Financial Reality Show

In the last few months, to be precise since the downfall of Lehman Brothers, the whole financial market is in doldrums. Looking at the 401(k) it looks like i will never get to retire, so i have not touched my allocations, they are still the same when Dow was over 14000 and i will let it ride the down swing till Dow reaches the magical 5 figures.
I have been reading a lot on financial jitters in forbes and businessweek, which don't paint any rosy pictures for at least few more months to come, the recession is hitting each individual hard and the best thing to do is to call the credit card companies to lower the apr and banks to lower the fees. Lets see what happens when the Feds meet on december 16th, what plan they come up with to boost the spending power of consumers and investors.

Yahoo Pipes to rescue

I'm back to blogging after a long silence i was undergoing few very pleasant events, life has to offer. While settling in one of the recent events, i was constantly looking up few items for sale on where else but the friendly old craigslist.com. It was a tiresome and bothersome process to go though the same old keywords for search and to search those items in a specific region of where i live.

We have a saying "If you manually do the same thing twice, automate it" and so i started looking for a mash-up application that i can use to automate my search. Thanks to Yahoo Pipes it was few licks and i was able to automate my search for "Baltimore" region. If your from baltimore region and use craigslist to search, try the pipe that i have published and you can also create a RSS feed so that your search is delivered to your feed reader with the new results or you can email the results also.

JPMorgan buys WaMu

WaMu that was for sale since last week has found a buyer in form of JPMorgan Chase. That was a quick sale i must say, and for the customers of WaMu nothing changes. This has made me wondering if my money in the brick and mortar institution (bank) safe?