I find myself a bit baffled by WordPress 2.1 at the moment. The spell check functionality doesn’t work at all for me. Look at the spelling of the word defaults below - “defults” - and the spell checker says there’s no problem. I don’t think this is an instance of Canadian vs. American spelling either. I did a bit of searching but can’t find anything about how/why the WordPress spell check feature would not work. Anyone have any ideas?

On Saturday, February the 3rd, I spent six hours in a investment seminar put on by Wealthstreet, a Calgary company that I’d been hearing about for years and meaning to get in touch with. I’m better than most with finances, but I have a firm belief that you should do what you’re good at and avoid what you’re not good at - and for me, that means seeking advice from people who do this for a living. I bought stocks all of one time in my life, and I lost money on it.

We’ve done some work with World Financial Group (WFG), but over the past year I’ve become increasingly disillusioned with them. Our consultants are the nicest guys in the world, but niceness does not a balanced portfolio make. The WFG plan had us sink 100% of our money into a single mutual fund, and after a few months I gave my head a shake and realized how exposed we were because we had almost no diversification (Enron stock holders unstand this now). I took some steps to correct that, but ultimately things still aren’t right - and that’s why I found this Wealthstreet seminar so fascinating. I’m indebted to my parents for inviting Ashley and I to attend this with them - it was a real eye-opener. After the first half was over I made an appointment to meet with a Wealthstreet advisor to re-work our portfolio (meagre though it may be).

I’m publishing my seminar notes for two reasons: first, so that people searching for Wealthstreet can find this blog post and see my positive experience with their seminar. Secondly, even for those people reading this blog that live outside Calgary (which is most of you), I think you’ll find many of the basic financial concepts to be sound no matter where you are in the world. It’s certainly worth thinking about your financial future no matter how young you are, and simply shoving all your money into RRSPs (or 401K’s if you’re in the USA) isn’t a good long-term solution.

I’ll make one caveat about my notes: they might not be 100% accurate, so don’t take them as such. There was a great deal of information, and I may have gotten some of it wrong. Besides, what kind of a person takes financial advice from a blog?

Dave Jones, Wealthstreet CEO

• Family is important, the allocation of time should be focused 99% on everything else in your life, 1% on focusing on your investments
• “You don’t get a mulligan when it comes to your retirement.”
• You should have four to seven income streams in order to retire
• 40% of Canadians have made an average of three withdrawls from their RRSPs
• IBM sold to Lenovo because they couldn’t afford the pension for their own people
• Pension Crisis is looming: too many people retiring, not enough growth in the funds to compensate for the amount of draw from pensioners
• Bullet Proof 50% of your portfolio, Growth & Income 40% of your portfolio, 10% speculation
  If you speculate with 10% of your portfolio, and only 5% performs, it might out-perform the rest of your portfolio
• Your house an as asset must be put to work – you can’t eat a doorknob
• 1 in 7 Albertans will be the victim or attempted victim of mortgage fraud
• House rich, cash poor: people who own a house worth a great deal, but they can’t afford the property taxes
• Personal savings as a percentage of disposable personal income is -5%. Someone who earns 100K a year is spending 105K
• 10% of the world owns 90% of the assets…Trump and Kiyosaki worry that 1% of the world will eventually own 99% of the assets (more…)
  

You know, there’s nothing worse than working on a blog post, doing a lot of formatting on it, then losing your wireless connection a few moments before you click on the Save button - and thus losing the formatting you just did. WordPress has an auto-save feature, but it doesn’t kick in often enough for my liking. I can’t find any reference to how often it auto-saves, nor is there any option I can find that would allow me to change the frequency. Word has an auto-save function as well, but even in the 2007 version it defaults to 10 minutes. I don’t know about you, but I think most people can do a lot of typing in 10 minutes and if you lose your work after nine minutes, you’re going to wonder why it wasn’t doing it every three minutes (I usually go in and change the default in Word to three minutes). Since WordPress is software running on my server, using my resources, why can’t I set it to auto-save my post every 60 seconds if I wanted to? I’m really impressed with WordPress overall as a CMS, but I’m often baffled by certain aspects of it (such as not being able to change the thumbnail size, or making the default image insertion full size and no link).

Here’s another one of those posts that are simply search engine fodder: I’m using Windows Mail, the replacement for Outlook Express, on my small laptop for my personal email. I find it easier to fire up one program, configured just with my personal email, than to start up Outlook and have hundreds of messages flood in from my seven (!!!) different email accounts. What surprised me tonight though was how hard it was to find something seemingly very simple: I was sending an email from Windows Mail, and I wanted to include a BCC (blind carbon copy) recipient. I started looking in the menus for the email I was working on - I looked under View, expecting to see BCC there. It wasn’t. I searched through every menu in the message itself, and even in the Windows Mail options. There wasn’t a single mention of BCC. From my email, I selected Help > View Help and typed in the term “BCC”. Not a single result. What?? I then tried “blind carbon copy”, a term that most people will not understand (average users know it only as BCC) and found 30 results. The first five included help topics on eliminating duplicate files, copy and paste from a remote computer, rip music FAQ, copy a file or folder, and copy information between files. Absolutely nothing on BCC.

I then tried Google and after a bit of searching, found the solution: with an email message open, click on View then All Headers and the BCC field will magically appear. All Headers? That’s completely, totally, and utterly non-intuitive. Who the hell knows that headers relates to BCC other than SMTP geeks more hardcore than I? Not cool at all - Vista, you lose a point in my books for this. The Windows Mail team needs to give their head a shake and change that to “View BCC”.

The ‘Net has sure allowed for some very interesting ways of doing business. My primary designer/developer for Thoughts Media lives in Italy. I just hired a developer in India, through Elance, to develop a script to allow me to upload and manage wallpaper images over at Zune Thoughts. Offshore hiring might be a problem if you’re the one getting underbid by people doing devleopment for $10 an hour, but if you’ve got a small business like mine and you have a limited budget, but have big goals, hiring help from other spots in the world - where your dollar goes further - is your only option. And it’s not like this is new - before companies started going offshore, they’d use interns or students for less expensive workplace help. I’m looking forward to seeing how this turns out…

Another week has gone by, and it looks like I’m still going to be without the gear I need to get up and running. Velocity Micro was supposed to ship out a replacement PC (this would be the third) on Monday AM to arrive in time for Wednesday. On Tuesday I emailed them and they said they’d have it going out the door on Wednesday for arrival on Thursday or Friday. Then when I emailed them on Wednesday to ask if it was shipped, they said they were having trouble with the machine and they would try to fix the problem and get it out to me for delivery by Friday. Today I emailed them and the machine is now finished and has been passed off to their shipping department, but that means it will only get picked up today in the best-case scenario - so I’m looking at Monday or Tuesday at best. It’s sad that on the 22nd of December I was supposed to setting up this computer.

XFX, the video card company that I’m waiting on a card from, said on the 24th of January that my replacement card would be going out “soon”. Then a few days later they admitted to me that they don’t even have the 7600GS in stock - the video card with passive cooling that I ordered specifically because it was silent. They said they’d ship me a 7800GT, a card with a noisy-ass fan. No good I said, I need a passively cooled, silent card. They said ok, we’ll ship you a 7800GT with a fan. Yes, they suggested that same card that I already refused. I then asked for a 7950 GT, the next passively cooled card they offer. It’s a more expensive card, but since they can’t replace the card I sent them, it seems fair they should give me whatever card matches the last card the closest. They’re checking with their inventory department to see if they have one of those cards in stock - so at least they didn’t say no right off the bat.

Another weekend without being able to set up my office properly. All is not wasted though, I have finish setting up our TV room in anticipation of the UFC 67 fight on Saturday night. We assembled the Toshiba TV stand the other night (more or less the right way ;-)), so now it’s a matter of pumping it all through the sound system so we can watch the first UFC fight to be broadcast in high-definition. It’s gonna’ be sweet on that big 72″ Toshiba TV!

I’ve been checking the Dell business Web site every morning for the past week or so, because they’ve been running their “Days of Deals” promotion. They’ve had some great deals - I picked up a 250 GB Iomega external hard drive for $89 with free shipping - but this morning’s deal took the cake: a colour laser printer, the 3010cn, for $19? It was about 5:50am when I looked at this, bleary-eyed, so I had to blink a few times. When I saw that Dell was charging $192 for a hub/memory card reader, normally priced at $249, I figured it out: some bumbling HTML intern had the prices reversed. I figured I’d try to buy one anyway (I already have a colour laser, but for $19…), yet upon clicking on the Customize link for the printer I was shown a price of $299. Drat - this wasn’t one of those scenarios where you could actually order the product. And they must have realized their error quickly, because now when you look at the page the printer is $299 - which is an excellent price for a network-ready colour laser printer (I paid $379 for my HP 2600n, current price is $449).