I have never had my own personal hard drive fail.  However, this past year both my roommate and girlfriend had hard drive failures.  In fact, my girlfriend’s hard drive has failed twice in the past year.  In both scenarios, every file was lost.  Pictures, school documents, and more were gone forever.  And because hard drives are not indestructible, this failure could happen to you.  Because of this everyone should prepare for this potential incident with three simple steps.

1. Back up your files regularly

If there are files that you just can’t live without, you should make sure they are backed up.  There are a couple of ways to do this.  You could buy an external hard drive and schedule daily/weekly backups.  You could also burn your files to CDs (or rewriteable CDs). 

My favorite solution, however, is online backups.  Using a program called Mozy (only available for windows currently), my computer backs up my files whenever I am idle.  It’s a free or pay service, depending on how many gigs of files you want backed up.  All you have to do is configure it once, and it becomes automated thereafter.

2. Monitor the status of your hard drive

I anticipated great things from Microsoft in their upcoming operating system: Windows Vista.  I had heard rumors of great features, a beautiful looking interface, and increased reliability.  Plus, Microsoft was building on Windows XP, which in my opinion, is an excellent operating system.  Furthermore, with increasing competition from the Mac OS and various distributions of Linux, Microsoft had a huge incentive to try to hit a home run with Vista.

Yet from the looks of it, Microsoft is dropping the ball.  Rather than improve upon XP, Microsoft has made Vista into something completely different.  For one, there are FIVE different versions of the operating system.  That spells total confusion for the average consumer.  Does the average consumer know whether they want the “Aero Glass Interface,” or whether they want “Remote Desktop?”  I’m guessing there are going to be a lot of people buying a version of Vista that has too many - or too few - features compared to what they want.

I guess this has been out for a while, but you can use Yahoo Finance to create a display on your own website that shows your visitors which stocks you own and how they are doing.  You can see mine right here, with a few indices substituted for index funds I own that won’t show up on the display.  Coolness!

Credit card applications from the leading US banks. Apply online!

There has been a lot of talk about electric cars this summer.  With movies such as An Inconvenient Truth and Who Killed the Electric Car sparking much needed environmental inquiry in the US, it has become apparent that one of best ways the world could reduce energy use and clean up the environment is to change the way our automobiles are powered.

Until just recently, it appeared that hydrogen was going to be the miracle energy that would revolutionize the automobile industry.  Cheap, efficient, and abundant - initially the promise of hydrogen fuel cells - now simply three words that describe qualities hydrogen fuel cells lack.  Still, a plethora of potential solutions exist, yet unfortunately we can’t have them all.  Of these potential solutions, the one I see that rises above all others is electricity.

The electric car is a concept that failed in the past.  I don’t know for sure whether it was killed by a conspiracy or the market, but it is clear that the electric cars made in the mid 1990s had problems such as short driving ranges, long recharge times, and were expensive.  It was simply a technology that wasn’t ready yet.  Because of this, many people have simply given up on the electric car.

Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, was recently interviewed on Moneytalk, a money talk show hosted Bob Brinker.  The interview was about Anderson’s new book, entitled “The Long Tail.”  The main idea from his book, according to the interview, is that the world economy is shifting from selling a lot of one thing, to a smaller amount of many things.  In other words, a wide variety of niche markets are developing in place of one large “mass market.”

An example that Anderson uses in his book is the iTunes music store.  We all take online music stores for granted now, but just five years ago, if you wanted to buy a CD, the easiest way to do it was to walk into a music store and buy it.  The problem with that is that you’re going to only have the most popular CDs on sale, and lesser known bands who don’t have many marketing tools available will be ignored.  Today, however, it’s just as easy to buy a CD from a not so well known artist named Ben Kweller as it is from the band Green Day, which is regularly played on radio stations.