Hey, great post. I really enjoy reading Getting Finances Done - keep up the good work!!

I blogged about something similar here: http://tinyurl.com/2xc2bv

I called it 10 Easy Steps to Save Thousands of $$$. It also helps you to reduce your carbon footprint as well. Can't be bad!

Nice post.

I am firmly in favour of personal carbon trading and believe that the traditional arguments just don't stack-up.

In fact I recently blogged about this exact thing here: http://tinyurl.com/2scnhk

In short: Personal carbon trading is an idea whose time has come. You can’t expect it to solve problems of inequity which already exist in the world - the rich will always be able to buy themselves a way out, and survive catastrophes better than the poor. That’s the nature of the capitalist society in which we live. But properly run, the scheme would protect the fuel poor, and allow low carbon consumers to make money from the rich.

In fact, the great thing about personal carbon trading is that government sets the outcome - a reduction in carbon - and the ‘price’ rises and falls depending on whether consumers change their behaviour. So the more people simply stick to their lifestyle and buy their way out, the price rises until people think it is better to reduce their carbon use.

Read more here: http://tinyurl.com/2scnhk

MTBF for me is one the least understood and least practiced techniques. Calculations of MTBF assume that a system is restored and returned to service immediately after failure. Sometimes mean time to failure (MTTF) is a more appropriate measure. Minitab has some wonderful tools for calculating both of these.

Finally, can you change the blog link from 63 buckets: this is dead, to learnsigma.com. Thanks :)

Thanks for bringing this book to my attention. I read on Amazon that,
elegant solutions, as May correctly points out, "universally change the world's attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and habits." Efforts to formulate elegant solutions are guided and informed by three principles: ingenuity in craft, pursuit of perfection, and fit with society. "They're the raison d'etre at Toyota, and nonnegotiable."

All good stuff, but possibly something that I didn't already know?

Yep, Iraq is a total mess, and it would be strange if Bush and his cronies, who didn't have a clue what they were doing in the beginning, suddenly begin to have a clue how to sort their mess out.

The USA, Britain and Australia should all be paying reparations to Iraq. After running scared of the UN, they barged in and then created a massive vacuum to be filled by insurgents, terrorists and gangsters. As the Oil Ministry was secured, the police force were being sacked. For such piss poor planning, and having forced millions of Iraqis into exodus and refugee status, perhaps we should be paying them?