Day Trading

The book I read to research this post was Day Trading for Dummies which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. You might be interested to know I've a post on candlestick charting at http://claireabella29.com/
Candlestick charts can help you predict the kind of market for a particular product like a type of commodity or shares etc. Day trading encompases a lot of different types of trading including things like options, futures, shares, currency and commodities. It's called day trading because you often buy and sell your stake in the same day. Some people trade on behalf of a company which offsets some of the risk but many work for themselves. There are two types of trading, investing where you benefit when the price rises and hedging where you benefit when the price goes down. Alot of the reasons traders invest in certain stocks are very subtle and many experienced investors would have difficulty explaining to a newbie why they invest in a certain item. As you get more experience you develop a kind of intuition. Sometimes if one company is being bought out for no apparent reason other businesses in the same industry will experience a surge in share price. It's just one of the quirks of the financial industry. Often investors are cautious every october because there have been several instances where the market has crashed in that month and people are superstitious. If you dabble in currency trading especially, you may find that because the market only adjusts slightly that you have to borrow large amounts of money to get a good return. The problem then of course is if the market experiences a downturn you may end up owing money. Although you can make a lot of money trading you can also lose a lot and for every gainer there is a loser that's the nature of the market. Often any gains are only short term and in one financial company they found every broker was making a loss. You definitely shouldn't spend more than you can afford to lose and at the very least you should do some research before investing especially if you are a newbie. Many brokers work from home online on a computer but in some cities there are trade arcades where lots of brokers work from the same place.

Beginning Programming With Java

The book I read to research this post was Beginning Programming With Java For Dummies by Barry Burd which is a very good book which I bought from Kindle. If you are new to programming java is relatively easy compared to a lot of programming languages. This book recommends a program called eclipse which is free, for writing java although there are quite a few programs out there that do the same job. Java was developed when someone was writing a program in one of the C languages and was having problems so he decided to write an intuitive language to make his job easier. Java will work on practically any computer as long as it's not really ancient. It runs on windows, linux and applemacs. The main purpose of java is to write plugins for a website but it can be used to write programs and many electronic items like mobile phones have their operating systems written in it. A darker purpose java is sometimes used for is the writing of viruses and some people disable the part of their internet browser that reads java for this reason. A couple of common mistakes people writing java make are having a space where there should be a character and either having too many or not enough parenthesis. You normally have an even number of these one either side of a statement.

Kindle Fire

The book I read to research this post was Kindle Fire for Dummies by Nancy C Muir which is an excellent book which I bought from Kindle. The kindle fire is a tablet pc and has a 7 inch screen. It is only $199 which compares favourably to the ipad and obviously amazon think they can make only a small profit on the fire and make a bigger profit on all the movies, tv series, apps, music and ebooks they sell you for it. Apparently they have over 100,000 films and tv series, 1 million ebooks and 17 million songs. The kindle fire has only 8 GB of memory but amazon gives you a free cloud account on which anything you buy for it can be stored and you can stream it onto your fire via internet and wireless network. The battery hasn't got the output of the ipad and only works for 2 hours less but is much lighter. You can watch movies and tv series in HD and it is also compatible with the normal format. It has an android operating system so there is lots of apps that work with it including a game that is rapidly gaining cult status called angry birds. In the settings you can choose only to download stuff from amazon which is ideal if you are concerned about viruses or you can set it to accept content from third parties. I don't have a kindle fire but I may very well get one but I do have a kindle ereader which is great. Recently I also acquired a kobo touch ereader which I often use. The prices on kobo are very similiar to kindle and they seem to have all the latest books. The kobo is a lot cheaper than its kindle counterpart. I think just like with the kindle fire they hope to get a profit from selling ebooks for it. The kobo touch is nice to use because my kindle is only the basic model and lacks a touchscreen.

Mining Gold On Twitter

The book I read to research this post was Mining The Gold On Twitter by Kimberley Dubbeld Deas which is a very good book which I bought from Kindle. This book is fairly short but is quite cheap & I noticed on Kindle there was another similiar book of similiar size that was more expensive. I have a twitter account at @blitzkriegww2 and something I am proud of is I have been retweeted by Christian Bale and some other celebrities. On Twitter you can follow anybody which is unlike other sites where they must get your permission. You can talk to anybody via the @ symbol. It's quite common for celebrities to retweet nice tweets they receive from people. I noticed the one day that Jessica Alba requested that people send her tweets telling her what they are doing which I thought was nice. Another time Kesha said that she had a bit of spare time and people could send her tweets with questions and she'd answer some of them which I also thought was good. There are programs like hootsuite and tweetdeck that let you write a tweet and send it out at a certain time during the day which is ideal if you are promoting an event. There is a twitter dictionary at http://www.twitonary.com/ which defines lots of the slang used on twitter. A lot of people on twitter are promoting a business of some sort and it is worth trying to find a niche your business fulfills then find followers who are potential customers. There are some twitter directories which are useful ie if you want followers in a certain geographical region. Sometimes you can follow certain people, @teamfollowback is one and they will help you get followers. There's a good chance any followers they have will follow you. Some people pay them for followers but if you are willing to work at it there's no reason you can't get just as many followers for nothing. Also check out my computing blog at http://scratbag.me/ which has blogs on things like twitter, twitter marketing and even mom blogging.

Flip Video

The book I read to research this post was Flip Video for Dummies by Joe Hutsko et al which is a very good book which I bought from Kindle. This style of camcorder get their name from the pop out usb connector they usually feature. They are easy to use & have software that makes it easy to post video to services like youtube. They use a memory card often an SD for storage and some of the newer ones use HD and have much higher transfer rates. They often automatically stop recording after an hour so are unsuitable as a webcam. There price is plummeting and they represent excellent value for money. Shooting a film is simple enough but this book looks at adding titles, editing your work and other things like burning to cdr or dvdr. A lot of people use ilife on the mac or windows live movie maker on the pc for editing the movie. Many people use nero for burning it to disc. Live movie maker comes as part of windows vista home premium and ultimate and comes as part of most versions of windows 7. If your computer doesn't have it but you have vista you can download it for nothing by googling it.

Beginning Programming

The book I read to research this post was Beginning Programming for Dummies by Wallace Wang which is an excellent book which I bought from Kindle. A friend of mine who used to have a sinclair spectrum and learned to program in basic and pascal told me he used to buy computer magazines. These had the programs written out & at first he copied them out, then started changing things and gradually got proficient in them languages. This book is a kind of tutorial in a simplified form of basic which I'm not going to go into here. There are more computer languages than spoken languages in the world. There's even one based on the klingon language used in star trek. Many of these languages have different strengths and weaknesses. Windows and similiar programs are written in one of the C languages which can be read on any machine with slight modifications. Some languages like Visual Basic need a small program to interpret them on a computer. AppleMacs tend to use AppleScript. Some languages like Prolog & Lisp are suitable for artificial intelligence and feature advanced decision making functions. The native language of a computer is machine code which is too complex for people to write in. The language you write in has to be translated. HTML is used for websites and plugins are done in java and javascript. Some languages like SQL require a database. Often a programmer will be fluent in several languages but sometimes he will do part of a program in one language and then someone else will use another language to do the rest. Once you learn one language it makes it easier to learn another but it takes a while to become proficient.

Bold As Brass

The book I read to research this post was Bold As Brass by Hilary Devey which is an excellent book which I bought from Kindle. This book is Hilary Devey's autobiography & was number one on the business & finance book chart on kindle quite recently. In case you're wondering who she is in britain we have a tv programme called Dragons Den where would be entrepreneurs put their ideas for a business to a panel of business people of which one is Hilary & if they like the idea they will offer to help finance it in exchange for a portion of the profits. Believe me they are pretty tough business people & apparently Hilary has business interest with an annual turnover of more than £100 million. She has also been on 2 tv programmes called The Business Inspector & The Secret Millionaire. Apparently her parents were quite poor. Her dad has his own business which went bankrupt because a major customer owed him a lot of money. Their house got repossessed along with most of their possessions. They had to move in with her grandmother who disliked Hilary. She joined the WRAF at one stage & when she left that she found it difficult to adjust to normal life. She worked in several jobs where she was supervising, training & motivating sales teams and seemed to be in her element. After that she went into business on her own. She had a son who was dyslexic and later became a heroin addict & also she had a bit of trouble with her partners so she has had it quite tough. One amusing case in the book was about a man who was a human cannonball in a circus & went on Dragon's Den to get funding for a new cannon & she said she'd be terrified of investing in that because she would have to phone his wife up every time he did a performance to make sure he was still alive.

Digital Photography

The book I read to research this post was Digital Photography for Dummies by Julie Adair King which is an excellent book which I bought from Kindle. Many digital cameras double as digital video cameras. In addition many multifunctional items like smartphones & even some mp3 players can be used as cameras. If you are serious about digital photography it's best to buy a dSLR camera and some of these have interchangeable lenses although you can usually only buy lenses that are specifically for that camera. Some cameras with a fixed lens let you change the lens view at the flick of a switch. One problem in the past was that a digital camera had to charge itself each time it was used which might take a few seconds but especially the more professional cameras are improving in this respect. Some cameras have fancy features like automatic red eye removal & smile detection. Red eye comes from if you use the flash which reflects off the retina. Smile detection only works when the person faces the camera but means when you photograph someone smiling the camera automatically optimizes its settings for that persons face. Some expensive cameras in the $8,000+ category prints photos at the back of the camera each time a photo is taken. Many photographers like wedding photographers use photo editing software but only use it to adjust the light levels. Photoshop Lightroom for the pc & aperture for the mac are ideal for this purpose. When you consider lightroom sells for around $300 & the full photoshop program for around $700 you can see savings can be made. I use photoshop lightroom for most of my photography purposes and use photoshop elements for any editing.

Digital Forensics Basics

The book I read to research this post was The Basics of Digital Forensics by John Sammons which is an excellent book which I bought from Kindle. This book is a good introduction to this field. The FBI has 16 regional training & working digital forensics labs scattered around the United States. Many police stations don't have the funds for a dedicated digital forensics lab or personnel. It's interesting that between 2009 and 2010 the total digital data in the world grew by 62%. Dennis Radar also known as the serial killer BTK was caught because he bragged about one of his murders on a floppy disk he sent to a newspaper & a file was found on the disk that led them to a computer that belonged to a church. They found out Radar had access to that computer. They then used DNA taken from his daughter which was a close match to DNA taken from the floppy disk and which showed it belonged to her father. He is currently serving 10 life sentences for the murders. Another case was the case of Casey Anthony who was accused of murdering her daughter they showed that she had searched on her computer for words like chloroform among others. Another case was someone was using stolen credit card numbers to buy merchandise & they followed one of the packages to a house that belonged to a couple who were arrested. They then found that the stolen credit card numbers had been used by other people. This led to 22 arrests and the recovery of $100,000 worth of merchandise. It was obvious that it was a case of organised crime & all those convicted went to prison.