Less light, more oil? Bye Bye Incandescent Bulbs?

If you replace one incandescent bulb with a compact fluorescent bulb, you'll save one barrel of oil a year. Imagine how much oil we'd save as a nation, if everyone had to replace all of their incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs.

I'll do the math for you, because the numbers are staggering. According to one estimate, this country would be able to get along without building 26 power plants. We'd save 5300 pounds of mercury emissions, 140 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions, and $16 billion on our electricity bills.

While I personally don't like the light that comes from a compact fluorescent bulb as well as I like halogen lighting, I do like the greenhouse gas emission savings we'd get as a result of switching.

Right now, switching is a choice, but it might not be soon.

Environmentalists and manufacturers are working on legislation that would phase out Thomas Edison's contribution to indoor lighting over the next 10 years.

Sum Salary: Stay-at-home mom's work worth $138,095 per year

In a country that pays outgoing CEOs hundreds of millions of dollars for running poorly-performing companies with sharply declining stock prices, stay at home moms don't get a whole lot of respect.

Choosing to stay at home and raise your children, if you're lucky enough to be able to afford that choice, means you go into retirement with a smaller 401(k), and have earned smaller social security benefits. There isn't a whole lot of support.

But there should be more. A new study shows that if the typical stay-at-home mom were paid for her work as a housekeeper, cook, psychologist, chauffeur, party planner, day care teacher, computer operator and chief executive officer of her own family, her annual salary would be over $138,000 per year.

How did Salary.com come to that conclusion? Stay-at-home moms typically work 92 hours each week, including 40 hours at base pay and 52 hours of overtime at time-and-a-half.

So how much would you earn if you held a full-time job and still did mom-chores around the house? An extra $85,000 for everything you do outside of the office.

You've got to worry when the TSA loses Data

Another day, another 100,000 names, social security numbers and personal data lost, courtesy of the U.S. Government.

Last week, the Transportation Security Administration, also known as the TSA, announced it had lost a computer hard drive containing Social Security numbers, bank data and payroll information for about 100,000 employees.

TSA Administrator Kip Hawley sent a letter to employees after authorities realized the hard drive was missing from a controlled area at TSA headquarters.

While there have been no reports to date of personal information being used fraudulently, the TSA agreed to provide a year of credit monitoring services for all employees.

Which is a relief, but you've got to wonder why the TSA, which is responsible for security at the nation's airports and train stations, isn't more secure.

More than half of cell phone users are typing in addition to talking. What's next?

My husband Sam and I laugh about how, when we were dating twenty years ago, we didn't have cell phones. Back then, cell phones back then were a very expensive piece of technology that just wasn't in the Glink budget.

But we sure could've used them. We used to call each other at our offices, and agree to meet at a certain train station in downtown Chicago. Invariably, we'd miss each other and wind up going home by ourselves. Cell phones would've eliminated that problem.

Of course today, more than half of all cell phone subscribers are now using their cell phones to do more than talk. Almost half of them are spending more time typing and less time vocalizing, according to a recent report from Forrester Research.

Instant messaging, the downloading of ring tones and games, and accessing the Internet have boosted profits for phone companies even as prices for voice minutes are falling. Since it's all about the money for cell phone companies, expect to see more of these extras in the next generation of phones.

Sometimes it isn't about price – Diary of a Home Seller

In late February, my husband Sam and I and two partners closed on a brand new investment condo.

Two months later, we still haven't sold it. We've had 40 or 50 people come through the unit in two months, but we haven't had a single offer. So, a couple of weeks ago, we decided to embark on an experiment to see if staging, combined with a significant drop in the price, would help us sell.

We moved the entire living room and dining room furniture of our partners, along with some things from our home into the unit and staged it. Then, we lowered the price about 5 percent.

While the folks who came through last week's open house all commented on how beautiful the unit looked, we didn't get an offer. And, lowering the price didn't generate a single call for the unit this week.

Sometimes it really isn't about price. Sometimes it's about how slow the real estate market really is.