When opening a new TD Ameritrade account, I was asked to choose four security questions and provide the answers to them. I don’t even know the answers to 98% of them. You better go study up on your elementary school yearbooks before opening an account somewhere! And, I think for one of [...]

Today, I was searching for “Cancun vacation homes” on Google, but then switched my search to just “vacation homes“.  What was very interesting is that although my second search excluded the word “Cancun”, the Sponsored Links on the right still showed Cancun-related vacation homes, as though the search terms persisted to my next search.
I sometimes [...]

After listening to John Doerr’s TED presentation, my mind started to think “green” thoughts. Along with the lights on at the local corporate building and the amount of plastic bags used to pack your groceries, it’s time to look inside the home. CNN published a story on the amount of power used by [...]

I was chatting with my father today and he’s been watching the news about Microsoft’s $240M (1.6%) stake in Facebook. My father has taught me a lot, and he is well in-tuned with the big businesses he invests in, among them Costco, Best Buy, Boeing, and, important to this news, Microsoft. He’s had [...]

I was digging around for videos from the Zeitgeist (I wish I had a login to that site), and finally found some new ones a few days ago. The founders of Google don’t often show up in presentations, but since the Zeitgeist is a Google event, it was fitting.
Sergey and Larry talk about some [...]

I’ve noticed that browsing the web has progressively taken longer over the past few months. If it isn’t some movie trailer on an expandable ad, it is a floating rich media advertisement or a push down banner. Most pages render fine, but get locked up trying to load content from atdmt.com (Microsoft’s [...]

I have had good success in maintaining consistency in my username across all online sites. You can find me most anywhere as “atulapatel” or “atulapatel@yahoo.com”. I’m a legacy Yahoo user and continue to use it as my email and username hub.
However, I was not as successful at some very important places — Gmail [...]

I purchased my iPod Nano 8gb Black three months ago. I love the iPod and use it to listen to podcast at my desk, in the plane, at the gym, and in the car. I paid the $199 price tag for my little gadget, so when I saw that Apple was launching a [...]

I came across something today that was funny but deserves some serious consideration. Jesse Hambley and Tommy Vallier, among others, talk about a new type of spam. If you take spam out of the picture, what do you have left: (1) personal or work emails and (2) the alerts from all the sites from [...]

Today, I revisited Plaxo which has a lot of promise because of its focus on contact data, while LinkedIn focuses on connections. I have yet to dig deep into it again, but I did come across the funniest thing. Plaxo decided to show Google Adsense on my dashboard, and you can’t beat the [...]