(Photo: Kevin Dooley)

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:

Stop being a Wantrepreneur; start taking action. Free vids! Get here: http://appsumo.com/wantrepreneurs-videos/ via @AppSumo

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]

Happy holidays!

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Odds and Ends: The 4-Hour Chef is now up on Amazon.co.uk

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…

Second

I am speechless about your birthday donations to Room to Read. I’ll have much more to say on this, but here are the basics:

- Of a target $20,000, you raised more than $30,000. Absolutely incredible.

- I will therefore match $30,000 instead of $20,000, for a total of $60,000, which means we can build THREE schools! Those schools will be built in Cambodia, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, to be completed in spring of 2013.

- Instead of 20 names on plaques, we’ll therefore have 30 names (10 per school): 27 top donors, and the three top commenters/fundraisers, as voted on my all of you below. The #1 voted commenter will also get the promised round-trip ticket described in the last post.

Please vote on the below commenters, choosing the person you think was most effective as a fundraiser:

David Turnbull
Bjorn Karlman
Melissa Rachel Black
Rachel Rofe
MK

Please see each of their comments below this voting box, and vote on your favorite here! I cannot thank you all enough. Much more soon…

David Turnbull

What does education mean to you?

Education, to me, is the opportunity for life to change for the better. It’s the one thing that can be consumed, but then reused forever. Once something is taught, its with the student for the rest of their life. It’s a long tail benefit with an enormous impact for both current and future generations.

And here’s what I’ve done:

1. I have a YouTube channel with over 33,000 subscribers. In the two recent videos I’ve dedicated a significant amount of time talking about this charity drive. You can find the videos below.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6OlN2vy3MI (Skip to 3:00 for the relevant bit)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF4vg3tAhhk (Skip to 2:58 for the relevant bit)

2. I also have a blog that receives upward of 20,000 visitors per day. I have done two blog posts where I mention this charity drive. At the moment, both of these are on the home page and probably will be for the next 24 hours.

You can find these blog posts here:

http://nintendo3dsblog.com/video-nintendo-loses-money-and-an-entirely-unrelated-call-to-action

http://nintendo3dsblog.com/video-street-fighter-atv-wild-ride-spyro

3. I have a Twitter account with just under 5000 followers. I’ve sent out two tweets asking for retweets. You can find them here:
http://twitter.com/#!/Nintendo3DSBlog/status/97159620669341697

http://twitter.com/#!/Nintendo3DSBlog/status/97618243363155968

I have also tracked the clicks from all of these sources, along with the retweets. You can find the details here: http://bit.ly/davidturnbull+ (make sure you include the + symbol at the end of the url).

Bjorn Karlman

Grattis på födelsedagen, Tim! (happy bday in my native Swedish).

Education to me is quite simply the leverage that allows individuals and societies to improve and grow. It is absolutely critical and I truly believe that the lack of it lies at the root of the majority of global problems. I ABSOLUTELY support Room to Read’s efforts to promote literacy and education.

As the Third Culture Kid of overseas nonprofit worker parents that invested over a decade of their lives to working on public health, education and medical projects in Africa and Asia, you definitely caught my attention with the Room to Read library building project.

I want to make a positive, international, sustainable and SMART impact for education in developing countries using today’s tools so your ephilanthropy ideas are like music to my ears. I officially work in health care philanthropy and I can say that you are miles ahead of most of the sector’s stateside fundraising professionals.

Here’s my stab at supporting your project (I share numbers/measurement backup sheepishly as I am only starting out in my quest to do good online and you and several of your readers are clearly already demigods in the arena):

1) I made an online donation
2) I tweeted from different angles about the project to my (wait for it…) 345 followers
3) I posted to both my personal page (with a very international and well-traveled 1135 friends) and my blog fan page on Facebook 317 fans
4) I wrote a blog post focusing on the importance of doing what REALLY matters and including multiple links for people to give to your project. (I am working hard on expanding the blog and currently it has a worldwide Alexa world wide ranking of #678,322 and stateside #54,940. It ranks as “relatively popular” (#140) in the Chico-Redding, CA area where I live and in San Francisco (#20,403). Alexa estimates the positive 3-month increase in global reach for the blog at 960%. I am trying to employ MED rules to keep this momentum going while avoiding burnout)
5) Emailed my blog subscribers (AWeber results show a 50% + opening average on the emails I send to them)
6) Posted two links (one directly to the cause page and one to my post) to my other accounts: (Google Buzz, Gtalk Status, MySpace, LinkedIn, Identi.ca, FriendFeed, Flickr)
7) Sold my wife on the cause and the donation :)

Alright, that about covers it. I am drawing inspiration from the following 4HWW passage about the Princeton undergrads that you urged to compete for the RT trip ticket to anywhere in the world:

“It was a difficult challenge, perhaps impossible, and the other students would outdo them. Since all of them overestimated the competition, none of them showed up.”

So this is me showing up. But regardless of the outcome, Happy Birthday again and thanks for using your platform in a uniquely meaningful way. You’ve convinced me of what CAN be done:)

Melissa Rachel Black

“What does education mean to me?” Great question and one that has certainly influenced my life.. that was the exact one I answered in a scholarship application essay in 2006 which won me a four-year fully paid tuition at the University of California. My answer then was “a combination of learning and doing” and thinking about it now, it still rings true.

I might be deep deep deep in debt if it weren’t for that opportunity.

Without reading I certainly wouldn’t be where I am today–growing my muse doing what I love designing and printing gangster-rap greeting cards, while living abroad. Literacy is an amazing skill and definitely one that should be available to all.

Going to spread the good word every way I can. I would be honored to win the trip (currently planning an epic adventure with my great friend) but I’m here to support no matter what.

Thanks Tim.

[SECOND COMMENT]

I replied to “What is education” in my previous comment, and just decided that even though there’s not much time left and I have a smaller audience than many of the other contributers, I would tell the silly little fearful part of myself who said my idea was stupid and that it wouldn’t make a difference to kindly SHUT UP. :)

1. Created a new card in my muse shop dedicated to Room to Read & this fundraiser. http://etsy.me/q7zS1o
2. Uploaded photos of it on flickr with a description & link to the donation page (57,790 views on my account)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/melissarachelblack/5993502241/in/photostream
3. Initiated a store-wide sale and will donate 50% of all income to Room to Read before 11:59 PST
http://www.etsy.com/shop/melissarachelblack
4. Shared a link to your donation page on my muse’s fanpage (92 fans)?
http://www.facebook.com/YeOldeGangster
5. Shared a link to your donation page on my facebook (874 friends)
http://www.facebook.com/meltr0n
6. Tweeted a link to your donation page on twitter (96 followers)
http://twitter.com/milkandcooties
7. Shared a link to your donation page on google+ (In 20 circles)
https://plus.google.com/106136978045494527771/posts
8. Shared a link to this blog post in our 4-Hour-Workweek Berlin meetup group (61 people)
http://www.facebook.com/groups/146524318752855/?ap=1
9. Sent a link to your donation page in my muse business’ newsletter (88 people)

For measurability:

Donation page: https://bitly.com/oQYQoM+
This blog post: https://bitly.com/nZpofR+

Viel Erfolg!

[THIRD COMMENT]

Forgot to mention–if I win the round-the-world ticket, I’m going to Australia, Fiji, & New Zealand, Thailand, Vietnam, and more with one of my best friends, and we’re going to continue the Room to Read mission… we will make a book!

She (from Britain) and I (from USA) will co-create a book called EATSRALIAN! with the help of local chefs & creatives to celebrate & examine the different food cultures of the big 3 English-speaking countries. We will organize food parties with local eateries and include their recipes, and invite designers, photographers, and illustrators we meet along the way to contribute imagery.

Food, art, friends, reading, and travel… an epic adventure. Nothing finer in my book.

And even if I don’t win, I’m glad to have participated in any small way. Thanks & happy birthday.

Rachel Rofe

What does education mean to me?

Education, to me, is the highest leverage thing we can possibly do to solve the world’s problems.

When people are empowered with education, there is hope. People can take education and they can do things with it. They can look for new solutions to problems in the world. They can learn to stand up for themselves. They can make change.

Most importantly, they can learn there’s another way instead of what they have now.

If you think about it, life is one huge white circle of possibility. So many people have problems that cause them to be hyper-focused on one tiny black speck in this HUGE infinite white circle, when they could be looking at such a bigger picture.

Education opens someone’s eyes to all of the infiniteness.

I know this because I went through it personally. I’ll give you a little bit of my back-story, not to get sympathy, but because it formed the reason why education is so huge for me. The quick version is: just a few years ago I was 100 pounds overweight, broke, and totally despondent.

I was sexually and physically abused throughout my childhood, hated myself so much that I wouldn’t brush my teeth or shower for weeks, and grew up thinking it was normal to be raped by my father. (This is EXTREMELY vulnerable for me to be sharing, by the way.)

When I was 14, my little 11 year old sister called me crying. She saw my father throw my mother’s head into a wall. Then he told my sister how she wasn’t really his daughter (untrue), and he tried to drive her and my mother into oncoming traffic. My sister had to reach through the center console and turn the wheel around.

I’m trying to keep this short, so I’ll just say things didn’t get better from there.

I honestly had no idea there was any other way besides the life I was living. I was focused on that black speck, not knowing about the huge infiniteness of possibilities in this world. I thought I’d forever be fat, with low self esteem, and no idea about how to stand up for myself.

EDUCATION is what saved my life. I came across a book called Secrets Of The Millionaire Mind. I never knew about personal development before and this totally shook my world up. The book led me into a 3 day seminar, and then a Warrior Camp, and countless more books.

That education taught me that it was possible to change my story.

I honestly didn’t know I could before that.

I learned that I could do anything I wanted to.

Since educating myself, I changed my life around completely. I’ve lost the 100 pounds, traveled to many places, and quit my dead-end retail job and started working for myself. I was a cover story in a magazine for my weight loss, was featured in a few magazines for my entrepreneurial skills, and wrote a book about meditation.

I’ve had so many people from my school days find me on Facebook and tell me they were blown away at the things I’ve accomplished. I think most people don’t know how much things can change. That’s why education is so crucial.

Of course, education isn’t just for people like me. Educating people in poor countries is literally their key to enhancing their lives and opening them up to other opportunities besides the ones they’re currently open to.

For example, a lot of little boys in Afghanistan aren’t able to go to school. They’re too busy trying to raise money for their family. Many boys end up entering the Taliban not because they believe in it, but because it pays.

That’s a TRAVESTY.

And that’s just one example. I’ve read so many stories about children who are forced to play small and live small lives… and also so many about the exceptions, with people who DID get to educate themselves and make their worlds so much better.

All of this to say… I am EXTREMELY passionate about education.

And since talk is cheap, I should point out that 2 weeks ago a friend and I raised $50,000 for underprivileged children in a school in an Indian Reservation in Arizona. I am so proud to know that the people who donated and I helped possibly re-write a child’s entire life.

You can read about it here if you like:
http://rachelrofe.com/how-we-raised-50k-in-less-than-10-hours-for-charity

I found out a little late about this contest but I still did my best to do several things to get the word out.

I wrote a blog post. I told my friends. I emailed it. I posted to Twitter, Facebook, my Facebook Page, Google Buzz, GTalk, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, and Flickr. I posted about it in an online forum.

I also ran a campaign and paid people $.30 per click to come over and check it out. I figured this would be a way to broaden my reach and hopefully get others spreading the word too. Hopefully the money I spent translated into thousands of dollars for the library.

You can track how many clicks I’ve been able to bring over by going to this specific link: https://bitly.com/donateforlibrary+ (make sure to keep the + at the end). That link will give you stats on how many people came, and from where. I sent most people to my blog post first.

Thank you very much for this opportunity, happy birthday, and congratulations for raising all the money you did. :)

MK

To me, education means freedom. And that came, mostly, from reading (although I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to attend great schools and to acquire a degree or two along the way).

Reading, though, was at the core of it all: I grew up in a library (literally, my mum worked as a librarian when I was a kid) and I have been an avid reader ever since. I believe the ability to read from an early age is crucial to an inner sense of freedom and empowerment—and to upward social mobility (it definitely has been for me, as I hail from a so-called “developing” country).

It’s a great initiative, Tim, and I hope you keep up the good work!

Here’s what I’ve done so far:
* Tweeted to my 280+ faithful followers:
“It takes $20,000 to build a library. Donate to Room to Read to help build one now: http://t.co/O7zBq6z #Reading = freedom!”

* Posted a question on my Facebook feed:
“What does reading mean to you?” with a link to the donation page

* Messaged my librarian friend, explaining the project to her and asking her to forward the message to her colleagues. She’s one of the most social-media-savvy librarians I know, so I expect that to make quite an impact. ;)

* Added a donation link to our Shopify store (we’ve been featured in today’s Shopify New Store Fridays blog post, so we expect a spike in traffic :)

* And much more to come!

(Photo: Small Dog Electronics)

Macs are easy to use. Intuitive!

Viruses? Never heard of ‘em!

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…

We’ll start with an e-mail thread from Jared Cocken, Creative Director of The Wonderfactory, then we’ll lead into personal suggestions.

If you have alternative solutions or more elegant fixes, please let me know in the comments!

Enter Jared

Most software glitches on OS X are permissions-based. Permissions set the read/write characteristics of every file and who those files can be viewed by; it’s an old system that comes from Mac OS X’s Unix underpinnings. Luckily, it’s usually pretty easy to repair permissions.

Below are a few steps that will (A) Fix common issues on Macs, and (B) Keep your Mac running smoothly.

Step 1: Backup Data and Repair Permissions

1) Backup your data using one of the following methods:

Local Incremental Method – You can use Time Machine to perform incremental backups. I like the freedom of no wires, so I back up over WiFi to a Time Capsule ($299). The initial backup will take awhile, so plug your Mac into the Time Capsule’s ethernet port and let it run overnight. The subsequent, incremental backups take far less time since they only back-up items that have changed. If you don’t want to spend the cash on a Time Capsule, you can opt to plug in an external drive. I like these drives from Western Digital; they’re affordable and easy to store.

Off-Site Incremental Method – If you don’t want to spend the cash on an external drive and you’re more worried about your data than your OS, I recommend Backblaze ($4 per month for unlimited storage). It won’t backup your OS files, so if you want to avoid the pain of hand-restoring your system, you’ll want to double up with one of the other methods, as well. If you have a lot of data, the first back-up will take you a long time even on a fast connection; incrementals will speed through. Should you have a fatal drive error and don’t have time to wait for a large data download, Backblaze will expedite you a harddrive (for a fee).

Off-Site Clone Method – I recommend SuperDuper! ($27.95). It allows you to create a bootable clone on an external drive, meaning you’ll be able to get your machine restored with all of its data in no time. It can be scheduled, or set to run when you plug in a specific external drive. I perform a clone weekly and store it off-site.

2) Open up ‘Disk Utility’ – [Location: "/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility"]

1. On the left, you’ll see little drive icons. There should be a slightly indented icon ‘Macintosh HD’ underneath another icon with a number (mine is 500.11 GB)
2. Select the one named ‘Macintosh HD’
3. Select ‘First Aid’ from the tabs
4. Hit ‘Repair Disk Permissions’ and let it run
5. When the repair is complete, click the non-idented drive and run another repair
6. Congratulations, you just repaired your permissions. It’s actually good practice to run this every time you install/update software. I normally set a calendar reminder so I don’t forget.

3) Restart your Mac

Did that solve your problem? No? Not time to reach for the whisky just yet. It’s time for some drive repair.

Step 2: Fixing A Corrupt Directory

Another common problem is a corrupt directory file. The directory keeps track of how all the files are connected. If it gets messed up, your computer will effectively be driving in the dark. But this can be fixed.

Remember that DVD that came with your Mac? The one that has the ‘Do not throw these DVDs away’ label on it? It’s time to go and dig that out.

1. Insert your OS X DVD
2. Restart your Mac
3. Press and hold the ‘C’ key until the Apple logo appears (you’re now booting from the DVD)
4. Open up ‘Disk Utility’

1. Select Macintosh HD on the left
2. Select ‘First Aid’ from the tabs
3. Hit ‘Repair Disk’ (NOT ‘Repair Disk Permissions’) and let it run
4. If you see any red results, they were likely the cause of your Mac’s problems

5. Restart your Mac (making sure to select ‘Restart’ from the hard drive, not the DVD)

Did that solve your problem?

No? DAMMIT MAN… what have you been doing to that poor computer?!

Time to move onto the final step…

Step 3: Enter DiskWarrior

If Disk Utility wasn’t able to fix the problem, you’re going to need to bring in the big guns. Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m talking about DiskWarrior ($99), the Spartan Army of OS repairing awesomeness. I’ve been using it since 1998, and it’s saved my bacon on numerous occasions. Sure, it might not look like much, but it’ll bring a whole world of hurt to those evil directory demons. How? It wipes them from the face of the earth by building it’s own directory.

Here’s how to use DiskWarrior:

1. Insert the DiskWarrior DVD
2. Restart your Mac
3. Press and hold the ‘C’ key until the Apple logo appears (you’re now booting from the DVD)
4. Agree to the ‘Blah, Blah, not our fault if you lose stuff, but we’re TOTALLY claiming the credit if we fix it’ disclaimer
5. Select Macintosh HD from the drop-down menu, and hit ‘Rebuild’.
6. Once DiskWarrior has finished building a preview directory, you’ll get two options: ‘Preview’ or ‘Replace.’ Click ‘Replace’ while shouting “This. Is. SPARTA!” (wearing an adhesive beard is recommended during this step).
7. Restart your Mac
8. Rejoice that all of your problems have gone away!

No? Okay… Now would be a good time to book an appointment at an Apple Store. The specialists at the Genius Bar will probably perform the exact same steps you just walked through, so it’s worth printing this post out beforehand to show what you’ve tried already, just so you don’t waste your time (or theirs).

If you call Apple Support, chances are that they’ll just tell you to reinstall your OS. Unless you followed Step 1 and backed up your data, that’s going to be a giant pain in the ass. Consider yourself warned!

Good luck!

Afterword and Additional Thoughts from Tim

Ultimately, I did all of the above but remained unconfident, even after adding other safety nets like using DropBox for redundancy and the lightweight Prey for theft protection. Why still unconfident? Simple: I’ve f*cked this type of thing up in the past with alarming regularity.

After all, the basic concept of a “bootable drive” eluded me for an embarrassingly long time. In plain-speak: you need a way to look at your computer without *using* your computer. Duh. The afflicted machine needs to be treated like a patient etherized upon a table, hard disk as still as a dead heart.

In the end, I took perhaps the simplest route as an insurance policy: I made an appointment at my local Mac store’s Genius Bar and brought DiskWarrior along with me, hat in hand. Long story short, my friendly Mac Jedi fixed my laptop using the store’s external drive, and the computer’s been fine since.

During the wait, I peppered this fine gentleman (nameless for reasons that will become obvious) with Mac questions of all sorts. There were a few additional takeaways that I found helpful:

1) If you’re going to run around with your laptop in a backpack, as I do, it’s best to get a machine with a solid-state drive, like the new Macbook Air.

2) To speed up reboot time, take all the crap on your desktop and put in a folder labeled something like “Desktop stuff to July 17, 2011.” This eliminates the need for your laptop to generate thumbnail images and accelerates everything.

3) Think Macs are impervious to viruses? Not forever, at least that’s my bet. I ended up installing the simple Sophos Anti-Virus for peace of mind.

4) You don’t need to buy new licenses for software when you get a new computer. Just copy and paste the following folders to your new computer in the appropriate locations:

- “Applications” folder
- Within “Library” (in your home directory), the “Applications Support” and “Preferences” folders.

Can anyone confirm or refute that this works?

5) Computers inevitably end up clogged with crap: stupid applications that don’t pan out, bloated unnecessary files, etc. I asked him: “If you were starting from scratch, what would you put on your short list of must-have applications?” His survival list included the following:

- Tuneup – for cleaning up and unbloating iTunes.
- Cocktail – use 1x per month to clean up your OS.
- Handbrake – for ripping DVDs to your hard drive.
- VLC media player – for playing various media files.
- Transmission – for downloading torrents (BitTorrent client).
- 1Password – for (not)remembering log-ins and passwords.
- Quicksilver or Alfred – for quickly launching apps (Call me old-fashioned, but I’m perfectly happy with Spotlight for the app-launching feature)
- Netnewswire – RSS reader (I don’t have an RSS reader installed)
- AppZapper (Tim addition to the list) – aptly called “the unintaller Apple forgot,” I use AppZapper to delete all the niggly hidden files, sometimes dozens, associated with applications that you want to get rid of.

Any other votes for elegant must-have applications? Other Armaggedon-avoiding Mac tips?

###

Odds and Ends: $1,000 Travelocity Winner and Stats

The winner of the $1,000 Travelocity Voucher is…James McDaniel! James, please keep an eye on your email for all the juicy details.=

And here are stats for the entire PunchTab giveaway, as of competition end:

Entrants – 697
Referrals – 8859
FB Likes – 639 (now closer to 1,000)
FB Fans – 430
Blog Comments – 539 (now closer to 700)
Retweets – 397
Total Entries – 10,894

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:

United States List of restaurant perpetrators
Canada’s list of restaurant perpetrators

2. Join Future Shark Adventures

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:

http://www.wildaid.org
http://www.sharksavers.org
http://www.rjd.miami.edu
http://www.sharktrust.org

Yes, I really love sharks. Here, I tag my first shark off of Miami as part of Summit Series: a beautiful female tiger shark. Truly gorgeous.

Have a fantastic weekend, all. Take the five minutes if you can. It will make you feel incredible, and it will have an impact.

(Photo: Sybren A. Stüvel)

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…

The bigger picture: Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead shares the insights and outtakes from Neil’s most amusing celebrity encounters, and it shows how to achieve rapport with the super-rich and super-famous. How do you make a connection with them and get them to open up? If you’re Neil, you shoot guns with Ludacris, get kidnapped by Courtney Love, go to church with Tom Cruise, make Lady Gaga cry, and go shopping for Pampers with Snoop Dogg.

I call the following chapter “So, You Want to Be a Writer?” because it covers one of the often-comical frustrations of writing professionally: copy editing. Though a critical part of the process, it is arguably the most maddening.

These are real examples.

Enter Neil Strauss

In a preview of weekend concerts for the New York Times, I wrote about a double bill by the groups the Friggs and Jackass. When I picked up the paper the next day, the preview just mentioned “two bands” and, although the description remained intact, the actual names of the groups were nowhere to be found in the story. Evidently, a copyeditor found their monikers obscene and simply removed them. It was just one example of the many challenges of writing about rock, hip-hop, and popular culture for the New York Times..

On another occasion, I wrote about a shady corner deli where “neighbors used to hear the sound of crack addicts having sex in exchange for free drugs.” When I looked at the paper the next day, the sentence had been changed to read in its entirety, “Neighbors used to hear the sound of crack addicts.”

Here are a few more examples of how decency standards are enforced at the paper of record.

Editing an article that quotes the Courtney Love lyric, “I’m eating you / I’m overfed” . . .

COPYEDITOR: We have to remove that quote.

What’s wrong with it?

COPYEDITOR: It’s about oral sex.

The whole article hinges on that lyric.

COPYEDITOR: If you want, I can run it past the news desk and see what they say.

Ten minutes later . . .

COPYEDITOR: The news desk says it’s about oral sex.

#

Editing a concert review in which singer Francis Dunnery describes himself as “complete scumbag white trash from the north of England” . . .

COPYEDITOR: We can’t use the word “scumbag.”

Why is that?

COPYEDITOR: Because it refers to a condom.

What’s wrong with condoms?

COPYEDITOR: It’s a family newspaper. You and I might like to talk about scumbags, but that’s on our own time.

#

Editing a Rage Against the Machine review . . .

COPYEDITOR: You write here that the band has lyrics attacking misogynists and homophobes.

Yes.

COPYEDITOR: Did the band say “homophobes”?

No, that’s my summary of the lyrics.

COPYEDITOR: We have a rule that “homophobes” is a word that can only be used by homosexuals in the newspaper.

Isn’t that a double standard?

COPYEDITOR: There’s also the case of the religious right. We don’t want to accuse anyone of having a clinical psychological condition that is the cause of their actions.

#

Editing a review of the English group Laika . . .

Why did you remove the sentence where the singer’s talking about how men carry an assault weapon in their pants?

COPYEDITOR: Because it’s obscene and this is a family newspaper.

But there aren’t any obscene words there.

COPYEDITOR: It’s implied.

Come on. There were dead bodies on the front page of the paper the other day. That’s much more damaging to a child.

COPYEDITOR: You sound like you’re pissed off that we’re taking this out. But you can either stay pissed off or realize that we’ll never print something like this, so don’t even bother trying again.

#

Editing an article in which country singer Steve Wariner recalls Garth Brooks signing autographs for “twenty-four hours straight without a pee break”…

COPYEDITOR: We’re going to have to send that to the news desk.

Because of the word “pee”?

COPYEDITOR: Yes, it’s scatological.

Ten minutes later . . .

COPYEDITOR: What do you want to say instead?

You mean the word pee is unacceptable?

COPYEDITOR: Let’s not argue about it.

#

Editing an interview with Master P . . .

COPYEDITOR: Is there any reason why you wrote g-a-n-g-s-t-e-r?

Yes, because whenever I write gangsta, you change it to gangster.

COPYEDITOR: Well, Al [Siegal, New York Times standards editor] has okayed the use of the word gangsta. He found a precedent for it in a 1924 review. So you can use it now.

#

Editing the interview with Mike Tyson, in which he says, “We made the industry, but we have no control over the destiny of the music” . . .

COPYEDITOR: It’s not clear what the referent for “we” is.

It’s obviously African-American people.

COPYEDITOR: Okay, let’s change it to, “Speaking of black people, Mr. Tyson said, ‘We made the industry.’ ”

No, don’t do that.

COPYEDITOR: It needs a referent. It’s not grammatical.

It sounds racist. And my name’s on the article.

COPYEDITOR: Then give me another referent to use.

I don’t know.

COPYEDITOR: Well, who is he talking about if not black people?

Just anyone involved in the culture that rap comes from.

COPYEDITOR: Okay, then let’s make it, “Speaking of the rap world, he said, ‘We made the industry . . .’ ”

#

Editing a festival review of an Irish-themed musical festival with the sentence, “On the main stage, Hootie & the Blowfish—the very name of which evokes a sudden desire to yawn and move on to the next article—rigidly jammed through a version of ‘Black Magic Woman’ that seemed longer than the lines for the Portosans” . . .

COPYEDITOR: I just don’t think it works.

What’s wrong with it?

COPYEDITOR: The last few words.

They don’t make sense to you?

COPYEDITOR: The mandate here is not meaning and content, which is fine, but taste.

What if I said longer than the line at the Guinness tent?

COPYEDITOR: That’s fine.

But that’s perpetuating an Irish stereotype. Isn’t that worse?

COPYEDITOR: Maybe, but it’s acceptable.

Despite the copyeditors’ efforts, a few obscenities still made their way into articles, starting with the Eazy-E song “Nutz Onya Chin.” The word “pussy,” used as an insult, also ended up in the paper. No one seems to have noticed it yet, so if you’re the first person to successfully find it and e-mail me the article at manofstyle@gmail.com, you’ll win a well-worn copy of Lenny Bruce’s How to Talk Dirty and Influence People.

###

Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead is out today. See his video trailer and more here.