Yelp, Google want u!

very interesting look at how the online ad have developed. I use yelp from time to time, for big city it's very good source / reference!


http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10418625-265.html

Quicken takes Mint... refreshing?

Intuit (i.e. Quicken, QuickBooks, TurboTax also has the free online version of Quicken) is buying Mint for approximately $170 million.

wow, after reading this I was thinking poor Mint got taking over, but the blog talks about Intuit's plan!

...After the acquisition closes, the Mint.com team will be leading the development of both Mint.com and Intuit’s existing personal finance products, Quicken desktop and Quicken Online. The fact that Intuit has agreed to acquire Mint.com, and is leaving our team intact, is evidence that Intuit has been impressed by and wants to build upon the user experience that Mint.com offers. We’ll not only improve upon that experience for Mint.com but also bring our know-how to the Quicken product line. Destroying the Mint.com user experience does not make sense for Intuit, Mint.com or any of our users.
(Aaron Patzer
Founder and CEO)

It's interesting because my previous was talking about the online personal finance application and MS Money.

Reference: businesswire

Microsoft ran out of Money?

I am a unwelling Quicken user but couldn't believe Microsoft would drop their only entry into personal finance software. MS Money no more after June 30th, 2009!

The excuse:

With banks, brokerage firms and Web sites now providing a range of options for managing personal finances, the consumer need for Microsoft Money Plus has changed. After suspending annual updates of Money Plus in 2008, Microsoft ended sales of Money Plus on June 30, 2009.

What will happen to the plus member?

Update (8/5/09): Later this year, Microsoft will release versions of Money Plus Deluxe and Money Plus Home & Business that will not require online activation. This version will allow you to keep your Money files and transactional history but will not allow access to online services or premium services. Check back here for additional information or look for future announcements in Money Plus.

of course this got me thinking what will I do if Quicken drop it's support? I know it's unlikely since Quicken is Intuite's bread and better. I'll continue this line of thinking at end of this blog.
But first Intuite's ad to get M$ Money's shares:

The Quicken team is here to help.

Right now, Quicken can transfer up to 10,000 transactions from Microsoft Money. We're currently developing an easy way for Money users to transfer more of their data into Quicken desktop products. Our goal is to make it as simple as possible to make the transition.

There are other desktop applications, but for Windows platform Quicken is the best. Other good desktop personal finance software is Moneydance it can run on Windows, Mac and Linux!

A new trends is the online version of personal finance portal they are free! Best two that I have tried is Quicken online and Mint both have it's good and bad... nothing ugly yet :-) I'll have to list the pros and cons on my later blog.

Best of luck to M$ Money users!

No more analog TV

Today (June 12th) is the official end of analog tv broadcasting in the US. All full power tv stations must stop analog broadcasting forever. This does NOT include low power stations and translators, they can continue analog operations as normal.

http://www.dtv.gov/consumercorner.html some FAQ

https://www.dtv2009.gov/ not sure if gov has money but here is the coupon for your converter box.

hope you are ready, I got my old tv hook up to converter and it works great!

take a bit of that apple, my take on iPhone vs Pre

I do not own an iPhone so this is just my option :-) But from handling it in store and friends who have it (claiming it's greatest thing) I can tell you it's an awesome eye candy. iPhone shows well (a term realtor or car sales person uses often), but when you try to use it as a PDA that is when it fell short. btw, Apple never claim iPhone as a PDA like device, but lot of office worker treat it like one. iPhone is great as music player (no #@!^) it's okay as a phone.

Finally something that can go up against! Since I am no banker, let's compare the cost.

Palm Pre (Sprint)

• $200: cost of phone with $100 rebate
• $70 per month: 450 voice minutes with unlimited messaging and data
• $90 per month: 900 voice minutes, unlimited messaging and data
• $100 per month: Unlimited voice minutes, messaging and data

iPhone (AT&T)

• $200: cost of phone
• $90 per month: 450 voice minutes, unlimited messaging and data
• $110 per month: 900 voice minute, unlimited messaging and data
• $150 per month: Unlimited voice minutes, messaging and data

I know there are lots of review out there but after June 05 we'll know how it handle in real world.

search the news feed for all the Palm Pre news

Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10 (Audio CD)

Wife planned a family trip over the Memorial Day weekend (in the U.S it's kinda like a start of the summer). I knew we'll be spending LOT of time driving, so I had the audio book pick out for the weekend road trip.

Since it's a day that we commemorates U.S. men and women who died while in the military service I think it's appropriate to read (whoops LISTEN to) the "Lone Survivor - The eyewitness account of operation redwing and the lost heroes of SEAL team 10" by Marcus Luttrell (Author), Patrick Robinson (Contributor).

Some review I read said the book is anti-liberal and too self-aggrandizing, too much testosterone... well if I was getting shot 100 different ways and had to watch my buddies KIA (see list below). I would give this man the respect and LET HIM TELL HIS STORY! It's Marcus's story and let it be his voice.

The book start slow with back ground on Marcus and how he became a SEAL. With great insight on SEAL training in Coronado, CA and gives you a deep appreciation for just how hard it is to become a SEAL, while the second half takes you through a harrowing battle that I couldn't stop the audio CD.

When I heard (remember this is a audio book) the SEAL decided to let the goat herders go... I was screaming Nooooo in my mini-van, my family must think I am outta my mind.

Above photo: Navy SEALs (Sea, Air, Land) operating in Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. From left to right: Sonar Technician -- Surface 2nd Class (SEAL) Matthew G. Axelson, 29, of Cupertino, Calif; Information Systems Technician Senior Chief (SEAL) Daniel R. Healy, 36, of Exeter, N.H.; Quartermaster 2nd Class (SEAL) James Suh, 28, of Deerfield Beach, Fla.; Hospital Corpsman Second Class (SEAL) Marcus Luttrell; Machinist Mate 2nd Class (SEAL) Eric S. Patton, 22, of Boulder City, Nev.; LT (SEAL) Michael P. Murphy, 29, of Patchogue, N.Y. With the exception of the lone survivor, Luttrell, all were killed June 28, 2005 by enemy forces while supporting Operation Redwing

photo can be found http://www.globalsecurity.org Top view give some idea on surrounding where it goes down, sorry no google "streetview"

We owed a debt of gratitude from a nation who remains free because of their sacrifice. The book is a great read, but if you prefer to found out more on the news (2005) just google to found other online article.

On June 28, 2005, three of four SEALS on the ground (Murphy, Dietz, Axelson) were killed during combat operations in support of Operation Red Wing. On the same day, a QRF of eight Navy SEALs and 8 Army Night Stalkers were also killed when the MH-47 helicopter that they were aboard was shot down by enemy fire in the vicinity of Asadabad, Afghanistan in Kumar Province.

Navy SEALs
SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team 1, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

1. Lt. (SEAL) Michael P. Murphy, 29, of Patchogue, N.Y.
2. Sonar Technician (Surface) 2nd Class (SEAL) Matthew G. Axelson, 29, of Cupertino, Calif.
3. Machinist Mate 2nd Class (SEAL) Eric S. Patton, 22, of Boulder City, Nev.
4. Senior Chief Information Systems Technician (SEAL) Daniel R. Healy, 36, of Exeter, N.H.
5. Quartermaster 2nd Class (SEAL) James Suh, 28, of Deerfield Beach, Fla.

SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team 2, Virginia Beach, Va.

1. Gunner’s Mate 2nd Class (SEAL) Danny P. Dietz, 25, of Littleton, Colo.

SEAL Team 10, Virginia Beach, Va.

1. Chief Fire Controlman (SEAL) Jacques J. Fontan, 36, of New Orleans, La.
2. Lt. Cmdr. (SEAL) Erik S. Kristensen, 33, of San Diego, Calif.
3. Electronics Technician 1st Class (SEAL) Jeffery A. Lucas, 33, of Corbett, Ore.
4. Lt. (SEAL) Michael M. McGreevy Jr., 30, of Portville, N.Y.
5. Hospital Corpsman 1st Class (SEAL) Jeffrey S. Taylor, 30, of Midway, W.Va.

Army Night Stalkers
3rd Battalion, 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne), Hunter Army Air Field, Ga.

1. Staff Sgt. Shamus O. Goare, 29, of Danville, Ohio.
2. Chief Warrant Officer Corey J. Goodnature, 35, of Clarks Grove, Minn.
3. Sgt. Kip A. Jacoby, 21, of Pompano Beach, Fla.
4. Sgt. 1st Class Marcus V. Muralles, 33, of Shelbyville, Ind.
5. Maj. Stephen C. Reich, 34, of Washington Depot, Conn.
6. Sgt. 1st Class Michael L. Russell, 31, of Stafford, Va.
7. Chief Warrant Officer Chris J. Scherkenbach, 40, of Jacksonville, Fla.

HQ Company, 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne), Fort Campbell, Ky.

1. Master Sgt. James W. Ponder III, 36, of Franklin, Tenn.


You can found the above list from www.seal.navy.mil

I'll try to add more link for each name when I found them. Feel free to let me know.

http://www.navytimes.com/news/2007/06/navy_sealbook_070618w/

digital music with ogg and mp3

I have not encode (rip) any CD for a long long time, now a day you can just buy songs from Amazon mp3, iTunes. But lately I'm thinking of convert some old LP and rest of CD to digital :-)

Back in '97, I was running Windows 95 and it takes 45 minutes to rip and encode ONE song! Early days there were only few software that can correctly rip and (wave-> mp3) encode songs. Now a day there are many audio encoder software that can handle wav, ogg, mp3 ..etc. takes only 45 minutes to encode entire CD!

We'll look at two formats that I use most often. Ogg format mostly stay on my Treo 800 Smart phone, but my collection is dominant by good O'l mp3.

OGG

Ogg Vorbis is efficient and is the state of the art in audio compression technology. Used properly, recent Ogg Vorbis encoders deliver sound quality surpassing MP3 with all possible bitrates.

OggDropXPd, the aoTuV version with Aoyumi's code, the characters you see is Japanese just follow the English direction you'll be fine. Some of you need libmmd.dll for that to work: it's here, unzip and put it in your \Windows\system32\ folder.

Best quality/size ratio for Ogg Vorbis: 6 in Quality Management Mode, and here are some settings resulting in high enough quality.

MP3

seem like everyone has a option about which encode to use since I'm not audiophilia but here are a few place to readup Mp3-converter.com

To encode/decode MP3 files I recommend RazorLame, a Windows frontend for the command-line executable of L.A.M.E.. There are others out there just google for LAME.


After you decide on the format make sure to check if your software can normalize the song. This is simply a way to make the volumes of your music “normal.” You may have noticed that some of your CDs are a lot quieter than others, and this is what normalization attempts to fix. Digital audio is basically just a big stream of numbers, one after the next.

Normalization scans a digital audio file and finds the biggest number in the whole song. If the biggest number is only half as big as it possibly could be, then your song is really only half as loud as it could be, so the normalizer detects that and scales all the numbers up to make the volume “normal. Normalization can be really handy on compilation CDs where you don’t want to have to adjust the volume knob between tracks to maintain the desired volume.

Privacy Policy for iamnobanker.blogspot.com

I'm no lawer either so I googled and this is my draft version from Serp Rank.

Privacy Policy for iamnobanker.blogspot.com

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Oracle can see the future of the Sun (and Java)!

just had my coffee and saw this news wsj , washingtonost not much detail is released. Knowing how Oracle and its famous CEO Larry Ellison work, not much will be release until all dust are settled. Of course two weeks ago there was the IBM's plan to buy Sun.

Appearly, the Board of Directors of Sun Microsystems has unanimously approved the transaction.

MySql now the new Oracle Lite?

Update: found this blog by Larry Dignan @ zdnet has pretty nice summery on things.

Ain't you kinda young for robbing bank? guess not.

Remember the boy is "accused" not formally charged.

A 13 year old boy was taken into custody Monday after allegedly robbing a Peoria bank (IL), with handgun

The robbery occurred about 11:34 a.m. at the bank's 2119 SW Adams St. location, and by 12:10 the suspect was in custody. The Peoria teen was apprehended in a garage behind a house at 927 S. Louisa St. in South Peoria.

According to Burgess, police eventually located the suspect hiding in the garage near the alley off Louisa. The suspect, who police haven't identified because he is a juvenile, was hiding behind a couch in the garage at 927 Louisa. His sweatshirt was covered with reddish-colored dye.

Recession has now reach young teens, using handgun at a bank is just asking for trouble. I wonder if the branch had a guard on duty? Because the boy is a minor we'll probably never see the video footage.

eclipse of the Sun (this time it could be eclipse forever)?

UPDATE 4/21/09 Oracle can see the future of the Sun

There has been many articles (forbes, computerworld, wsj) about this possible takeover.

Java developer blogsphere and newsgroup have gone wild about the possible outcome.. what ifs..
There are many offering that are overlap between the IBM and SUN.

Sun's profilo includes, but not limit to the following:

• Java
• OpenSolaris
• MySQL
• GlassFish
• VirtualBox
• JavaFX (very very new....)
  
• OpenOffice/StarOffice
• NetBeans
• SunStudio...

some of the things I can see that maybe duplicate, but if merged the two will become a stronger product.

AIX v. Solaris
Power vs Sparc
Web$phere vs Glassfish
Eclipse vs Netbeans
DB2 vs MySQL (well... DB2 is MySQL may not be at the same level of offering)

I enjoy using Netbeans on my own time, but at work I had to u$e$ RAD7 (aka eclipse + $$$). I would hate to see another free IDE goes ... and left with one RCP (Rich client platform). I'm sure the community will keep the Netbeans RCP alive, but without a major support it's hard to see its true potential.

Update 4/6: Business blog nytimes "Sign of Times" has interesting takes on what "maybe" going on. Rejected the offer!!

April fools

After getting my coffee I log into gmail and saw this

Loan $25 to change lives through Kiva (micoloan)

In Swahili, the word “kiva” means “agreement” or “unity”. Lenders choose a business and make a loan by using a credit card online at the Kiva website. Kiva then transfers the loan proceeds to local partners, who distribute the loans to the businesses. Over time, the local partner collects repayments and offers business updates through Kiva. Ultimately, your loan is repaid and you can withdraw the money or lend it to another business. The purpose of Kiva is to connect you with needy third world businesses looking for loans.

This is a great cost! In this down turn in world banks, perhaps a little mico loan can make a difference.

I found this video from 2007, very interesting talks from the co-founder Matt and Jessica Flannery of Kiva, before Oprah can get the chance!

Even more kiva related video on yooooooutube! http://www.youtube.com/user/kivamicrofunds

Maybe because I'm no banker that is why I think this is a great idea ^_^

shhh I'm leaving let's make SOME NOISE!

the letter was post on NYTIMES titled "Dear A.I.G., I Quit!" I think there is some major political jabbing behind all the media press. In one corner Uncle Sam... at the other CE* of AIG and there are minor characters of AIG have their own corner... maybe Tax payer doted the rest of the ring? I don't know if there is any win-win situation here. If we were to keep this fight up alot of people will get "hurt".

I'm not saying getting pay $1 and work 10, 12, 14 hours per day and got bonus (wait, do they really call this bonus if someone is paid by performance?) of $742,006.40 (after tax). I know I can not do Mr. DeSantis's job (nor can I run 40 y.d in 4.3 and catch ball to save my life) so I can't say much about the "bonus" or how it's structure...etc.. Businessweek has an interesting article "The Mindset of an AIG executive", it's a fun read. How do we know what is the mindset of anyone in this crazy market, Mr. DeSantis feels betrayed by his company. and the tax payer feels... perhaps the management @ AIG should have "manage" situation a little better.

One final thing... I don't think publicly posting the letter is such a good idea... burning bridge is never a good thing.

Here is his boss's interview titled "Liddy on AIG's Long Road Ahead" this gives a different prospective.

Quicken did you see my Moneydance

Are you a Quicken 2006 owner? I received the follow email...

Dear Valued Quicken Customer,

According to our records, you may be using Quicken^® Premier 2006. As of April 30, 2009, Online Services and live technical support for Quicken 2006 will no longer be available.¹ To maintain uninterrupted service, upgrade to Quicken 2009.

Looks like end of April is the last day you can download online transaction! Once again Quicken is forcing more $$ from me. Q2009 just seem to have too much junks packaged together... I enjoy using but can't understand why I have to buy a whole new upgrade. Q2009 is like Q2006.8 with all the patches + new custom front page (btw, it's not the first time they redone the front page!) .

Alternative! MS Money? naaa I did found Money dance this run on Mac, Linux or Windows. This software has free trial of 100 transactions which I'll test it out. But in the mean time I'll have to upgrade to 2009, which buy me another 3 years!

What is the catch? Network marketing

This is 2nd part regard to Market America (MA) "Drink that purple thing! (aka OPC 3)"

After trying to learn more about this Market America from the wife... it didn't lead me anywhere... but I did hear some buzzword which I wrote it down... UnFranchise, residual income, BV (business volume), IBV, business center...

I decided to googling the buzzwords and found my own answer. Here are the "numbers" I got from online search (I cross check with the credit card bills).

Annual membership Fee $129.95 the first year and then $99.95 each year thereafter. This option allows you to leverage your time and participate in the Management Performance Compensation Plan (MPCP) and earn residual income commission by building 2 teams of business partners. **uhm, why does this seem to form a shape also known as MLM**

web portal $20 monthly, so you can have web site which has ULR marketamerica.com/[your store alias here] This is where you can as you customer to shop and earn IBV. I guess $20 is okay, consider it's a pre-made template that you can't customize and MA can place their own ads.

50 BV monthly of personal volume - "this equates to about $60 - $70 depending upon the items you are using". "Remember, each product has its own BV value assigned to it, but on average BV is 80% of $Cost. For example, $100 = 80BV." You do the math! This 50 BV is not for "you" it's pass to the person above you and "bubbles up". btw, this also encourage you to recruit others, more on this on later blog.


Misc. local seminar/ training (optional) $15-30 per month. I was told online training doesn't cost anything but if it's on location there is usually a small fee to rent spaces.


okay that was fun! So now I see the "initial" cost, what is the income potential? I think I'll title my next blog "show me the money!" to look into this burning issue.

* if I miss anything just post your correction, please don't spam my inbox.