I signed up for a new 2-year agreement with Verizon Wireless this week, and got a new Kyocera KX414 phone. The reviews on this phone over at Wireless Gaming Review aren’t too good, but I wasn’t really intending to use it for gaming. I’m trying to decide if I should sign up for Get It Now for e-mail and web access, then just cancel my palm.net account. It’d be cheaper, but the screen is so tiny, and there’s only the numeric keypad, so it seems like it’d be a pain to use.
Author: Andrew Huey
Dark Materials
This article in the Times today got me kind of interested in Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy. Here’s an interview with him at Powells.com that’s pretty interesting.
OneNote
Interesting OneNote review. I’m still not sure if it was worth the $50…
mix tape
Very nice mixtape posted here — all legally downloadable.
Pixar
Hello Kitty
My continuing, unexplainable, desire to acquire oddball Hello Kitty items continues unabated. However, I am still successfully restraining myself. I will NOT buy Hello Kitty toilet paper. Really. Unless I see it for sale at San Diego or something.
Boondocks
The Boondocks has been running strips over the last few days comparing the presidential candidates to various superheroes and villains. Today’s strip is particularly good — George Bush as the Joker!
Hello Kitty Pez
I just saw these on eBay. OK, I’m not actually going to buy them, but I’m really tempted.
Non-obvious tech tip of the day
Downloading quotes for a preferred stock into Quicken:
“Edit the symbol name in Quicken by removing the space, the P, and the R, and replacing them with a hyphen (-). “
Oh yeah, I would have eventually figured that out on my own. The P and the R! Of course! And here I was thinking I could just type in the ticker symbol as-is, off Quicken’s own friggin’ web site! What was I thinking?
big picture
I was just looking back on some financial stuff for the last year. It seems I often forget to look at the big picture with this stuff, instead getting caught up in the details. One mutual fund that I have in my IRA has been a bit of a dud since the market went south in 2000/2001. I was gratified to see that it had gone up from about $25 to $35 over the course of the last year. Then, I zoomed back a bit more, and remembered that I bought it at around $40 back in the nineties, and that it had hit a high of about $100 before the crash. Oh well, maybe it’ll get back to $40 before I retire, so it won’t be a net loss.