Starting tomorrow, my wife and I venture across the pond to the Greek Islands for a two week stint in Europe.  Needless to say, my posting will be scarce during this time…

Interestingly enough, I went to my local bank to convert $100 in U.S. currency to Euros.  The exchange rate was about 0.778, which means I’d get roughly 78 Euros for my $100 bill.

But wait!  There’s a catch!

The bank was going to charge me a $11 processing fee for the exchange.  Considering this would effectively lower the exchange rate by about 7%, I politely declined…

Surely there must be a better way.

Email seems to be the life blood of people my age.  In a sense, it’s almost like an answering machine: Leave a message and I’ll email you back.

I remember the daily routine of each day at work.  Walk in the door, log on to the computer, and download all those new messages.  Sometimes, reading email would supersede pouring my first cup of coffee, a definite indicator of where my priorities stood.

It seemed my addiction to email outpaced my addiction to coffee, and after thinking about it for a while, I now understand why.  Email helps define your daily task list, and even prioritizes it.  If there are questions from customers, they had to be answered first.  After all, if the customer called you on the phone, you’d be hard pressed to leave them hanging about the status of their project.  Of course, maybe that’s why we use email, so we don’t have to get answers immediately!

At my old job, I often wondered how much work I actually did that was worthless.  There were tasks that I was asked to complete that had very little relevance to my job description, or even took away from performing my job.

As an aerospace engineer, I figured that about 15% of the work I did was actually engineering, another 65% of the work I did was a result of engineering, and 20% was junk work: Work that I did that was neither engineering, or a result of engineering, and did not contribue to either.

I came across an article in the Journal via …

With the merger of TD Waterhouse and Ameritrade, new features are slowing being added to the service.  The best part is, there isn’t a fee to use many of these features.

The latest tool to be added to the traders toolbox is the Market Motion Detector.  The Market Motion Detector gauges the speed at which the price of a certain stock or sector is moving.

It will show you stocks which the price is not only increasing, but its also speeding up.  It will also show you the bearish side of the market trends as well.

I’m …

It used to be that if you needed a job, you’d pick up the local (or national) paper and look through the classifieds.  If you find one you feel your suited for, you pick up the telephone, or mail in your resume.

Ah, those were the times.  When you thought you stood a good chance of getting an interview, or at the very least, a reply.

The internet has changed all that.

Now, you access a site like Monster.com or CareerBuilder.com to sort through and find hundreds, if not thousands of jobs you feel you might enjoy and qualify for.  The problem is, many thousands of other job seekers are seeing the same job listings.

The fact is, the internet has made it so easy to go find a job that it has made getting hired even harder.  On top of that, smaller Human Resources departments now have to deal with thousands of resumes for a particular job instead of just a handful.

I’ve taken a great interest in economics since the Freakonomics guys turned me on to thinking deeper and extracting the incentive that drives people to do the things they do.  My search for economics blogs a few weeks ago led me to Marginal Revolution, whose contributors are two economics professors at George Mason University.

With illegal immigration as a hot topic on our nations front burner these days, it’s interesting to hear economists thoughts on what effect illegal immigration has on our economy.

I read Alex Tabarrok’s open letter on immigration this morning, and while I was in agreement with …

That 411 service provided by my cellular service provider has come in handy on more than one occasion. Of course, on that first occasion, I was a bit surprised as to the cost of that handy service, making me think long and hard about how badly I needed that telephone number or address information in the future.

Now, however, it appears that the “Google-esque” advertising business structure has made its way into the 411 realm.

By dialing (800) FREE-411, you get the same service as dialing 411, only for free.  The way they make their money is by playing an advertisement when you …

We’re living in an interesting world. We’ve got so much information at our fingertips that unless you’re fixated on the television or computer, the rest of the world could seemingly pass you by in a matter of seconds.

But is this a good thing?

While we are bombarded with information 24/7, we can only process so much of it in any given amount of time. And then act on that little tidbit of information? Forget it, you’re too busy taking in more…

Kevin Kelly wrote a good post about the steady increase in information.  The number of emails, telephone conversations, photographs taken… they’ve all increased exponentially over time.  One person could argue that our increase in productivity is a result of this fact, but another could argue that our productivity is the cause.

An interesting revolution is upon us that may just make credit cards a thing of the past.  PayPal has launched their mobile payment system, allowing PayPal members to make payments, transfers and donations from their cell phone.

After registering your cell phone number with PayPal, and thereby linking your phone with your PayPal account, you can wire money from your credit card or checking account to any existing PayPal account. 

Just text “Send 20 to [friends cell phone number]” to 729725 and you transfer $20 to that friend.

After you send the transaction, PayPal will call …

The House has extended the capital gains tax break for an additional two years, set to expire now in 2010.  The idea now goes to the Senate…

This legislation fixes the rate at which capital gains and dividends are taxed to 15%.  There are also some alternative minimum tax issues that were addressed, but since no one I know has any idea what the alternative minimum tax is, much less how to calculate it, it doesn’t seem all that important…