Wednesday, February 18th, 2009
Andrew Horowitz, noted author, podcast host and MSN Money TopStocks contributing blogger, has been named the champion of the 18th round of the Strategy Lab on MSN Money, a stock-picking challenge in which six top traders run mock $100,000 portfolios for six months and document every move they make. Winning by a margin of over 20% over his closest competitor, Horowitz credits his investment strategy of “QuantaFundaTechna,” detailed in his book, for his strong performance.
In celebration of his win, Horowitz is offering a free download of his book, “The Disciplined Investor – Essential Strategies for Success,” for a limited time to all MSN Money registered users. The book contains several tips and tricks that Horowitz used in developing the “QuantaFundaTechna” strategy and is a great resource for both the novice and more experienced investor. Each chapter details the core disciplines that make up a complete portfolio strategy. Copies of “The Disciplined Investor – Essential Strategies for Success” will be available for a free download on the MSN Money site February 18 – 20.
Celebrating the MSN Strat Lab Win: My Book for FREE! | The Disciplined Investor.
I’m a regular listener to The Disiplined Investor podcast. I don’t have any money to invest but he does a great job of explaining what is going on in our economy in these turmoltous times. While it’s free, download his book and check it out.
Tags: Andrew Horowitz, book, finance, free, MSN, Strategy Lab, The Disciplined Investor
Posted in In The News, Software, finance | No Comments »
Sunday, February 8th, 2009
Last weekend, FairPoint Communications found themselves in a big mess while taking over the email of their customers since they bought the landlines and phone services in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont from Verizon. I can’t say I understand what happened. It sounds like server problems in handling the domain change due to the hand over of account control.
You can read about this at the Concord Monitor website.
This incident highlights something I’ve been telling friends and family for years. Do NOT use the free email from your ISP. It’s tied to the ISP! If they change ownership or you decide to change to a different service provider then you will be forced to change your email address. That’s never a good experience. In fact, I personally find it more of a hassle then changing phone numbers.
Dick Eastman has written a great article entitled, “Why You Need a Second (and Better) E-mail Address“. Hat tip to the Maine Genealogical Society where I first read the Mr. Eastman’s article.
I agree with everything Mr. Eastman says. Gmail is my favorite as well. Free Gmail or Yahoo mail or whatever is an improvement over being stuck to a particular ISP’s email. But I might go even one step further and suggest you take a look at Google Apps Standard Edition. For a very small annual fee you could have Google manage email at your own domain. By owning your domain then you never have to fear it changing. And if Google does not satisfy you then simply move your domain to another host. Your own domain puts you in complete control!
Don’t Use Your ISP for Email!
Tags: domain, email, Fairpoint, free, Google, ISP, problems, service
Posted in Communication | 1 Comment »
Sunday, June 29th, 2008
Finally, it’s summer time! Since I work in a public school system, that means eight or nine weeks working with few people around. Lots of time working alone. So I’ve been loading up my iPod with lots of free audio books.
The sources of free audio books on the World Wide Web is pretty wide. I’ve written about a few authors who podcast in the past. There are many others out there. Here are some sources I found for books I wanted to read:
For classic stories and older tales that are now in the public domain then check out LibriVox. I downloaded ten days of audio for my summer listening pleasure. Between my regular podcast listening and these stories then my summer alone time should be full.
A few things I might suggest about exploring free audio books is that you should be prepared for wide degrees of quality recordings. Some are very good and professional. Most are very fine amature recordings. But some are downright bad and the quality distracts from the story itself.
Then there is the telling of the tale itself. Like a good joke, some people can repeat a good joke and get everyone laughing. While others, like me, can ruin a great joke with poor delivery. This is true of narrators as well. So I advise picking a chapter and having a test listen before spending lots of time and bandwidth downloading hundreds of megabytes of audio files. I just can’t hear the story through some narrators tone and inflection. But some narrators are true actors and can really add to a story with their voices.
I’ll report back in a week or so with a report some of the first stories I’ve listened to.
Tags: audio, book, Entertainment, free, Podcast
Posted in Entertainment | 3 Comments »
