nyet.”

AlwaysOn Magazine is out

AlwaysOn Magazine - blogs and magazine combined into a blogozineAlwaysOn is a 48-page quarterly magazine that’s the product of the AlwaysOn-Network.com, run and published by Tony Perkins, former editor-in-chief of Red Herring magazine. The original Red Herring got shut down and then re-launched with the new concept and new editorial team. AlwaysOn, however, is a new concept that tries to unite the old-world publishing (this is the first paper issue of the magazine, however) and blogs and interactive features available to the Internet publications.

Tony got some pretty big names like Michael Powell, Guy Kawasaki, Tim Draper and Bambi Francisco to write an occasional posting for AlwaysOn, and every member of the site could kick in and participate in discussion. Michael Powell was one of the posters who frequently addressed issues discussed by commentators in the subsequent posts (without engaging in comments). Tim Draper accepted venture capital pitches via hia AlwaysOn blog (the winners would get 10 minutes with the VC, not immediate funding). AlwaysOn is a cozy environment for anyone in the business of high-tech.

The magazine mostly consists of the articles pubished on AlwaysOn by big-name bloggers and contributors as well as AlwaysOn editorial team. Pages 10-11, however are given completely to member bloggers (they are called insiders on AlwaysOn Web site, since a while ago the site started charging for getting full member perks). The magazine looks pretty good and is printed on nice glossy paper. However, it looks like all the materials printed in the paper edition are available through the Web site. The articles feature nicer graphs and more colorful graphics (like the picture of Tony with Al Gore and Sergey Brin in Davos).

It’s a good magazine if you want to keep track of what’s going on in Silicon Valley and high-tech world in general, and for $50 site membership fee you get the quarterly magazine for free.

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