I feel a lot better now.  It took more effort than I expected to do the redesign, but now it is done.  Comments are welcome, as well as suggestions.  Would a calendar be useful, etc?  I did not expect that I would have to learn some PHP and CSS, but it proved useful to do so.  Almost makes me want to tell stories about programming exploits in my early career, but I think I would bore most of you silly.

Over the next few weeks, I will be adding some subdued advertising, and setting up an Amazon Store, with (initially) short reviews of investment books from which I have benefited.  If you want to buy the books, I appreciate it, but my service here will be to give you enough knowledge of what the book is about, that you can figure out whether it would really be of value to you or not.

On a different note, much of next week will be devoted to finishing my slides/talk that I will be giving to the Investment Section of the Society of Actuaries at the Annual Meeting on October 15th.  I’ll post the slides here when I’m done, and you all can have a look at them.  My talk is on the Global Macroeconomy.  Small topic, huh?  I offered others, but that was the one that they most wanted, and would be the most challenging for me.  Good thing that the markets have gotten so interesting — when they asked me to speak back in April, things were much quieter.

Again, I thank you for reading my blog, and particularly for those who register and comment.  You make the blog and my life richer.

No post tonight, because I spent a lot of time today working on my site redesign.  I’m afraid most of the time went for naught.  I am getting pretty close to completion, though, and when the new design goes live, I would like feedback on it.  I will miss some design elements of the current site, and I am still working with the new design to make it look better.  It is more functional than the present site, but it is not as pretty, and I’m afraid I’ll have to sacrifice there.  (On the other hand, maybe I need to get a book on PHP programming…)

One more note: Remember when I wrote about Timothy Sykes forthcoming book?  No?  Oh well, it’s for sale now, and there is a link at the bottom of this post.

Oh, wait, one more off-topic comment: be sure and check out this new feature at Google Maps.  Suppose I wanted to go from Baltimore to Milwaukee, but I wanted to go through Indianapolis.  I can type in “21042 to 53005″ to generate a map, but then I can drag the path to Indianapolis, and it calculates the optimal path.  Other applications: you are looking at your work commute, and find that the optimal path goes through a construction zone.  You can drag the path to avoid the zone, and it calculates a new optimal path.  Pretty neat.