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?
UPDATE OCTOBER 26th 2009: As of a couple of weeks ago, Wealthsteet’s phone number has been disconnected and the company is apparently out of business. I have no information about how to get in touch with Dave Jones, nor what this means for investments on the Wealthstreet Dragon Fund, a fund operated by Dave Jones. This blog entry has a comment that seems to indicate the Dragon Fund may still be intact, but I don’t know whom to contact to get further information. Some further updates on this can be found here.
UPDATE: This blog post was originally written in February of 2007. At the time I was quite impressed with WealthStreet and Concrete Equities. Now, as of May of 2009, I’m very concerned for my Concrete Equities investment after reading this forum thread. I certainly don’t believe everything I read online, but there are enough red flags to warrant significant concern. Most concerning of all to me is that Dave Jones has recently stepped into the role of CEO at Concrete Equities. How can I expect fair and impartial advice from Wealthstreet regarding my investment in Concrete Equities if the same man is running both? I can’t, and that’s very troubling to me. My “Wealth Coach” at Wealthstreet no longer works there, and no communication was sent out to his clients informing them that he was leaving. I had to call Wealthstreet and find this out when I asked for him and was informed he no longer works there. I would advise extreme caution regarding getting involved with Wealthstreet at this time.
UPDATE #2 (August 20th, 2009): The forum thread at Canadian Business I linked to above is no longer valid. It has been deleted, and my post in those forums asking why the thread was deleted, was itself deleted. This is called “a clean up” – someone is trying to erase all traces of this issue online. Lawyers and accusations of libel are involved. Thankfully, you can still get some of the discussion via Google’s cached version.
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
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).
It’s not often you see the words “Neener, neener, neener” in ad advertisement, but that’s exactly what I saw in the bottom of a Windows Live Messenger chat window. I clicked on it, and was taken to a Web site about DLP technology (they don’t burn in like plasma TVs can). Well done marketing person – it got me to click. Too bad I already own a DLP. 😉
As much as I try to keep my office clean and organized, I’ve tented to ignore the networking equipment that is my lifeblood, which is something I remedied yesterday. When we had this house built, we ran CAT5 cables from all around the house (there’s one drop in almost every room) down into the basement to emerge near the electrical panel. I’m not talented enough to create a patch panel or anything that elegant, so instead I just had a bunch of cables going into a bunch of devices, all perched precariously on top of various boxes. Here’s what that looked like:
As you can see, it’s quite the mess (dig the Spider Man mat though!). This isn’t a REAL “before” picture though, because I had already put up the shelf. We had some left over wood from building our garage “hold lots of empty cardboard boxes” shelves, so I had my father in law cut me a shelf from the wood (I have no capability to cut wood – I don’t even own a saw). After spending a good 30 minutes un-tangling cables and setting everything back up again, I now have a much more tidy solution.
From left to right on the top shelf, that’s my Motorola Cable modem (connected to Shaw’s Extreme server running at 10 Mbps downstream), a basic Linksys 802.11g router (waiting for a D-Link Draft N router to show up), a 400 GB Maxtor NAS drive, a 160 GB drive connected to the NAS drive, then a Netgear Gigabit router on top of a 250 GB drive also connected into the NAS. Below that I have two different UPS units, each sharing a bit of the load. If I lose power I figured I’d have ‘Net access for a few hours at least. This new setup will make things easier for me to swap out gear, which will definitely be happening this year – by the end of the year I expect to have a final 802.11n router in there, and some form of Windows Home Server (likely the HP product). This isn’t a real “after” photo either: after I took this photo I ended up putting the UPS units up on the black table, positioned below this shelf, to get them off the ground in case of a water leak. Clearly I lack the concept of “before” and “after” photos. But at least I have some clean cabling!
So many people in the media/blogosphere have Google-coloured glasses on, sometimes it makes me groan out loud. Google just updated their image search: it now hides the image resolution, the size, the file format, and the URL the image is from until you mouse over it. When you do, a light blue box appears around the image, and the extra data is displayed. Here’s how that looks. Microsoft’s Live Search (formerly MSN Search) has always done that, and a lot more: you can use the thumbnail size slider to fit more on the screen at once and it will pull in more images for you automatically. When you mouse over an image it also zooms the image in a bit (or a lot, depending on the thumbnail size setting). Here’s how that looks. Google absolutely copied Microsoft. Do I think there’s anything wrong with that? No, not at all – I don’t think that when one company makes a change it should mean that no other company can ever do anything similar. I do think it’s important to point out a double standard when one exists though, and this is definitely one.