Fred’s Mind

If any of you keep up with my facebook status updates.  I must say that this whole banking thing has got me all confused.

Here is the most recent piece of it.

I just read this: http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2008/09/22/quote_du_jour_2_1.html

And it got me to wondering.

If they can only provide 15-20% returns.  But are leveraged at 30x debt to equity.  Doesn’t that mean they were only making about .5% for each factor of equity?

That seems to be FAR lower than what the bank would pay me for keeping my money in their savings bank account…

In other words, it would seem, if I could get 30x out of my equity, i could make 15-20% returns on my money just by putting it into fdic banks?

Granted, this is an apples to orange comparison as GS is a lot bigger than the small man such as I, but the point remains.

So, what is it that I am missing from this thought process?  Please, all you financial peeps shed some light?

Is anyone else having the newest Pidgin regularly crash on you?

I can’t go an hour without it crashing.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/08/why-were-failing-in-math-and-science.html

Wow, its been a long time since something I read hit me as hard as this.

I think this gets to the very crux of the problem. We are talking about kids here. If you build an interest in science now, you will get them interested for the rest of their life. Instead though, we interest our kids with Barbies and American Idol. Is it of little wonder that Reality shows now are more popular than say Jeapardy?

These little things are exactly what gets ingrained into a culture. It is exactly how cultures are built. We can’t see it as well as we exist in the gradually changing culture, but it is there none-the-less.

http://www.jkontherun.com/2008/07/giga-omni-media.html

For the last couple of months, I have been spending countless hours looking / waiting for a new TabletPC to come out. With the amount of time I have spent on looking, I probably could have just went and bought top of the line and forgotten all my worries. In the course of looking for one of these computers, I was able to stumble onto this site, jkontherun, and have found it to be great ever since.

I just want to say congratulations to the two of them as they hopefully were able to get something for all the hard work they have put into their blog.

I think this buyout confirms two of the fundamental points which Scribefire is based on, and why I am excited about what I am working on.

1) Niche blogs can be successful.

Blogs which highly target a niche can still be successful even as the Internet becomes more and more commercialized. Federated Media, Glam Media, etc all have found that advertisers want to target to niches and that they haven’t been able to, or that its hard. Most of the companies are targeting the large blogs with the large audiences, but there isn’t a reason why semi-successful or even more niche audiences are just as important to advertisers.

2) Bloggers really just want to blog.

Two snippets from James really struck a chord for me.

What will change is a good thing- both Kevin and I have joined the Giga Omni Media group and will be able to focus all of our time on writing for you here on jkOnTheRun.

Having these resources at our disposal will not only mean your experience on the site will get better but it means that Kevin and I can concentrate solely on creating the content you crave.

The truth of the matter is that when you are running a blog, especially if it becomes a full time job, is that there is so much to have to worry about beyond your actual passion. The idea that, quite frankly, writing content and finding an audience is hard enough without having to find your own advertisers. The un-fun parts of actually making money starts to take a bigger and bigger role.

As advertisers feel more comfortable with the idea of User Generated

Hi Everyboyd.

I am splitting up my blog.

http://personal.fredlu.com will be … well … the personal blog.

This blog will be more work related. And in that vein, I thought it was high time to put up what I have been working on and I promise I will next week. In mean time, the hint is on my right.

Just downloaded Firefox3 to try it out.

Good news:
Scribefire and FireFTP both still work. I use scribefire more than fireFTP but both as very useful extensions.
Tamper Data also works. Great for debugging.

Bad news:
Firebug doesn’t work. This is a horrendous killer for me. This extension is critical to my job.

In the 10 minutes I have played with it so far, it seems pretty good. I especially love the smaller shortcut bar, means it fits a lot more links than before.

UPDATE: Firebug does work, but it isn’t as good.  It used to output everything that was output to page, but I no longer see it anymore.  I used to be able to see what javascript built what frame etc, but can’t find that anymore.

http://checkoutblog.com/entries/2008/5/29/the_incredible_shrinking_laundry_deterg.aspx

Ever since finding it, I have absolutely loved the Walmart blog, and find how amazing a transformation in how I feel about the company came about because of it.

Prior to the blog, I always thought of Walmart as the big scary store. It is out to pay low and make profits purely based on size. Yet, reading the blog, you can find all the good things they do too (like this particular post about detergent). It is great to see a company use their power (buying power) both for good and evil. The good probably doesn’t come out nearly as often as it should.