Meant to post this sooner, but yesterday was kind of a mess. Here is a sneak peek at some links from my weekly Weekend Reading column over at TheStreet.com.

• Wall Street braces for massive layoffs (Reuters)
• The TED spread's & TED's bogus journey (Risk)
• Yahoo's clock is ticking down on Microsoft deadline (Reuters)
• Books about the current crisis are coming out fast and furious  (New York Times)
• New solar ETF launches (Claymore)
• Interview with Warren Buffett: Says current downturn will be far longer than consensus (Fortune)
• Is oil headed for $200? (Bloomberg.com)
• Delinquent auto loans are rising quickly (Washington Post)
• The Forgotten History of Domestic Debt (NBER)

My friend Andy Kessler has an amusing series of interviews over at Yahoo Finance Tech|Ticker with Apple founder Steve Wozniak. If there were some way to embed 'em, I would, but there seemingly isn't.

Check the latest one here, with Andy K. jousting on a Segway with Woz over Mac guy versus PC guy. My take: Woz won, but Andy threw the match.

Here are slides from a keynote I gave in Pittsburgh last week at the Three River Ventures Conference. Unfortunately, no notes or audio, so you'll be forced to make up your own. Other than the Randy Newman / Bob Seger slide, however, I think it's generally self-explanatory.

| View | Upload your own

[Update] Speaking of ignorance, in the first version of this presentation I attributed a quote to Richard Feynman that should have been attributed to Niels Bohr. Damn interchangeable mid-century physicists. It's now fixed.

Emptying my burgeoning browser tabs:

• Employers stuck for trades people, technicians (Reuters)
• Debt costs rising for companies that must refinance (Bloomberg)
• Graph of Financing costs trends: Highest for corporates since 1997 (Bloomberg)
• Misplaced bets on the carry trade (FT)

There is a largely fact-free piece in the WSJ today about efforts to have a college named after super-successful Yale fund manager David Swensen. In case you have somehow missed it, Swensen has been among the most successful fund managers in the world over the last two decades, turning Yale's endowment from $1.2-billion to $22-billion.

So, should he now have a college named after him? That seems like a fairly obvious idea, given that he will have more of an impact on Yale than any alumni in the recent past or (likely) future. But there is apparently some controversy about naming a college after a money guy -- as opposed to an artist, dead president, etc.

My take? If Yale colleges are going to be named after people who have had an impact, then Swensen should get pride of place. Hands down.

Is there anyone out there who's not long oil and short the dollar? With that in mind, OHAR (oil hit another record) today, this time touching $117.76, largely on the back of all the fondness for the stuff among traders.

So, what's next: $100 or $125? I have no objection to the idea that we are on a sawtooth higher as oil heads toward its inevitable peak, but I have a hard time believing that there isn't a major price break or between now and then.

Thoughts? Musings? Nihilistic proclamations? Share them if you've got them.

I resisted jailbreak-ing my iPhone for ages -- okay, months -- but finally did not long ago using ZiPhone. Man oh man, is it an eye-opening experience. While the iPhone felt like a platform before, now it is a platform, with hundreds of apps available, from the special to the silly, including some very high-quality stuff indeed.

Sure, things will get better when iPhone 2.0 arrives, including apps built with the SDK, but this flash of the iPhone future -- and of mobile gadgets in general -- is mind-expanding. (And yes, I know I'm late to this realization, but better late than never.)

I've been arguing endlessly via email/IM with my online-advertising-conspiracy-theory minded friend Barry Ritholtz, which has gotten me looking at sectoral online advertising data. Some good stuff in the recent research report from online ad sorts Efficient Frontier, including this graph of sectoral trends in line ad spending:

Search spend has fallen off dramatically in finance and in retail, while it's flatlining in automotive. But online travel ad spending is ticking up smartly, undoubtedly financial sorts heading out of country when faced the current crummy economy.

Here is what people say they plan to do with their refund checks. I'm guessing they will spend less than they think on bill payment, and more than they think of frivolity, but whatever -- it won't be saved.

[via NPD]

There is some fascinating data out from Verizon on the upsurge in SMS messages during the Boston Marathon today at key points along the route. In general, nearby SMS traffic was up 213% compared to the previous Monday, with the largest volume between 1 and 2pm.

Here is the data, with percentage changes week-over-week, for various locations along the Boston Marathon route:

What's so special about Kenmore Square? It is normally a zero SMS traffic area? And I wonder how much of this was Twitter-related SMS traffic this year compared to last year.

The trouble with oil/dollar/etc. records is that once you're at a record the odds are awfully good you'll set another record. After all, if we assume that prices generally follow a random walk, the odds are darn close to 50% that on the day after a record high that we set another record high. And that leads to a non-stop series of noisy headlines, "New record XXXX price set!"

I think we should institute a new rule: No talking about a record price until at least 40 hours day after a record has been set. Call it a kind of market noise abatement act.

Okay, no more eulogies for VCs please. Coming after all the overdone pieces over the weekend parroting the data-blather about a downturn in VC spending -- everywhere except Silicon Valley, where most of the VC spending happens anyway -- we have an article on the subject in today's FT. This entire genre is turning me into a VC sympathizer. 

More importantly, I'm really struggling with the supposed corollary, which is that angel investors will fill the investing void. While I have no doubt that angels are more sophisticated than ever, wonderful people that they are, sometimes there is a reason why a market gets abandoned, and that's because it has become a crummy market. And with returns trailing considerably less risky interest-bearing accounts, that is currently the case in early-stage venture.