The Writers Coin

Welcome to the Comics and Cents Carnival, where we try to find the humor in all things money. As usual, we’ll start with something funny to warm ourselves up.

For all four of you that missed the Joaquin Phoenix clip that’s been talked about so much recently, here it is. It’s funny, although word is it’s all an elaborate prank they’re putting together as a documentary, but still worth checking out:

On to the articles!

The Smarter Wallet presents Trying To Repair A Plasma TV At Home? Don’t DIY! posted at The Smarter Wallet. This is a pretty entertaining clip of a guy fixing a plasma TV. Hey, it worked!

Mr. ToughMoneyLove presents Stimulus 2009: Five Programs that Congress Forgot posted at Tough Money Love. I think the program for calculator retrofits is my favorite.

jim presents Stop Watching Market News, Start Watching LOLCATS posted at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity. Includes a pretty funny clip of Will Ferrell doing his thing. And hey, LOLcats are always funny.

Len Penzo presents If Arnold Schwarzenegger Was My Household CEO… posted at Len Penzo . Com. An interesting look at Arnold in charge of Len’s home.

Tell the world of what we’re doing here and hopefully we’ll get more and more submissions!

I just finished reading Malcom Gladwell’s (who also wrote Blink and The Tipping Point) fantastic book about success, Outliers. It’s a great read and it’s filled with tons of really interesting nuggets of information, but there’s something he writes in the acknowledgements section that got me thinking, and I wanted to ask what other people thought about it.

Here is the quote:

My earliest memories of my father are of seeing him work at his desk and realizing that he was happy. I did not know it then, but that was one of the most precious gifts a father can give his child.

I thought that was really deep, especially after watching Revolution Road and how much DiCaprio’s character hated his job.

Do you love what you do? If not, does it matter to you what kind of example this sets for your kid?

Over the weekend I finally sat down and did something I’d been meaning to do for a long time: update the look and feel of the site. I added the banner, the two RSS buttons you see at the top, and tweaked some other things that aren’t really that noticeable.

Why did it take me so long to finally sit down and do this?

In one word: code.

You need to know what the code on the back end of your blog means when you’re trying to add or move things around. I’ve learned a little bit, but it can still be a hassle. It got to the point I was ready to pay someone to do it for me.

But I decided to just sit down and get it done, and the tool that helped me out the most was Google Chrome. It has a feature called “Inspect Element” that tells you what the code means and where it is on your page.

What is Google Chrome?

It’s a web browser just like Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, only it claims to be faster and more efficient (I would agree). I’ve been using it for a few months and I highly recommend it.

Where Can I Get It?

First of all, you’ll have to download the browser from Google, and you can do that here. Don’t worry, it’s free.

Where is “Inspect Elements?”

Just right click anywhere on the page you want to “analyze” and and you’ll see this box. Right at the bottom you’ll see Inspect Element.

Then this box will come up:

Looks like a bunch of nonsense, doesn’t it? Sure it does, but that’s just because you need to know how to make sense of it. The left hand side is the section of your page. Whatever section is highlighted or selected on the left, its properties (size, color, margins, etc.) will be shown on the right.

The Cool/Helpful Part

Here is my favorite part: as you hover over certain parts of that left-hand side, you’ll see your page light up. That’s the part of the page the code represents! If you have two monitors it’s easier to use, but if you don’t here’s what it looks like (click on the image to blow it up):

That yellow box? That’s the highlighting…

This is what helped me “get” what I was doing as I edited my blog. Certain areas represented certain sections of code, and the more I used Chrome to explore the code on my site, the better I understood the changes I was making on the back end.

I really recommend bloggers take an hour or two to tool around with their code to really understand how to make certain changes, and this is a very helpful tool.

Doing it yourself is way better than paying someone else to do it—especially if you write about personal finance like I do!

“This is the future of book reading. It will be everywhere.” Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball and Liar’s Poker. ->Taken from Amazon’s Kindle page.

Yesterday I wrote a post about whether or not I thought the Kindle would kill traditional books. But I totally forgot to mention the financial angle. When is the Kindle 2 worth its $349 price tag?

I decided to crunch some numbers to see if and when the Kindle was “worth it” versus simply buying books the traditional way. It may sound weird to some that “the traditional way” is to buy them off the Internet—but hey, welcome to the new world order.

The Experiment

First of all, we need to find out how much the “average” book costs if you buy it new from Amazon. So I ran through the top 25 books on their bestsellers page and got an average price.

Traditional Book Average Price: $12.09

But let’s not forget shipping, which comes up to around $3.99.

Kindle Edition Average Price: $9.47

And let’s not forget that you can also sell your book off once you’re done with it—something that won’t happen with the Kindle. Let’s say you can at least get one dollar back for each book.

So, hypothetically, every time you buy a Kindle title instead of the actual book, you’re “saving” around $5.61.

“But WC,” you might be thinking, “the Kindle costs $359!” And therein lies the rub.

That means you have to buy around 64 books to “make up” for the money you spent on the device. Since I rarely buy books anymore (thanks public library!), it wouldn’t make sense for me.

Granted, you can fit way more than 64 books onto the device, so I’m sure it will eventually pay off (at least until the Kindle 3 comes out and you have to have that one too). As a bunch of other articles out there have already said, right now this device is for the tech-minded people that love to get things first, costs be damned.

How long would it take you to buy 64 books? From a strictly financial POV, is the Kindle worth it to you?

On a sidenote, there were Kindle versions of the top-25 bestselling titles on Amazon for 15 of the top 25, so for some titles you simple don’t have access to certain titles. And for a book like Watchmen, a Kindle version wouldn’t even make sense.