ING Direct raised its savings account interest rate to 2.60%. What a great business. In exchange for no tellers or branches and non-immediate availability of funds, you reap the benefits of a dramatically decreased cost structure. It takes some planning but is well worthwhile, considering the paltry rates paid out by traditional big banks.

Which brings us to tax refunds. So much marketing and advertising revolve around tax refunds. H&R Block even provides a "refund anticipation loan," a practice of dubious honesty beyond the scope of this entry. Anyway, the point is that I think people have been trained to look at tax refunds in too celebratory a manner. They're simply getting back what they should never have given up. Not only that, but by giving the government an interest-free loan for a year, they've sacrificed the opportunity to save or invest that amount and get a return. If you get a refund of $100, that's not the whole story; if you had kept the $100 instead of giving it to the IRS for a year, you could have turned it into $102.60 in an ING savings account.

It may seem like small change, but the time value of money, and float generally, is a phenomenon of primary importance. When I got my refund last year, there wasn't a sense of windfall--it was more like an annoyance had been corrected, but still somewhat short of what could otherwise have happened.

After a fun weekend featuring dinner at Baluchi's and brunch at Elmo, it looks like tomorrow will be a busy day at the so-called weather desk. This coastal storm looks like it will be a game of inches.

According to most model predictions, the city will be right in the twilight zone between a band of heavy snow and a mixture of snow, sleet and/or rain. It's still too early to nail down exact amounts. But we do know a few things.

First, much of the precipitation will fall at night, which means if it does stay snow, it will accumulate optimally. At this time of the year, the sun angle has become strong enough so that if snow were to fall during the day, its accumulation would be offset by strong solar energy. However, it is not at all clear that most or all of the precipitation will be snow. We'll just have to wait and see.

Second, the storm is a relatively fast mover. Even if it is all snow, this will not be a superstorm of 2005 or anything like that, where it stalls off the coast and churns out endless amounts of moisture. Even accumulations in heavy snow bands north and west of the city should be not much more than a foot, maybe 15" in some spots.

Third, we know there will be some snow at the start. This is because the air is so dry. When precipitation starts falling in dry air, the temperature falls several degrees because of evaporational cooling--the same kind of cooling that makes you feel cold when get out of the water from swimming or showering. Even if onshore winds bring the temperature above freezing eventually, the temperature will have to climb back from an initial descent.

The consensus seems to be for a track somewhere across Long Island as it moves to the north-northeast. This is as close as it gets. A shift 30 miles in either direction could make a difference of several or more inches of snow. Given the lack of cold high pressure over Quebec and the track so close to the coast, my hunch is that the heaviest snow would not be in the city proper. It could, however, be in a band as close as I-287 around through northeast New Jersey into Rockland and Westchester, as close to the city as White Plains or Danbury. We'll see.

Recently I've made the rounds listening to some albums that have been sitting on the shelf (so to speak--they're on my iPod) for some time. One is I'm the Man by Joe Jackson, released in the fall of 1979. Jackson's genius is even more evident now, after the surge of punk rock in the 1990s. "On Your Radio" hints at a proto-punk flavor while featuring piano seamlessly planted in a mix of rock and jazz. Jackson also manages to hint at jazz with hard-edged guitars at the end of the title track's bridge. Anyone that likes '90s rock or punk, from Green Day to Jane's Addiction, should have this album and appreciate its brilliance.

Do the Collapse, by Guided by Voices, is twenty years younger, but still classic melodic punk-ish rock. It's impossible not to love the sugary "Teenage FBI" as soon as you hear it; "Optical Hopscotch" is somewhat more challenging but still moves along nicely. "Hold on Hope" tones down the pace, with soft vocals over an acoustic guitar bed, without being lethargic.

Finally, Stranger than Fiction by Bad Religion (1994) continues to represent a pinnacle of intelligence in seemingly endless sea of one-hit 90s punk songs. "Infected" is the most widely-known song from this album, but "Leave Mine to Me" turns up the speed, and "21st Century (Digital Boy)" is visionary ("I'm a 21st century digital boy/ I don't know how to read, but I've got a lot of toys").

New music is great. Old music rediscovered, with the benefit of perspective, is often even better.

Tonight's episode of "The Apprentice" highlighted a critical aspect of client service--learning about the client and the market. As this episode shows, sometimes you're most in danger of screwing up when you think you know the market. Preconceived notions stifle the constructive exchange in which true needs and requirements are communicated.

This is why we don't approach new business with flow charts and fancy diagrams of proprietary methodologies--we start with a blank pad. We spend time learning about how an organization generates relationships and the people responsible for those relationships. We've made interviews, meeting minutes and focus groups a bit of a running joke, but I think those have everything to do with the impact we've been able to make with what we've done.

More generally, "The Apprentice," for some reason, seems much better this season--I think because although the product placements are there, it seems to touch on more of these important business issues. I'm enjoying it this time around.

Snow has now arrived in Manhattan and it could be the start of an exciting weather week. The southern (tropical) jet stream is juicing up, and cold air will continue to come out of Canada. This combination generally sets up the opportunity for moisture-laden coastal storms, and indeed, all eyes are on next Tuesday or Wednesday for a possible coastal system.

Unfortunately, the computer models have been having all kinds of trouble pinning down storm paths in this complex pattern. The European model, for example, first predicted the storm to travel up the Appalachians (which would mean rain for us); then it took the storm out to sea south of us (which would mean light snow at most); now it shows the storm passing over NYC (which would mean rain). The GFS model is no more consistent. All bets are off for precipitation type. In addition, the sun angle is high enough so that for a big accumulating snow, most of it would have to fall at night.

Some kind of unsettled weather is a good bet next week. But any kind of specific high temperature prediction and precipitation forecast will be pretty much guesswork through at least Sunday.

Recently, I've come across one of the neighborhood's best lunch options: the lunchbox special at Lenge, on 69th and Columbus.

After miso soup and salad appetizers, you can choose from a number of options to configure your own lunchbox. I choose the chicken teriyaki over any kind of tempura. I don't really believe in tempura. It seems to me that with the exception of authentic Southern fried chicken, frying food is a way of watering down the authenticity of honest, well-crafted flavors. The people who order tempura seem like the people who load up on fried cod or haddock while on the Maine seacoast, and then feel like they are participating in the true Maine seafood experience.

The chicken teriyaki is simple but flavorful, cooked perfectly so it is textured and moist. It comes with a combination cucumber/seaweed salad, six small vegetable dumplings, and of course, a maki roll (either California, tuna, or, I think, yellowtail). The sushi is not glamorous but it is consistently excellent.

All of this used to price for $11.50; they've just raised the price to $12.50, and it's still worth it.

There's a strange ad on page C11 of today's New York Times business section. It's a help wanted ad for the New England Sports Network. I've never seen this kind of ad in the business section.

Ah, but NESN broadcasts the Red Sox, which is partly owned by The New York Times Company. The Times slapped a "Media Job Market" banner on top of the single ad. Right.

It must be great to work in the advertising department of a conglomerate. If you can't get people to buy advertising, you can always bank on your conglomerate siblings and cousins. You can tell how lazy or ineffective an advertising department is by looking at the number of ads from within the same empire. Ever notice how some NY1 shows feature lots of ads for AOL or Time Warner Cable? Or how many generic GE corporate image ads fill the empty slots of MSNBC?

I don't know of any actual studies on this, but you have to figure that naturally, conglomerate membership makes it easier to be a worse advertising manager. It's natural. You can always dig up a generic ad from the corporate parent or sibling. Why stay late at work coming up with clever advertising selling points for ABC when you can just throw on the latest Disney World ad and go home?

It's another one of the ways conglomerates diminish the amount of money an enterprise creates. People should continue to view these "synergy" ads with great skepticism.

What a great day for mail! First, I received my check from OldCellPhone.com, the great business that buys used cell phones. (Another great one is CellForCash.com.) It's so easy: you go to the Web site, look up your phone model and price, and then register. In a few days, you get a cardboard box with padding. You spend two minutes putting your phone in the box and putting the postage-paid label over the original shipping label, and drop it in any mailbox. I sent in my old v600 when I switched to Verizon Wireless in early December. So it was a bit of delay, but with no aggravation.

I also received my replacement driver's license, which arrived just over one week after renewing it at the New York DMV. Very impressive. This process must have been so much more cumbersome before information technology. I would hope that recycling an image and text on a piece of plastic can now happen in less than a day, and indeed, it looks like it did.

Some blurbs from a nice holiday weekend:

• Verizon Wireless continues to provide perfect service. I've had it for almost 3 months now and have still not called customer service once. (This is mostly appreciated by the friends of mine who know that if there is something to complain about, I will find it.) It just always works. My bill is always accurate. I'm not charged any faulty termination fees or fictitious roaming charges like I was with AT&T Wireless. Verizon Wireless is just there. It's perfect.

• For brunch on 9th Avenue, ditch the crowds outside of Vynl and Eatery and go instead to Julian's. The food is a half-step better and not much more expensive. Vynl and Eatery have great food also, but who wants to wait outside for an hour for French toast?

• How come every time you go shopping for shoes, it doesn't matter whether you're 100% sure of your size--the salesperson still tries to convince you that this will be the time that size 11, and not 12, will be right for you.

• I have now determined that the potatoes from Whole Foods are unquestionably better than those from anywhere else. For some reason, you can microwave a Whole Foods potato and it comes out much more like an oven-baked potato than potatoes from other stores. I don't know why this is the case, but the difference is unmistakable. Also, I have found the avocados at Whole Foods to be perfectly ripe, whereas the ones at Fairway are too hard. I like to support Fairway, a native New York business, whenever I can, but Whole Foods wins on these two critical fronts.

Nice going, New Jersey. The state is accusing Blockbuster of deceptive marketing. Apparently, the company's new "no late fees" policy doesn't actually mean "no late fees;" customers who keep a movie beyond 8 days after the due date are charged the price of buying the movie.

Blockbuster says it has "taken a number of very thorough steps to let customers know how our new program works." Are they kidding? The whole ad campaign, including huge signs in store windows with 75-point font block letters, is based on the "End of Late Fees" message. Incidentally, since the new policy started, I have rented a movie, and nobody told me about this fine print.

Blockbuster would have been better off positioning the new policy as an "extended rental period," which is really what this is. That would have been a reasonable response to Netflix's truly unlimited rental period, and I think Blockbuster would have gotten a good response from people who think that two days is too short but forever is unnecessarily long. Instead, it opted for an exaggerated and deceptive message and is now rightfully getting caught.

The biggest problem for the National Hockey League isn't that this season is now cancelled. It's the massive PR problem evidenced by a recent poll on Yahoo! Sports--almost 2/3 of people said they didn't care if the NHL came back next season.

Even accounting for the unscientific nature of this poll, it is impossible to imagine the same results for a poll about Major League Baseball or even the NBA.

I'm probably a casual hockey fan and can really get into a tight playoff game, especially one that goes into overtime, regardless of which two teams are playing. But it doesn't feel like anything is missing without the NHL in action. When baseball was on strike, there was a palpable absence from the sports pages; the lack of hockey news has simply occurred without being very noticeable.

From what I have seen, I'm a bit underwhelmed by The Gates in Central Park. Orange is not my thing, and the swaying fabric is, well, eh. Fine. It's exciting to see so many people flock to Central Park, and the wave of enthusiasm has been a refreshing break in the February blahs.

But all this chatter -- in the news media and elsewhere -- about some supposed "meaning" of The Gates is absurd. Why does it have to have meaning? Sometimes art just exists. It reminds me of how listeners write epic analyses of song lyrics, looking for an "interpretation," when in fact the musician just puts the lyrics out there for each person to enjoy in whatever way works for him or her. Same with music itself. If I write something with a rough meaning in mind, but it means something else to someone else, great. The point is just to get it out there as a form of expression.

To use something more visual as an example, consider food. There is undoubtedly an artistic element to the presentation of food, combining colors, textures and flavors in a unique way for a particular culinary experience. Does it make sense to ask what the "meaning" of diced red pepper is? Since red is often used in warning signs, does the red pepper symbolize caution?

I think a primary cause of this misguided analysis is the way we learn about literature in junior high school. You can't just read a book--you have to write papers on the symbolism of everything. It's not just raining--the rain is there because that symbolizes a foreboding development. With written fiction that may be valid, but this doesn't necessarily translate to visual art, in which most people have no experience (and which is generally an elective or nonexistent in American education). Many of the people who mastered the game of symbolism in literature courses (elite journalists and other English and humanities majors) are now the ones pestering the artists with questions about what The Gates means.

The Gates is more like red pepper in salad than like the rainy morning in a novel. People should stop obsessing about some secret meaning and just take it in whatever way works for them. (I happen to prefer red over orange, however.)

This weather pattern is pretty boring. It's been nice, but today is another run-of-the-mill mid-February sunny day with a high around 40. Yawn.

But boring weather can be fun. Early next month I'll be in Fort Lauderdale, where boring is good: sunny with highs around 80, moderate sea breezes, and lows in the mid 60s. It's the best time of year down there with low humidity but nice warm air.

I just finished watching the Jersey shore motel episode of "The Apprentice." (It was so refreshing to watch an episode that was not oversaturated with consumer product placements and promotions.)

There is no question that the right person, Brian, was fired. Brian demonstrated the exact opposite of good leadership. A good team leader minimizes individual liabilities to find ways people can complement each other's strengths. After Brian finished the project, everyone seemed to be in tension with each other. This had been the same team that won the Burger King task; Brian mismanaged everyone into shambles.

It's not that other team members of Net Worth were perfect. But Brian was a negative catalyst of the worst kind, and his dismissal was the fairest outcome.

We're good at making desserts. Let's also make t-shirts!

Sara Lee Corporation has had enough of that, and is ditching its non-core businesses to focus on food. Excellent.

WCBS meteorologist Jeff Berardelli makes a great point in today's discussion of the storm that wasn't. Forecasters are sometimes lured by the level of detail included in today's computer model predictions. But a detailed long-range forecast doesn't mean an accurate forecast, and the level of detail sets up an expectation that just isn't possible.

This perception is created by other weather services. The National Weather Service now has these "pinpoint" forecasts stretching out to 7 days. We aren't told that in 7 days it will simply be warm or cool; we are told that the high will be 76. Accu-Weather is even more evil. They have a 15-day forecast on their Web site. In addition, when they issued their long-range seasonal outlook, they had the gall to issue a press release saying that because their forecasts are more detailed than those of the National Weather Service, they were more accurate. This is absolute nonsense. There is no evidence that Accu-Weather's long-range forecasts are more accurate. In my view, there is no evidence that Accu-Weather meteorologists are even competent.

Meteorologist Nick Gregory keeps it honest by limiting forecasts to five days. (Full disclosure: Nick is a friend of mine.) His approach is the right one. You may take a good guess from the models that it will turn colder or warmer next week, but that's about it. And sometimes that's not even right.

Weather services, public and private, would be wiser to do more research and development on short-term forecasting, such as where the hurricane will go tomorrow or how much snow will fall in the next several hours. That makes much more of a practical difference and is a lot more useful than the latest 240-hour prediction by a computer model.

Here's more great insight from Investor's Business Daily. Basically, using lots of nice-looking lines and dots on a stock chart, it shows that you can look backwards to see an earlier point when buying a stock would have been better.

As usual, IBD provides no aggregate evidence for its article--again, it nicely isolates the one stock that happens to fit its trading gimmick du jour.

How about an article on trading opportunities that mirror Super Bowl outcomes? If a stock is out there that fits this pattern, IBD can definitely find it.

Shares of Hewlett-Packard were sharply up today following the announcement that Carly Fiorina, the company's CEO, would be leaving. I guess shareholders aren't exactly disappointed.

They shouldn't be. I have little doubt that Fiorina will do great things with another company sometime soon. But her decision to merge HP with Compaq was not only wrong, but also conflicted with explicit opposition stated by directors and large shareholders. Combining HP and Compaq has been a huge undertaking, dragging the company into lethargy and leaving it with little definition.

The next leader's first project should be to break up the company. When components of a conglomerate are set free, shareholder value is released as the independent entities realize their full potential. HP makes great printers, and the company should think more in terms of improving its printer business operations and efficiency -- and setting up clever partnerships (not mergers) with complementary service or product providers.

Certain songs have things I call great "moments." It's not the same thing as a hook. It's a specific point in the song that, for some reason, stands above any other. It's a point where you say, "Wow, that's really clever."

One such moment is in "Send Me On My Way" by Rusted Root (from the album When I Woke). It comes right after the first time the chorus is repeated after the bridge. Before this point, the chorus has flowed into the lyrics "Send me on my way" in a major key, but this time, at time marker 3:18, it turns minor. The minor iteration leads into a female vocalist singing in thirds above the lead singer's voice. The whole sequence is maybe 10-15 seconds long, but it's just fantastic, and that moment is when Rusted Root presents the idea in a minor, not major, key at 3:18.

So when I bought Rusted Root Live recently and saw that "Send Me On My Way" was on it, the first thing I listened for was how the band handled this transition. The bridge, predictably, is much longer in this version. Then it's time for that magic point. Unfortunately, Michael Glabiki hits the critical note with all the precision of a Charles Smith brick. It was disappointing. I'm all for authenticity of live music--studio engineers can engineer anything into perfection--but this was particularly egregious. Oh well.

A similar thing happened at a Bruce Hornsby concert I attended several years ago. Bruce was playing with a new band, and they started to perform "The Tango King" (from the album Hot House). The bridge in this song features a slowly unfolding series of thick, dissonant chords in brass, building upon each other. The harmonies pile higher and higher until at 2:43, the ultimate thick chord is repeated multiple times before collapsing into a resounding G major. The moment is unmistakable, propelling the rest of the song for another two minutes to its end.

When Hornsby and his band performed the song at this concert, they botched this moment. Or, maybe it was more understated than it should have been. At any rate, it was disappointing because as soon as the song started, I was looking forward to this point.

A success story? The Dave Matthews Band in New Haven in October 1996. "Ants Marching" (from Under the Table and Dreaming), which features one of the greatest song moments of all time. This is at the close of the bridge, at time marker 3:58, when the most challenging of increasingly complex harmonies finally breaks, with a masterful drum accompaniment, into the song's primary riff by 4:07.

The live version was even better. I couldn't believe it. From the first note, I anticipated this partciular point in the song, and the band drilled it like a swish at the buzzer.

It's a beautiful warm day today, perfect for brunch on 9th Avenue in midtown (a quintessential Manhattan experience). High pressure is bubbling down from Quebec, bringing deep blue skies and just a hint of an onshore breeze.

Usually warm temperatures come with winds out of the south or southwest. But this high, although to the north, is not Arctic in origin. Rising upper air temperatures and melting snowpack are allowing the sun to operate at nearly full force today, so we're sitting in the low 50s. (Near the coasts of the Atlantic Ocean and Long Island Sound, onshore breezes have developed, keeping temperatures there in the 40s.)

As for the stalled ocean storm, it's still spinning near Bermuda, having been stuck there for several days now. But not much happened here despite lots of threatening forecasts. It's a good lesson that unrealistically detailed long-range forecasts, pegged on pie-in-the-sky scenarios rooted in highly unusual setups, are an unwise venture.

This is unlike me, but for a hamburger tonight for dinner, I actually opted for the somewhat processed Arnold hamburger buns instead of the fresh Fairway ones. Why? Experience has proven that the Fairway ones are too big. The bread/burger ratio becomes too large--it shouldn't be much more than 1:1--and the burger gets lost.

The Arnold buns are much smaller and will do a let a larger burger shine (when combined with sliced tomato and avocado).

Speaking of Fairway, I'm leaning back in its direction now even though I also like Whole Foods. Fairway is much more New York. The aisles are cramped, and there are too many strollers and old people, but the signs are much wittier (even bordering on snide) and the produce is just as good. The one specific thing Fairway does wrong, compared to Whole Foods, is package its fried chicken to go. As I learned on "Good Eats" with Alton Brown, fried chicken should be stored in cardboard or paper, never in aluminum foil--this deadens the texture of what should be a delicately crispy batter. I'm surprised that Fairway continues to package its fried chicken in a way that is now widely known to be wrong.

Floyd Norris mischaracterizes the debate about Regulation FD. He seems more interested in setting up the big bad voice of business against the little guy.

It's not that simple. The main academic objection to Regulation FD is not that it stifles some abstract concept of free speech. It's that it winds up being worse for investors. The argument goes that if companies have to tell everyone something anytime they tell anyone, they will eventually reveal less. That will limit the flow of information into the market, and limit the extent to which well-informed investors can react to it and signal to other investors where to put their money.

To my knowledge, there is no convincing proof that Regulation FD has made life better for everyone. I think it's too early to tell whether it's good or bad overall.

As Norris observes, most of us don't have a friend in the executive suite who can tip us off during the next golf outing. Fine. This is a fact of life. That's why investors need to diversify and not pin all their hopes on what Wall Street analysts or the media say.

I never understood what "Get It Now," a service of Verizon Wireless, was -- until I saw specifically that you can download Pac-Man and Tetris. So I did.

Granted, the controls are a little tight, since you have to use the tiny buttons on the v710. But this is authentic Namco Pac-Man, not a shareware imitiation. It has the original theme music. The graphics, though small, are sharp and accurate.

The unlimited use fee was a little over $6, which is well worth it. While on the bus, I've been using the Mobile Web to view satellite and radar images. But games don't require reception and I (or my 8 year-old nephew) can play them anywhere boring.

I've never plugged into the camera phone phenomenon--the v710 has a camera I never use--but the games and mobile Web are great features. Of course, calling is most important with a cell phone, but I've found great reception and clarity nearly everywhere.

I switched to Verizon Wireless two months ago, but yesterday I had to call AT&T Wireless (now Cingular) on behalf of someone else. I was excited to see that the call center software has been reprogrammed to demand segmented inquiries even more strongly.

But there's still an escape: press zero 9 or 10 times, and then wait for a brief pause before you hear "We seem to be having trouble. Let me route your call to the next representative."

When it comes to dialing a number for the category of your question, I don't think I have done that in four or five years. I don't care that menu options have just changed (whose hasn't?). I don't have 5 minutes to listen to the new menu options; I'd like my question to be answered. Common sense and experience tell me that, at the end of the day, most representatives can handle most questions. They're sitting in front of a computer with just about all of your account information and customer service history. As a result, I find that it's best just to press zero as much as necessary to break out of the system and be routed to a real person.

I particularly love when companies ask you to punch in your account or phone number and billing ZIP code, but then they have to ask you for it again.

What's the reason for this? Companies aren't stupid (usually). These systems are designed by high-priced consultants with reams of data on consumer behavior. I think that many companies make a calculated attempt to make the call center experience just a little bit aggravating. Calls are expensive--on the order of $20 per inquiry versus much lower costs for e-mail or self-service.

What else could explain the scratchy hold music used by AT&T Wireless for so long (they've changed it now), or the excruciating new age nebulae used by Circuit City? It appears that the optimal level of service is not perfectly fast and efficient (which would set up too strong an incentive for customers and would sack companies with high customer service costs), but rather right on a line between effective and aggravating. Too aggravating, and nobody receives the sufficient level of service required to retain them as a customer; too fast, and people may call too much.

Sometimes it's useful, though. Whenever I need to place a test call using a new cell or landline phone, I call Delta Airlines (1-800-221-1212). You're guaranteed a fair amount of time before someone answers.

I'm very surprised. Google was up 7% today. Investors are not supposed to like surprises. You'd think the market would be spooked even though the short-term news is favorable. A whole day of trading has passed and the stock ended the day up sharply. What happened?

I don't think you can just say the market is "wrong." The market has had more than enough time to digest this information and register any post-reaction.

I think, more likely, that it has to do with characteristics of the subset of people investing in Google. These people are probably less risk averse than the average investor. They drove up the price of Google stock following a rocky IPO registration process. Now, following a sketchy turnaround, they're rewarding the stock and then some.

I have no idea how many shareholders Google has versus how many, say, IBM or GE has, but the risk-friendly investors of Google may simply be buying more of it. The stock price of a more mainstream company would probably not have performed the same way.

It will be interesting to see what happens with Google's subsequent quarterly announcements.

"Google Silences Critics," says one headline. That seems to be the prevailing reaction to the company's recent announcement that it wound up beating expectations. Fine. Except two months ago, Google sounded a warning that it expected worse, not better, results.

It's nice when things turn out okay, but why the sudden turnaround? Much of Google's revenue is advertising-based. It's not like they rolled out a new product and swarms of customers piled in the door in the last two months. These advertising deals are relatively steady over a number of months. Two months should not make a difference.

Between this and the sloppiness in preparing for its IPO, Google seems to be a company that does not have a particularly tight grip on how it channels information. This time, the surprise was positive. Next time I wouldn't be so sure.