Saturday, March 31, 2007

Ask Pud: Life in general


There are two types of haters you'll encounter.

  1. People who are jealous of your drive and possible success, and make themselves feel better by beating you down.
  2. People who are so conservative and afraid to take risks, that they just can't understand your logic and figure there must be something wrong with you.
I'm not saying you should drop your friends, but you should try to surround yourself with like-minded peers -- people who will think what you're doing is awesome and will root for you.

Source: Ask Pud: Life in general

Pud sold his web site to Techcrunch for 1.3 BILLION dollars. (or maybe just some stock and a cow bell for his drum set.).

Consumption Junction, what's your function?


As unobtrusive as a small electric clock, the PowerCost Monitor™ is a powerful real-time direct feedback display device for domestic energy consumers. It tells them at a glance, in real-time, how much electricity their home is using in dollars and cents and in kW.

Source: Blue Line Innovations

Save money & save the environment with this $150 gadget that will tell you how much power your electronics are drawing.

Google Notebook & Microsoft OneNote


Google launched a tool called Notebook last year which is similar to a scaled-down web-enabled version of Microsoft OneNote, less the ink.

If you are looking for a quick, free, and useful tool to track notes from a browser, this is it.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/05/note-this.html

If you're looking for the best tool to track notes, journal your day, research & documentation  from your desktop then get Microsoft OneNote.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/onenote/default.aspx

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Toronto Real Estate Wealth Expo

Last weekend I attended Trump's wealth expo organized by Learning Annex. I have attended some pretty amazing events with them in the past (speakers including Lance Armstrong, Bill Clinton, Sir Richard Branson) and this one, though mostly one big infomercial, had it's pluses and reinforced many of the things I have read about selling, psychology and finance.

There's quite a few postings about the disappointment people felt after attending these events.
  • I grew tired of all the “happy go lucky” types.
  • All the speakers pretty much told me things I pretty much already knew: buy low, sell high (brilliant)
  • One guy pointed to a curve illustrating when to buy a stock (the lowest point of the curve).
  • When to sell the stock (the highest point of the curve). I’m going to be rich now
    I almost smacked the person next to me, when they actually wrote that down — maybe some peopledo need help
  • I went back on Sunday, late in the day because I can only take so much idiocracy. I toned down my attitude a bit because I realize a lot of people were buying their packages.
  • One woman sitting next to me just loved James Ray (the Secret). She was yelling positive re-enforcementsback at him when he was giving his speech — I felt out of place.
  • I felt a lot of folks there were willing to try anything to be successful.
  • I felt that a lot of people were victimized this past weekend.

http://www.wealthjunkie.com/2005/11/10/should-you-waste-your-money-on-the-learning-annex-real-estate-wealth-expo-one-reader-says-no-way/

I caught myself writing down 'get out of debt' with everyone else before I stopped. For $50, I thought it was an interesting way to spend the weekend. If I had to pay for a hotel or any travel costs, or full price for the ticket it probably would not be something I'd do unless I personally knew someone speaking at the event. Take it with a grain of salt - there's no free ride to getting wealthy and buying someone else's training course probably won't do it.

Out of all the speakers I listened to this weekend, there were a couple of standouts:

  • Tony Robbins, an incredibly motivational guy - he is _the_ motivational speaker to listen to, and knows how to hypnotize a huge audience. If it was a hundred years ago, he would be speaking in tents and throwing snakes around. If I had $1 million I would probably go to his training course in Tahiti to kill a weekend.
  • Bill Bartmann, the billionaire you never heard of, who started his billion-dollar business from his kitchen with $13,000. (which he borrowed from a bank where he already owed $1m, to start a debt-collection agency). I saw him twice. If you want your kid to become a billionaire, make sure his first name is Bill and his last name starts with a B. Bill's selling a Billionaire Mentoring Program, and is a bit late in getting his reality TV show off the ground. You can sign up for his free evening seminar here. A review is here. He said that he'll be organizing a free concert event for 50,000 students at the Rogers Centre to combat drug and alchoholism abuse. Note to Bill, get rid of those extra exclamation marks and the announcer on your web site. NOW IS THE TIME!!!

And more than a few other "characters":

  • Don Burnham, who spoke like someone out of the Sopranos but was signing $1000 training contracts like he was signing autographs. Don't you want to get rich? Fuggeddaboutit.
  • The Secret is.... don't watch the secret. I walked out after they started rehashing Tony Robbins' meet-and-greet tactics. blech.
  • Free Money from the Government's Chris Johnson, who almost caused a stampede by offering his training materials for free to the first couple of people who rushed to the back.
  • Real Free Money from Robert Shemin, who was handing out $80-$100 to people who put up their hand. His was an interesting seminar, since many of the previous speakers, whom he called his mentors, attended, including..
  • Dr. Al Lowry. He's 82, looks 62, and shows how working hard and having fun can extend your life.
  • Raymond Aaron. He's 61 (I think), lives in Richmond Hill, and has an ego bigger than his paycheque, though it seems to be working for him. The mind can do some interesting things, and his convinced himself to do a 350-mile footrace to the North Pole next week. All the best Raymond, and bring lots of warm socks.

Plus, using his own innovative techniques developed over the last two decades, he shows you how to—step-by-step—take conscious control of your world so you can double, triple, even quadruple your income doing what you love to do.

What if I want to quintuple my income. Guess I'm out of luck with his program. I think to become a millionaire I need to at least tredecaple it.

The surprise for me was Harry Stinson, the condo guy of 1 King West in Toronto. He was probably the most down-to-earth of the bunch, and really spoke out about what he believed in and how others could do what he has done to succeed. He is on his way to billionaire status, just two or more bankruptcies and he'll be there.

This week, Mr. Trump declared he wished all of his competitors were like Mr. Stinson, who he alleged "was talking about how he was going to beat me and then he went bust."
Mr. Stinson fired off his own response, pointing out that Toronto's Trump Tower looks "like a parking lot ... My condo-hotel at One King West is full tonight, by the way."

When Tony Robbins was speaking, he showed how a 'demotivational' speaker would walk into a room (shoulders down, head to the floor, "Don't Worry, be Happy" playing) and how a motivational speaker would (head raised, fist pumping, techno music). Harry was walking in to Bobby Mcferrin, though he did admit he wasn't a trained speaker as he read his notes. You could tell that he spent some time getting ready for the event, and even cracked a few jokes at Trump's expense. (tallest nonexistant building in Toronto? Here's your nonexistant award.)

So to me, $50 to attend was better than $50 to go to dinner & the movies (or maybe just the movies nowadays). I'm not rich yet, so I guess I'll probably have to go again next year.

Saturday, March 10, 2007

Banknotes.com - Introduction to Collecting of World Banknotes - Currencies of the World

Interesting to note that paper money was introduced because of emergency shortages in coins and metal money. 

When Marco Polo came back from his travels in China (1275-1292), people in Europe didn't believe that the Chinese used paper for money. Paper money in Europe came 300 years later. The use of paper money in China stopped in 1455.


The history of paper money in Europe is interesting. It started as emergency money sustituting for regular money. The first emergency paper bills are from 1483. The first bank notes were printed in the 17th century.

Source: Banknotes.com - Introduction to Collecting of World Banknotes - Currencies of the World

 

Similar to Income Tax, which was collected as a "temporary" wartime measure, and now dominates most fundraising activities by governments.

Of course, there are glitches in the automated tax collection systems from time to time.

The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) system went down sometime Sunday night or Monday morning and, "We have now traced the source of the problem to software maintenance conducted on March 4, 2007," says a CRA statement. "We are currently working to bring all systems back online gradually."

Source: P2P.NET

This could potentially cost the government, it's employees, and the Canadian economy millions.  The government will lose interest on unpaid taxes.  If nobody gets their refund on time, consumers will be less inclined to purchase items that are non-essential, like plasma TVs or iPods.  RRSP loan borrowers will have to float their loans longer, which may cause some borrowers to default on payments.

Last year the government processed almost 25 million individual and 1.7 million corporate returns, returning $18 billion dollars.  That's over 49 million dollars a day.  Not to mention the cost to H&R Block and other tax professionals who no longer have a way to quickly skim a percent or more off your instant return.  Moneymart & RentCash should be doing well right now...

Whatever happened to backups & mirrored systems?  If this were a bank machine being down for more than 5 days, how many CIOs would last through that one?

On another note, mortgage rates appear to be on the rise.  Here's one way to make your house tax-deductible to offset the pain a bit.

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

The Geek's Guide to Getting Free Stuff | The Free Geek

 

The Geek's Guide to Getting Free Stuff

Whoever it was that said, "There's no such thing as a free lunch," didn't know about the Internet. There are a lot of free things online, and a lot of it is actually legitimate and valuable. Better yet, many of them won't spam you with additional offers unless you've okayed it.

There are also offline ways to get free stuff, most of which you don't have to pay anything for, or very little (taxes, shipping). So here's our list of ways to get free junk or links to other lists. Most of what's here should appeal to the geek, and since most geeks still drink, eat and bathe, there are some freebies listed in that vein.

Source: The Geek's Guide to Getting Free Stuff | The Free Geek

Monday, March 05, 2007

Carbonmade

 Carbonmade is a site to display your art portfolios, and will shortly be hosted on the ever-expanding Amazon S3 service.  There are some amazing artists here.

I like the way the payment plans are broken out.  I'll pick meh...

Whoo! is our pro plan. For only $12/month you get 50 projects with up to 500 hi-res images and 10 high quality videos.

 

 

Meh. is our free plan. It doesn't cost you a thing and you get 5 projects with 35 images.

Source: Carbonmade: Create an account

Thursday, March 01, 2007

Canada's web conference - Toronto, May 30th and 31st, 2007

 

connect

Canada's premier Web conference, being held in Toronto on May 30th & 31st, 2007, is a chance to connect with people who are as excited about the potential of the Web as you are – people who want to know more about how it is changing the way we live, work and interact with the world. And you won't just connect with them in the hallways – at mesh, every panel and workshop is interactive.

Source: Canada's web conference - Toronto, May 30th and 31st, 2007