Sunday, January 31, 2010

Forbes article about the money behind chelation therapy

I am still getting Forbes Magazine for free.  I have been receiving it for at least one year.

In this January 18, 2010 article on Heavy Metals, Inc., it discusses (briefly) how some providers are trying to push chelation therapy for a variety of diseases.

I'm not saying whether it works or not.  This is just an FYI about the money behind the treatment.

New Media Players for the Family Room

In the recent Forbes Magazine (yes, I still get it for free), there was an article about how hard disk drive manufacturers are introducing media players.  They featured devices by Seagate, Iomega, and Western Digital.

The interesting part is that I recently purchased a couple of the Seagate FreeAgent drives at Sam's Club last month.  They have a Seagate FreeAgent Theater+1080P HD Media Player STCEA201-RK that is available on Amazon.com that can play HD or non-HD media.  The price for the device is right at $149.99.  It looks like it will take any of their current FreeAgent drives.

Not sure it is a need at this time.  Time will tell whether this pans out as a useful tool.

For more information why I go to Sam's Club and not Costco click here on a previous post.  I have "survived" for at least one year without Costco and the only reason why I feel I would need it is for the $10 coupon off of TurboTax?

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Crude Oil is Oversold in the short-term

I believe that Crude Oil is oversold in the short-term.  If you look at the United States Oil Fund ETF with trading symbol of USO, it is down about 10 percent from its January 6, 2010 high of $40.97 to today's close of $37.25.  I believe it could go up to just around $40 in the short term.

Disclaimer: I either own and/or control long positions in USO.

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Your 2010 Financial To-Do List

This is courtesy of Morningstar posted to Yahoo! Finance.

It is a quick summary of what to do each month in 2010.  For example, the big thing for the month of January is to create a personal balance sheet which determines your net worth.  You will need to list all of your assets and liabilities.

Click here for the article and the complete list for 2010.

Monday, January 11, 2010

Use On-Screen Keyboard for Virtual Machines running within Mac OS

In case you are looking for the "Print Screen" button or some other buttons such as the "Page Up" or "Page Down" buttons when running a virtual machine (such as one of the Microsoft Windows operating systems), this is what you can do.

On Windows XP Pro (which I am running on VMWare's Fusion 3 on Apple's Mac OSX), you can do the following:

      Click on Start => Accessories => Accessibility => On-Screen Keyboard

You will then get the following window that pops up.



As you can see, it will take up some screen real estate, but will give you back some functionality that you may have lost with a different keyboard.

I will post an entry showing some other options for screen capture (still and video) on the Mac OS.

Saturday, January 2, 2010

Blame 2001: A Space Odyssey for us not using "ought"

I heard a blurb about how 2010 should be called "twenty-ten" instead of "two thousand ten."  We were not calling 1999, "one thousand nine hundred ninety-nine."

For 2009, we should have been using the term "twenty ought nine." Sometimes the "ought" is abbreviated to "o" for "twenty-o-nine."

Some people are saying the 1968 movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey was called "two thousand one" has made it so familiar that when the year changed from "twenty hundred" or 2000 to 2001, it felt so much more comfortable to say "two thousand one" instead of "twenty ought one."

Friday, January 1, 2010

Market Update

Just a quick update on my thoughts.

  • Equity market averages have been consolidating.  The Dow Jones Industrial Average looks like it is in a tight trading range of about 300 points.  Look out when it breaks either way.
  • On this post from December 3, 2009, I reported that Gold was just about as overbought as it could be and I was looking for a short-term target of $108 based on the Gold ETF with the trading symbol GLD.  It has hit that target and even a little more.  (Note that on that previous post, it appears that the link I inserted for the GLD chart updates every day so to know what the chart looked like on December 3, 2009, you would need to look at an archived chart. It looks like GLD is now consolidating nicely and it may be able to make a move in the next week or two.
  • The Crude Oil ETC (USO) appears to be short-term overbought.  The risk/reward appears to be favorable to enter a position where you would benefit from a downward movement. I am not doing anything at this point. If the market moved another 5 percent higher, it seems like it would be even more likely to fall.

WikiEducator: Check it out as a resource

For those who are interested in education resources, I found WikiEducator.org earlier this week.  It appears to be built on the MediaWiki software which is used for the popular Wikipedia site.

Click here to view what Copyright Issues there may be under the Creative Commons license.