The innovations in the Bitcoin realm are coming quickly. And since I last looked, they now discourage mining bitcoins on your own. And also since I looked, there are now physical Bitcoins! I just read an article asking whether they might be considered illegal.  These things look great and help push their acceptance forward.

So I finally installed the Bitcoin app and have a Bitcoin address for you to send me some:

1NTsbjZH4HnqeQKK5dpFzfjJvGjr61N1ps

Not to bribe you or anything, but I figure if I can get a couple of coins from my (diminishing) audience, I would be encouraged enough to do another MMM show.

I have a small window of time before the official announcement is made before which I can make my own predictions, wish lists, and observations about the new miracle device. Apple is expected to announce it on January 27th at a media event. I guess there is not enough time for them to get all my wish list items incorporated into the thing, but at least they will have my wish list for their 2nd generation of it by 2011.

First, my preferred name for the thing is the Apple iPad. I like the way it rhymes with iPod and it is alliterative with iPhone as well. iSlate is my 2nd choice just because it sounds cool. iBook would be my 3rd choice as it would fit into the MacBook line nicely, but iBook places too much emphasis on this thing being just an eReader and not enough on the other things I want it to do. Read on. iTablet? Sounds like something Dell would call it.

Form factor. The iPad will have the 10” screen everyone is expecting and will basically be a “Honey I Blew Up the iPhone” looking thing. A home button at the bottom and that’s all you see physically. Aluminum back, buttons and holes along the edges. Nice places to put your fingers as you hold it in portrait or landscape orientation.

Buttons and holes will include those found on the iPhone: Headphone/microphone jack, volume buttons, mute switch, sleep button. But it will also include USB. The BIG question is will it include a power hole or a iPod dock hole? You see, it makes a difference in deciding if the iPad will SYNC with a computer or will BE a computer. Will your iTunes library still be on your MacBook and you have to sync it with the iPad, or will the iPad have enough storage to hold all your music by itself? My guess: it will BE a computer and can run iTunes on its own. It could still share music with your MacBook with that family sharing  route and it could share photos and files and so forth. So my money is on it having a nice magnetic power adapter with all kinds of neat accessories we can buy like a car charger and external battery. PLEASE let me use the same magnetic adapter as my MacBook. My guess: they won’t! (They make TONS of money on those things!) And make some kind of adapter that lets me plug it into all my various iPod connectors in the car and external speakers.

The USB adapter will allow commonly needed connections like cameras, flips, and, wait for it… iPhones! And yes, i want to be able to charge my iPhone from the battery of my iPad. You won’t need USB for the external keyboard and mouse because those will connect via BlueTooth. And while you are typing and mousing on your iPad, you will need it to somehow stand up, won’t you? So I’m wondering if this thing will have some sort of picture-frame-like stand on its back that lets you sit it on a desk or table either in portrait or landscape orientation.

I keep harping on orientation. For me this is key to the iPad: being able to read books and long pdfs on it in portrait mode. Already it is more useful than a MacBook for that reason alone. I find reading books in landscape to be too small a window into the text. I don’t know how many others are like me, but the first thing I do on a new computer is move all of those dock or taskbar things from the bottom of the screen over to the left side. That gives me a little more reading room on my MacBook. And I try to trim menu bars and status bars away as well. With the iPad in portrait mode I will be in reading heaven even on a smaller 10” screen.

How will this thing get on the Internet is a key question. Of course it will have Wi-Fi. But will it be on the 3G and EDGE networks as well? Will I have to buy more service from ATT Wireless? Will it tether through my iPhone? Will the iPad BE a phone? My hopes are that it will BE a phone that uses the same phone number as my iPhone, that I can talk on either one, that I can switch between one and the other during a call, that I can surf the net on the iPad while talking on the iPhone, that it can let me make and receive calls with my BlueTooth headset, and that it can act perfectly well as a desktop speakerphone. Not too much to ask, right? If iPhone was the “Jesus Phone” then what would this iPad be, the “GOD” phone?

But my guess of what will actually happen is more limited. I think for this first release it will have Wi-Fi and 3G and EDGE DATA networking only. You will have to add some sort of appendage to your ATT Wireless iPhone plan to get remote internet on the thing. No calls, talking is for iPhones and that is the way we say it will be, says Apple. Maybe in a later release they can figure out if it makes sense to add a phone or not. Perhaps too many people will end up using the data plan to make Skype calls and they will come around.

What about software? Is the iPad a small MacBook or a big iPhone? Wow, this is a tougher one to call. I can make a good case for both. You want to be able to run iWork on the thing, right? But yet Apple wants you to buy 10 billion apps for the thing too. So like a flash it hits me: it runs MacOS but with an iPhone mode so you can do BOTH. But the iPhone OS is all about limiting what you can do. Will Apple want to limit what you can do in the iPad? If so, it will be more like an iPhone with some iWork apps available for download. Actually in that case they will probably throw in some iWork apps for free but you gotta buy all the other cool stuff.

How will you use this thing if you already have a MacBook and an iPhone like I do? You will have your iPhone in your pocket, your MacBook on your desk, and your iPad in your hands. On the couch, in a seat, or in bed. This is the “media comes to me” device. Read a book? Sure, the iPhone already has the Kindle app from Amazon so you can buy thousands of books for $9.99 and start reading. Knowing Apple, they will probably start selling books through the iTunes store. Don’t wanna miss a market, right? But I better be able to get pdfs onto this thing easily and freely or it goes in the trash.

You will also of course watch movies, listen to music, surf the net, and make blog postings. Standard fare. It is the book reading thing that makes the iPad so special. And of course it will be the first successful touch screen computer from Apple. The iPhone set the stage, but now we will have pinch and zoom super-sized. We’ll be using our arms more to see those details from the satellite view. Ah yes, GPS. Big maps finally. Would this thing be appropriate on the dashboard? Not unless it has a camera that can show what is in FRONT of the car! And speaking of cameras, it needs at least two: One on back like normal on the iPhone for taking vids of others and one on front for taking vid of you. Maybe one on the side just to be sly. And I’d really love it if the one on the front is actually UNDER the center of the screen, invisible to us but fully able to see us nonetheless. That way on video calls people will be looking AT YOU instead of somewhere off into space.

Finally, the dreaded question: How much will they want for this thing? Remember when the Jesus Phone first came out how much they charged? Same deal here, waayy more than what we want to pay. They will really put it to those early-adopter guys, hahaha! I expect that early price to be $899. Gasp! With netbooks retailing for $399! Yep, but it will drop after a few months to $699 and everybody will be like, “Whew, now I can afford one at last.”

So prepare for the iPad invasion. Prepare for the weeping, shaking bodies to behold not the iTablet being brought down from the mountain but the iPad being unveiled on Steve’s stage. I can’t wait.

I’ll discuss on show 150.

I owned the Kindle 1 for about a year. I purchased a total of 3 books for it. Yet I had about 100 books on the gadget. How? I used software called mobipocket to convert pdf files to the format the Kindle likes. Many sites on the internet allow you to download free public-domain books. I also didn’t purchase many books because many times the books I wanted to read were not available at Amazon for the Kindle. And if I could get the book from the library, I actually think I prefer the hardback version to the electronic version, possibly because I get immediate feedback of where I am in the book just by feeling it.

I do like the idea that I can carry a stack of thousands of books around on one device. I like that my home is not as cluttered with books. But I’m thinking that if I can find a great pdf reader for the iphone, I’ll just use that instead.

FOR BEST RESULTS, AFTER YOU CLICK PLAY, CLICK THE ARROW BUTTON IN THE BOTTOM RIGHT THEN SELECT "HQ" TO GET EVERY OUNCE OF INDEXING JOY FROM THESE VIDEOS!!!

Steps 1-3

Steps 4-6

Steps 7-9

Steps 10-12

This was a lot of fun to put together. I used Keynote and then exported the show to iMovie to render the video. Images and diagrams are from ifa.com. For backtested performance information go to ifabt.com.

We have probably seen it 20 times. Every viewing is “spoiled.” So who cares if the plot is spoiled? Nevertheless, if you have not seen Groundhog Day and do not want to be spoiled, please stop reading now. This post includes SPOILERS.

A quick plot review: Phil Connors, played brilliantly by Bill Murray, is a bitter and sarcastic weatherman sent to cover the Groundhog Day festivities at Gobbler’s Knob near Pittsburgh. He gets stuck in time and wakes up on the same day over and over. Phil is the only one who realizes it. He can learn new things but everyone else is unaware. They are living the day for the first time every time.

At first Phil is bewildered. The next few loops of days later he gets angry. Several loops later he gets depressed. Then he repeats loops in which he tries to take advantage of his unique situation. He is learning while others stay frozen in their knowledge. This becomes boring to him eventually. He becomes depressed and resigns his fate. He comes to marvel at how his producer Rita (Andie MacDowell) is genuinely kind to everyone she meets and he comes to realize that he too can be kind. He sets out in the final loops of days to be kind in each and every situation in which he places himself. He learns to play the piano, to speak French, and to ice sculpt. He knows everyone in town and much about them. He truly changes his character. The last loop ends after Phil completes his transformation from bitterness to kindness. He, like the groundhog Phil, sees his shadow. His winter ends.

Groundhog Day works on many levels. It is funny, tender, philosophical, sad, clever, and though-provoking. I imagine this must have been a joy for writers Harold Ramis (of Ghostbusters) and Danny Rubin because of its roller-coaster cleverness. And it must have been fun to shoot because many of the sets were used in a variety of multiple takes to demonstrate the various stages of Phil’s time loops.

But the main reason the film appeals to me so much is because the movie unwittingly portrays the life of a computer programmer, like me. We are a unique breed of people; we who interact constantly with others, in our case computers, that are stuck in time. We are always trying things, failing, and ultimately succeeding. We code up something that never works the first time. We start over, make a change, and try again. We get angry, sad, frustrated, resigned, and ultimately overjoyed at our software loops. The computer doesn’t know what we’ve been through. We are the ones learning while the computer simply responds to our interaction. We come to realize that we must be kind to our computer, we must be careful what input we provide to it. It only knows us by our inputs.

After 10,000 hours at the keyboard, we master our environment. We learn the new languages. We sculpt out of the hardness that which time melts away. We use our skill for genuine good, not expecting reward. We’ve been through the cold and the gray but tomorrow does come and it is a better day.

From BLUE YORK by John thomas Oaks and Grand Central
Music and Lyrics by John thomas Oaks
Featuring Tim Caudill — Bass, Gary "Biscuit" Davis — Banjo, Kevin Moore — Fiddle, Jeff Zona — Acoustic Guitar, Lakieta Bagwell and Jimmy Bryant — BGVs

Probably won’t play it on the show, but it is worth watching to see the lyrics.

These days though we are hearing the word "trillion" a lot more. Million. Billion. Trillion. They all basically sound the same. Like dime, nickel, quarter. Are they really that much different? It is amazing that they are indeed very much different. In fact, in order to get a billion of something you have to have a thousand million of them. Then to get a trillion of them you need a thousand billion.

More remarkable is how many millions of something you need to get a trillion of them. Let’s supposed that in addition to paper money in denominations of ones, tens, twentys, and one hundreds that the FED just happened to print up for convenience a one million dollar bill. It would have printed on each corner, "1,000,000" and below would be "ONE MILLION DOLLARS." (Oh hey, I just realized, there is no "$" symbol on US money. Hmmmmm.)

If you could get a legitimate one, would you like to have a ONE MILLION DOLLAR bill? I suspect you would. It would pay for a lot of things. In fact, for most people it would completely pay off all their loans and would also carry them through tough times in case they had to leave their job. A million dollars is a lot of money to a person. Yes, a ONE MILLION DOLLAR bill is a lot of money.

So with these one million dollar bills, how many of them would you need to have $1 Trillion? It is astonishing to realize that you would need ONE MILLION ONE MILLION DOLLAR bills to reach $1 Trillion. A million times a million. To write all that out is $1,000,000,000,000. I learned today that Zimbabwe is now printing a one trillion dollar bill (correction: a $100 trillion! ). It is worth something like $30 or $300 US dolllars because of their currency’s hyperinflation.

But I keep hearing how the TARP, the government stimulus, the unfunded liabilities, and all that stuff are putting the US somewhere between $1,200,000,000,000 and $65,000,000,000,000 in debt. Literally mind-numbing numbers for most people. So let’s average the two and round it to 30 trillion. With 6 billion people on the planet, that works out to be $30,000,000,000,000 divided by 6,000,000,000. To simplify by getting rid of excess zeros say $30,0000/6 which is equal to $5,000 of debt for every man, woman, and baby on the planet.

I’m hoping that this is the peak. I’m hoping that we will not have to start using the word quadrillion. But what can I do about it?

Hours later the big screen darkens and I return to my small screen and read about how China may cease purchasing more US debt and how the dollar may fall. I hear the echos of schwiings and thwoosh sounds still.  Will the “one currency to rule them all” be thrown into the fires of Mordor? What then of our gold rings and gold coins?

“Make haste my lord. The hour is drawing neigh. The battle begins at dawn.” May the battle for Middle Earth be won!

hat tip drop.io/dailysourcecode

I produced the video on my new 13" MacBook using the iMovie software that came with it. Amazing where computing, communications, and the internet has come since my first PC XT clone that I built in 1986.

“It is business as usual for us,” said a spokesman for the Glazer family. 

The new logo features the new sponsor’s initials “USA” in the same font and inside the same white rectangle as the previous sponsor. The spokesman dismissed reports of a completely new logo featuring the image of Federal Reserve Bank chairman Ben Bernanke.

I ENCOURAGE you to Download this show thru iTunes!

But, if you just cannot deal with that then go ahead and download the new show right now

The Mad Money Machine is proud to be sponsored by Index Funds Advisors at ifa.com.

Topics in this week’s show include:

I’m interested not only in your financial fitness, but also in your physical fitness. Get off the couch and get running or jogging with the Mad Money Machine Couch to 5K Running Plan in 12 Steps based upon the plan originally described at Cool Running. That’s 12 graduated running plans starting with Step 1 that alternates between 60 seconds of jogging and 90 seconds of walking. The plan moves you all the way up to Step 12 where you will achieve a full 30 minutes of continuous running.

I’ve put together some great music to make your jogging effortless. Just listen for my cues on when to start and stop running for each step. Keep running on the same step until you feel comfortable that you can move up to the next one. It doesn’t really matter how long it takes you to get to step 12, as long as you’re up off the couch!

To help you spend your time, in addition to enjoying great music I’ll also give you an overview of each of the 12 Steps for Active Investors. You’ll not only get in physical shape but also in financial shape at the same time. Learning while running! These timeless tips worth memorizing provide an overview to Mark Hebner’s book, Index Funds: The 12-Step Program for Active Investors. You’ll learn what it means to be an active investor and why you don’t want to be one! By the end of these 12-Steps, you’ll be a 5K runner and a couch investor.

Music from music.podshow.com:
Money – Tems
ALTA PLAZA – XRAY DOGS
The Pop Culture – DJ Top Shelf
Money – Theory in Motion
Proof Remixed – Diet Slyce and On the Money – Trap Door
Money Control – Voide
Money – AbaNDa SHAKE
Coz They Invented Money – Gravitator
Cashbox – Big Head Todd and The Monsters
Runaway Train – Under Feather

Email me: feedback at Mad Money Machine dot com, or comment, or Call me on the Mad Money Machine voicemail line at 206-734-4763

CLICK HERE TO TAKE THE MMM SURVEY NOW!

Thank you. You can click the link again at any time to view continuous results that other people have posted.

You may want to read Patrick Byrne’s (of Overstock.com) description of Jim Cramer. It is kinda long, so I’ll have to read it some time later this week myself.

 Are the Feds Manipulating the Stock Market?

from naked capitalism by Yves Smith

This message came from an investor who has provided me with some very useful research from time to time:

"Mike Belkin, who writes a weekly technically-based look at lots of markets—the only technical service to which I subscribe—notes today that last week equity fund flows netted to a $22.9 billion inflow, broken down as $3.3 billion of mutual fund outflow, and $26.2 billion of ETF inflow. His inference is that the Fed/Treasury is buying ETFs. Just so you know, Mike is an ultimate insider, although he views things with a very jaundiced eye, and views them from Seattle. He ran a Salomon prop desk for years, and is the opposite of a conspiracy theorist or a perma-anything—he’s very good at noting crosscurrents and catching shorter term countertrend moves within broad longer term trends."

The reason I consider this credible is that I was told back in 2000 by my derivative trading buddies that the Fed, known as the Turk, would place orders in S&P futures. Note that the Fed has no responsibility for the health of the stock market despite what its actions would lead you to believe.

I find this all rather hard to believe. Surely neither the Fed nor the government would intervene in the workings of the free market. What would they do if their bet lost? Who would pay?

Interesting how the auction works: If a bid is submitted within the last 5 minutes of the auction, the auction is extended another 5 minutes. That’s what eBay should do to shut down the snipers!

Congressman Wolf,

HR 5512 is considering coin modernization. Instead of merely replacing zinc pennies with steel pennies, I recommend eliminating the production of pennies, nickels, and quarters. Then continue production of dimes and half dollar coins.

Eventually, retailers will drop a decimal place from prices, such as from $14.95 to $14.9, and the penny, nickel, and quarter coins will be undesirable.

By discontinuing production of pennies, nickels, and quarters, we will save hundreds of millions of dollars each and every year.

Thank you,
Paul Douglas Boyer
MadMoneyMachine.com

You can watch a video of the hearing. But nobody is talking about the solution that makes sense: drop a decimal place in prices and eliminate the penny, nickel, and quarter. What do I gotta do to get my proposal to congress?

http://wcbstv.com/video/?id=109908