Financial Times Goes Free for Students

You have to have a Facebook account, though. More

Adventures in Deal Toys

The humble lucite commemorative deal toy is the latest American export. More

Private Equity Resumes

Hiring managers, attenzione. (And those of you with dusty resumes, take a gander). More

ThinkPad Extra Aged, VSOP, Blue Label

You know those antiquated leather “portfolio” things that certain cheesy businessmen in their 50s tend to schlepp around the city? You know, they’re usually stuffed with like a Hertz Gold Club card and some kind of overpriced pen…?

Well leave it to the brand geniuses over at Lenovo to take what is an otherwise sleek and largely functional machine and transform it into a poop-colored schlock-fest.

Ladies and gentlemen … I present to you, the most elite computing product EVER — the ThinkPad Reserve.

For $5000 USD (and sorry those of you outside of the UK, France, UAE, China, Hong Kong and Canada???) you can pre-reserve a Reserve.

What that gets you is 24-hour non-automated, live customer service; 4-hour on-site service around the world; and everyone who sees you holding that thing assuming you’re in sales.

As they say, always be closing ;)

LinkedIn Adds Ego-Boosting Feature

I know many of you are avid Doostangers, but for those that also use LinkedIn — a new feature I noticed recently. You can now see who’s viewed your profile in a semi-anonymous form (see below). Clicking on “See who has viewed your profile” doesn’t tell you names, but titles and companies, which depending on how you’ve described yourself can be just as revealing as your name. Note you can turn this off. TechCrunch reports that the feature was enabled in mid-May…

In a World Without Blackberry…

  • I wouldn’t fear the blinking red light
  • I’d always be late
  • Breakout-derivative games, i.e. Brickbreaker, would have passed away quietly decades ago. And I would have not learned cheats to said games either…
  • Staring at a screen would only consume 90% of my waking hours instead of 99%
  • I would never, ever, wake up to the sound of NNnnnnnrngggghhhhhhh-clack (Blackberry falling off), again
  • I would only be suffering from mouse-scroll related carpal tunnel
  • Possibility of vacation longer than 1 day = nil
  • It would be much harder to “look busy” on demand
  • I would realize how boring my dinner companions are

Bloomberg’s Investment Banking League Tables — by Fees

Top 10 M&A — in Fees, 2006
Rank Company Fees (MM)
1 Goldman Sachs 2,940
2 Morgan Stanley 2,609
3 JPMorgan Chase 2,598
3 Citigroup 2,486
5 UBS 2,036
6 Merrill Lynch 1,986
7 Credit Suisse 1,956
8 Lehman Brothers 1,441
9 Deutsche Bank 1,336
10 Lazard 1,092
Source: Bloomberg Markets.

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Ideas for Project & Code Names

Suggest if you want to scare your coworkers

  • Names of hot coworkers
  • Lord of the Ring characters or Tolkien placenames (same goes for Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter)
  • Countries people are scared of
  • Project Hitler
  • Colors (lavender)
  • Smurf names (Project Papa Smurf)

Obscure takes on overused categories

  • Obsolete greek letters, (i.e. Digamma, Qoppa)
  • Associating companies with comparable Sororities/fraternities (Lamda, Lamda, Lamda; Delta Zeta)
  • Forget Greek/Roman deities. Krishna anyone?
  • European cities spelled backwards (Nodnol, Sirap, Trufknarf — great for healthcare projects) More

All Keyboard, All the Time

After reading the WSJ article about Humanized, a company that makes software that drastically cuts down on mouse use, we decided to give Enso Launcher a spin.

What, you say you already don’t use a mouse at all? Well, good for you, you BSD. Not I. Some programs, I find, just really work better with a mouse. And I still tend to use a mouse to switch between programs, maximize/minimize (yes, I know there are shortcuts).

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Are You Ready for EXCEL 2007???!!!!!

Are you ready for 1 MILLION ROWS, 16,000 columns?

Are you ready for the Ribbon?

Are you ready for smaller spreadsheet file sizes???

What about better, easier pivot tables?

Then you might be ready for Excel 2007.

Well, it sounds like from the articles I’ve been reading on Office 2007 (and Excel 2007) that the program is much better when it comes to data representation and formatting. I tried to give it a test drive but got fed up with the sign up process.

Anyway, the chart and pivot table functionality is supposed to be much improved, but as Heavy Excel Users know the big question is will the keyboard shortcuts remain the same?

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