The Definition of Zoomie

I've known this for a while, but I've never really looked into the official definition of Zoomie...

Teasing out the Efficient Market Hypothesis

The media profits from selling stuff: newspapers, magazines, and airtime for ads. It seems that the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) has been shelved by the media mostly. We still get the top mutual funds and other crap that is based on past performance, even though, the print in the mutual fund prospectuses clearly state: "Past Performance is no guarantee of future results."

The responsibility to point out the effects of the EMH often fall on academics, like todays post over at Greg Mankiw's blog; he gets bonus points by pointing out the effect in a WSJ article, which curiously, fails to talk about what the results mean.

Facebook is all that!

Valerie is always telling me that I think Facebook is less than I portray it to be. Well, sometimes it is...

That is a lot of pennies

Wow. I've never seen so many pennies in one place...

My first InDesign document!

So, I have this document for work that we use to capture taxpayer information when we have a client come to our VITA site. In the past, it's been a simple two page, two sided document. Easy, one sheet of paper covers all we need. Well, this year, the IRS wants us to collect additional info. While I could make two sheets and staple them together, this is not ideal. Stapled documents (especially in the top corner) are sometimes hard to file and retrieve. They like to tear, and I don't need loose documents floating in my cabinets!

So I needed to fit four 8.5x11 pages onto one 11x17, two sided. I had my original in Word 07 with all sorts of fun tables and text. I researched how to print in 11x17, but I couldn't seem to replicate other's success. So, I was advised by many people (including Valerie) that I had to move to InDesign.

Now, I've taken a class in InDesign, but by no means am I an expert. However, I have a great InDesign designer on speed dial (actually several); with Valerie's help, I managed to duplicate my document in InDesign from Word (place is an awesome command!) and now I have my completed document.

When I finished my document, I had a great upswelling of pride.; it's been quite a while since I have completed a project in a totally new software package. As I was walking to the parking garage, Valerie called. I relayed to her my excitement, and she was genuinely happy for me. I realized at that moment what I was experiencing: Kindergartener's first crayon project. It met the criteria: 1. I was taking my project home, 2. It was somewhat imcomplete (i stapled two 11x17 together), and 3. I had completed a difficult project that, for a skilled person, would be easy.

Nevertheless, I put my new intake sheet on my fridge with magnets.

This is a test. This is a test of using Google Docs to publish a post to my Blog at Blogger. Which may be picked up by Facebook. This is only a test.

ConsumerReports.org!

Ahh, at least some of the ads are now pointing to ConsumerReports.org. That makes me much happier!