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I’ve been listening to a terrific audiobook version of a new book entitled Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

This is a really fascinating account of several experiments done by the author, Dan Ariely, who’s a “Social Economist”. If you think this stuff is boring, you’ve got another thing coming. Actually, the audiobook version is quite fun to listen to. The guy reading it has a nice British accent, and in many situations it’s really amusing.

If you’d like to learn some new business strategies that work because of the way people just tend to act, then you really want to read this book.

One example they discuss is a strategy for “getting the guy/girl at a party”.

There’s also an excellent discussion on “Why People Cheat” and how you can predict when it’s most likely to happen.

The audio book contains 7+ hours of material, and it would take quite a while to go through it all. Just visit the link here and see what else it contains. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS BOOK!

Phishing fradusters are everywhere.  I get “PayPal Fraud Alerts” several times a week.  I get stuff from banks I’ve never heard of, and banks I don’t do business with.  But the ones you need to be most careful of are the ones you DO work with.

Well, I just got a Phishing spoof purporting to be from Google advising me of the following:

Dear Advertiser,

This is your official notification from Google AdWords that the service(s) listed below will be deactivated and deleted if not renewed immediately.

As the Primary Contact, you must renew the service(s) listed below or it will be deactivated and deleted.

Renew Now your Google Search Advertising services.  <<— FRAUDULENT LINK!

SERVICE: Google Search Advertising
EXPIRATION: July, 23 2008

Thank you for using Google AdWords service.
We appreciate your business and the opportunity to serve you.

Since your Google AdWords account is tied not only to credit cards but to stuff that can cost you a LOT OF MONEY if it’s messed with, be VERY CAREFUL with these kinds of things!

Do NOT click the link!  Rather, go to your AdWords account the way you usually do (adwords.google.com) and see if you get any kind of notice when you login.

Personally, I’ve never been advised that my AdWords account needs to be renewed — only that my credit card is expiring and that I need to update my records.

Be informed, and be careful.

-David “The Tool Wiz” Schwartz

Somebody recently posted a complaint in a forum, whining about the fact that services like GMail, Yahoo Mail, HotMail, and others apparently either won’t accept emails with big attachments, or they strip them off.  That’s like complaining that you can’t fit your entire wedding party into your Volkswagon Beatle for a cross-country trip.  It’s the wrong solution to the problem!

Email attachments get encoded into a form that roughly doubles their size, called Base64.  So a 10k attachment makes the email around 20k.  I had someone try to “forward” me an email to which she attached a 40MB zip file.  She was confounded that her email service wouldn’t accept it.  DUH!  Even if it would have, my mail server is configured to reject any emails with attachments over 2MB.  I just don’t want ‘em!

Most viruses and trojans are sent as attachments to emails.  And most of THEM tend to be files with extensions like .exe, .com, .dll, and .js.  Google even rejects emails with zip files attached to them that contain files with these extensions.  I think that’s smart.

Here’s the solution:

If you have a hosting account ANYWHERE that gives you FTP access, all you need to do is upload the file to your hosting account via FTP and send the person a URL to it in the email.  It’s that simple. This is a great use for those free hosting accounts your ISP gives you with your internet service.

There’s absolutely no need to send big file attachments on emails to anybody, EVER.

Things have been quiet for me lately, but they’re about
to take off.  I wanted to share this with you.  It’s
kinda long, but I hope you’ll stick with me.  It might not
interest you immediately, but it’s something to think
about.

There are a couple of things to buy here, but they’re
awfully affordable.  More than that, this is the first
in what I expect to be several messages along a new
theme that could be VERY PROFITABLE for all of us. 
So stay tuned.

BTW, you can also now follow me on Twitter:

http://www.twitter.com/thetoolwiz

Now that all the noise has settled down about John Reese’s
new Traffic Secrets launch, I have a little tip about one
“traffic secret” that I seriously doubt JR will be telling
you about.  This one is from my friend and reluctant mentor,
WillieCrawford:
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I just got done restoring the previous version of someone who asked me to upgrade their Wordpress blog.

The good folks at Wordpress.org released V2.6 “over a month early”.  But it has a problem if you’re upgrading from an earlier blog: the Categories get messed up.

So if you’re going to upgrade, do NOT move to 2.6 yet.

And always remember to do a backup of you database before you run the upgrade!

BTW, I’m available to do installs and upgrades for Wordpress, Rapid Action Profits, and other scripts at $50/hr.

Today is July 11, 2008. It’s the day the iPhone 3G was released into the market. WOW! I’d love to get one of these puppies.

I have a friend who thinks it’s just a bunch of hullaballoo about nothing. He’s missing the point. And maybe the boat.  The truth is, the iPhone finally delivers what Bill Gates has been talking about for 10 years, saying how Windows will revolutionize mobile computing.  Only Bill never envisioned what Apple has actually accomplished!

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I just stumbled into this:

http://www.law.com/jsp/legaltechnology/pubArticleLT.jsp?id=1202422768997

It’s about a free site where you can search for legal briefs and whatnot.

You might think, “so what?”

How about this:

Check out the blog the article refers to. You’ll find it contains some surprisingly interesting articles!

What are your thoughts?

-David

Well, I’m finally getting around to posting something here after a long silence.  Something went wonky with my blog and I couldn’t access anything on the plugins page and some other stuff.  So I just stopped posting things.

I don’t really have more to say at the moment.  But I’ll be posting a little more regularly again shortly.