Morton Fox's journal

I'm not sure I understand the appeal of take-and-bake pizza places. I thought the whole idea of going to a pizza place was for them to make the pizza. With a take-and-bake place, all you're getting is a raw pizza that you still have to heat up in your own oven after you bring it home. Worse yet, this Wise Bread blogger had to wait 80 minutes at the store for his take-and-bake pizza! After reading that blog post though, I remembered that the local A&P supermarket has its own version of take-and-bake pizza. So this evening, I went and got one. It was $3, a store special. Of course, the downside of getting takeout from the supermarket is I got distracted by their other weekly specials and just had to stock up on soup and yogurt too. But it still didn't take 80 minutes! Anyway, this is what it looks like after baking. There's enough for a meal and a half.

Did more of my tax return. I think I only have two 1099 forms remaining. Of the two, one will be from Ameritrade, who is delaying my Form 1099 because their records "indicate [my] account holds a position(s) with a high likelihood of a dividend reclassification." Heh, okay. Even then, I think they'll end up sending one or more 1099 corrections anyway. Last year, the last 1099 correction I got from them was in mid-March. As a long-time holder of income and royalty trusts, I've come to expect things like that. However, it won't do me any good to file my taxes early anyway. After the most recent batch of forms, my tax refund meter stood at -$5,327. So I might as well use the grace period to earn a bit of interest on the tax set-aside.

Installed Motorola Phone Tools on my notebook computer. I wish I'd taken notes when I installed it on the desktop computer last year because this is a tricky process. The MPT CD didn't come with drivers recent enough to recognize my phone so I needed to install the latest handset drivers. Even then, MPT didn't recognize my phone. After a bit of experimenting, I figured out how to add my phone manually as a "RAZR V3c". It's actually a "V3m" but the driver definition for that model is still not there and the "V3c" seems to be close enough as far as command strings go.

I won a $20 Amazon gift certificate in the Wise Bread Forums raffle. First, the Adsense revenue share, now this. Wise Bread is the forum that keeps giving!

I've been significantly hedged since the third quarter of last year, so I've just been shaking my head, looking in bemusement at the current market downturn. That doesn't mean I didn't have anything in play though. As always, I keep a few lowball limit orders open in order to snag abnormal variations in price. It's like going fishing for investments. At the market open, one order got filled at a price just 3 cents above the morning's low! Exciting stuff, even if the action took place before I logged in this morning. Aside from that, I was planning to do a bit of bargain hunting but I was a bit late and Bernanke's surprise rate cut had pretty much put an end to that idea. So never mind.

In my view, the 0.75% Fed Funds rate cut was little more than a band-aid over the gaping chest wound in the financial markets. Cutting interest rates appeared to have an effect the first few times but it is clear now that the impotent Federal Reserve can only defer, not prevent, the credit bust that, according to Austrian Business Cycle Theory, must inevitably follow a credit boom. Repeated bailouts only serve to prolong the bad debt and cancerous malinvestments that keep us from wiping the slate clean and making a fresh start.

On a different note, I started working on my 2007 tax return this morning. I'm only 10% of the way through the 1099 forms and the tax refund meter is already down to -$1122! Fun!