Just for fun, I asked my start-ups (and a few friends) if they’d like to offer y’all a little something special from the holidays. Here’s an incomplete list.
Many are working on top-secret stuff and couldn’t jump in, but a few were game on last-minute notice, so here you go!
They are listed in alphabetical order by company/name:
Everything you need to transform. Free trainers, complete nutrition plans, & top-selling supplements. Save 10%! www.Bodybuilding.com/Save10
Photo + Film + Design + Software. Use coupon “tim2011″ for 25% off ANY single @creativeLIVE course til 1/1/12 http://creativelive.com
Email joseph-at-crowdflower.com and we’ll give you free CrowdFlower credits and a free crowdsourcing consultation to get you started on our self-service platform.
Foodzie’s Tasting Club delivers a monthly selection of artisan food products. Gift it and receive a FREE month on your own subscription. Valid through 12/24.
Ed Cooke trained Josh Foer to be US memory champ in 1 yr. He’ll train you if you can learn 500+ words in a week on http://www.memrise.com
Create a free and private website for your family photos this holiday season on Posterous Spaces.
Want a virtual assistant? Get one, FREE, for a year. (From Ramit Sethi of iwillteachyoutoberich.) http://bit.ly/uVjY3M
45% off a year of Reputation.com’s MyPrivacy service ($55 for a year) to protect your digital personal information. You can use this link http://www.reputation.com?code=4HOUR to get the discount automatically or enter the code 4HOUR in the gift code section on our site when buying.
Have a Productive New Year for 50% off – Sign up for @RescueTime for $36/year! – http://bit.ly/RT36Y
3 months free – Shopify Unlimited Plan, first 100 to use the promo code ’4HOUR’ [value $537]
Banksy grafitti close to the Roundhouse, Camden Town, London (Photo: CanonSnapper)
Just two quick housekeeping items, then back to our regular programming — some fun content coming — next post.
First, how you can get your product or service in front of 200 influencers this week; second, an update on the overwhelmingly successful school campaign.
First
The “Opening the Kimono” event is fully booked, and — my goodness — what an audience it will be! Top bloggers, highest-followed Twitter users, authors of 20 or so New York Times bestsellers, the team that engineered virality for Rise of the Planet of the Apes, top executives from huge companies that are household names, and many more.
If you have a product or service you’d like to get in a gift bag for this 200-person group, please fill out this form ASAP. First responders get priority. Note that, if you’d like to do this, all physical products would need to be shipped to Napa, California to arrive no later than this Friday, August 19th… Read More
Well, perhaps. But problems do crop up, even with the venerated Macintosh. Not long ago, I went to use Spotlight (cmd + spacebar) and, well, it looked a little off.
It displayed “Indexing Spotlight,” with an estimated finish time of several MILLION hours.
I’m no computer scientist, but that seemed like an abnormally long time. Alas, “ruh-roh” realizations alone do not diagnose problems, let alone fix them. Much of the world has felt the same at one point or another: “My [fill in the blank] is screwed, but I don’t even know where to start.” Cars? Computers? Health? We’re all ignorant of something, as mastering everything just isn’t an option.
So, I put a notice out on the Internets asking for help and learned a lot about Macs in the process. First and foremost: It need not be complicated to bulletproof (or unf*ck) your Mac.
But what if your Mac crashes or is stolen? Does that goddamn spinning beachball mean that my computer’s going to implode? Is there a simple way to sleep soundly at night?
My hope is that this post somehow helps you to do exactly that. It won’t be fancy, and it won’t impress the Carnegie Mellon CS crowd, but it will get the job done with minimal headache and paradox of choice. Here’s what I’ve learned so far… Read More
It doesn’t take a lot of time, money, or sacrifice to do an incredible amount of good. Hence the name of this post (and potential series): Five Minutes on Friday. Even if it’s not Friday, this post might interest you…
Can you — and can I — take just five minutes each Friday (or Saturday, Sunday, etc.) to fix big problems and feel awesome in the process? Sure. It need not suck or feel like work. In fact, it can be like getting a Christmas present. Or perhaps like slaying bad guys as The Punisher.
Pretty sweet on both sides. Here are two quick options for your five minutes this week…
Listen to Music, Save Japan
Make a $10 or greater donation to Music for Relief for earthquake and tsunami relief in Japan and receive a kick-ass exclusive compilation of music from incredible musicians. To get people to take action, the offer is only good for a few days. Listen to the music (listed below) and make a donation here: http://japan.downloadtodonate.org/
Current Tracklisting:
Hoobastank — Running Away (acoustic)
Shinedown – Shed Some Light (acoustic live)
Sara Bareilles — Song For A Soldier
Flyleaf — How He Loves (live)
Staind —Right Here (live)
The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus — 21 and Up
Angels & Airwaves — Hallucinations
Taking Back Sunday – Best Places To Be A Mom
Placebo – Bright Lights (live)
Black Cards – Dr. Jekkyl & Mr. Fame
B’z — Home
Surfer Blood – Take it Easy (Live)
Ben Folds – Sleazy
Slash featuring Myles Kennedy – Starlight (live)
Counting Crows – Colorblind (live)
R.E.M. – Man on the Moon (live from Tokyo)
Talib Kweli – GMB
Plain White T’s — Rhythm Of Love (live)
Elliott Yamin — Self Control
Pendulum – Witchcraft
Patrick Stump – Saturday Night Again
Linkin Park — Ishho Ni
Pretty sweet, right? Click here to download the tracks.
Email/Call a Company, Save 200,000 Sharks
More than 100 million sharks are now slaughtered annually to fuel the shark fin soup trade. The soup is non-nutritive, expensive, and doesn’t even taste particularly good (yes, I tried it in China in the 90′s). It is served mostly as a status symbol at Asian weddings, formal functions, and high-end restaurants.
How is this fine soup made?
Shark fins are cut-off the sharks in a process called “finning.” The practice is wasteful, unsustainable and ecologically unsound. Here’s how it works: sharks are caught on long-lines (miles of line floating in the oceans, affixed with hooks and bait), brought to the boat, and have their fins are hacked off. Next, since shark meat isn’t worth as much as shark fins, the mutilated but normally live animals are thrown back in to the water to sink and die.
Sharks cannot reproduce fast enough to keep up with mass-production shark finning. In the Atlantic ocean alone, shark populations in many species have decreased more than 90% percent in the last 15 years alone. It’s fucking disgusting.
I wanted to be a marine biologist for nearly 15 years, and if there is two things to remember about sharks, here they are:
- Most sharks don’t attack humans and have no interest in us whatsoever. I’ve dived with hundreds of sharks without incident.
- If you destroy apex predators (predators at the top of the food chain), the rest of the food chain topples soon thereafter.
If the oceans go to hell, so do we. To stick it to the bad guys and help the good guys, here are two five-minute options:
1. Boycott and Publicly Shame Restaurants That Serve Shark Fin Soup
Below is a list of Canadian and US restaurants that still serve shark fin soup. Boycott them, write to them, and — corporations hate bad PR — publicly shame them for inhumanely slaughtering sharks, using blogs, tweets, Facebook, e-mail, or whatever you have:
The University of Miami offers year-round shark expeditions, including weekly tagging trips in the Florida Keys, Great White Shark expeditions in South Africa, and Diving and Tagging tiger shark adventures in the Bahamas. Click here for more information.
If you have other creative ideas on how to promote ocean conservation, please contact Dr. Neil Hammerschalg at nhammerschlag-at-rsmas.miami.edu. To learn more about shark protection, visit these sites:
Neil Strauss has written six New York Times bestsellers and is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine. From the standpoint of most aspiring writers, he’s reached the pinnacle of success.
That’s why I first sent him an e-mail in 2005.
I attached a draft book proposal and asked for his feedback, hat in hand. To my astonishment, he responded with words of encouragement, and that book proposal later became The 4-Hour Workweek.
We’ve since become good friends and — who would have imagined? — have even taken retreats together while on deadline. Our latest jam sessions took place in a beach cabin in Malibu. I was finishing The 4-Hour Body and Neil was wrapping up his latest opus, Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead: Journeys into Fame and Madness.
Evenings were spent force-feeding Neil protein (that’s when he gained 10 pounds), drinking Cocoladas, and trading war stories from publishing and writing.
Neil wrote one chapter in his new book about the trials and torture of editing. I almost died laughing (crying inside) when I read a draft, and I made him promise I could put it on this blog… Read More
James Cameron is writer and director of Avatar ($2.7 billion grossed), The Terminator, Aliens, and Titanic, among other blockbusters and genre-defining films.
On October 9th, James Cameron, Jim Gianopoulos (Fox Films Chairman/CEO), Peter Diamandis (X PRIZE Foundation Founder and Chairman), Tim Ferriss (that’s me), and a select group of others will experience zero gravity. And you could be with us… Read More
It’s time to celebrate! Three years in the making, The 4-Hour Body debuts next Tuesday.
I’m throwing a blow-out party in New York City that evening to thank readers who can attend. I hope to do more parties around the world in the coming months to thank you all. My sincerest gratitude to The King Collective for producing this event and making it gorgeous.
Here are the details — first the basics, then the fun stuff… Read More
In a future post, I will explain exactly what I did in PR and marketing (including recordings and screenshots) to help it happen, but the reality is: you made it happen.
You all rock. For buying the book? No. For making this community what it is. For helping one another and sharing your stories and lessons learned. For teaching me more than I can ever possibly teach you.
This is my dream team.
I’m leaving for South Africa this week (first time to Africa!), but I wanted to try and express my thanks before I left. There are three things I’d like to start with:
1) Free signed books at Samovar in San Francisco
2) Free round-trip ticket anywhere in the world per the last post
3) 600 free books on Facebook (+ Facebook bankruptcy template)…Read More
I dislike shopping, but I love finding the perfect gift.
Finding that gift, though, gets harder with time. Those damn adults seem to already have everything. That includes me.
More salt and pepper shakers? Nah. Alternate versions of the shirts I got last year? No, thank you. In the eternal quest to eliminate clutter, I now give Santa a not-to-buy list instead of a wish list.
If you’re having trouble thinking up killer (in the good sense) gifts, here are 12 goods that deliver.
All of them have either changed my life or saved my ass… Read More
Roger Bannister broke the mythical 4-minute mile barrier in 1954. (Source: Guardian UK)
Dean Kamen is no stranger to innovation.
He’s also no stranger to doubters and skeptics. People said the Segway was impossible, but Kamen disagreed, and he was right.
“Don’t tell me it’s impossible,” he says, “tell me you can’t do it.” “Tell me it’s never been done. Because the only real laws in this world–the only things we really know–are the two postulates of relativity, the three laws of Newton, the four laws of thermodynamics, and Maxwell’s equation–no, scratch that, the only things we really know are Maxwell’s equations, the three laws of Newton, the two postulates of relativity, and the periodic table. That’s all we know that’s true. All the rest are man’s laws…”
