Tony Brewer View

Back in the day, my dad would keep track of his stocks and bonds a couple of different ways. He had two business friends who advised him on trades, and he read the morning paper’s “Business” section with the closing stock market reports for each ticker symbol every day while eating breakfast and drinking his coffee.

He had manila folders in his home office with all the paperwork on each investment, and he used a 13 columnar pad to track the performance of each one by making notes in the columns. I know he would be very impressed with the new Online Portfolio Manager and how that would take the place of all the tedious hand entries he made.

Now he could take advantage of the Portfolio rebalancing software on the internet and be on top of each stock daily, if he chose to. In fact, I don’t think he even knew the term “Day Traders” back in his day. I don’t remember him ever getting excited about one day’s stock market performance. He was in it for the long term and had the patience of Job.

Today’s investors have a more itchy trigger finger and with all of the information made available throughout the day, Do It Yourself portfolio management is sure to be a popular service for my generation. The downside to frequent trading is the fees, which can be hard to track and consider in the heat of the moment. Money management tools used correctly can help people make their own educated decisions and not have to rely on salesmen to alert us to the smart trades.

This might be a little offensive to few people, and if so, I am sorry you are offended. I thought it was very funny.

They say that humor always comes at the expense of someone else, so if you paid for this, I thank you.

Although I did take some freign language classes in high school, it never really occurred to me that one day I would need translation services to be able to read a book or document. But now that I have the world wide web, I can read newspapers from almost any city in any country, written in their native language. The only trouble is that I can’t read their native language – without help!

When I started following a friend’s blog who has friends from all over the world, I decided to click on some of blogroll links on his site to see who else might have similar feelings and viewpoints. I was surprised to find many of his friends write in their native language, so I asked him how does he read all that without formal training in those languages? He told me about document translation services that are available to anyone. Some services are free and some have a small fee attached. But either way, there is help available.

To start off, I found Übersetzungsdienst, which means “translation service” in German. Now I can read the blogs that are written in German and can read the daily newspapers in Germany, too.

This is the time of year that dogs and cats are attacked by fleas, ticks and mosquitoes when they go outdoors. Just like humans don’t want those pests crawling on them, cats and dogs are miserable from insect bites, too.

If the ps have very limited exposure to the kinds of grass and undergrowth that harbors the insects, you might be able to just use a flea shampoo regularly on your pet. But if that is not enough to protect your pet, consider one of the new monthly treatments that your vet can prescribe, like Advantix.

I use Advantix on my dogs and they have immediate relief. The pests are not only repelled, they are killed. That helps make sure your furniture, carpets and bedding do not get infested.

There was an interesting interview with a woman named Michelle Rhee about education reform. This woman has evidently spent years working with and for education. Now she has founded a non profit agency to help push education reform to the top of the political agendas.

Her group is called, Students First. I plan on looking up her web site and learning more about her mission and plans to help better educate our nation’s youth.