I guess I was sort of an inspiration for 2 of my other friends with limited stock trading experience, as they both purchased some stock as well. After being down on the first day (from what I purchased it at), the stock jumped up over 14% today (including after-hours trading), making me about $230 on my $2,994 invested:

I’d say that’s a pretty good start I have been contemplating selling the shares and then buying again later. I have a feeling there will be a big selloff from the banks and people trying to make a quick buck, which will affect the stock price negatively. Overall I think it’s a safe long-term investment stock, so even with a selloff, I feel that it will stabilize and then start to trend upwards. From everything I’ve read, the opinions about what the stock will do are all over the place. From people saying it will go back down to the IPO price, to others saying it will go up to $70-$90. In reality, the stock market is a gamble. Do as much research as you can, learn what you can, see how news, etc affects other stocks, and use that to make a better judgment with your own stocks. I’m definitely no expert, my overall portfolio is down 30% (before Visa)…but just giving my two cents.

All I know is that I had a hunch about Google when they became an IPO. I put them in my fake portfolio at the $95/share, and now look where they are at. I’ve had Apple in my fake portfolio since their shares were $11.38….I would have a 1071.09% return on that right now! I have the same feeling about Visa, so this time I’m running with it. If you do the same thing, and are new to the market, just make sure you don’t invest more than you can afford to lose.

One other interesting thing I found is that many of the major credit card/bank companies went up pretty big today:

American Express: +9.48%
Discover: +10.26%
Mastercard: +5.75%
Capital One: +7.66%
Citigroup: +10.24%
HSBC: +3.01%
JP Morgan Chase & Co: +9.25%
Barclays: +7.26%
Bank of America: +8.56%

I wonder how Visa helped affect these?

Just curious if any of you guys are investing in today’s Visa IPO? The stock is up 35% from the opening IPO price as of writing this. I just bought $3,000 worth of shares at $59.75…I think the stock has a lot of potential.

I’m curious to know your thoughts on whether it’s a good buy or not…regardless if you invested or not. I’m pretty new to the stock market, so any advice is more than helpful.

Surprisingly I searched in Google last night and found that two of my sites (including this blog) now have the coveted sitelinks:

I think Google could have done a better job with the links, but I’ll take what I can get I wonder how they decide what goes in there. I could have sworn reading somewhere that you can adjust or suggest the links in Webmaster Tools, but I only see the option to block a link:

I also surprisingly realized that my page rank for this blog went away completely. I’m assuming Google penalized me for selling Text Link Ads on the sidebar. With my new design, I’ll be removing TLA, and will only be running text links that have a rel=nofollow. Hopefully Google will unpenalize (sp?) me then. Even though I have no page rank, it hasn’t really affected my traffic from Google. Here’s a chart of the past 30 days of Google (excluding Google Images) traffic:

I’ve recently been doing a lot of stuff to try and make money using the eBay affiliate program through Commission Junction. While I’m glad I’m really just in the beginning of using the program, it’s still going to be a huge pain. Since eBay is moving off of CJ, all of the affiliate links need to be updated. Imagine those with thousands of blog posts…starting May 1st, 2008, those old links won’t make money anymore unless they are updated.

There will be a couple of big benefits from all this though:

• Easy global registration to multiple countries simultaneously
• New, targeted banners and rich media creatives
• New landing page optimization and geo-targeting capabilities
• More detailed reporting capabilities for eBay??s programs
• eBay will be offering a 5% bonus for all traffic (through the new network) in April. For those that can migrate quickly, they will see the benefits

The last three could potentially be really good if eBay does it right. I’m always up for new, targeted banners if it can be tied into content better and can be more effective. I’m interested in seeing what they mean by new landing page optimization. Geo-targeting capabilities may be something really big that I’ll be able to use for an upcoming project I’m working on. One of the biggest things is more detailed reporting. I’ve always said that the reporting was too limited by Commission Junction, and hopefully eBay can make this right. Reporting can do a ton for a publisher to better optimize how they promote the affiliate network, which makes more money for eBay and the publisher.

Overall it seems like it will be a good thing, but a huge pain in the ass. If there is any way they can make old CJ links still work, they should do that. I don’t see how that wouldn’t be possible since the old links use the rover.ebay.com domain…it’s not like it’s a commission junction domain, it’s on their own domain! Just make the new ones a different non-rover.ebay.com and if there are some sort of less reporting or features from the old links, they’ll be able to separate them.

My other concern is auditing. Currently, Commission Junction is the middle-man…the third party to verify reporting and data is correct. I hope there is something in place to ensure everything is accurate.

You’ll be able to start migrating April 1st, 2008, and should be done by May 1st, 2008. Here’s the full e-mail I got:

Dear David Pitlyuk:

We are excited to announce eBay??s new global affiliate platform: the eBay Partner Network.

The new platform will go live on April 1st, 2008 PST, at which point eBay will no longer be running its affiliate program through Commission Junction. Beginning April 1st, affiliates should register with eBay Partner Network and migrate their links from CJ to the new platform.

While CJ and ValueClick have been valuable partners to eBay throughout the years, we??ve decided to give our affiliate community a customized experience for eBay affiliates.

All the great tools and benefits of working with the eBay program will remain the same ?? access to the Editor Kit and affiliate API, the flexible destination tool, the great payout structure. In addition, the eBay partner network will provide several new features:

• Easy global registration to multiple countries simultaneously
• New, targeted banners and rich media creatives
• New landing page optimization and geo-targeting capabilities
• More detailed reporting capabilities for eBay??s programs

The eBay Partner Network and Commission Junction will run in parallel for one month through this process, so please plan to complete your migration by May 1st, 2008.

You can receive an additional 5% bonus for all traffic tracked through eBay Partner Network in April 2008 (bonus applicable to traffic sent to Half.com and US, UK, Australia, Canada, Italy, India and Spain eBay sites). The sooner you migrate, the more you??ll earn! Just:

• Register with eBay Partner Network on April 1, 2008
• Confirm your registration, and obtain your new identifiers
• Update your links with your new identifiers.
• Reminder: Please plan to complete migration by May 1, 2008.

You will receive more information and step by step directions for the transition on April 1st. A special help desk to answer your questions about migration will also be available starting April 1st. You can find more details, including a list of programs that will be affected, at http://affiliates.ebay.com.

Thanks for being a valued partner. We??re excited for a successful transition, and the opportunity to grow your business through even more innovations, information and communication moving forward!

Sincerely,
eBay??s Affiliates Managers

A friend of mine told me about a demo day at Coleman Powersports to try out the 3-wheeled BRP Can-Am Spyder. For those that don’t know what it is, a picture tells all:

The Can-Am Spyder is like a mixture of a motorcycle, quad, and car…all in one. There is really nothing like it out there. The two wheels are in the front, allowing you to turn it without having to lean your body like a motorcycle. With a variety of stabilizers and traction controls and then some, it keeps the vehicle planted on the ground and giving it a surprising amount of traction. You could even consider it an all-weather motorcycle, as there are no traction issues with a wet road.

For the demo day, BRP brought over a bunch of the Spyders:

After taking a short survey and watching a video, they took us out onto a small course setup with cones. They showed us the basics of using the Spyder, and we took it out for a couple laps to get the hang of it. There is only a brake on the right foot, and the clutch works the same way as a regular motorcycle. There is an optional automatic option which is about $1,500. There is also a reverse functionality that you obviously won’t find on a motorcycle. If you can ride a motorcycle, you’ll get the hang of this right away…it’s very easy to ride. Here’s a shot of me going through the course:

After going through the coned course, we took it out on the open road, driving it around for a few miles. It was a real blast, and I actually enjoyed riding it a lot more than I thought I would. Taking corners were fun as you could really feel it compensating the weight differential. It’s fairly quick as well…faster than I thought it would be. There is a 110mph limiter, so you can definitely get it up there if you wanted to.

The company who makes the Spyder is the same company behind Sea-Doo, the popular maker of jet skis. The Spyder MSRP’s for $15,499, but they may actually be going for higher as the ones I see on eBay are mostly going for closer to $20,000. Prior to the test drive I would have never thought that I would actually want one. While I wouldn’t personally spend $15,000 on one…if I had a bunch of expendable income, I wouldn’t mind having a few of these to have some fun with friends. If you’re just interested in getting into motorcycles, but may not be ready or comfortable getting on two wheels…check this out at your local dealer, it just may be for you.

I’ve been looking for a 97 Blue/White Dodge Viper as my next toy/garage queen car, and I finally found the one I want. The car is completely stock, and only has 6,300 miles on it! It has been sitting in a heated garage for it’s entire life, pampered. Exactly what I want The price is right too. I’m located in VA, and the car is located halfway across the country.

So I’ve been talking to the owner over the phone (an older gentleman), and part of my offer to him was that I would pay for the car in cash. What I meant by that was something like a wire transfer. So when he finally accepted my offer, it was based on it being a cash one. When I brought up a wire transfer, he said that would be impossible because he does not have a bank account. Who doesn’t have a bank account?? The possible scam alerts went off, but everything else seemed right. I posted in the Viper forums to get their thoughts, and many said to be very careful, others said they didn’t see a big deal…he may actually have an account, but wants cash to protect himself against a scam. I know for a fact that my roommate who buys/sells cars requests cash as well (although he would still figure something out with alternative methods).

I obtained a few vital pieces of information from the seller:

• His full name
• His address
• He stated that he purchased the car brand new (also a good thing to look for when buying a car), so I found out the dealership he purchased it from
• The dealership he does the cars maintenance at
• The VIN # for the Viper

So I spent a good part of yesterday and today doing some follow up research to see if everything else checks out:

• I called Bernie over at BJ Motors in Richmond, VA for his advice. Bernie owns a higher end used car dealership, that also specializes in Vipers.
• I checked the VIN with Carfax. Everything checked out just fine.
• I called Chuck Tator over at Tator’s Dodge in NY. Chuck Tator owns the dealership, and he is known as the Viper Wizard. He has been extremely friendly and helpful with me in the past with my other Viper, even with questions that do not benefit himself in any way. He ran the VIN # for me and gave me a full history of the car. The VIN checked out as the correct car, and was purchased by the same seller’s name in the same city that the seller is located. It had a number of maintenance done to it at certain times through the 11 years it has been in existence. These were then verified by calling the seller and asking about them. He also verified it was purchased at the same dealership in which the seller said he purchased it from.
• I called the dealership in which the seller said he purchased it from, and I verified with them that that was in fact the case.

This was half the battle. The other half the battle was trying to figure out a way to get him cash without putting myself in potential danger, giving some sort of paper trail, and not getting on a plane with a bag full of money. My first big idea was to find a bank located in the sellers state, as well as my state…open an account, transfer money there, and then pull it out at the bank when picking the car up. The only potential was Bank of America, but after making some phone calls, I found out that the bank that was considered BOA, was actually purchased by them but not migrated over yet. Damn.

Luckily, I have a good friend that goes to law school about 20 minutes away from where the car is located! I gave her a call, and we worked everything out so that I will do a wire transfer of the cash into her account. We will then go to the bank with the seller, the car, and the title and she will get a cashiers check in the seller’s name. In the memo she will make sure to remit the payment from me and write that it is for the car (the paper trail!). The seller will then be handed the check, and immediately hand it back to the bank (after providing 2 forms of ID and filling out a federal form since it’s over $10,000) to cash it out. I feel safe in this situation, he got his cash, I got the car, and everybody should be happy. Keep in mind that I also have to set this up with the bank about a week ahead of time so they can place an order to have that amount of cash on-hand for that day. Much to many people’s surprise, banks don’t have much money they can just hand out. They will easily take your money, but it’s much harder to take it out.

Knowing all of this information, do you think I should feel comfortable with the transaction? Or do you feel it’s a scam somehow? If you still think I am somehow getting scammed, definitely let me know how, so I can look further into it.

Hopefully I’ll have a pristine Viper sitting in the garage in the next two weeks! Anybody want to buy a perfect fully loaded 6-speed 97 C5 red Corvette with 36,000 miles for $19,999 ? E-mail me!

I’ve talked about doing a new design here, here, and here in the past. One of my goals for this year is to actually go through and launch it! I’m currently working with a developer now to get this done…the actual design aspect is 95% complete. The design (just the homepage) has been HTMLized and integrated into Wordpress.

Now we’re working on doing some of the custom stuff that I need done. Once that’s complete we’ll work on getting the actual sub pages (like a post page) HTMLized and integrated into Wordpress. After this is done, we’ll be going through other pages to make sure all looks good (ex: category pages, archives, etc), importing all the old data into it, doing a bunch of testing…as well as updating (this will make more sense when it’s launched), and then hopefully launching it.

I’m really hoping to have the new site launched this month as it is the one year anniversary of my blog…and what a great way to celebrate that! I think you guys will really like the new look and feel! For now a teaser will have to do:

Back in May I wrote an article on how to get paid to drive a Dodge Viper for free for the summer. While I ended up having the car for quite a bit more time then just the summer, I still got paid to drive it I officially sold the car a few weeks ago (which is why I picked up the Corvette), and without getting into any actual numbers, I can say that after buying the car, paying all of the taxes registration, title, gas, insurance, etc…I ended up with about $1,000 profit. Who wouldn’t take a Dodge Viper supercar for 6 months or so, and get paid $1,000 to do so?

I will say this though, I only put about 1,500 miles on the car, but it was a blast! Even though I made $1,000, the new owner still got a decent deal on a pristine 94 Viper with only 16,300 miles on it. If you play your cards right, you could technically do this with any car (although it is a lot of work sometimes).

Now that I’ve had some time with the Vette, I’m actually starting to miss the Viper. While the Viper was on my list of dream cars to own one day, my actual dream Viper is a 96-97 blue GTS (hard-top) with white stripes. I’ve recently put the Corvette up for sale (no hardcore selling, but if it sells, I’ll sell it), and hope to profit about $1,000-$3,000 on it. For a 97 with only 36,000 miles on it, I should have no problem getting $500-$1,000 more than I paid at the minimum. Once that’s sold, I think I will start to seriously look for my dream Viper (They normally range in the $40,000-$50,000 range), and hopefully pick one up. I’ve already starting my search, but I don’t want to jump on anything until the Vette is gone.

The main differences between the Viper I had an the GTS I want are the following:

• The color/stripes! This is my dream Viper combo
• 450hp compared the 94 which had 400hp
• Much nicer/updated interior. Let’s just say the 94 Viper interior needs some work…although it was cool back in 94
• Much more practical. With actual windows and a button for the doors, it’s a much more practical car. Although who cares about practicality with a Viper?
• The hood scoops! This 2nd generation Viper has a hood scoop and two gills on the hood. It makes it look much more aggressive in my opinion.
• The back of the GTS is just way sexier. I love the way everything is molded into the back, and am actually not too big of a fan of the rear of the RT/10.
• The RT/10 I had was convertible, which I will definitely miss
• The 1st generation Viper that I had, had side pipes. This means that the exhaust pipes came out of the side of the car…a very exotic thing. The GTS has the exhaust come out of the middle of the back of the car. While it still looks cool, side pipes were neat.
• There are a bunch of other differences, but the above are the major ones that affect me

A used 1st generation/2nd generation Viper is a great supercar to get if you can afford it. The car does not depreciate very much at this point in time. So if you want to drive a car that turns every head, and is a blast to drive, but don’t want to spend too much money over time…the Viper is your answer. There are a couple new reasons why the value of the Viper will either depreciate at an even slower rate, or may even go up.

There is a very good chance the 2011 will be the last year that Dodge makes a Viper. Dodge has already stopped making a lot of the parts for older Vipers, and there is some word that they will stop all together in 2011. My thoughts are that this should help out the value of Vipers already out there. That and the fact that they are so rare already will help out with keeping the price you paid up there. Remember, there are more Corvettes made and sold in one year than Vipers have ever been made since they started in 1993.

At the beginning of this month, my friend Derek Semmler made a post about a contest to win $106.34 by referring the most amount of people to his site by February 25th. The winner would be chosen by the most number of referrals shown in his Google Analytics account. As I was reading his post, I came across one line:

You??re free to use any means available to refer traffic to my site – as long as Google Analytics counts the visit I will consider it valid.

As I read this, the light bulb over my head went on. This was just asking for some sort of evil method of winning the contest. My plan was to use a 1 pixel by 1 pixel IFRAME on the footer of all the pages on my blog. For those that don’t know what an IFRAME is, it’s basically a website within a website. You can specify the size of an IFRAME, and then load another webpage into it…usually it’s another page on your own site. I decided to load Derek’s site.

I wasn’t sure if this would register as a referral on Google Analytics though, so I created a test page loading in my own site. I checked to see if it came in as a referral…it did. Score! So I added the below code to every page on this site:

<iframe src=”http://www.dereksemmler.com” height=”1″ width=”1″></iframe>

If you can see this little black dot below, this is what the iframe would look like that would load Derek’s site inside of it and generate a referral visitor.

After a couple of days running the code, I got an IM from Derek letting me know I was evil lol. He agreed that it was ok based on his terms, so I left the code on my site for a few weeks to ensure my win. I felt bad, so I made sure that I’d post about the contest, and I also made this little ad which you may have seen running on the sidebar:

Yesterday Derek made a post announcing that I was the winner, and then PayPal’d me $106.34. Definitely goes up there as one of the easiest $106.34 I’ve ever made

Thanks for being a good sport Derek! If you don’t already read his blog, make sure to give it a chance. It’s good enough to make it onto my RSS reader, and I’ve been a subscriber and a commenter for quite some time now.

For those of you that have not yet heard of the new Nissan GT-R, it’s time to take a look:

This is the first time that the GT-R has ever been brought to the US, and there are a lot of enthusiasts that are unbelievably excited about it. Only 2,500 will be brought in the first year (2009), and with a base price of only $69,850, you can bet that dealers will be marking them up beyond belief. What is there to get so excited about? The $70,000 Nissan will beat a Porsche 911 on the track. A 911 can easily cost of 2-3 times the price of the GT-R!

The GT-R has a 3.8L V6 with a pair of turbos boosting the car to 473hp and 433 ft-lb tq. Did I mention it is all wheel drive, does 0-60 in 3.5 seconds, runs the quarter mile in 11.7 seconds and gets 21mpg? That’s something to get excited about.

Autocar did a comparison video between the new e92 BMW m3, the Porsche 911 GT3 (which they believe is the best Porsche 911 ever made), and the 2009 Nissan GT-R. What did they find? I think the title to this post gives it away. Check out the videos:

I have two good friends that are planning to pick up 1 of the 1600 being brought to the US…I’m crossing my fingers that they get one so I can get a test drive. You can bet I’ll make a post on that if they do!