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Changing pace from negative Cyber-terror post, lets recapture our fun. Today’s video is not music video, nor is it anyone playing at the beach.

It is very informative 8 minutes or so video, helping to explain the intricacies of Financial Markets Turmoil that occurred recently, including the infamous Sub-Prime Lending fiasco. British humor at it’s finest! Thanks, Marc, for the tip!

Now, once you watched it and ready for real educational part, and you do have some money you are saving for a rainy day, here are some of my personal investment tips:

• Stay Away from any Fund that is called Enhanced, High or Structured. In other words, stay away from Hedge funds!
• Don’t invest in anything which you can’t explain how it works. So do invest in CDs, and companies that you trust. Like my favorites of late Microsoft, Yahoo! and Kraft Foods. Use a company like ShareBuilder to simplify your investing.
• Want higher returns and willing to take on some risk? Try Prosper loans marketplace. At least here you know exactly who you giving your money to, what is their income and credit score. Plus, they have 100% identity protection guarantee, so if anything fishy is uncovered, you get 100% refund of your funds.
• Of course, good old 5.00% Savings Account is a simple option also

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I have been waiting too long! Welcome, everyone, to the Digital Music age! What, I missed the revolution?

Not at all. I refused to purchase music that was locked into single platform and DRM‘d to death. Why would I pay for a song, only to end up not being able to listen to it on most of my PCs at home or on most of my mobile devices?! Even if my entire home was Apple (which it totally isn’t), there are still serious limits!

You can always stop by your favorite store and purchase a CD with a music you want. Then, with few simple clicks, you would have your very own Compatible Unprotected music, so why buy into Apple’s jail?! Even if you love Apple devices that much, simple rip the CD onto it, and viola!

Enter the Future! Finally, Unprotected High-Quality (256Kpbs) MP3 files can be purchased from a trusted place, non other than Amazon.com!

Today I rushed forth and purchased my first complete digital album. The experience wasn’t flawless, but it was mostly due first time setup. Amazon asks you to download a tiny desktop application to manage your downloads in background. It looks straightforward enough, and easily configurable to tell it where to put the music on your PC, automatically. It will even auto-add it for you to Media Player or iTunes library, nirvana!

Go ahead and try it, individual songs are as low as $0.89 and I finally have a digital music store I can wholeheartedly recommend! Just click through on excellent Frou Frou album in the blog’s side panel.

Last thing for today, I know my Podcasts super-guide is way overdue. I started on draft, really! Meanwhile, let me just tell you that I use PodNova.com to organize my Podcasts and to auto-download new Podcasts to PC/Linux/Other platforms of your choosing.

I downloaded the latest version of client and it seems simple enough, and works fine on Vista!

Speaking of Vista, it’s been about 5 days since I installed my authentic Windows Vista Premium (which took about 10 minutes, btw!) and I love it! Of course this is just a start, and I am yet to try Video Editing and Graphics Editing, but everything else I tried went very well! So, Highly Recommended!!!

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  We have been eBay patrons for many many years, probably almost since it’s inception. But lately, it seems to become more and more of a wild west and less and less of organized trusted marketplace.

Check out this latest example of an auction. Could this be an antique sold by resident of last century? Must be, and he’s probably a ghost by now! That or there was some other reason that eBay blocked him from selling and supposedly removed him/her (see screen shot below for evidence).

But, even though the user is not registered since July 2006, his/hers auctions are doing just fine. There are several of them ending daily, some even with Actual Winning Bids!

I wonder what the poor folk who pay the person can expect for their money. There isn’t even a way to leave negative feedback, once the user isn’t registered. But it gets better! We have decided to alert the “excellent” eBay customer care to this alarming situation, and got a reply back, several days later:

First of all, I would like to thank you for reporting such an important information to us. Valued members like you are indeed an asset to our community.

… please report the listing violation using our online form.

The best part is, that the form they are referring us to has no such reason in valid complaint drop-down as ‘unregistered user selling’, or even ‘other’. And, presuming for a second that our complain ended up in the ‘wrong’ department, they can’t forward emails/complaints inside eBay customer care?! They have to ask us to resubmit?!

Just to make sure I bore you to death with this post, there are more horror stories from other users and one that we ourselves recently ran into. And trying to resolve it with proper eBay channels is impossible, it seems that they don’t have the time to read even few sentences of your complain to understand the situation. Instead, they are shooting standard email responses completely unrelated to the question/concern.

Well, rant over. I think eBay is still fine for those cheap unimportant purchases, but if you are planning to make a major purchase, beware!!!

Us? We are giving up at this point. Maybe the good folks at Consumerist can pick it up and get to the bottom of this.

Seriously, with all the Millions and Billions eBay and PayPal making on these auctions, they can’t find good programmers? Or decent customer service?

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I decided to give Prosper.com a try about a month ago (read my original thoughts on that), and today came across an interesting listing from our brave soldier currently deployed.

I do hope, for his sake, that the listing’s photo is real and of his own financial accounts. However, the most interesting thing must be the Questions and Answers section of the listing. When asked, out of genuine concern from Prosper investors about being repaid in case of his fatality in a dangerous deployment, the answer was:

No I am not in a “safe” area. But to compare the odds of me dying here lets look at statistics. There is no traffic where I am at. So if you live in the states YOU have a MUCH higher chance of dying in an accident than me dying here in Iraq. (Aug-02-2007)

Hmm, no traffic, you say? Who knew that we are in the danger zone here while Iraq is all around safe place to be, eh?

Looks like other Prosper lenders have no argument with this rock solid logic, since there are no further follow up questions and his listing is getting fully funded any minute now.

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