Steve Oliphant’s Musings

James Brausch in his post on How to Learn has a good idea for taking notes. It involves carrying a voice recorder around with you, and then every couple of days listening to your recordings and writing them down. There is an easier way.

jott.com will let you call a number (I have it setup in my cell phone on the speed dial and with a voice command, I can dial it with 1 touch) that will record up to 30 seconds of voice, and then transcribe it and email it and (if you choose) text it to you or anyone you have setup as a contact with them.

So, no more excuses! Record your ideas! Act on them!

An interesting thing has been happening between James Brausch and CD Baby.

CDBaby has been running a contest for the top selling CD, and James Brausch has been promoting his CDBaby CD’s from his blog. He has achieved top spot, but it seems that CDBaby is trying to cheat him out of it.

James has the option of suing CDBaby, or ignoring their behaviour. He has asked his blog readers what they would do. I would ignore them and take my business elsewhere. Here is why:

The amount of money gained suing CDBaby would be miniscule compared to the amount that could be gained putting that same time, effort, and energy into creating and promoting – two things that James does very well.

Also, while I do believe in justice, I don’t believe in vengence, and often lawsuits end up being more about vengeance then justice. It is just bad energy that hurts all parties involved.

In my opinion, the bottom line would be better served by forgiving, and moving your business elsewhere. As for justice, why worry about giving CDBaby what they deserve? They haven’t worried about giving James what he deserves, so what should it matter if CDBaby gets their punishment/reward now or later? CDBaby is being short sighted and losing valuable online goodwill. A lawsuit might even help CDBaby fix their actions and profit them more in the future. If this is the case, and the lawsuit is done at the expense of James Brausch’s emotional energy and time (much more valuable then any money involved,) then is that justice? I don’t think so.

-Steve

I have too many clothes in my closets and drawers. I think I will use
this method to get rid of them.

James Brausch is giving away two books I want

I hope I get them

One is Richard Bach’s “One“. I have read “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” by him and really enjoyed it.

The other one; More Words that Sell will help improve my copywriting. (Something always worth working on.)

MuVar is getting updated – both improved and having bugs fixed.

James Brausch has used one of my suggestions, but has a really good reason for not using the other one – namely that the HTML code can get messed up. He asks if I used Firefox – I did. I also used Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. I also tested with multiple computers. So I would bet that the problem is a php configuration on my server. I haven’t tracked it down yet. I will post here if/when I get it figured out.

For anyone else trying to figure it out, it seems that on my server (and also some – very few – others,) once a cookie is set, it doesn’t get overwritten or reset. This is not good when entering new information that gets passed in a cookie. But my fix – using hidden fields in a form – is not good either because in the posted data HTML will get messed up. One possible solution that I haven’t tested yet is to mangle the data in the hidden fields so that there is no html there, and then after they are posted, unmangle them. PHP includes to functions that do this easily, base64_encode and base64_decode.

I probably won’t be able to test this idea or look for other solutions before next week. (I try to observe the sabbath on Sunday, and I have procrastinated taxes until the last minute) but if I find anything I will let everyone know.

James Braush is creating a book from content on his blog.

I am excited about this!

If you read his blog (or the book) you will understand why.

He takes his readers step-by-step and teaches them exactly what to do and how to do it to become one of the 2% who are making incredible amounts of money on the internet.

The information presented here is priceless. He teaches how to (easily) create your own products, how to make websites to sell them, how to drive traffic to your websites, and how to automate the whole process so that you can continue to make money even in your sleep.

James also teaches how to change your life so that you can become successful at anything. This is much more than a “How to make money on the internet” blog, it is a “How to become Free” blog! He writes on time management, self improvement, relationships, and much more.

You can receive a complete education on business, especially internet business, just by reading his blog.

I very much appreciate it James, I can sincerely say “Thank you!” for making this information available.

-Steve Oliphant

As you know if you follow this blog, I am a big fan of James Brausch and his products. One of his products that I recently aquired is MuVar – a software package that you put on your webhost and it automatically tracks and optimizes your webpage.

Recently on his blog, James asked for reviews of MuVar. I want to give a glowing review, but I can’t (yet). When some of the things I address below are fixed, then MuVar gets a big thumbs up from me.

(James, if you or someone from your organization reads this, please feel free to let me know if I missed something in the install videos, or take and implement the fixes below – and then let me know – I really, really want to give a glowing review because after it is working MuVar is awesome!)

The Good:
Testing is always good. Automated testing where the program takes the results and applies them to your website so it is continually being optimized to make more sales is even better. And a simple, easy to use interface that sets all this up is the best!

MuVar is all of this.

The Bad:
When I first tried to use MuVar it simply didn’t work. I would use the interface to add variables and any quotes (double and single) would end up with multiple backslashes before them. So if I had a testimonial on my web page such as:

“This is Steve’s best software”

it would end up looking like:

\”This is Steve\’s best software\”

I googled around and found that this was a (mis)configuration on my server (actually the default configuration of a PHP install) and also found a fix which I applied. (Fixes are below in the “Ugly” section)

Next, after I got that problem fixed, I found that on some variables, no matter how many times I entered in a new one, MuVar would somehow be caching a previous version, so I would end up with 3 variables all containing the same stuff – which was from a different variable alltogether.

Come to find out, this was a problem with cookies. It was either a misconfiguration of my server (again) or something wrong with my browser. I fixed this by changing the use of cookies in one part of MuVar to the use of REQUEST variables instead.

So finally, I got MuVar working.

And it is very cool. A great idea, implemented with an easy to use interface. Of course for most people you won’t run into the problems I did. But I am sure that some will. So, if you do end up with similar problems to mine, Apply the fixes below.

The Ugly:
In order to avoid the backslash problem, I had to either modify my php.ini file by changing
; magic_quotes_gpc = On
to
magic_quotes_gpc = Off

It turns out that PHP defaults to “escaping” or adding a backslash to all quotes that are in POST, GET, REQUEST or COOKIE variables.

If you don’t have access to your php.ini, then you can edit the misc.php file and add the following code:

I added it right at the top of misc.php at about line 10 right after
$testVal="This is a test.";

This fixed the extra slashes problem.

Now, to fix the cookies problem, I had to modify two files: review.php where I added the following at about line 47

And in addverdoit.php:

Change all instances of _COOKIE to _REQUEST, so that

Becomes:

With these changes, MuVar works perfectly for me. And I can highly recommend it. Actually, even after taking the time to make the fixes, I can still recommend it.

So go ahead and Buy Muvar – and try it, then if you run into the same problems I did, apply the fixes (They only take 5 minutes to apply.) You will be glad you did!

-Steve Oliphant

I posted a review at amazon.com about James Brausch’s latest CD. Go read it. Buy the CD. You will be glad you did.

James Braush has been blogging about throwing away the TV. I recently purchased his CD on Life/Time management and was playing it for them.

I had told them before hand that “this was a multi millionaire who was sharing his secrets on how to do it” so they were listening rather closely. And when he said to get rid of the TV, they ran screaming from the room!

I had to laugh – and wonder – at the pervasiveness that the television has in our family’s life. Long ago we got rid of Cable – and the TV is not hooked up to an antenna – it is used for watching videos (that my wife and I approve of) and for playing video games. But, I have noticed that our children (ages 5-16) spend a lot of time in front of the boob tube.

I wonder what would happen if the TV disappeared. I imagine that we would read more, play games together more, and get more done around the house.

We homeschool most of our children – and we do use the TV as a supplement to their education.

And my wife pointed out that “TV is not bad, it is mindless entertainment that is bad – whether it be TV, internet surfing, reading trash or whatever.” She seems to be against getting rid of the TV altogether too.

And I must admit that I really enjoy being a couch potato myself.

But I think that if I want to join the 2% of people who are truly free, the TV may have to go.

Hmm . . . How to convince the rest of my family?

Maybe it will conveniently break. <evil grin>

James Brausch is an internet marketer that I admire and buy products from. I highly recommend that you check out his blog.

I especially recommend that you purchase his Information Product Creation Course. It only costs $35 and contains more information than most courses costing at least 3 times that amount.

I plan on blogging more about his products and things I have learned from his blog and courses here in the future.

Edited to add:

James, I think you should just test drive them both – with your wife – and then choose