Photographers: add to your "to do" list

Here's a list of potential events/trips photographers may want to take. It's from Outside Magazine's September 2009 issue (yeah, I get this for free along with a bunch of others).

It includes trips to Mount Everest, Colorado, New Mexico, Antarctica, California, Great Plains, Yellowstone, Maryland/Virginia, and the Great Barrier Reef.

Click here for more details.

It does seem like Mergers and Acquisitions are picking up

Here's a recent LA Times article from September 21, 2009 listing three high-profile deals that were announced. Today on Yahoo! Finance there are two more deals listed by Cisco (click here) and Viasat (click here). Most of these are in the (low) billions.

Another sign that things are eventually turning around (hopefully).

Looking to make more money? Do you have extra time?

Here's an article posted to Yahoo! Finance that lists 3 ways to make more money through the internet. Here hey are:

• An open network. This is where you get paid to contribute and also a share of "clicks" to view your materials.
• On-demand services. This is where you get paid to provide answers.
• Crowd-sourcing. This is where you divide projects into many (possibly 100's) of small human intelligence tasks. Like finding the typo on a Facebook advertisement of "pscychoogist" which should be "psychologist")

Click here to read more details.

Which type of vacuum cleaner is best?

Here's a short article that says that it depends on your needs. This should be obvious.

When I was growing up, we had a canister. I remember that it dual-purposed as a toy. Among my memories included using it as a "wagon" that you could pull someone on and a "car" where one person could push another.

Now we have a Shark for a quick vacuum around the kitchen area and Kenmore canister vacuums for each floor. Yeah, don't remind me. I'm trying to think about the reasons for having two canister vacuums. If I remember, it was "rationalized" because of the inconvenience (and danger?) of lugging one up and down the stairs. Also involved was redundancy and feeling like needing a backup vacuum in case one failed.

The article ends by saying "don't buy more than you need." We may have bought (slightly) more than we needed, but we definitely didn't pay for all the bells and whistles.

Click here to view the article on the Orange County Register website.

Video: What will it be? V, W, L, U, VW, or Square-root?

Wow. So many descriptors to what we're going through from an economic recovery perspective. Now here's a video of someone describing a "Square-root" recovery.

Click here to watch.

What's the value of your football team?

According to Forbes, the most valuable football team is the Dallas Cowboys at $1.65 billion. The least-valued team is not surprisingly the Oakland Raiders at $797 million.

What's interesting is Revenue and Operating Income. While the Cowboys have a reported $9.2 million, the number two team (Valuation), the Washington Redskins valued at $1.55 billion has an operating income of $90.3 million. This is ten times that of Dallas. The number three team, the New England Patriots, has operating income of $70.9 million.

Dallas needs to pump up the revenue and/or decrease its costs. Get the cash flow going.

Click here for the complete rankings and see how your team is doing.

We need more of this. Especially in Southern California.

Well, not the wood pellets, but the grinding up of pine trees killed by the bark beetles.

So many nice and interesting articles in the current issue of Forbes (yes, getting for free).

This one is about a guy, Mark Mathis who went into a Home Depot and found out there was a shortage of wood pellets for his stove. Because of that, he started his own pellet mill. After one year, he's already turning a profit.

The best part, is that he's making the wood pellets with wood from trees that were killed by the bark beetles. The wood is dried in furnaces that are heated by sawdust.

Future plans include turning one ton of wood into 60 gallons of ethanol and 800 pounds of wood pellets.

Click here to read more.