I have just put up a glossary here on Aridni. As of right now it contains primarily terms for trading and investing stocks, but it is a starting point to grow from. I will be adding terms to it as the site grows further.

I hope that you can find it useful in your work.

Glossary

Sideways Market: A situation where stock prices change little over a specific period of time.

Speculator: A person who tries to make money buying and selling futures and options with the sole intention to make a quick profit.

Stochastic Index: A computerized tool measuring overbought and oversold conditions in a stock over a certain period.

Stock Market: A market in which shares of different companies are bought and sold.

Technical Analysis: Anticipating future price movements using historical prices. trading volume, open interest, and other trading data to study price patterns.

Todd and I both made a lot of money at casinos that allowed us to go to school and buy the things we wanted. For us, casinos provided a guaraneed increase of wealth. Oh how I loved the wad of cash in my pocket when I walked out the door!

Of course, we were casino employees, not patrons. While I’d typically stick to the theory that the only people at casinos who make money are:

(1) employees (who don’t then gamble at the end of their shifts)
(2) owners

But it turns out that every so often, casinos produce another winner:

(3) turns out one gambling couple actually did profit at a casino in North Dakota… to the tune of $3 million in one 75-cent bet.

I didn’t even know you could win that much in one bet. In Montana, the max is $800.

What would the world look like if everyone lived like you and me? The reality is, of course, that the world would be pretty disgusting. We consume a heck of a lot. Luckily, all 6.6 billion people on the world don’t live like you and I do.

But what are the consequences of our decisions? A great site, Sustainability.org, will calculate how many earths we would need if everyone had the life that you have, from the foods we eat, homes we live in, and amount of trash we generate. Go play the game for yourself.

A lot of Gen Y Americans score around 7 earths or more, so I thought I’d be set–I don’t eat meat or drive alone much. I recycle and use programable thermostats… and we’d need 2.7 earths to sustain people like me. With all my effort, I’m still failing.

Go check out your score and share your thoughts with us.

One of the cool things about firefox is just how much you can personalize it with extensions and themes. Today I am going to show you some of the extensions that I recommend. I have even found myself adding some of them in computer labs when I’m only going to be there for an hour or so.

Navigation wise I really like Gestures. There are a couple different extensions that will do this feature, and for the most part they seem to all work the same. Basically you can right click and draw a few lines in order to navigate. If you haven’t used them before, I would highly recommend it. Even with a few simple commands, life becomes so much easier. If you are only going to add one feature from my list, make it gestures.

The next tool that I like is the Gmail Manager. This will let you log into mulitple gmail accounts and keep an eye on them for you. It will show you the number of emails in the in-box, notify you of new mail, and all the things that will distract you and keep you from being productive. There is also another add-on called the Gmail Notifier, but that can only handle one account, and doesn’t show you the message clips, you have to actually log in to see your email. I recommend the gmail manager. If you don’t have a Gmail account, I recommend that too!

The Next one is called Search Status. This finds out the site’s Google Page Rank, as well as the current Alexa rank for the domain. Then it gives you tools to investigate further, and easily determine who’s site it is, and how long they have had it. From these you can help to gauge the credibility any given site. But of course, they are not the end all be all.

Sometimes when you need to upload a single small little file onto your server, opening up an ftp client is a little overkill. Well, at least when you have fireftp set up it is. With this little extension you have the connection waiting for you a tab away.

Next is Web Developer, I bet you can never guess what that is used for! If you do web design it can help you figure out where the pictures are going, where the divs end, and what you need to do. I honestly don’t use it enough, but it really has some cool features that can help you out when you need them.

Fasterfox will let you tweak your connection and help you to optimize your settings. That way you can get firefox to run a little faster, cache sites a little better, and it gives you a cool logo as well!

Of course I should mention grease monkey because of the possibilities; however I haven’t found many scripts that I really like a whole lot. There are plenty of small scripts that you can add that will change page layouts and edit things a bit. There are some useful scripts over at userscripts.org

I was chatting with Daniel who runs Daily Blog Tips and he just let me know about Colorzilla. It’s really geared for web designers and developers. It basically gives you an eyedropper tool much like in Photoshop. You select a spot an it gives you the color code in RGB and Hexadecimal. No more taking screen-shots to figure out the colors!

He also mentioned Stumbleupon. I was going to leave this one out, because there are so many interesting things that you can find with it. Adding it might provide you with a muse, but most likely it will provide you with a million things to read that are NOT included in what society likes to call ‘productive’. If you have some time to kill, then it’s certainly worth checking out. It might be a good idea to make sure all of you work is done first!

There are nine cool plugins to try out with Firefox, of course these are just some of the many useful tools out there. What are your favorite, “can’t live without” extensions?

I just ran into a cool little video from Tubetorial about subscribing to RSS feeds in your firefox browser. If you don’t use firefox, a lot of other browsers support it as well but you might not look as cool.

Anyways Tubetorial has all kinds of great videos that you might want to check out. A lot of them are along the lines of setting up your own web page and things along those lines. If you have never been there it’s worth checking out.

No, you didn’t misread the title and technology does work for productive measures as well. But if you let it, you can seriously damage anything that resembles real work.

Here are a couple great ways that can help you to do less while giving you the psychological benefits as well as the physical appearance of working.

When you actually get into a project, wouldn’t it be great if there was some sort of an alarm or notification when you get a new email. You know just something to pull you out of the zone while demanding an immediate response.

Then once you have your email program open, perhaps then you could have a couple rss feeds that shoot right in. This demands immediate attention as well, those articles aren’t going to read themselves!! There could be a small to large number of precious time consuming links contained within or perhaps there are thoughts and ideas sparked that send you on a wild never ending goose chase. Don’t forget to check your stocks a couple times while you’re at it.

Later on down the road an hour or two you might get back to whatever you were supposed to have been working on.

The other option is to use technology to your advantage. Only use it when you can afford to. Turn off your email notifications, close your browser, and let’s get things done.

Just recently I was reminded that it is important to back up files that you may have stored anywhere. And of course I learned this lesson the hard way. Another domain name that I run was hacked into and the page was trashed.

I made two mistakes on my side that allowed this to happen. I picked an easy username and easy password and I didn’t have a recent backup. Fortunately for me the page was very small, under 2Mb and most of the content was saved on my computer. It was only a matter then of a little redesign and uploading it.

Passwords – For this particular site I used a password that had some of the keywords of the site in it. Bad Idea! People with malicious intent can run programs that simply try plugging in different words from a dictionary to gain access. Here are some password hints to make it harder to do.

1. Use letters and numbers – Adding 0-9 exponentially adds more possibilities to go through as you add more characters to your password.
2. Don’t use whole words – The easiest way to get through passwords is to plug in words.
3. Don’t use the same password for multiple places – If someone figures out one password, what’s to stop them from trying it everywhere and messing up things for you all over?
4. Use acronyms – If you really like Triscuit crackers, your password might contain, ‘bwgwc’ standing for ‘Baked Whole Grain Wheat Crackers’ or you could use lyrics from a song, or take a saying.
5. Use harder acronyms – Instead of taking the first letter, you could make it harder by going for the second, third, or last. In our above example we would have ahrhr, koaec, or dents; however I wouldn’t recommend the last one that makes up an actual word.
6. Use feeling – If you can push letters in some sort of a pattern on the keyboard without even thinking about it, that could be a good start. For example if I roll my left hand right now I get asdf, and as long as I am using a qwerty keyboard, that action will always give me the same thing. I could go anywhere on the keyboard and punch in a pattern and not know the password, but have something hard to duplicate.

Combine the above tips to make the strongest password you possibly can! On Thursday I’ll have the second part of this ‘Remember not to forget’ set, backing up files.

The next time you are surfing the net, take a look at some of the websites you are on. If it wasn’t for the internet, could that company survive? Well it’s not fair to ask that, but how about we modify that to, ‘If it wasn’t for the internet, could that company prosper?’

In a world without the internet, all the content would have to be delivered through the traditional routes. You would get news and articles from magazines, newspapers, direct mail, and television shows.

Fortunately we do have the internet and you can get your Aridni articles quite easily! And we don’t have to print off a thousand copies of articles everyday.

While chatting with a friend the other day, we came up with a great idea for a ‘webusiness’ that we could work on. That is basically any business model that is reliant on the internet to be successful. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo are webusinesses. Could you imagine if they weren’t? How about MySpace? That would be a disaster if everything wasn’t organized neatly in databases.

After hammering out a few key details and determining the additional work that would be required for the new project, we decided to go ahead. I purchased the domain name and hope to have a decent start by next weekend.

Even if I have to put the idea off for a month, domain names are only $7 a year at Godaddy. Hosting is dirt cheap as well. So there is no reason to delay setting up your webusiness today. Or at least you could register the domain name and get a jump on your neighbors. The amount that you would be out if you decided to terminate the project early is quite minimal.

Every project has to start with an idea, what do you do with yours?

We talk a lot about ideas for growing wealth. And if you stop to think about it, I’m pretty sure every plan of attack can break down into one of the four:

1. Business—sell yourself, your product, your idea, or your services
2. Investing—gaining bonds, growing interest, gambling stocks and CDs
3. Real estate—I never thought of this method as a kid…own properties
4. Internet—extend the possibilities. A lot of people are making fast money on brilliant ideas. Even less classy ideas like collegehumor.com has brought in millions for its authors

Don’t spend every minute and dime focusing on one of these money makers, though. I’ve been trying to think of anyone who’s wealthy that only used one of these methods. I can’t think of a soul. Therefore, diversify your avenues just as you diversify your stock portfolio.

When you work on a project for an hour lets say you can produce one unit of work In the same amount of time your friend Wanda can produce 1.1 units of work and John can produce .9 units of work.

If working alone you can produce three units in on hour, then working together you could hypothetically be able to complete three and a half or four units.

This is all dependent on how well your coworkers know each other, their individual personalities, and views toward each other. If the balance here is not there it is easy to go flying off the wrong direction and only produce a fraction of the amount.

You need everyone to keep the other members in check and accountable. They should be able to rely on each other to stay motivated. If Wanda and John are working hard on the project, I don’t want to fall behind or look like a slacker, so I’ll work hard on the project.

People will get tired eventually or overly social so it’s not quite a perpetual motion machine, but it’s the closest the business world can get to it.

Creating something greater than the total of all it’s members is also the goal of Tribe Wanted. 5,000 people are being brought together 100 at a time to live on an island and attempt to create a better economy in Fiji.

So as I have pointed out, and tribewanted is off to prove, 2+2=5 for extreme values of 2

Do you have anything sitting in your Paypal account? Do you treat this same as the rest of your money? Most people seem to discount these funds and are not quite as frugal with them.

But here is the kicker, it is real money. It may take a little longer for it to show up in your hand as cash, but it is money nonetheless.

People are more willing to split with Paypal funds because they are sitting there doing nothing. People are always willing to empty out their account for purchases before going for their credit card.

People don’t get hit by the ‘guilt factor’ nearly as bad as using credit cards, bank accounts, or cash. For entrepreneurs this is a great thing.

What I am getting at here is that it is a good idea to accept this form of payment on your website. It’s spent like Monopoly money, and cashed in like real money.

I’m sure you have heard of the website MySpace before. It’s been in the news so often recently that there is pretty hard to miss. There is also Facebook for college kids, and MySpace’s forerunner Friendster.

These three websites are social networking sites that allow you to say ‘these 917,234 people are my friends’ regardless of if you know them in person or not. These people that are listed as your friend will all view your profile at least once. Then some of their friends will visit your profile and want to join your network.

The number of people you are connected to, or ‘friends with’ will grow exponentially after setting up a good seed amount and getting your profile seen.

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