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Stock market got you down this past week? OK, it hit me fairly hard too. FYI, here is an interesting option I discovered today. Profunds Inverse Mutual Funds—a result that is the opposite of traditional mutual funds. For example, when the S&P 500® goes down by 1% on a given day, Bear ProFund should increase by 1% and UltraBear ProFund, by 2%. Conversely, when the S&P 500 goes up by 1%, Bear ProFund should decrease by 1% and UltraBear ProFund, by 2%. These funds are no load.

While I was researching some facts for by business plan, I stumbled upon the following from the U.S. Census Economic Bureau. It turns out that in the from the last US Ecomonic Census in 2002, Legal Services is almost a $200 billion dollar industry while Sofware Publishing is only about $90 billion, and Internet Service Providers and Web Search Portals about $20 billion. I found this quite disturbing, but maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.

I think this is just weird but delicious so I am passing it on. I ate pork rinds as a kid, and I still enjoy them. If you like pork rinds too, then you will love microwave pork rinds. Yes, that’s right, there are microwave versions just like microwave popcorn. I had no idea anyone made such a thing! I happened to discover this snack a few months ago when I was at a client’s office. And while I haven’t seen these for sale in supermarkets, you can find them online from many vendors. They come out really good.

For over the past year, I have been a Blackberry user, and last month I got a new 8700c. One of the really great things about this device is Cingular's new EDGE network which makes browsing the web in real-time finally possible. I've used it on many occassions to great effect including....

This weekend I went shopping with my daughter at the mall. She wanted to show me the Onyx ultimate hair straightener from herstyler.com.

It's a great product, which retails for $175. The salesman at the kiosk was very helpful and mentioned that we could buy it right now on sale for only $119 plus tax! My daughter really wanted it too. All might have been good for him except that I pulled out my 8700c and started cruising the web to get info on the product. I pulled up the company's website. I googled the product, and most interestingly, I found one on eBay closing in 1 hour for only $32.99. I told my daughter, let's take a walk as I entered a bid using the Blackberry's web browser. When we got home 1 hour later, I had won. My daughter remarked to me, "It's so interesting that we went shopping at the mall, and ended up buying on the Internet." Indeed. This is the future, and not such great news for retail shops. More details to follow.

I just returned from Marrakech, Morocco where I attended a conference. On the last day, I went to the markets in with some friends to buy souvenirs and see more of the town. Overall, I found everything "fully valued" and there were few bargains. The shopping trip quickly turned into a negotiation workshop. Things started out very high, and you had to negotiate pretty hard just to get things back to any reasonable level. We learned about special “American� pricing in the shops. At one point, one of my friends was haggling pretty hard with a vendor over an item. The seller was getting frustrated and he said to me friend, “I don’t understand why you bargain so hard! You are an American. You have all the oil of Iraq, and all the money in the world…!� Then the other salesmen in the shop started laughing.

That comment and the reaction of the others were very telling of how Moroccans see Americans for sure, and the impacts of the Iraq war. Be that as it may, it is true that Moroccans are poorer overall than Americans, so I was left pondering this question, among other things, is there any difference in negotiating with someone who is significantly poorer versus someone who is closer to your economic level? How much do you haggle with poorer people?

Checkout the following slick video to see the new, user interface improvements in Office 2007. Gone are the toolbars, replaced by ribbons and galleries. The improvements and new features in Office 2007 look really good. Will this require you to upgrade to Vista?

The last few months I have been listening to a variety of podcasts. Some of them start out strong and then totally fade out of my attention, e.g. 43 folders. Even though there are plentiful tools to self publish easily on the Internet (like this Wordpress blogging tool I am using), it is really hard to create compelling audio or video content. And I think it is way harder than text based content. There is one podcast that I have been listening to every week. It's consistently good and inspiring even after almost 30 episodes. Venture Voice -- Entertaining Entrepreneurship. The interviews on this show, and the entrepreneurs they cover, are absolutely worth listening to. There are some other podcasts I like too, and I will list them here in the future. If you have a favorite podcast that is consistently worth listening to, let me know.

I was at the Apple store a few weekends ago with my daughter. She took me to see the PhotoBooth software. It's simple and incredibly fun software that lets you add effects to pictures taken with the built-in camera. The screen flashes white when it takes a picture which is very clever and emulates the flash on a camera. Of course, the computer doesn't have a flash. And since the computers in the store are connected to the Internet we were able to send the pictures off to ourselves. Very cool. The only downside to this software is that it only runs on iMacs and the new Macbook pro's. You cant buy it separately if you already have a Mac or a different one.

The "answer" to happiness has been outlined the following excellent article I read today at LiveScience.com. I fowarded this article to some friends and they found it useful.

"It requires some effort to achieve a happy outlook on life, and most people don't make it."
—Author and researcher Gregg Easterbrook.

From the article, "One route to more happiness is called 'flow,' an engrossing state that comes during creative or playful activity, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has found. Athletes, musicians, writers, gamers, and religious adherents know the feeling. It comes less from what you're doing than from how you do it."

I found this puzzle while cruising the Internet today.

A sultan has granted a commoner a chance to marry one of his N daughters. The commoner will be presented with the daughters one at a time and, when each daughter is presented, the commoner will be told the daughter's dowry (which is fixed in advance). Upon being presented with a daughter, the commoner must immediately decide whether to accept or reject her (he is not allowed to return to a previously rejected daughter). However, the sultan will allow the marriage to take place only if the commoner picks the daughter with the overall highest dowry. Then what is the commoner's best strategy, assuming he knows nothing about the distribution of dowries?

Click here for the answer

This is a cool problem because forms of it occur all the time, the classic example being dating/marriage like in this puzzle, but its applicability is definitely not limited to just that. The strategy indicated in the solution is itself not that surprising because I think that's what most of us do, or least I do, most of the time--that is after a while we pick something. The real question being how long do you wait to pick? What I found surprising is how long to wait under the optimal strategy, and that it's (only or incredibly) 37% likely to produce the best result. So the bottom line is don't stress about this kind of problem the next time you encounter it, because there really is no perfect solution and not one that "works" more than 37% of the time anyway.