Pointy Haired Dilbert - Chandoo.org

I have noticed something totally strange while trying to get an auto insurance quote online at GEICO. See it for yourself.

They are showing your password in the URL… OMG

Make sure you don’t use the site for getting new quotes as it could be a potential privacy breach as anyone watching the URLs like network admins, ISPs owning the logs or other users of the computer can see your password and access your account to see your details like SSN, Date of Birth, Accident history.

During my evening jogs I go past this place, its a patch vast open space in the midst of the urban land. I made a mental note to shoot here during early morning as I would get very good view of sky. Yesterday I woke up early and drove there to took some shots. The sunrise was beautiful.

PS: I have post processed the image to improve sharpness and contrast
PPS: Liked this photo, see the entire series of Photographic Fridays

same flower, another angle, originally uploaded by Chandoo.

We went to near by Scioto River park last weekend to spend some time without any noise. But we didnt know that there was a concert going on there. So we walked out of the park to surrounding Dublin residential area and I spotted few nice flowers en route. I am sucker for flowers, I cant control my finger when I see one, I had to click. May be because they are already beautiful, my shots are bound to be nice Whatever may be the reason, enjoy the shot.

While trying to spell check one my sheets I have learned this cool trick to fetch real time stock quotes without any webqueries or vba or anything.

First enter the stock code in a cell (this works for US stocks only), for eg. AAPL for Apple, MSFT for Microsoft etc. Then ALT+CLICK on that cell, this will open “Research task pane” on the right side of the screen. The screen should look something like this:

Dont worry if you dont see the stock quote, that could be because your research type is set to either “all research books” or “thesaurus”, just click the drop-down and select “MSN Money Stock Quotes” - 2nd option from last (Excel remembers your selection, so next time you alt+click on a company code it automatically shows the stock quote) Once the quote is displayed in the research task pane, just click the “insert price” button to get the quote inserted in to your worksheet. Simple eh?

Now, if you want to track a bunch of company quotes, just create a simple macro to do the alt+click on each of the company code cells and you have a real time quote tracking terminal built into your excel sheet. Just go wild

Bonus tip: If you want a company profile data for a particular stock (like company address, phone number, exchange codes, last year revenue) select the “Thomas Gale company profiles” instead.

Please note that both this options work Excel 2003 and above.

Also read: Create stock / mutual fund portfolio tracker in excel using web lookup queries

WTC site - ground zero, originally uploaded by Chandoo.

This is the first of a new series of posts I am planning, “Photographic Fridays”, Every last weekday I will post a photo I have taken for your review / comments. I want to be a better photographer and all your comments are going to help me in becoming one.

To begin with, this is the photo of World Trade Center site - Ground Zero, I took while I was in NY during the memorial weekend. We got down at wall st. metro station and walked to this place, it was getting dark by the time we reached here and since some construction work was going on, we were not to be allowed to the memorial site.

Now that iPhone is going to have GPS built in, here is an application idea any of you iPhone app developers out there.

The idea is simple, whenever the phone-holder is driving, this app would automatically answer calls with a pre-recorded message (that can go like, “Hi.., I am driving right now, please leave a message and I will get back to you when I stop”) and record callers message with in the phone hard-disk (instead of directing the caller to cell phone company’s voice mail service) and play when the phone-holder choose to.

You can find out if the phone-holder is driving by monitoring how fast the GPS co-ords are moving (beyond a reasonable threshold of 10mph implies they are driving, of course the person could be in a moving car / train as a passenger, in that case, they will let the app know by tapping a few keys / options)

I think, this would prevent a lot of people from actually taking calls while driving, reduce some concentration laps. Of course, its wholenother story that people may drive less, thanks to fuel prices
What do you think?

PS: Image source

During our recent visit to NY I have been to the famous Brooklyn Bridge and I clicked photos till my fingers itched. Here are some of them, let me know if you have any review comments

I couldnt carry my tripod though, some of the pics became real blurry at original resolution.