Could you ever imagine reading an investment book with multitudes of different ideas ranging from lukewarm to hot, only to find out after you’ve finished reading it that the book was written by Bernie Madoff?  That is pretty close to what I have just done.

This last summer I picked up a handful of books at a yard sale about real estate investing and managing properties.  One of them was a book titled ’171 Ways to Make Money in Real Estate’ by Sonny Bloch.  The book was first published over 20 years ago and gets very specific into the different ways to buy or negotiate for property.  Some of the exact methods and numbers would no longer apply due to the changes over the last twenty years, but I thought this was an interesting read nonetheless.

He talks about methods he used to buy property in Florida before Walt Disney World was built, then selling for massive gains.  He mentions this a few times through the book and really showed himself as a credible expert.

After I read the book, I researched the author.  Wow.  What a way to lose faith in everything I had just read.  Apparently he was the talk radio equivalent of Bernie Madoff.  He defrauded his listeners with investments such as fake gold bars, equity in bogus radio stations, and wireless cable.  Most of the  victims were elderly people who wound up pennyless as a direct result of Sonny Bloch.

While my problem with Sonny pales in comparison the problems he caused 15+ years ago,  I can’t place any trust in this book.  I know parts of it are true and would still work today, but the real question is bigger.  Do I really want to take financial advice from someone who defrauded the elderly out of almost $25 million, fled the country, and when brought back charged with (and plead guilty to) 7 different counts of tax evasion and perjury.

I’ll probably flick through the again, but it will not be going back on the shelf.  The garbage can is a much better place for this book.  Glad I didn’t pay more than a quarter for it.

Malcom Gladwell’s latest book has been out for a couple of months now, and I’ve got to tell you that it’s great. He has a really easy to read writing style. He mixes ideas with stories so seamlessly that really build and support his conclusions.

One important part of the book is having 10,000 hours of any activity to become truely proficiant at it. It doesn’t matter if it is writing programs and designing software all throughout software like Bill Gates, or if it is playing night after night nonstop in seedy establisments like the Beatles did.

Getting in that many hours would mean that whatever you wanted to completely master would have to be something that you absolutly loved doing. It would have to be a complete passion of yours.

Malcom Gladwell is very good at making things interesting, even if they normally wouldn’t be appealing to you he is great at crafting his words together.

This is a great book and I highly reccommend it; however I do believe that his previous two books Blink and The Tipping Point were better reads overall. They had more information that could be applied to life situations. In this book there are a lot of moments that will make you think “Oh, that’s cool.”

I haven’t been dissappointed by any of Malcolm’s books yet, and this one certainly lived up. I would also reccommend the audio versions of his books, you can load them up on your ipod and listen to them. Being read by the author, they have the inflections and dramatizations added to them percicly where Gladwell wanted to emphisize.

Pick up either Blink or Tipping Point first, and then don’t let this one go by.

I thought it might be nice to organize the books that Katie and I own or have talked about here on Aridni.  I’ve started to put together the Aridni Library -click here to check it out- there are still some books that need to go in.  And I’d like to get them linked up to relevant posts later on.

So this is a starting point for that process.  I hope it will become a helpful resource for you as it gets developed more and more.  Pretty soon we’re going to need to get a librarian on staff!!

I recently finished reading ‘The Art of Deception – Controlling the Human Element of Security’ which is a book written by Kevin Mitnick. In case you haven’t heard of Mitnick before, he is the most famous social engineer ever.

Social Engineering is basically using the social skills of influence and persuasion to get whatever the the persuader wants. It relies heavily on the reliance and exploitation of basic human trust. It’s quite similar to being a conman, only usually it’s done against a company rather than an individual.

Mitnick talks about various workarounds in security systems that can be bypassed by anyone using the correct lexicon who sounds like they know what they are talking about. He explains different methods of attack and ways to get a hold of information using different scenarios.

A good portion of the book is about shielding your company from attacks from social engineers and possible policies that you might want to employ. This portion of the book is done very well and I would recommend checking it out, espicially if you have never heard of social engineering before.