b.cognosco

The 4-Hour Work Week

terrywfrazier@gmail.com — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 04:58:53 GMT

Got a new book over the holidays - "The 4-hour Workweek" by Timothy Ferris. One of my consulting colleagues recommended it a few weeks ago as being a good source for tips and ideas for some of the areas I've been investigating as a sideline the past few years. I love the book. I read most of it on a 2-hour flight from Atlanta to San Antonio, so it's clearly a fast read. But it's also a practical book, containing specific and usable ideas and recommendations in the areas of personal automation, personal outsourcing, product development, and removing yourself as a bottleneck.

This is what I call a "connector" or gap-filling book. I think you have to be at a certain point in your thinking on these areas in order for it to resonate with you. I've spent more time than I care to admit thinking about and poking around the edges of this stuff and made very little progress. I've read numerous books on time management and internet marketing and product development and PPC advertising and such. I've conducted a few of my own experiments. I've tried to find assistants and sources for doing tasks that are necessary but burdensome and low priority for me. But it just never worked like I wanted. There was never a serviceable "big picture" I could latch onto and I never got that mental "click" that happens when a concept gels in your mind and you can begin to make it your own. I don't know why this is so hard in some things and so easy in others, but I've learned to keep striving for that "click" and I know it when I feel it.

“4-hour Workweek” was a constant stream of little connections and examples that fit together to form a proper big picture, such that things which previously seemed isolated and disconnected are now linked in an overall vision. This is important for me as I have no energy for pursuing small things, no matter their potential, when I can't see a clear contribution to a the bigger goal.

I don't have any interest in copying Ferris' global vagabond lifestyle. But his approach to creating a low-pressure, low-risk, low-involvement business structure is compelling - especially if you have already been struggling to do many of the things he discusses. If you haven't, Ferris' claims may seem like just so much additional BS in a world already filled with it. But I don't think they are. My goal for 2008 is to implement as many of Ferris' strategies as possible, starting with the identification and outsourcing of my "boat-anchor" tasks and moving up to higher-level functions such as product design, marketing, etc. I will outsource as much of this as possible, and catalog my progress and failures here. It will be nice to have a theme for blog entries again.

What Not To Do

terrywfrazier@gmail.com — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 05:00:00 GMT

Someone has no doubt spent millions developing this beautiful, and utterly unusable, digital book interface. (hat tip to Ernie.)

Cool Origami Bookmarks From Your Laser Printer

terrywfrazier@gmail.com — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 16:39:43 GMT

First we had PocketMod, the pocket organizer made from folding a single sheet of paper. Now Italian artist Fabio Sirna brings us colorful, non-destructive bookmarks right from your laser printer. [via Marc Orchant]

DIY - Paper Bookmarks
First of all: thanks to all the people for comments, feedback and suggestion. I've update the Paper Bookmarks, and now there are two versions. Both are on A4 size paper, but I design it to fit also the Letter size. If you have trouble, please explain me, because I don't have letter size paper here. I think that if you scale the print of about 95-98% it works well also on letter size paper. [...]

Trend Watchers Resource List

terrywfrazier@gmail.com — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 17:57:18 GMT

A list of resources for trend watchers, from Gerald Celente, founder and director of the Trends Research Institute. Published at StartupJournal. [via TP Wire Service]

Recommended Reading For Trend Spotters
Current events form future trends, says Gerald Celente, founder and director of the Trends Research Institute, which has been tracking business, consumer, social and lifestyle trends since 1980.
[...]
Here is a selection of books Mr. Celente counts among the exceptions, as well as his daily online reads for spotting trends.

The Secrets of Economic Indicators: Hidden Clues to Future Economic Trends and Investment Opportunities by Bernard Baumohl. "Whether you're tracking pop culture, high fashion or health care, all things are connected, and economics is the tie that binds them all."

The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism by John C. Bogle. "Tracking trends is a way of seeing where we are, how we got here and where we're going. And John Bogle's new book does just that."

China, Inc. : How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World by Ted C Fishman.

The Chinese Century: The Rising Chinese Economy and Its Impact on the Global Economy, the Balance of Power, and Your Job by Oded Shenkar. "I'm among those who believe that while the 20th century was America's, the 21st will be China's."

The Big Book of Self-Reliant Living: Advice and Information on Just About Everything You Need to Know to Live on Planet Earth by Walter Szykitka (Editor). "One of hottest trends we see is the rapidly growing desire of more people to be self empowered, non-reliant, and 'off the grid.'

Haaretz, Al Jazeera, the Independent and China Online. "These four are our daily must-read news sites."

Drudge Report and the Raw Story. "We log on to these two Internet sites daily because they generally span the ideological spectrum."

Automating the International Affiliate Sale

terrywfrazier@gmail.com — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 19:18:06 GMT

This morning Matt Mower sent a link to Toronto-based programmer Scott Ambler's site, where Scott has created an Amazon Affiliate page with links for US, UK, CAN, AUS, and JP geographies. Matt has bought a few books from recommendations here, but has never purchased via my Amazon links becasuse they are US-based and he is in the UK. Matt thought Scott's setup was good and recommended I do something similar so he could purchase via here in the future. He went on to say:

It also occurs to me that, with one of those things that can look you up via your IP address, you could dynamically generate a link to the correct associates site (US/UK/etc...) without needing to provide a whole bunch o'links (but obviously providing fall-back to a page with all of them in case it goes wrong).

This seems like a good idea but I don't know anything about it - how difficult is it, are there existing tools, etc. An inquiry to AJAX and Remote Scripting guru Brent Ashley on the feasibility of Matt's suggestion led to hostip.info which has some interesting examples of what can be done with ip lookups. Below I've pasted in a snippet of code that should (if all goes well) display the national flag of an individual page viewer.

If there is a zooming map and a flag above this worked, if not it didn't. I can't see the HTML in Qumana so I don't know how this will be formatted. But it seems to me that using an ip lookup service such as hostip.info combined with a little server-side scripting one could do what Matt suggests. I don't know how useful it would be. Probably not very for any one individual - I've sold a whopping 10 books through Amazon since October 1, generating roughly $10 in affiliate fees. Can't imagine that would be much higher if I'd had CAN/UK affiliate links available. But then again...

Technorati Tags : marketing

PC Magazine WindowsXP Security Book

terrywfrazier@gmail.com — Fri, 25 Nov 2005 02:43:00 GMT

PC Magazine is publishing a massive tome on how to fix windozeXP security. PC Magazine Windows XP Security Solutions (available mid-December) is 456 pages filled with everything you shouldn't have ever needed to know about windoze. A book this size, on this topic, delivers a simple but powerful message - Buy a Mac.

Robotic Book Scanner for High-Volume Digital Conversion

terrywfrazier@gmail.com — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 18:08:42 GMT

This is very cool a non-destructive robotic scanner for books. The video of this thing at work is nice. [via Tim Oren]

Bookbots

Maybe not as world shaking as milbots or healthbots, but if you're Google or Amazon, or possessed of a very large dead tree library, you'll want Kirtas Technologies' Bookscan (check out the video). If you've ever had to get legacy printed material into a scanning or OCR system, hands-on or just paying the bills, you'll appreciate it. Gadgets like this as well as the search engines' book indexing projects will slowly break down the "Internet Event Horizon" that's made a lot of information created before the mid-1990s invisible to the net.