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8:30 AM Tuesday, March 14, 2006: Continued nice run for InSite Vision (ISV). Should go higher, yet.



Yesterday InSite announced top-line results from the second of two required phase 3 clinical trials to evaluate the safety and efficacy of AzaSite (1.0% azithromycin solution in DuraSite anti-infective eye drops in patients with bacterial conjunctivitis). In a study to show superiority of AzaSite relative to vehicle, patients treated with AzaSite had a significantly higher clinical resolution rate, the trial's primary efficacy end point and a significantly higher bacterial eradication rate, a secondary end point, than those receiving placebo. Importantly, the study also showed that AzaSite was safe and well tolerated.

Sometimes I draw a blank on new investment ideas: My friend Dan Good says I shouldn't be obsessed with "a new investment a day." Go smell the roses. Go play some tennis. Go watch some tennis. I did yesterday. We went to Indian Wells to watch the Pacific Life Open. Safin won. Agassi lost. We're going again on Thursday. Hint: If you go to night matches, take a heavy parka, gloves and thermal underwear. It's cold sitting in those stands, despite it being the desert.

Now you know why executives like takeovers: According to today's Wall Street Journal, North Fork executives stand to reap huge payouts from Capital One's $14.6 billion acquisition. The top three officials could receive at least $288 million, including roughly $185 million for CEO John Kanas.

Calling from overseas back to the U.S. From the cheapest to the most expensive way of calling long distance or international, there's probably a 2,000% price difference these days. I mentioned CallingCardPlus for cheap ways of calling overseas. Now friend Warren Belkin, writes, "You probably know that US calling cards generally are NOT good to use overseas. We go to Australia every year, and if I use an AT&T calling card from Australia back to the US, the charge is around $5 a minute (vs. $.25 a minute from US to Australia). While traveling in Europe and Australia, I found a great service, ekit.com."

You can find many such services on the Internet. Google "international calling." In most cases, you need to be country and town specific. For example, calling from Canberra in Australia to the U.S. is more expensive on some services than calling from Sydney.

Another reason to love the French: France is pushing through a law that would force Apple to let consumers download songs from its iTunes online music store onto devices other than the iPod.

Ambien is worse than marijuana: I'm personally not big on drugs, except for antibiotics. It seems every time a drug gets popular, they find weird side effects. This story from today's New York Times is definitely weird:

Study Links Ambien Use to Unconscious Food Forays: The sleeping pill Ambien seems to unlock a primitive desire to eat in some patients, according to emerging medical case studies that describe how the drug's users sometimes sleepwalk into their kitchens, claw through their refrigerators like animals and consume calories ranging into the thousands.

The next morning, the night eaters remember nothing about their foraging. But they wake up to find telltale clues: mouthfuls of peanut butter, Tostitos in their beds, kitchen counters overflowing with flour, missing food, and even lighted ovens and stoves. Some are so embarrassed, they delay telling anyone, even as they gain weight.

"These people are hell-bent to eat," said Dr. Mark Mahowald, who is director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center in Minneapolis and is researching the problem. He and colleagues are preparing a scientific paper based on their findings that a sleep-related eating disorder is one of the unusual side effects showing up with the widespread use of Ambien. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., have made similar findings.

A woman in Salinas, Calif., whose case is to be included in the Minnesota study, said she would awaken to find candy bar wrappers next to her bed and Popsicle sticks on the floor near the refrigerator. She blamed her husband and sons before finally believing their claims that she was eating at night, unaware.

Worried that she would choke, "my son was so afraid at night, he'd come sit by the bed and watch me," said the woman, Brenda Pobre, 54. Despite seeing several doctors, Ms. Pobre did not link Ambien to her nocturnal eating until after she gained 100 pounds. ...

Most of the people who use Ambien say the drug puts them to sleep, and they wake up without incident. But several doctors and a number of patients say that sleep-eating is one of a variety of unusual reactions to the drug.

The reactions range from fairly benign sleepwalking episodes to hallucinations, violent outbursts and, most troubling of all, driving while asleep, a subject explored in an article last week in The New York Times.

.... Another woman who has complained about sleep-eating was Helen Cary, a labor and delivery nurse in Dickson, Tenn., who began taking the drug so she could sleep days while working 12-hour night shifts.

"I'm very ambivalent about this drug," said Ms. Cary, 57. "Without it, I would never have survived five years of night shift." But Ms. Cary said her behavior became strange while under Ambien's influence.

"One day," she said, "I got up — my husband describes this in great detail — I got a package of hamburger buns and I just tore it open like a grizzly bear and just stood there and ate the whole package. He said a couple things to me and then he realized I was asleep." She has switched to working days and no longer takes Ambien.

Makes sense to me: Northwest Airlines will try charging $15 extra for a few choice aisle and exit-row seats. They're calling it "Coach Choice." You wonder they hadn't thought of this beforehand. I'd pay extra for the extra room.

Even the good guys screw up, occasionally: From Computerworld, "A faulty antivirus update from McAfee Inc. that mistakenly identified hundreds of programs as a Windows virus has resulted in some companies accidentally deleting significant amounts of data from affected computers. The McAfee update (DAT 4715) released on Friday was designed to protect computers against the W95/CTX virus. But because of a programming error, the update also incorrectly identified renamed and quarantined hundreds of legitimate executables including popular ones such as excel.exe, lsetup.exe, uninstall.exe, shutdown.exe and reg.exe.

For companies that had configured their McAfee antivirus program to automatically delete bad files, the error resulted in the loss of hundreds, and in some cases even thousands, of files on systems in which the update had been installed, said Johannes Ullrich, chief technology officer at the SANS Internet Storm Center (ISC) in Bethesda, Md.

McAfee released a new patch (DAT 4716) updating the earlier one, five hours later. But any company that had been unlucky enough to install and run DAT 4715 would have experienced significant problems, Ullrich said.

Give this piece from yesterday to your kids:
A few BIG decisions determine the quality of your life: They are:
1. Who you marry.
2. How long you stay together in a bad marriage.
3. If you have children in a bad marriage.
4. If you get a job or become an entrepreneur.
5. How long you take to undo your bad decisions, i.e. your mistakes.

In recent weeks, I've had lunch with several old, old friends and I've asked "how it's gone." I've heard horrible stories of marriages broken after 35 years, of retirement nest eggs destroyed by divorce and outrageous lawyers' fees.... Yet, in all cases, my friends knew the mess they were in from early on -- but inertia, children and career obsession delayed the inevitable breakup, making it more painful -- emotionally and financially.

The Pacific Life Open / Indian Wells Tennis Tournament continues.

Your husband in dead:
Brenda O'Malley is home making dinner, as usual, when Tim Finnegan arrives at her door. "Brenda, may I come in?" he asks. "I've somethin' to tell ya".
"Of course you can come in, you're always welcome, Tim. But where's my husband?"
"That's what I'm here to be telling ya, Brenda." There was an accident down at the Guinness brewery.. ."
"Oh, God no!" cries Brenda. "Please don't tell me."
"I must, Brenda. Your husband Shamus is dead and gone. I'm sorry."
"How did it happen, Tim?"
"It was terrible, Brenda. He fell into a vat of Guinness Stout and drowned."
"Oh my dear Jesus! But you must tell me true, Tim. Did he at least go quickly?"
"Well, Brenda...no. In fact, he got out three times to pee."

How to savor fine wine
Mother Superior called all the nuns together one evening and said to them: "I must tell you all something. We have a case of Gonorrhea in the convent."
"Thank God," said an elderly Nun at the back. "I'm so sick of Chardonnay."

Harry Newton

This column is about my personal search for the perfect investment. I don't give investment advice. For that you have to be registered with regulatory authorities, which I am not. I am a reporter and an investor. I make my daily column -- Monday through Friday -- freely available for three reasons: Writing is good for sorting things out in my brain. Second, the column is research for a book I'm writing called "In Search of the Perfect Investment." Third, I encourage my readers to send me their ideas, concerns and experiences. That way we can all learn together. My email address is . You can't click on my email address. You have to re-type it . This protects me from software scanning the Internet for email addresses to spam. I have no role in choosing the Google ads. Thus I cannot endorse any, though some look mighty interesting. If you click on a link, Google may send me money. Please note I'm not suggesting you do. That money, if there is any, may help pay Claire's law school tuition. Read more about Google AdSense, click here and here.
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