One of our party guests at the Hawaiian Luau said something to me which had me cracking up. I was just reminded of this when I was reading Will Yahoo! Shares Bounce Back? Now, mind you it was 2am and I should say I had been running on 6 hours of sleep for the past 3 days and I was also working on my 8^th frozen Chi-Chi Cocktail.

So, this guest was an MBA Student and their class had recently been discussing the fall of Yahoo’s shares. As soon as she found out I was in the Internet business she jumped at the opportunity to ask me what I thought about all of this. They were expected to come up with a thorough analysis and explain to the class their findings.

She excitedly talked to me about Market Cap, Price to Earning Ratio’s, Volume and a bunch of other fundamentals which really was the last thing I needed to be talking about at that moment. But I had to play the nice host and the things she was saying all sounded like very smart MBA stuff. So I let her explain to me what her findings were.

MBA students have an amazing ability to talk about very sophisticated things but typically miss the obvious.

In her speech to me about how wonderful Yahoo was and why the drop in share price made no sense she would also repeatedly say, “I much prefer to Google on Yahoo!”

So after a few more minutes of listening to her speak, I said

I am no expert in finance and everything your saying sounds really good but if I was to address your class I would not talk about Price to Earnings or Market Cap. I would not even address the topic of Yahoos Stock.

I would have to address the subject of what it means to the Search Market when smart MBA students are saying things like “I much prefer to Google on Yahoo!”

After 48 hours of no sleep and solid partying in Las Vegas for my brother’s bachelor party I flew back to Los Angeles on Saturday morning to record breaking heat.

Sat night was Luau night for my wife’s 30^th birthday and the temperature hit 119 degrees in our city. Want to know what 119 degrees feels like, suck on a hair dryer!

119 was record breaking heat for all time and it was by far the worst it has ever gotten.

We had planned for over 40 people, though 50% of the people failed to make it due to the excessive heat. But the 50% that did make it to the party were the ones we really wanted to have come! SO THERE!

Here are a few tips to throwing a Hawaiian Luau themed party in 119 degree heat.

1. You need at least 120lbs of ice to keep a large keg of Dos Equis cool. The 60 lbs of ice they deliver to your house will melt before the party starts. But don’t panic like I did and go and buy 240lbs of extra ice as this is way too much but it was nice and cool carrying it in.

2. When renting a tropical frozen drink machine, double check the work of the installers and make sure the cool setting are turned up to max coolness otherwise you will have really cold slush.

3. Offer lots of cold bottled waters. We had two large crates of it and they all went fast. You will need 60 – 80lbs of ice to keep the bottle waters cooled.

4. Don’t go crazy on the food. We ordered way too much food and it turned out people don’t like to eat when it’s too hot.

5. Buy lots of extension cords. Things had to be moved around a few times and for some reason all the plugs that needed to be plugged were in areas of the garden where there were no outlets.

Final Tips

6. Do a day after party. Get together with a handful of friends the day after the party to clean up the mess and finish eating the rest of the food. A day after party is by far the best idea because playing host at a real party is not really relaxing.

7. And finally, publicly say thank you to those people who worked all day outside setting things up while enduring the record breaking scorching heat. Be sure to check out Michelle Caplans amazing art!

New Pictures Added

Bachelor Party & Hawaiian Luau

Let me just start this post out by saying, FUCK!

From North Korea to Lebanon things are serious and if this is not the beginning of a new World War I’d hate to see what is. The fact is we are dealing with hostile ideological, religious and ethnical differences and things don’t look good.

I am not an expert in geopolitical issues but from watching the news over the past few weeks this is what I understand.

The Council on Foreign Relations reported that Pakistan had been supplying North Korea designs which would help them make highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons. Kim Jong Il’s missile launch on the day the United States celebrated its independence was nothing more then a blatant statement to the world that he now posed a threat to Japan, South Korea, China, and the United States. Speculation has it that the Taepondong Missile can reach a 6,000 – 10,000 km.

The United States has been deeply concerned with Iran developing nuclear weapons for sometime. The head of Iran, Ahmadinejad is now publicly saying he wants to defeat the Americans and eliminate Israel from the face of the earth. Let me not forget to mention the deeply disturbing connection with Iran, Syria, Hamas, and Hizballah.

In an attempt to keep peace last year, Israel had made concessions to the Palestinians by removing all Jewish settlers from the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This was an emotionally charged event causing many great pain. It is now understood that this concession on behalf of Israel was viewed by the Islamist fanatical as weakness.

According to next weeks Time Magazine, “Hizballah kidnapping an Israeli corporal and smuggling him into the Gaza Strip, has produced the worst Arab-Israeli cross-border conflict since Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982.”

Hizballah is an Islamist Shi’ite group that operates freely in southern Lebanon, aka Guerrilla’s because there is no structured government in Lebanon to overpower them. Sounds a bit like what is going on in Iraq.

Israel is now following America’s lead by not negotiating with terrorists.

The news brings us back to Pakistan with India officials accusing Pakistan-based Islamic militant groups on the recent Mumbai bombing’s.

To think this is not enough, the Pakistan Ambassador is currently in talks with the Iran Defense Minister.

How about al –Qaida? Well, it turns out they are all connected to this. In February 26, 2002 the Institute for Counter-Terrorism wrote a report on the connection between Al-Qaida and Hizballah.

The presence of al-Qaida cells in Lebanon and the cooperation with the radical Islamic terror organizations sponsored by Iran poses a potential real and immanent threat to American interests all over the Middle East.

What concerns me deeply with the enemy is their ability to hide in any society. How do you fight an enemy who blends in with innocent people?

Quoting Newt Gringrich in an interview with Tim Russert of Meet the Press on July 16, 2006

The British home secretary saying that there are 20 terrorist groups with 1200 terrorists in Britain. Seven people in Miami videotaped pledging allegiance to al-Qaeda, and 18 people in Canada being picked up with twice the explosives that were used in Oklahoma City, with an explicit threat to bomb the Canadian parliament, and saying they’d like to behead the Canadian prime minister. And finally, in New York City, reports that in three different countries people were plotting to destroy the tunnels of New York.

I would really like to know what all your thought are on this?

Could you be the next Mozart, Tiger Woods, Newton, Bobby Fisher, or that person you heard about who went to Harvard Medical School and graduated the top of their class?

In August, Scientific American magazine will have an article Secrets of the Expert Mind which asks the question, how does one become an expert in their field and what separates grandmasters from the average?

Since the beginning of the century many studies have been conducted trying to figure out how one becomes an expert and this article ties together years of in-depth analysis of chess grandmasters.

Experiments with blindfolding chess grandmasters and creating preset positions on the board have allowed scientists to conclude grandmasters are playing primarily by memory. The reason why they have achieved the grandmaster level is not from some special mental ability but from practice.

These studies were assessed over various other fields such as music, mathematics, reading, and sports and they have concluded prodigies are made, not born.

So what does it take for you to become the next master in your field, well there is a “10 year rule” that states is takes approximately a decade of heavy labor.

It appears the 15 years olds in Nigeria have some new competition!

(Update 7/16/06: This email appears to have originated from 193.219.226.18, Lagos, Nigeria)

Hello,

My name is Mr.Chu Chan a citizen of North Korea; I would like you to guide me through the most viable investment opportunities in your Country. Alternatively, I can invest in your line of business perhaps if it?s viable. I am one of the defectors from North Korea and I am currently residing(Refugee Camp) in Vietnam.

I have been in this country for sometime after defecting from the North, I was into currency exchange business and I was always travelling to other parts of Asia, Europe and North America during that period, I was able to move out my funds and deposit it in a financial institution overseas.

I want to invest this funds in your country with your help and advice because we are being treated as foreigners here and watched closely because the Korean government believe we are security treat, A lot of defectors now go on to Canada or the United States and some parts of Europe to live. For more details, please see the following websites;

http://www.detnews.com/2003/nation/0310/09/a19e-292811.htm

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41966-2003Oct3?language=printer

http://www.iht.com/articles/531755.html

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1181380/posts

I want you to send me a complete breakdown of the investment opportunities in your country and also let me know what exactly I need to do to enable you invest the funds for me in your country.

If interested, I will then come over to your country after you receive the funds and work out the investment plans with you. After I hear from you and find out the best investment business you can introduce to me, I will tell you how much is involved. I will expect your response together with your contact details.

Reply as soon as possible. (chuchan_15@yahoo.com.vn).

Regards and God Bless.
Mr. Chu Chan.

The trend of the web is moving towards social networking with almost every major player now offering some sort of “social” experience for their userbase. I am amazed to have just read that Friendster has just been awarded a patent for “system, method, and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks.”

You may recall that Friendster was once “the place to socialize” before Myspace came along and now they have fallen wayside but Friendster’s Patent Possibilities in BusinessWeek writes

Friendster President Kent Lindstrom says the company is in the process of determining whether the site will be able to charge licensing fees. “Any kind of businessperson would say, ‘Hey, we’re going to prosecute this to the full extent we can and get every penny we can out of it,’ ” says Lindstrom. “But we do work in a community of businesses and don’t want to just cause trouble if there is no reason for it.”

This reminds me of the time Amazon got a patent for “One-Click” back in the day when ecommerce sites were already offering customers the ability to purchase products with “one click”. This is currently being re-examined.

Patents, Trademarks and copywriting are highly beneficial for society. They protect entrepreneurs, inventors, writers and artists and without it people would just be ripping each other off left right and center. I could even argue the fact that without the protection of the US Patent Trademark Office there would be no real motivation for people to invest in new ideas thus society would possibly not progress as rapidly as we do with its protection.

But Come On!

I find it ridiculous anyone would be granted this type of patent. Tagging users with keen interests is no different then what dating sites were doing in the late 90’s and how every ecommerce site groups like products together.

This really is a case of Venture Capital backers investing in startups and instructing them to SPAM the Patent Office with every possible patent in the hopes one of these babies would pop.

More info at Red Herring

I woke up Saturday morning to a mailbox full of comments for the Blog post 14-Year-Old Girl Assaulted On MySpace. I could not believe how many visitors had picked this post up and I soon tracked down the source to Netscape’s new Digg like service. I had submitted this post a while ago just to beta test their new service.

So I decided to see if I could drive more traffic by posting You Must Watch the Dark Side! Bush Administration knew Iraq Was Not Connected to 911 in Netscape and this post just exploded with traffic.

Within a few hours this made it to the first page of news.netscape.com and by the end of Saturday I had over 3,000 unique visitors and on Sunday I had over 5,000.

In addition to all the comments I received on this Blog, there are now over 50 comments on Netscape regarding the 911 post.

There’s nothing like a little controversy to drive traffic!

July 8^th 2006

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July 9^th 2006

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Want to know why we are in Iraq? Want to know what was going on in the minds of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, the rest of the Administration and CIA that lead the United States to Iraq?

You must watch this!, a 1.5 hour PBS Frontline documentary called The Dark Side. The footage is available for all to see online.

“Amid revelations about faulty prewar intelligence and a scandal surrounding the indictment of the vice president’s chief of staff and presidential adviser, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, FRONTLINE goes behind the headlines to investigate the internal war that was waged between the intelligence community and Richard Bruce Cheney, the most powerful vice president in the nation’s history.”

“A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies,” Cheney told Americans just after 9/11. He warned the public that the government would have to operate on the “dark side.”

“Early in the Bush administration, Cheney placed a group of allies throughout the government who advocated a robust and pre-emptive foreign policy, especially regarding Iraq. But a potential obstacle was Tenet, a holdover from the Clinton administration who had survived the transition by bypassing Cheney and creating a personal bond with the president.”

I watched this a week ago and have been struggling to write a blog about it since. I think after watching this, you will see why nothing more needs to be said.

When people ask what I do for a living, I tell them I am involved in Internet Marketing. The typical response to this is “Oh, you’re the guy who is filling up my email box with SPAM!!”

I usually laugh and explain to them that there are many facets to Internet Marketing and I primarily focus my time on getting websites indexed higher in the search engine results pages. Yet responses typically vary from this point and I hear more often then anything complaints about pop-up advertising and email spam.

At this point I usually take a moment to explain why they are getting random pop-up advertisements and email spam and usually direct them towards Adware SpyWare developed by Lavasoft and to install some good virus email software like AVG.

For those who read this blog and are not involved in the Internet professionally, let me just say that there are subcultures to this industry where some extremely skilled marketers play very dirty. As my father would say to me during a game of eight ball in his staunch English accent when I try to “pool” him “Oy, you play dirty pool”.

Well these guys definitely play dirty pool! These folks cross the line of ethics so far that the end users, aka ‘you’, are not even considered.

I’ve been in the online space since the beginning and I’ve seen a lot of ideas for making money on the Internet but I never spent much time in the Adware space. What I do know about this space is that there has been a phenomenal amount of money made infecting computers with little uninvited applications that pop-up random advertisements.

I just came across an article from BusinessWeek, The Plot to Hijack Your Computer, which goes into detail about a company called Direct Revenue who is probably the king of the Dirty Rotten Spammer club “They watch you surf the Web. They plague you with pop-up ads. Then they cripple your hard drive”.

Once embedded in your hard drive, spyware communicates via the Internet with the company that produced it. The company’s computer keeps track of your online meanderings and sends you pop-up ads relevant to the sites you visit. The travel-booking sites Travelocity (TSG ) and Priceline.com (PCLN ) have both been direct customers of Direct Revenue. People who picked up Direct Revenue spyware and then perused flights on Travelocity might find their screens obstructed by a pop-up for Priceline, or vice-versa. The travel sites say they stopped doing business with the company earlier this year.

As my readers may have noticed I have taken a few days off from Blogging. Actually apart from reading industry related information to Internet Marketing, I have taken the past week off from reading my normal subscription magazines and staying on top of the news (although as I am posting this, I am catching breaking news on North Korea’s missile testing but this blog post wont be about that).

Over the past four days I’ve done nothing but drink beer and eat meat. I do have some small things to talk about which I thought were interesting. I’ve had the past four days off to really do nothing apart from hitting the gym lifting weights and playing far too much poker on the internet.

I was luckily enough to be able to take a private tour of a company which manufactures baby and pet products. I can’t mention the name of the company but what I can say is that it is always a treat for me to tour other peoples companies and see how things work. You can get a real sense of how the founders think just by looking around each department and seeing how they have laid out their environment.

It has been over 100 degrees here during the days so I tried my best to stay indoors. I did manage to bang out a poker strategy book,
“The Intelligent Guide to Texas Hold’em Poker”.

The past few times I have gone to a casino I’ve spoken to a few good players and they have all mentioned this book to me. I really have been looking for a book which could help me fine-tune my game and help me see the game in multiple dimensions. This book does offer some cool scenarios and ideas on how to change your games around and discusses 4 common types of games to look out for.

1. Loose-Passive Games
2. Loose-Aggressive Games
3. Tight-Passive Games
4. Tight Aggressive Games

I’ll summarize these below. I have already put to test a few of their recommended strategies while playing online last night and I did really well. We will see how these hold up when I go to Vegas in three weeks. I am off now to watch some fireworks and see a concert in my local park.

Excerpts taken from “The Intelligent Guide to Texas Hold’em Poker”.

Loose-Passive Games

If you go to a casino cardroom on a weekend, at the lower betting limits you will find games that are close to fitting the loosepassive definition. Tourists, beginners, and people out to have a good time populate these games. Money is not the main issue-entertainment is the attraction. The stakes are small compared with the costs of most entertainment/social activities. Loose-passive games are actually the easiest ones to beat. To win money, you must become antisocial: that is, not play every hand through to the end.

Loose-Aggressive Games

Play-money poker is a good approximation of loose-aggressive games, because for loose aggressive players, money is something they play with. Part of the thrill is unnerving the other players with their lack of caution towards money. Often it only takes one or two loose-aggressive players to turn an entire table into loose-aggressive play. Everyone starts throwing money around to show that the aggressive player does not intimidate them. Soon the whole table is on a tilt.

Tight-Passive Games

Typically in tight-passive games, there is not much money on the table. An extreme tight-passive player buys-in for the table minimum and guards the chips, putting money in the pot only when they have a lock. You cannot win money that is not in play and you certainly can’t win more money than is on the table. If you see three or more players at a table behaving in this manner, consider finding another game. Your profit potential is limited and if you do fall behind, you have no hope of catching up.

Tight Aggressive Games

Not only must you rethink what it means to have a good flop, you must also rethink what it means to have a good hand. You may get away with stealing pots by betting marginal cards, and then lose with strong cards. The difference is that your opponents won’t challenge you unless they have strong cards. When your opponents are weak, they will back down. The attitude, “1′11 call to keep him honest,” that pervades loose games doesn’t exist in tight-aggressive games. If your opponents call or raise, don’t become confident just because your cards are good this hand, and in a prior hand that you won, your cards were weaker. Your strong hands may be losers if tight-aggressive players are not respecting your bets.