Mad Money Machine

Shifting to Mac Hastened

Remember that new Dell XPS I bought off eBay to help rescue my previous DELL XPS that failed? And remember that it worked, right, I got my data off the hard disks. Whew, that was nice. Now guess what? The sound is gone. No audio. Mute. I have tried everything that is reasonable including replacing […]

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NYTimes has great interactive graphic on getting back to even

Check this out. NYTimes, with its unlimited budget (ha) has gone and done my pitiful "Table of What it Takes to Get Back to Even " several times better. Theirs is an interactive graphic (in Flash no less) where you can enter what you once HAD, what you now HAVE, and your expected return rate […]

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Run Windows 7 on a MacBook

I’m all about living on the bleeding edge. Gotsta have the newest toys. So, I downloaded the beta version of Windows 7 and also downloaded a trial copy of VMWare’s Fusion. The idea here is that I will run the beta of the new Windows on a virtual partition on my MacBook. If things blow […]

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Gift Cards

We have a stack of gift cards. Literally, a stack. I used to carry them around in my wallet so that in the event we were out and about and happened to stop at one of those stores, I’d have the card with me. But my wallet got so thick with these things that it […]

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Austrian Investing Means Investing in Capitalism

I was talking with Mark Hebner today about this idea of Black Swan investing. As I mentioned in show 141, I read an article entitled “Is There Such a Thing as Austrian Investing?” by  Sterling T. Terrell. He talks about the differences between passive and active investing. But then he talks about their similarity: they both […]

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Backup Solution? HP MediaSmart Server perhaps

I’ve been doing a lot of reading about various backup strategies. It is one of my 2009 New Year’s Resolutions, remember? Here are my requirements: OS Agnostic. Don’t want it to be tied to Mac or Windows. Want it to be able to do anything. Yet, I want it to be Apple Time Machine compatible […]

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Lord of the Rings

We are in the middle of watching the entirety of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, super-duper extended director’s ultra specuatcular release. Nine hours of DVD bliss. Watching all of those dark battle scenes, sword swing after sword swing accompanied by those “schwiing” and “chiing” sounds, then arrow piercing’s thwoosh. Hours later the big screen […]

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Still searching for the perfect outliner

I’ve been using outliner software since the 80’s. What’s it do? It helps you keep lists. Nested lists as outlines.  Like this: Things to buy Milk Eggs Fish Backup software Things to do Today Wash car Mow lawn Go to the store Books to get from the Library Index Funds The Revolution The Left, the […]

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How do you get your news?

How do you get your news? Newspaper? TV? Radio? Magazine? I’ve tried all of these and none of them work as well for me as the Internet. Newspapers are too much chuff (and advertising) to fool with. TV is too much fluff (and advertising) to fool with. Radio is too much bluff (and advertising) too […]

Tags: media, news, RSS

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Two Informative Podcast Episodes

With Keynesianism on the march, are you wondering how Austrian Economics fits into today’s financial situation? I regularly listen to both the EconTalk and Bloomberg on the Economy podcasts. I recommend that you listen to these two particular episodes: 1. Bloomberg on the Economy, 12/24/2008: Tom Keene interviews Gerald O’Driscoll ( subscribe in iTunes) 2. EconTalk, 1/5/2009: Russ […]

Tags: Austrian, Gold

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Lazy Portfolio Smackdown 2008 Winners Announced

I have updated the Lazy Portfolio Smackdown page to show the preliminary results for 2008. Note that after a few weeks the results will be updated once again after Yahoo! gets their dividend data included in the historical quotes for each fund. I do not think that the dividend data will alter the results though. […]

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