Important Things to Know

COOKING LIKE A GUY™

Allen Jones: “Just a reminder when it comes to beans or any other food item in a can:  The label is flammable, so remove it BEFORE you put it on the stove top.  And a lower heat or flame works best.”

REGISTERING A WEB SITE

Sergei Slobodov: “It looks like you overpaid by 133%, or $20, to reserve cookinglikeaguy.com (per last week’s column). You can register a dot-com domain name for $15 for one year through Dotster until February 15 ($25 thereafter), and it seems to be the lowest price among all registrars certified by ICANN. I guess domain names are a commodity now. Soon there will be a meta-registrar web site that would register your domain at the lowest rate by checking current ongoing prices and specials of all the registrars. And soon after that, domain name registration will finally become free, and you might even get a bonus toaster.”

HAVING A PARTY?

Try evite.com to handle the invites and RSVPs. By now, anyone without an e-address doesn’t deserve to be e-vited anyway. Oh, OK — invite them by phone or snail mail, but tell them this is the last time.

LIVING TO 100

Last week I knocked a stupid site called deathclock.com. Want a much better idea of how long you’ll live? Take this quiz. (Thanks, Dan Goldberg.)

INVESTING WELL WHILE YOU DO

Yesterday I suggested that Allan S. consider an index fund less giddy, perhaps, than the S&P. Notes Jack Nettleton: “Vanguard has a fund tracking one of these less puffed up indices: its BARRA Value fund.”

COOL TOOL OF THE WEEK

Last week, according to the folks at traffick.com, it was our very own quickbrowse. In their words: “This useful Web-based tool performs the unusual task of stitching pages together to create Masterpages that allow you to gather all of your favorite sites on one page. To make this process even more efficient, you can bookmark these Masterpages or have them e-mailed to you. This ‘personalized browsing’ experience could very well revolutionize the way we browse the Web.”

From Traffick.com’s mouth to Paul Allen’s ears.

CORRECTIONS

Don: “According to Judith Smrha’s web site, the quote attributed to J. P. Morgan was made by John Maynard Keynes.” Oops.

Scott Nicol: “Actually, the PC was introduced in September ’81 [not “1982”], and the standard model had 16k and no disk drives [not two floppy drives]. You could buy a disk drive (and DOS), but without a disk drive you would use the cassette interface and cassette-basic, which was built into ROM. The first disk drive was single-sided, and stored 160k (DOS 1.0) or 180k (DOS 1.1 or higher). Most early PC’s were configured with one floppy and 64k. How do I know this? I was a geek just starting grade 9 when the PC came out, and my best friend got one at home a month later. The machine had 16k and one floppy. Later it was expanded to 704k (it is possible to get 704k on the original PC, you just had to be a geek to figure it out) and two floppies (one single-sided, one double-sided). I’m still a geek today.”

Blessed are the geeks, for they have made the world amazing for the rest of us.

Friday: What Every Beneficiary Should Know About Her Dad’s IRA (and the case for naming a charity as the beneficiary, or else converting to a Roth IRA)