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FOX News - AP AP AP AP AP AP AP AP AP AP AP AP AP AP AP AP AP AP AP AP AP AP AP AP AP Feb. 13: Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., tours the UAW Plant in Janesville, Wis. Feb. 13: Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill

Latest News
CBS Sportsline - In 2007, the Redskins defense totaled 33 sacks, 24 fumble recoveries, 14 interceptions and a pair of defensive touchdowns. They completed in the middle of the pack among DSTs; the club itself ranked fourth against the run and 16th against the pass

News Corp jumps
MSNBC - Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. is in discussions with Yahoo about combining MySpace and some other on the internet properties, the Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site today. The deal would help Yahoo defend against a hostile $44.6 billion bid by

Congressional Republicans grapple with idea of McCain at top of ticket
Miami Herald - The Miami Herald is pleased to provide this opportunity to share information, experiences and observations about what’s in the news. Some of the comments may be reprinted elsewhere in the site or in the newspaper. We encourage lively, open debate on

Houston & Texas News
Houston Chronicle - A federal jury that had expected to hear opening statements this morning in the civil rights lawsuit that that led to the disclosure of District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal’s e-mails was sent home, but not disbanded, by the judge. U.S. District Judge

The hour’s top Asian news from The Associated Press
MSN UK News - Thank you for rating. Masked gunmen seized £84 million worth of paintings in a daring daylight robbery, but theirs is just the latest in a long line of audacious art thefts MSN UK News looks at whether society has failed to heed the warnings it

CNN to Launch News Channel in Chile
Forbes - CNN and the local cable television company VTR are launching a 24-hour all-news television channel in Chile, the two companies announced Wednesday. A joint communique by Turner Broadcasting System Latin America, Inc. - the TimeWarner, Inc., company

Yahoo and News Corp
Financial Times - It is natural that Yahoo should try to squeeze a superior offer out of its unwanted suitor, Microsoft . But plans to help the internet giant fend off the bid smack of desperation. The gist of the plan seems to be that News Corporation would inject its

Bahrainian Physicians Successfully Remove Nail From Man’s Penis
FOX News - Physicians successfully removed a 2-inch nail from an Indian man’s genitals after he admitted himself to a hospital due to abdominal pain and the inability to speak, the Bahrain Gulf Daily News reported Wednesday. An X-ray of the man, who wasn’t

Reuters World News Highlights at 2200 GMT, Feb 13
Forbes - BEIRUT - Senior Hezbollah commander Imad Moughniyah, on the United States’ most wanted list for attacks on Israeli and Western targets, has been killed by a bomb attack in Damascus, the Lebanese group said on Wednesday. BEIJING - China urged

News in brief
Guardian Unlimited - A 20-year-old man was charged yesterday with the murder of a teenager who was stabbed to death in a street attack. Lewis Stephen Gray, from Hull, will appear at Hull magistrates court this day accused of murdering Joe Dinsdale, 17, who was found with a

UPDATE 2-ValueClick Q4 profit beats Street; settles FTC probe
Reuters - News of Microsoft’s proposed takeover of Yahoo Inc (YHOO.O: Quote , Profile , Research ) has further stoked speculation that ValueClick could be snapped up by larger companies operating in the World wide web advertising market as they scramble to gain a

Retail Sales, Stimulus News Help Stocks
BusinessWeek - Stocks finished sharply higher Wednesday after stronger-than-expected retail sales in January helped ease the widespread fears of a recession. Sentiment was also lifted by President Bush’s signing of the U.S. economic stimulus package, some

On the horizon: news from the frontiers of science
Christian Science Monitor - It might not be too long before that new blazer or blouse recharges your BlackBerry. A team of scientists at Georgia Tech has developed proof-of-concept fibers that generate small amounts of electricity when individual strands rub together – the way

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Filed under: Budgets, Debt

$1600. That’s the total of our monthly bills. That number doesn’t sound too bad, until I tell you that it doesn’t include utilities, bills, and all those other glamorous things we all must have. Nope…that is for the mortgage, the wife’s vehicle and the Harley Davidson. $1600.

In February of 2007 this was no problem. I had a great job with great pay. I also had this degree with $20,000 in student loans behind it that I wasn’t using. I was also away from home a lot. I missed my family. So I did the logical thing; found a job closer to home, and it was a much superior job.

Currently I am an IT Technician for the local school district. I actually received a pay raise with this new career. I earn almost $4,000 a year more now. Strangely enough, I get less on my checks, about $200 a check less. There’s a lot of mandatory deductions in education. Like the mandatory retirement account (which is a great thing, and my employer matches about 9% of my salary) and the insurance. That’s a kicker. Nearly $300 a month. I think I need to get sick more often…get some of that money back. So as you can see, I got a raise, but in reality I got a pay cut.

We were sending my youngest son to day care. He calls it school. He loves it. We can’t afford it. There’s a program that’ll help pay for some or all of that expense. We were over by $100 a month. Ridiculous. I nearly want to go to my boss and ask for a pay cut. We need the help right now, and I’m not above asking for help.

As I discussed in my first post, I have a problem. Not being broke, well, that’s a problem but not the main one. My problem is spending. I love to spend money. I love to purchase gadgets. I am addicted to gadgets. Want a small taste? In the past six months I’ve purchased the following:

* iPod Touch
* Nintendo Wii
* Blackberry Pearl
* TomTom GPS

That’s a small taste of my buys. I love ALL those things, but do I really need them? An argument could probably be made for the iPod and the GPS, but other than that, I don’t need any of those. I spend and spend like my money grows on trees.

VIPS made a comment to write down everything I spend and trends will develop. Let’s face it. That’s not the most exciting thing to do. Saving receipts, keeping a log…the premise of it all is great. It’s the execution that kicks you in the butt. There has to be an easier way to keep track of everything you spend without having to write it all down.

Alas, I’ve found a solution. Xpensr.com is a mobile expense tracking web app, and it is FANTASTIC! Xpensr lets you keep track of your spending and send them in via email, sms, IM or voice. No more evening session writing numbers and going through receipts. Xpensr keeps track of your spending, and you can even export it to any management software you are using. Good stuff.

So here is my next goal. Starting February 13, I’ll track my spending. Each single dollar, every single cent. On February 20th, I will post the log for all to see and all to critique. People have told me I’m crazy for doing all this, but I think it’s the quickest path to becoming debt free.

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Filed under: Design, Fun, Windows, Social Software

Count this as the newest entry in the mind-boggling “I have a Personal computer but I want to make it look like a Mac” trend.

Apple Live Messenger is a skin for Windows Live Messenger that will magically transform your Messenger windows into an Apple look-alike. The new Messenger interface comes complete with Apple logo, Aqua Blue background, and much more Apple-y goodness.

Proof that we’re all Apple fanboys in our core (pun definitely intended), the Apple Live Messenger skin is currently the third most popular skin on the Messenger Plus! Live website, with over 200,000 downloads.

Installing the skin requires Windows Live Messenger and Messenger Plus! Live, both free downloads. In case you’re not familiar, Messenger Plus! Live is a popular add-on for Windows Live Messenger that adds a number of features and extras to the software.

[via Appaholic]

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Filed under: Internet, Utilities, E-mail, Social Software, Beta

Just a week after Digsby widened its private beta by giving away 5,000 invites to Download Squad readers, the development team has already issued 4 new builds of the chat, email, and social networking client. Probably the most significant new feature is support for proxy settings to help users get around corporate firewalls.

There are a ton of other bug fixes and minor new features as well, including:

• A fix for “connection lost” issue when logging in
• A fix for MSN Messenger IMs not being sent
• A fix for Digsby getting stuck while loading skins during the login
• A fix for freezes while logging into Yahoo! Messenger
• Ctrl + Backapsace now deletes one word at a time in the input box

If you already have a Digsby account, you can either download the latest client from the Digsby home page or just fire up Digsby on your Computer if it’s already installed. The client will download all the updates automatically. While the lack of proxy support was one of the main complaints we heard from users last week, there’s one other issue we’d love to see Digsby work on: The program’s massive memory footprint. Digsby can easily use 70MB or more at launch. Considering how many functions the service has, that might not seem like a lot, but similar applications like Pidgin use just a small fraction of the RAM that Digsby does.

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Filed under: Raising money, Citigroup, Activist investing

“No Exit” is a 1944 play by Jean-Paul Sartre, which contains the famous line, “Hell is other people.” At this point, the title could also describe Delphi’s current Chapter 11 problem.

On the way to getting out of Chapter 11, auto parts company Delphi ran into the credit environment. Its $6.1 billion exit package, which has been set up by a group of banks lead by Citigroup (NYSE: C) and JP Morgan (NYSE: JPM), is in trouble. With the current fixed income markets in lock-down, hedge funds and other institutions don’t want the Delphi paper.

Read the entire story at 24/7 Wall St.

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Filed under: World wide web, P2P, Social Software

Want to share web page links with your friends on Twitter? No problem, just post a link or better yet, shorten it with TinyURL or a similar service so you can share a link without wasting precious characters. But what if you want to share a file that’s sitting on your desktop?

That’s where Twittershare comes in. Twittershare is basically a no-frills Twitter client that lets you do three things:

• Upload a smallish file to a server
• Share a link to that file with your Twitter contacts
• Send tweets to your contacts

So any time you want to send a document, photo, or song to your Twitter followers, you can just fire up Twittershare and upload your file. There’s a size limit of 10MB per file.

Twittershare does not display incoming messages, so it’s not a replacement for full-fledged Twitter clients like Twitterific or Twhirl. But if you’re looking for a quick way to share files, Twittershare can do that. You can either make your Tweets public or send direct messages.

There’s a desktop client available for OS X, and a web client for everyone else. Eventually the team behind Twittershare plans to release a Windows-compatible client based on Adobe AIR.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

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Filed under: Finance, Internet, Features, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

As you may have noticed, now might not exactly be the ideal time to get involved in the stock market. Sure, year over year, chances are you’ll make money. But there’s a good chance that if you throw a few thousand dollars into a mutual fund right now it might be worth less in 3 months than it is today. Fortunately, there’s more than one way to turn your savings into more savings. And thanks to the web, a couple of new opportunities have developed over the last few years.

First up, you might want to take a look at on the web savings accounts and CDs. Since banks like ING Direct don’t have to spend a lot of money on bricks and mortar operations, they can offer higher interest rates than many traditional banks. And even many old school banks offer on the internet accounts with higher interest rates than their traditional offerings.

But thanks to the current economic downturn, many of these banks are lowering their interest rates. While you could easily open an account with a 5% interest rate a few months ago, you’ll be lucky to find one over 3% now. If you’re looking for another opportunity, albeit a riskier one, you might want to check out a new breed of financial transactions: social lending services like Prosper, Lending Club, or Zopa.

Continue reading How to make, borrow, or lose money with P2P lending

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