For years, I delayed signing up for the company's 401k plan, for a few reasons - first, the company didn't offer matching funds, limiting the potential benefits, and second, I always felt that I could react more quickly to market changes and be more likely to select potential winners, while mutual funds selected by a third party would be far too diversified to do any good. Years of being an amateur stock picker (always in tech and without diversification) showed me I could routinely outrun the market, and though there were always risks, I tended to come out on top.

However, I gave in at the end of 2004, and have watched the 401k slowly increase. And I do mean slowly... as even if I put as much as I can into the "high growth" funds, we're lucky to see anything more than 1% increase on a good month. Meanwhile, the money left in eTrade is a lot more flexible, but, as is cautioned, has the ability to be withdrawn and spent at any time, while the 401k is hidden away where I can't reach it.

So, the stock market in 2006 has definitely been up and down, as it seems for every winner I've picked, another tried and true favorite has been letting me down. That brings us to today. The three largest stocks I own on eTrade were each up today - at rates of 1.3%, 2.5% and 4%. I didn't mind. Slow and steady wins the race after all. But at market close, when I expected the 401k to chip in with similar gains, instead, all four funds were down... between .9% and 1.4% apiece. Seems they aren't picking the right horses.

So - today, I win. Louis 1, 401k 0. I'll watch this space and keep you posted.

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Monday is a big day for the Tivo in our house, usually running with its red recording light on from 9 through 11:30, picking up 24, CSI Miami and wrapping up with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show. Usually, we don't get through all the shows on the same night, and cherry-pick the episodes as available through the week, but with both my wife and I home and not moving around (but somehow getting work done with the TV on in the background), we took in a special 2-hour episode of 24, followed by CSI Miami - in what should be three gripping hours of television drama, but instead only exposed CSI Miami for the half-baked, poorly written, half-acting tripe it is.

After a double feature of the non-stop intensity of 24, which has scene after scene of action, surprise, and intrigue, the laidback, wait-around, ridiculous attitude of CSI Miami is simply nauseating. While 24 can at times be less than credible (somehow the bad guys never kill Jack Bauer?), David Caruso's transparent, shallow pandering to the camera is flat-out ridiculous, and each time we suffer through it, I swear it will be the last time, and that this time, we'll take it off our Season Pass once and for all. Watching 24 and CSI Miami back to back just makes the choice that much more clear.

When David Caruso was on NYPD Blue, his character was very good, and he rivaled Dennis Franz for our attention. But we all know how that ended - with his being written out of the show and forced into what was long considered the most dramatic example of career suicide known in the TV acting business. That he got a second chance with CSI Miami was fine, but the man is a disaster, and his colleagues aren't that much better. In fact, the show is so formulaic and foolish, there are drinking games set to the characters' odd behaviors. It's one thing to try and support the CSI franchise. CSI: Las Vegas is still pretty good. But Miami and New York leave much to be desired. Jack could probably take them all out in one action-packed episode... of 24.

Google is on quite the ride, and with the company's wealth of engineering talent, capital and a rapidly-expanding technology infrastructure, the sky seems to be the limit for what's by far the world's most successful, most popular search engine. Beyond this, the company has been adding new Web services to its portfolio, including GMail and Blogger, and software services including Google Earth, the Google Toolbar, and most significantly, Google Desktop, which for those running Windows, lets users index their computer files and search them all with the same ease as they can the Web today. With the latest iteration of Google Desktop, the company introduced a new feature enabling customers to search their files from multiple computers, with the data being stored on site at Google. While this has raised privacy fears in some crowds, it may soon be accepted practice, as most technology advancements are after time has passed.

Now it's clear that Google isn't done there. In a presentation shown at the company's recent analyst day, some of the slides made reference to a service to "GDrive", which aims to store all the world's files - whether they be "emails, Web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc." The optimistic hope is that Google's GDrive would eventually grow to be the master drive, with local drives acting as cache or backup, not the other way around. While the idea is similar to Apple's iDisk and a variety of online services, Google may be aiming to take it to another level. Initial reaction has been mixed, whether it's labeled as the "wild fantasies of engineers with too much caffeine" or instead making yet another vault of data for unscrupulous feds to access should privacy rights be further deteriorated. Time will tell, as Google has not yet announced GDrive publicly , and it may be months before we know the truth.

Related Links:
Wall Street Journal: Google Has Plan to Act as Hard Drive for Users' Files
Geeking With Greg: In a World With Infinite Storage, Bandwidth and CPU Power