Archive for November, 2006

Do You Need A Shopping List For Black Friday?

Gottadeal.com has been releasing its Black Friday list of “door buster” specials since about October 15th for that super busy day after Thanksgiving, which is Friday, November 24. Today, Wal-Mart and Circuit City are two of the stores that were released today. Of course, I’ve already started checking things off of my Best Buy list. They’ve even got a TMX Elmo tracker. With 15 days left until Black Friday, expect to see addtional lists available in the next few days.

Even though retailers such as Linens-n-Things are also running huge Black Friday specials, the push will undoubtedly be in the consumer electronics area…particularly LCD and flat-panel TVs. Here are some of my favs:

• Samsung 46″ Widescreen DLP Projection HDTV w/ Built-in Digital ATSC/NTSC Tuner & Cable Card, HL-R4667W
• Samsung 50″ Widescreen DLP Projection HDTV, HLS5065S
• Panasonic 32″ Widescreen LCD HDTV w/ Built-In ATSC Tuner, TC-32LX60

And the Top 10 Sellers in Electronics on Wal-Mart.com:

So after you gobble down that turkey and dressing, and the “eh why not, i’ll have 2 pieces of” pie, you…just like many others…will be browsing the Internet to add items to your wish list. Wal-Mart will be ready. In anticipation of this busy day of shopping, Wal-Mart launched its new and improved website to help make shopping faster and easier.

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Charlie Gasparino: The Gallantly Raucous Wall Street Cop

I had the pleasure of attending Take Stock Texas where the irascible Charlie Gasparino was the featured speaker during the the day-long event. Ok, maybe irascible is a little strong. It’s just that everytime I watch him on CNBC, and especially after hearing him speak today, I get the feeling he’s like a short-tempered mob boss ready to whack somebody at a moment’s notice. I think maybe I watch too many movies. I might mention that Mr. Gasparino was tame compared to last year’s speaker, Jim Cramer. Either way, I thought it was entertaining to watch the ultra-conservative San Antonio assembly cringe as Charlie delivered his irreverent views of the type of people he investigates…and repeated use of the word “Jesus!” in a largely Catholic city.

Now that I’ve made CG seem like a completely insensitive hard-ass, I must say that I really enjoyed listening to him. You can understand the root of his exasperation toward Wall Street’s bad guys. His mother was convinced by a “motivated” broker to buy a stake in the NetNet Fund, which ended up hitting rock bottom in the wake of the 90s dot-com debacle.

His intention today wasn’t to exploit the past performance of mutual funds gone awry, but to inform investors - from unsophisticated to educated - of how brokers make money, and to understand the culture of The Street and how it motivates those brokers. He analogized the stock market to watching porno…a guilty pleasure of sorts (I wish I could have seen the look on the MC’s face). He went on to give examples of how an average investor could misinterpret one’s personality. One example was of a former sheetmetal broker that likes to light cigars with a blowtorch and refer to his compitition as “Goldman Sucks”. He is referring to Bear Stearns CEO, Jim Cayne. Of course, he mentioned Dick Grasso, who is the subject of his upcoming book King of the Club: Richard Grasso and the Survival of the New York Stock Exchange. Dick Grasso was at one time hailed a hero for his efforts in reopening the New York Stock Excahnge (NYSE) shortly after 9/11. Grosso later became the poster child for deceit when they found he had stashed away a pay package worth $187.5 million. Gasparino maintains a level of esteem for Grosso and contends that he’s a good person that happened to “screw up”. While Grosso didn’t steal the money, most would probably agree that he didn’t deserve that much either.

Those of you that have seen him on CNBC and have followed him closely would have appreciated the speech. If you’re still unfamiliar with CG, consider his first book, Blood on the Street: The Sensational Inside Story of How Wall Street Analysts Duped a Generation of Investors.

Other recommendations:

• The Informant: A True Story, by Kurt Eichenwald.
• Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind
• Serpent on the Rock, by Kurt Eichenwald
• Does Your Broker Owe You Money, by Daniel R. Solin

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Stephen Colbert Responds To Rush Limbaugh’s Criticism of Michael J. Fox

Check out this revue by Stephen Colbert of Rush Limbaugh’s recent disparagement of Michael J. Fox…with a little help from Herbie Hancock.

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Getting My Blog Started Has Been A Learning Experience

Well, I’ve learned a ton of things since my first post about 3 and a half weeks ago (I created my blog on 10/14). Of course, I’ve been keeping track of my traffic using Google Analytics. Understanding that traffic is key, I’ve done a variety of things including consistently creating and updating my sitemap, posting comments on other blogs (meaningful comments, of course :)), referring to my page on forums I enjoy reading when it is pertinent to the discussion, etc.

When I first began using Google Analytics, for some odd reason, I only inserted the code in one[WordPress] template. Well, I should have figured that given the traffic I was getting…or that I thought I was getting. Clicks directly into a story were not recorded. Once I inserted the code into all of the templates, here’s what happened:

Moral of the story? Paste the Analytics code into your Main Page Template, your Single Post template, and your Page Template for starters. My traffic went from about 25 visits per day to 133 visits on 11/04. But don’t be misled by the sudden spike. It was probably always higher than the 25, but wasn’t being tracked properly.

My next project was to add any plug-ins that would make developing the blog easier…and help me generate traffic, of course. Here is a post that includes 10 WordPress plug-ins that I am currently using. I recommend each one of them.

As far as Google Adsense is concerned, I made $5.07 in just 17 days that I had the blog in October. To date, I’ve already paid for my domain name (I’ve surpassed my October revenue in just 5 days in November). While in your AdSense setup, it is a good idea to use the competitive ad filter to help increase your earnings. This helps eliminate links from MFA sites (Made For AdSense), which pay bid the bare minimum for a keyword on your site.

So, while I’m still learning everyday…if you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to let me have it. I’m like a sponge.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Rent a FemBot for $3,500.

Wow. That’s all I can really say. This thing has more believable facial expressions than David Hasselhoff in his performance of Dr. Jekyl & Mr. Hyde (see 0:39 and 0:56). $3,500 gets you the Sanrio Actroid DER2 for five days.

Popularity: 1% [?]

All I Want For Christmas Is…Not Another Gift Card

I remember when I was a young tike, I used to browse the Sears and Toys R Us catalogs to search for my potential Christmas gifts. I'd cut out the pictures of my most favorite toys (sorry for the grammar...trying to add that little kid feeling of mesmerism to it), and make a little booklet for my mom and dad to consider...and a copy for Santa Claus, of course. Then, there was the adolescent phase. That's when you're asked what you want, but your responses are limited to "whatever" and "anything is fine with me...whatever" and so on. So, you get whatever, which is comprised of socks and underwear and that hidious sweater from your Uncle Ron and Aunt Sally. Now, the conventional wisdom now suggests the easy way out..unless, of course, you're a toddler. The easy way? Gift cards. I love gift cards. I prefer them. If I can stockpile enough over the course of a year or two, I can get that one big high-priced item I've been wishing for. I thought maybe that was a little overboard; but this morning, I read about the stockpile of gift cards that apparently exist. According to this article from ConsumerReports.org (via Yahoo!), 23.3 million Americans have unused gift cards from last year's holiday season. That translates into $972 million unredeemed cards. Wow. If I could just find some loose gift cards in my friends' couches, I might be able to get that big screen I've wanted for awhile now. The other things I'm just now getting used to is the idea of using a wish list. I've just started to compile one on Amazon. I'm sure many of you have already compiled pages of items you "wish" for. But like I said, I'm a sucker for gift cards. Hopefully Best Buy doesn't follow the recent policies implemented by some of the airlines. I could probably cut em up and sell them as guitar picks or something.
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