No Guts; Phone Home August 28, 2000February 15, 2017 FIXED LINK Sorry about Friday’s link to Forbes. I fixed it, but until Saturday it was pointing to the wrong article. The topic: whether to invest through mutual funds or build your own. Here it is again. FREE PALM Doug Gary: “DLJdirect has the Handspring Visor offer again. This time it is with an opening account deposit of only $1,000. You have to keep the $ there for six months earning a good money market rate — no other requirements. If one wants a Palm-related product, this is an instant 18% extra return on one’s money. Here’s the link.” NO GUTS So it turns out that I get a small plaque on a wall of plaques at a hospital. Asked how I want it to read, I send back: “Thank You for Not Smoking.” This apparently throws the development staff into a bit of a quandary. All the other plaques are “in memory” or “in honor” of someone, or else just “dedicated by” the donor. Do I really want my plaque to say this, they wonder? A little irreverence in a good cause? A little levity to cheer people up? Or would this offend people, ruining the overall “tone” of the wall? Ultimately, I chicken out. It will be a plaque more or less like all the others. But if only we could do a better job helping today’s teens avoid this beguiling addiction, we’d need dramatically fewer hospital beds down the road. Smoking obviously should remain legal. But in Canada, half of every side of the cigarette pack is being devoted to the naked truth: things like vivid photos of lip cancer. How’s the Marlboro man gonna sell that? (Actually, the Marlboro man is long dead of lung cancer.) PHONE HOME Steve Coultas: “Your readers might be interested to know about BigZoo, a company that charges 3.9 cents a minute for long distance anywhere within the 48 contiguous states. They used to have just one 1-888 number (this is a dial-around type plan), but have recently added two more 1-888 numbers to dial, together with local access numbers which, if you use, you are then charged only 3.6 cents per minute. They have just added a 75-cent a month fee, but that’s the only fee they charge. You have to pay in advance, online, using a credit card. I think it’s $10 increments. Phone call quality has been identical to any large company for me.” Dan Beck: “A good site for phone rate comparisons among about every phone service extant is abelltolls.com.”