Agilent VEE Pro will show a ‘tip of the day’ windows upon start up. There are many tips you can learn from this wizard windows. However, this is the best and I like it the most:
Agilent VEE Pro best tip of the day
Book review: Value Averaging
Value Averaging: by Michael E. Edleson
Title: Value Averaging: The Safe and Easy Strategy for Higher Investment Returns
Author: Michael E. Edleson
ISBN-10: 0470049774
ISBN-13: 978-0470049778
If you are doing investment, you should be familiar with Dollar Cost Averaging (DCA). It is an systematic investment method to reduce average unit price of your stocks/fund. However, DCA is not perfect, it has some weaknesses. For example, in long term investment, DCA’s return ratio will be reduced due to the inflation.
The Value Averaging: The Safe and Easy Strategy for Higher Investment Returns another investment strategy to overcome the disadvantages of DCA. The author called it Value Averaging. This book explains how value averaging works, include detail calculation how it cover the shortcoming of DCA. Also, it uses historical data from S&P and Nasdaq to compare both dollar cost averaging versus value averaging on return of investment.
This book also teaches how to design your investment plan using spreadsheet software like Ms Excel. You’ll be able to learn from the examples how to use formulas to calculate financial data like annuities for periodic investments, dca and va. There are some examples on how to do the simulations with the investment plans as well.Another interesting part of the book is the author shares how to reduce transaction cost and avoiding taxes.
The last part of the Value Averaging share with the readers on various investment vehicles that are suitable for value averaging. If you are in mutual fund investment, you might want to read it for more detail.
This book brought me a new investment method, value averaging. This is a good investment method to cover what DCA’s shortage. However, value averaging is also not perfect. If you read the book carefully, it is not hard to spot the disadvantages. The book shares about the weaknesses and there are strategies to manage it. There is no perfect system. Like my friend said: there is always another concept behind a concept.
start: 01 Nov 2009
Finish: 03 Nov 2009
Wall Street collapse and new world order
華爾街完全崩解 世界國力新序列
Title: 華爾街完全崩解 世界國力新序列 (Wall Street collapse and new world order)
Author: 楊衛隆
ISBN: 978-988-17749-3-4
This is the book written after the US’s sub-prime mortgage crisis. It started with a sarcastic story on how the state government trying to save the Citigroup.
The author reveals how the WallStreet and the rich taking advantage on the subprime crisis to make another fortune. It also explains the root cause of subprime mortgage and world financial crisis. Not only telling what has happen in the pass, the book also forecast what will be happening next and discuss how China can play its role and influence the new world order. Overall, this is an interesting story book 
Finish: 20 May 2009
Contact me if you want to borrow the book from me.
Book review: Search Me: The Surprising Success of Google
Search Me: The Surprising Success of Google
Title: Search Me: The Surprising Success of Google
Author: Neil Taylor
ISBN-10: 1904879160
ISBN-13: 978-1904879169
Wonder what is the secret of google to make it such a high growth company and popular brand? Google is not just a search engine, but it has a lot of good products. Other than gmail, there are many more products that you might not familiar now. For example, the google chrome browser; the android, the mobile operating system.
The Search Me: The Surprising Success of Google tells you all you want to know about how Google build their brand, how they are so outstanding among the search engines. A breathless, energetic, and fun look at one of the great brand stories.
Start: Jan 2009
Finish: 31 Jan 2009
Contact me if you want to borrow the book from me.
Extend laptop battery life
Normal laptop’s battery life is about 2-3 years. However, many users experienced that their notebook batteries usually start aging faster than expected. So many users will just power adapter as replacement to the battery but it is very inconvenient solution.
The battery life is depends on usage. but you can do some maintenance on the batteries to prolong the battery life. Do you know that the notebook’s battery need to be calibrated from time to time, especially if it is not been used for long time. The calibration is to fully discharge and recharge it to reset its gauge.
When do you need to perform calibration on the battery? One of the indicator is when you notice that the Windows system tray battery gauge become inaccurate. Below is the instruction on how to calibrate the battery:
Continue reading ‘Extend laptop battery life’ »
Dive Into Greasemonkey
Title: Dive Into Greasemonkey
link: http://diveintogreasemonkey.org/
Greasemonkey is a firefox plugin which enable user to inject their own javascript into certain webpages. By doing so, visitors or users are able to do many creative things over the original webpage. Below are few Continue reading ‘Dive Into Greasemonkey’ »
How to make a link to friend in facebook wall
Isn’t it cool if you know how to link to your friend or group on your wall post like shown in Figure 1?
Figure 1: Facebook wall links to a friend
This is very useful especially you want to promote somebody or a facebook group. Your other friends who read your post can click on the link to figure out more about the person or group easily.
This is very easy to do this. What you need to do Continue reading ‘How to make a link to friend in facebook wall’ »
Book review: Come into my trading room
Come Into My Trading Room - Alexander Elder
Title: Come Into My Trading Room: A Complete Guide to Trading
Author: Dr.Alexander Elder
ISBN-13: 978-0471225348
ISBN-10: 0471225347
The book’s author, Dr. Alexander Elder, is a psychology professor in New York and has been a professional trader for the past 20 years. It took him 3 years to complete and publish this book which is evident in the amount of detail he includes.
In this book, Alexander reveals his trading secrets and introducing 3M of success trading: Mind, Method and Money Management. It also covers trading secrets for stocks, futures and options. It gave a brief introduction of technical analysis, indicators, trending and the triple screen trading system.
Below are a few interesting extracts from the books:
- A former military pilot said that day-trading was more exciting than sex or flying jet aircraft.
- Markets are the most entertaining places on the face of the Earth. They are like a card game, a chess game, and a horse race all rolled into one.
- Showing strangers your trading diary feels almost like inviting them into the bedroom during an intimate moment. As we grow older, we care less and less about what others think of us; I do not believe I could have shown you my diary just a few years ago.
What makes trading so exciting? What is the fun and entertaining part of trading for a living? Read the book to find out more and get into Alexander’s trading room and read his trading diary!
Start: 15 August 2009
Finish: 31 October 2009
Secure WordPress admin access with IP address
This is another 5 minutes setup to enhance your wordpress security. This method minimizes hacking to your blog’s admin account by setting the white list IP address which you normally log into your wp account. The trick is to make use of .htaccess file. This is the content of the .htaccess file that you will put in the /wp-admin folder.
AuthUserFile /dev/null
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName “Example Access Control”
AuthType Basic
<LIMIT GET>
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx # your ip address
allow from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx # ip address white list
</LIMIT>
How to find out your ip address? Just google “what is my ip address”
Converting microsoft office documents to PDF
There are few methods to generate document in pdf format. I notice a few friends bought Adobe PDF editor to produce ebooks, manuals and general documents. However, there are few other options which is free. You might want to consider the alternatives if you are on budget and would like to save cost for your business.
If you are Microsoft Office 2007 user, there is a free add-in. The Microsoft Office ‘Save As PDF’ plugin enables you to convert ms office documents such is words (doc, docx), excel (xls, xlsx) and so on, to PDF or XPS format. After installed the addin, you can save the document as pdf format as shown in the Figure1 below:
Figure 1: Office 2007 save as PDF
The disadvantage of this method is you are not able to create PDF file in any software other than Office 2007.
Another free solution to create pdf file is using a free virtual PDF printer. With this method, you can print your documents into PDF format in any software as long as print is supported. One of a good and FOC pdf printers is PrimoPDF.
Hope you can save money with the suggestions.