Previous Columns
9:00 AM EST, Friday, August 29, 2008: Money magazine headlines "21 Good Things to do in a Bad Market." Among them:

+ Turn off CNBC.

+ Read a good book. They like "Your Money and Your Brain" by former Money writer Jason Zweig.

+ Ditch energy stocks.

+ Make sure your cash is really safe.

+ Keep your living expenses low.

+ Save more.

+ Think about something besides money. "Happiness is not something to acquire and save up. It's something you pursue."

Awesome, dude!

My advice for this long weekend is simple, Hug the family. Play and watch lots of tennis. Go swimming. Avoid drowning.

Nicer people. From MarketWatch, "Of the roughly $250 billion Wall Street profit made between 2004 and 2007, half has been all but wiped out by asset write-downs. The value of U.S. brokerages, as measured by the Amex Securities Broker/Dealer Index has tumbled 50%."

The incredible new Nikon D90:

David Pogue says "the new Nikon D90 is a mind-blowing, game-changing camera." When Pogue gets excited about new technology, he's usually right. Read his entire New York Times review.

"Bank of America Alert." This email wants me to "restore your account." Ignore it. Delete it. It's fake. It's looking to scam your social security number and rip you off.

Watch your "new" laptop. True story. Several employees were issued laptops containing porn. When the porn was discovered, the employee was fired. They didn't even know it was on the laptop. Lesson: Check your laptop's contents before you use it.

Microsoft's Word 2007 uses a new file format. It's called DOCX. You can't open DOCX files in old versions of Word. Convert them at www.docx2doc.com/.

Nudge; Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness: Synopsis of this new book: A groundbreaking discussion of how we can apply the new science of choice architecture to nudge people toward decisions that will improve their lives by making them healthier, wealthier, and more free.

From the New York Times review, "Along the way the authors present fascinating findings about how people actually make decisions, together with lots of personal advice: save more, diversify your investments, don’t invest much in your employer’s stock, don’t pay points on mortgages, buy insurance with the biggest deductible you can afford, don’t pay for extended warranties."

Two fax machines are four times better than one. It makes far more sense from a traffic engineering point of view to have banks of fax machines than to give everyone their own machine. If that doesn't work politically, at least give everyone two fax machines. That way people like me can send you faxes and not receive the inevitable busy.

Ubiquity for Firefox is interesting. "Ubiquity's goals are to:

+ Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions.

+ Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs.

I'm not using Ubiquity. But it's worth watching the short video to see how they're making the Internet more useful.

The great new invention. Beating a path to our door.

Finish the job, please. Why do contractors insist on dragging the job on forever? Please explain to my tiny brain the New Psychology of Incompletion. Perhaps they love hearing my mellifluous voice on their answering machines goading them into action?

Lots of good tennis to watch this weekend. And fortunately a respite from politics. Watch the tennis in high definition. My best setup is DirecTV and a 61 inch Samsung DLP (now down to an amazingly low $1640 on Amazon.)