Avoid Ads and Maketers from Following You

If you want to avoid being tracked by a cookie or deter online behavioral advertising, go here: http://www.aboutads.info/  This will allow you to opt out from online behavioral ads served by some or all of our participating companies.

WikiInvest

My favorite free tool for stock watchlists, investing insights, charting, notes, managing portfolios, etc. is now Wikinvest. You can import your portfolios from your accounts so you can track them and see real-time market data.

If you are a developer/blogger, you can use their tools in your blog. Like:

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View the full AAPL chart at Wikinvest

Great tool! Check it out.

Want free DVD movie rentals? Use these Redbox codes for savings!

You can go here to get free movie rentals from your local RedBox movie box.

How to Prevent Junk Mail

Don't you just hate junk mail? What a burden on the environment! Not to mention taking up all that space in your mini-mailbox. Never fear, go here: Proquo. It's a free service and promises to stop different kinds of junk mail from different sources.

Give me the Operator!

"Give me the operator!" Don't you get frustrated sometimes when you are going in circles while calling a business. You try pressing 0 or the * key and nothing. You get frustrated then you hang up. You just wanted to talk to someone and not some machine. Well I have something for you. Go here, Gethuman, find the company and look under the gethuman column to see how you can talk to homo sapiens sapiens.

Save - Free Firewall

Recently I installed the free firewall software from Comodo. It is a neat program and has fewer pop-ups than other firewalls because of its ability to "learn". So if you need a free firewall software, try this one as it was also recommended in the latest issue of PC Mags under The Best Free Software.

Save - Free Antivirus Software

Need a free antivirus software? Try avast! 4 Home Edition. I recently installed it on my notebook and currently use it. It has a couple of "engines" that check email, web, smtp, etc. There is no adware or any other annoyances. Give it a try.

Travel Search Engines I Use

Here are some of the travel engines I use. Give them a try, specially on Tuesdays at midnight. 1. Mobissimo 2. Kayak 3. Sidestep Good luck and happy traveling!

Cheap Prices on Air Travel

Right now there are some nice rates on air travel, specially to Europe, from now until probablly May or the start of summer. I have not seen these prices since a long time. What I have found is that if you do a search on Tuesday at around midnight, you get better prices than other days. Also try leaving on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday and stay at least a Saturday.

Raw oysters!

I ate a rather interesting meal, well an appetizer that is, on one of my trips. Raw oysters! But instead of with lemon and tabasco or horse radish I ate them with a sauce which contained red-wine vinegar and shallots. I wonder if these would sell here in the US?

Don't Pay Full Price for Windows Vista

In his newsletter, Brian Livingston has a great tip on how to clean install the Windows Vista upgrade version on any hard drive, with no prior XP or W2K installation, or even a CD! Thanks Brian! By buying the upgrade and not the full version, one can save around $72. One can also buy the OEM (with no Microsoft support) or the student edition and save more as well.

Want to be a marketing guru?

learn Tip - I was at the bookstore last night and notice a nice,informative marketing book - The Marketing Gurus: Lessons from the Best Marketing Books of All Time According to Amazon: Marketing Gurus offers 17 summaries of marketing books published in the last 15 years. It's arguably a narrow range for the best "of all time". Featured books include:

• The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
• Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore
• Positioning by Jack Trout and Al Ries
• Kotler on Marketing by Philip Kotler
• The Popcorn Report by Faith Popcorn
• The Anatomy of Buzz by Emanuel Rosen
• Purple Cow by Seth Godin
• Relationship Marketing by Regis McKenna
• And more

Marketing Gurus essentially is a book that summarizes other marketing best-seller books with some updated comments and hints. So if you want to be a marketing expert and don't have time to read all the other books, grab this one.

Want a free advanced stock quote tracker/ticker tape?

Earn - Do you want to get started investing in stocks? Want to track a portfolio, chart some stocks, or have one of those nice stock ticker tapes running in your screen? Try Medved (www.quotetracker.com) quote tracker. Features:

• Streaming Real-Time quotes
• Live real-time intraday charts
• 50 Techincal indicators
• Streaming Level II Quotes
• Integrated Trading Intraday & Historical Chart Trend Lines
• Advanced Alert System with Email alerts
• NEWS Monitoring
• Multiple portfolios support
• Scrolling Ticker Tape
• Historical charts
• Ability to connect to many data feeds

It is supported by ads and you can pay to remove them. It is a pretty need system similar to the ones advanced investors/brokers use - and is free.

You can always have money in the bank...

save - From Ben Franklin's Poor Richards Almanack to The Richest Man in Babylon they can't seem to stress enough the idea of paying yourself first. 10% at least but one can start with whatever; you just need to get the rhytm going. Go ahead, open a HSBC, ING, or Emigrant savings account and start automatically paying yourself first. You must open an account that is seperate from your regular checking account since this will make it harder for you to withdraw your saved money. Consider it as a bill that must be paid to yourself. Pay it before all other bills. Try it and you will be amazed that you will always have money left over at the end of the bank; I know I do.

Access,share and sync your files from anywhere - FREE

do TIP- Ever need to access your computer files from another computer or need to share them so that others can download a la ftp? Then say hello to Foldershare (www.foldershare.com) *. Foldershare also lets you sync files between computers. Free - courtesy of Microsoft. *Note: As always, I put the address of the website in parenthesis so that you can see there is no affiliate marketing. I don't get a cent from these products. I just use them everyday and find them very useful and makes me more productive and that is the whole point of this website - bringing out the best in people. Thanks

How to Win Friends and Influence People...

learn - Some quick pointers from the excellent classic book by Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People

• Never criticize, condemn, or complain
• Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself. Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person's precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment.
• "As much as we thirst for approval, we dread condemnation"
• When dealing with people let us remember that we are not dealing with creatures of logic but we are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity
• Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - so don't
• Give honest and sincere appreciation - always.
• "Don't be afraid of enemies who attack you. Be afraid of the friends who flatter you."
• Become genuinely interested in other people
• Smile
• Remember people's first names and make them feel important
• People have low self-esteem - so continuosly reinforce their levels of self esteem by making them feel important, needed, respected, etc.
• Admire and respect sense of accomplishments which increases the value and self-esteem.
• Specific, immediate praise i.e. "Excellent sale!" in intervals and not every time
• Pay attention and listen attentively

And finally the most important pointer: The deepest urge in human nature is the desire to be/feel important and needed

Save - Need to unzip or uncompress files for free?

Try 7-Zip (www.7-zip.org)

Main features of 7-Zip: High compression ratio in new 7z format with LZMA compression 7-Zip is free software distributed under the GNU LGPL Supported formats: Packing / unpacking: 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR Unpacking only: RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, CHM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS For ZIP and GZIP formats 7-Zip provides compression ratio that is 2-10 % better than ratio provided by PKZip and WinZip source: www.7-zip.org Why pay for other software? Free and useful.

Do - Need system info for your computer (gratis)?

I constantly troublshoot and help others out fix their computers. The first thing I need to know is what kind of computer it is, i.e. what does it have. I use SIW - System Information for Windows (www.gtopala.com) This program performs computer configuration analysis and diagnostics. It was recently names to PC World's 101 fabulous freebies. SIW gives detail information about your computer properties and settings, detailed specs for CPU, motherboard, chipset, etc. A standalone tool that does not require installation. Just double click to run and voila, instant info! You can even run the program directly from a USB flash drive. How neat is that? No strings attached and no ads. All free. Read a review.

Save - Learn a foreign language for free

I love learning new things and these include learning a foreign language or two. There are literally hundreds of ways of learning a new foreign language. I have tried many language software and audio programs. For me these are the ones that have helped with a price though:

• Tell Me More
• The Rosetta Stone
• Pimsleur Levels 1-3

If you want to learn for free though, try these 2 sources:

• MIT's OpenCourseWare
• Annenberg's Learner.Org (www.learner.org)

With these 2 sources you can be hablando espanol comme fou! Oui c'est vrai, senor WebPatron.

Save - Want a free MIT education?

Want to learn a foreign language or some history? Then take free courses via MIT's OpenCourseWare (ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/index.htm)

• MIT OCW's goals are to: Provide free, searchable, access to MIT's course materials for educators, students, and self-learners around the world. Extend the reach and impact of MIT OCW and the "opencourseware" concept.

I can actually do the same assigments as MIT students. Pretty neat stuff.