You can be safe shopping online. Follow the tips in this article
to quickly become an expert on the subject. Then make sure to pass it
onto your friends and family. If these ethically-challenged vendors
don’t get any bites or sales, then they won’t be around for very long.

via GfG

At $11/mo for the paperback book plan, I think you would need to read 2-3 books per month for it to pay off. The audiobook plans are more pricey and the any format you want plan tops out at $30.49/mo.

As my reading sources have shifted to the Net, I probably wouldn’t break even – I think I’ll stick to the local library for now.

Just today I received a rather legitimate looking e-mail that could easily be misunderstood to be from Skype. If I had clicked on the embedded link, and installed any of the software I would have been in for a world of hurt. It was one of those malware writers that makes you believe you have a virus/malware and says you need their software to clean your computer. Their ‘software’ in turn ends up being garbage that costs lots of money.

Here’s how to lock down your Skype settings:

1. Go to the menu Skype-> Privacy
2. Ensure that all of the “from” settings are from “people in my Contact List only“

Here’s a screenshot of what that dialog box looks like. Click for a larger version.

There is just one minor drawback. You will need to manually add new contacts before they are allowed to call/message you. A small price to pay for a lot more security.

I’ve attached an Excel spreadsheet w/ formulae that I used to compare
mortgages. Just punch in the value of the house you want to buy, the downpayment you plan to make, and the various fees that your potential lender is going to charge you. You can adjust this to suit
you.

Good real estate sites for searching and even for background knowledge:
Realtor.com, Homes.com, Homefair.com.

I’d recommend going with a big realtor like Century21, Coldwell Banker,
etc. They typically have more resources. On the other hand, you may
find a smaller realtor will give you more personal attention – just
make sure they have access to MLS listings.

Find out about current interest rates: bankrate.com. You can
also do some comparison shopping there.

Mortgage shopping comparison: lendingtree.com. Of
course, once you plug in all your personal info, expect to get lots of
calls! Do it once you’re sure you need to secure a loan. I highly
recommend checking with the big lenders as well as what you get from a
shopping comparison agent. The big guys can typically offer you the
best rates, loans backed up by lots of money, they probably won’t
resell the loan and they have more resources to support you in the long
run. So consider: eTrade, ABNAmro, eLoan.

There is a Wharton Prof who has a really good website discussing all of the
ins and outs of mortgages, loans, banks, etc. You should definitely
check it out. In fact, it’s useful even if you already own property. He
calls himself the Mortgage Professor. Go figure…

The day you decide to lock in on an interest rate is the day that you
can expect to spend most of the day doing that (at least if you want to
try to secure the best rate and and the lowest lender closing costs).

Good luck!

PS> This was originally an e-mail that I was about to re-send to yet another person when I realized (yet again) that I should really blog this and share it with the rest of the world. That way, I don’t even need to re-send the e-mail, but instead say – just check out my blog! Yeah, some of you may not agree, but that’s ok – you don’t have to; you don’t even have to read this!

PS> Interesting article on Brock Pierce of IGE (which was a company that used low-paid workers to farm virtual gold and re-sold it at huge profits).

Notable headlines: “China Withdraws from Tibet, with Apologies”, “President signs single-payer health care into law”, “Faster Way Seen to Reduce Atmospheric Carbon” and for you sci-fi fans, “Lucas authorizes fan reworkings of episodes 1-3″!

Oh yeah, if you go to http://m.youtube.com on your cell/mobile, you can pull up YouTube videos. Make sure you have a good data plan, b/c those videos ain’t small compared to text-based web pages or SMS/text messages.

This could fly, but I suspect that the decent fees in the multiple hundreds of dollars will only apply to a small, proven successful set of individuals. If you make less than $100k, don’t expect companies to be knocking down your door and willing to pay over $1k. I wonder if I could make a living interviewing?

Not too long ago, Netbank was shut down by the Feds, and their main banking assets were acquired by ING Direct for a song. I was a loyal Netbank customer for about 10 years, and enjoyed it tremendously. While I became complacent with the (initially good) rates, and stopped looking for better deals, for the most part I got what I needed.

Netbank was probably the first online only banking entity to not only offer above average rates, but also free bill payment. One feature that I didn’t even knew existed when I signed up, but immediately loved, was the ability to write someone a check from within the website and have Netbank print out and mail the check. Free. When I told friends and family about this, they either didn’t believe me and/or were amazed that that existed, more so when I sent them a check!

Lots of banks now offer this feature, but my vague memory tells me that Netbank pioneered this. I’ve started the process of migrating my accounts to ING Direct, as they appear to have what I need for bill payment and have great interest rates, and I don’t really want to spend lots of time researching new banks.

BTW, for those of you wondering how this has affected, the short answer is not at all. My money was FDIC insured, and I think the Netbank site may have been down for less than a day while ING Direct did some tweaking in the background to get it all under their control, but other than that, everything still looks, feels and is the same for me and the rest of the Netbank customers. The only impending thing is that I get the distinct impression that ING is trying to phase out the Netbank services and bring us under their main umbrealla of services. Makes sense for them.

Thanks Netbank. It’s too bad you didn’t manage to stick around and benefit from the fruits of your pioneering work, but I was glad to be along for the ride.

About a month ago, we signed up for a new service called BlogRush for Gizmos for Geeks. BlogRush is essentially a networking tool where you earn credits based on how many times the widget is displayed on your site (i.e. pageviews) and in turn, links to current articles on your site are displayed in the widget on other similar blogs.

Since its launch, BlogRush has had tons of issues with spammer types signing up for the service to up their traffic, and so they decided to move from an automated sign up to a manual review process. We just got an e-mail saying that GfG was reviewed and that it did not meet any of their “Quality Review” criteria. I had to laugh; I may have even snorted. Reading through their list of 7 criteria, I found it rather ironic that we (our site) didn’t meet all of those requirements easily. I’ll post the “Quality Guidelines” below.

About the only thing that we could be faulted for is too much advertising on the site, but honestly, what blog out there isn’t trying to make some money, and how do you do it without advertising? We’re not blogging to drum up buzz for something else that we sell. Our blog is our product. But come on – we have 3 ads on the main page. Three, for Pete’s sake.

We found out about BlogRush from Shoemoney’s blog and guess how many distinct ads he has on his blog – 9 at least count. I’m not faulting Shoe at all. Actually, quite the opposite. God bless him for being able to stick that many ads on his site. If you told pretty much anyone that they could plaster their car with ads and never have to work again, do you think they’d stop to think about it for a minute? Hell no.

In case you’re wondering if we’re going to pursue BlogRush to get reinstated, the answer is nope. For our couple hundred thousand impressions, or whatever it was (since we can’t see our statistics any more), we did not get a single referral. Not one.

Guess what we’re going to do with our newly freed up page real estate? Yup, you got it – stick an ad there!

Read on for BlogRush’s admirable, but strangely enforced, list of Quality Guidelines.

BlogRush Quality Guidelines:

- The blog contains unique, quality content that provides opinions, insights, and/or recommended resources that provide value to readers of the blog. Articles, videos, public domain works, press releases, and content written by others are okay to be used on the blog, but the ratio of unique content should far outweigh content from other sources.

- The blog should be updated on a regular basis (at least several times a month) and should not just go a few months between posts.

- The blog should already contain at least 10-12 quality posts. New blogs with very little content will not be accepted.

- The blog’s primary contain must be in English. BlogRush is currently not available for non-English blogs.

- The blog should not contain an excessive amount of advertising and links and very little actual content. The focus of the blog should be quality content.

- The primary content of the blog should not be “scraped” content from other sources and/or script-generated pages for the sole purpose of search engine rank manipulation. The focus of the blog should be quality content.

- The blog’s content (or advertising) should not contain any of the following types of content: hate, anti-racial, terrorism, drug-related, hacking, phishing, fraud, pornographic, nudity, warez, gambling, copyright infringement, obscene or disgusting material of any kind, or anything considered illegal.