Again I find myself making excuses for not blogging frequently, but this post is just that: The reason I haven’t blogged recently is I’ve started as a Summer Analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets in Charlotte. I’m working specifically with the Industrial Group, dealing with Industrial Technology and Transportation & Logistics. Through KeyBank, we are able to offer a full range of investment banking services, including M&A advisory, credit, equity underwriting, and more.

Specifically, my ~70 hour weeks are spent making pitch books, models, doing equity research, and developing value added ideas for our clients. Almost every day I deal with a new company, a new deal, a new industry segment. I’m learning a lot, not just about the sectors we deal with, but about investment banking in general. So I’m creating a “Finance and Economics” category here on the blog, where I will post general tips, lessons learned, and my own distilled experience.

I’ll do my best to post regularly, both for my own benefit and everyone else’s. Hopefully this category can become a reference for college students wondering what investment banking is like.

Recently, Philip Kaplan (aka “Pud”, founder of Adbrite and FuckedCompany.com) was emailed a question by a single mother looking to get her life back on track. Philip answered the question on his blog, and I found his answer particularly fascinating and relevant. The full text of Philip’s answer is replicated below:

Some people know what their passion is. Unfortunately, you do not. But I’m going to help you find it.

Here’s what you do:

Ask yourself, if you could do ANYTHING in the world, what would it be? What’s the ultimate fantasy that you’ll probably never actually achieve, but would be awesome? Rock star? Movie starlet? Teacher? Birthday party clown? Brad Pitt’s wife? That’s the “WHAT.”

Now ask yourself, “WHY?”

For example, my “WHAT” was “be a rock star heavy metal drummer!” Upon further analysis, my “WHY” was “I want to do something creative. I want freedom. I want to affect lots of people.”

As it turns out, there were about a million different more tangible things I could do, that would satisfy my “WHY.” That’s why I became a freelance web programmer: creativity, freedom, and the opportunity to reach the masses.

What’s your “WHAT?” What’s your “WHY?” You’ll be surprised how easy it is to satisfy your WHY, once you’ve figured out what it is.

I found that, as a college student rapidly approaching graduation, Philip’s advice to identify your “why” instead of focusing on your “what” was especially pertinent as I considered my long term career and happiness goals. I also think that his advice is helpful to entrepreneurs casting about for some direction in life. Many are so focused on becoming the next Web 2.0 darling, that I think they may have lost sight of why they embarked on an entrepreneurial career path in the first place.

Do what you love. Follow your why. The rest will fall into place.

I hate Snap! Previews. You know, those little bubble icons like this that appear after every link on so many blogs (most notably TechCrunch). Their uselessness has been pointed out before by such big name blogs as Lorelle on WordPress and Performancing. Lorelle says “Personally, I consider these Snap Previews a blight on the web” and Performancing’s David Krug says that Snap Preview is ruining your blog.

Snap Previews take extra time to load, are not accessible, and are generally annoying when they popup under your cursor. So, here’s how you can disable them for good, across all the sites you visit:

1. Find a website that uses Snap Previews. If you can’t think of one off the top of your head, use TechCrunch.
2. After the page has loaded completely, trigger a snap preview by hovering over a link or Snap Preview icon. If all goes according to plan, this is the last Snap Preview you will ever see.
3. Click the “Options & Disable” link in the top right of the preview (see screenshot, click for larger version)

4. Click Bubble Disable for “ALL SITES” (see screenshot, click for larger version)

5. Click “Close Options” and click off of the preview. You’ll never see another Snap Preview again!

Let me start with an apology for my, how shall I put it … less than prolific blogging over the past month. Ironically, I released the Ready Fire Aim RSS Widget, and then didn’t follow it with any content in my feed! I’ve been extremely busy with mid term exams (thank you, WFU Calloway School of Business and Accountancy). After two weeks of 5AM bedtimes and 9AM alarm clocks, I took a week off and headed to the beach to relax and catch up on sleep.

Imagine my surprise when I came back today to find that this post had received over 2,500 hits in just a few days. This seemed strange to me because the Windows version of the walkthrough had always been more popular. After checking my referrer logs, I realized that almost all of the traffic was coming from StumbleUpon. I’d heard of StumbleUpon before, but had never actually tried it. Spurred by this influx of traffic to my blog, I installed the StumbleUpon toolbar. This thing is addictive. Every time I press the “stumble” button, I’m presented with a new site I’ve never seen before. I can even customize which types of sites I’m interested in. At first I had expected that the service would be vulnerable to spammers and commercial sites with no real content, however, I learned that there is an approval system for paid content, and user feedback is also considered when displaying sites (similar to Digg). What a great time waster!

Speaking of spam, in addition to the 2,500+ hits on the Verizon/OS X walkthrough, I also received just over 800 pieces of comment spam, all of it caught by Akismet (and with no false positives too!). This means that 30% of all the visits to that article during the past week were by spam bots (and that’s just the ones that figured out how to leave a comment). This seems a huge number to me, especially when it seems that the spike in spam was correlated to the spike in traffic from StumbleUpon. The reason I find it strange is that I cannot find a link to my site anywhere on StumbleUpon.com – it seems the only way to find my article is by pressing the “stumble” button on the toolbar. This means that typical web crawling spam bots wouldn’t find me, and that those bots that did must somehow be surfing through the StumbleUpon service.

Can anyone that uses StumbleUpon take a guess as to why this might be? Is there an HTML link somewhere on StumbleUpon’s site that I missed? Let me know in the comments.

I few days ago, there was a post on Digg highlighting a Digg-style WordPress Admin Dashboard theme. It was by aspiring designer Teddy Hwang. Curious after reading the Digg story, I found my way over to Teddy’s site, and was immediately impressed with his blog’s design. I noticed Teddy had just begun something called Project Widget. In an attempt to further hone his design skills, Teddy is creating OS X Dashboard widgets for free. The widget conveniently pulls in all the most recent articles from your blog (via RSS), and displays them on the OS X dashboard. Teddy will create a custom themed widget for any webmaster that asks him, so if you want a custom-designed widget of your own, use the Project Widget link above to request one. Here’s what the Ready Fire Aim widget looks like, you can download it here.