We had a half-foot of fresh snow yesterday, so I headed out.

Conditions were pretty good. The storm had mostly stopped dropping snow, but skies were still cloudy. I expected the runs to be in better shape, but the powder was heavy and a bit crusty in places, especially later in the day. But oh! it was great fun to make turns in some fresh snow again!

I actually didn’t do too much. My ribs feel fine (after rupturing a lung and breaking ribs six weeks ago), but I had hurt my ankle in the crash and aggravated it last week. As I expected, stress on my ankle kept my time on the hill short. I hit a bunny lift four times, to see how my ankle would handle it and – being mid-week in May – the slopes were empty and untracked. It’s amazing how much untracked powder there is near bunny slopes. Anyway, I moved from there to Broadway Express (lift 1) and took a few runs, progressing up to the black-diamond race courses. By the last run my ankle was pounding so I didn’t really race… just kinda… made turns. It started snowing again so I called it quits and went home.

Within a couple hours my ankle felt much better, and it feels good today, too. But today I’m taking it easy, reading & writing. I plan to go riding again tomorrow.

Today was my first day back on the slopes after I ran into a tree and broke some ribs. My ribs have been fine for a week; felt fine, at least. But my right ankle still hurts when I stress it; that was actually what I was worried about most.

I stuck to the bunny slope today, which was handy because they closed the rest of the mountain an hour later, due to high winds. I didn’t want to take much risk; mostly I viewed today as a chance to try the various movements that snowboarding demands and see how I felt 24 hours later (ie tomorrow). I feel fine now, 8 hours after I got home. I think I’ll be ok.

One thing I was thinking was that I need better risk-management. Riding through unknown trees when I was tired was a poor choice. I remember the ski patrol dude asking me what I could have done to avoid the accident. That’s easy:

1. don’t ride in trees at all
2. don’t take such risks when I’m tired
3. take a lesson and improve my skills
4. get in better shape so that I’m not that fatigued after 5 hours

My sister was spooked by my story, since her kids love to ride through trees. She likes option #1 up there. I tried to stress #2-4 to her. Skiing and snowboarding are inherently dangerous, and riding in the trees increases the danger. But there are ways to protect yourself, but most importantly you should manage your risk.

Many people (I think with small dicks, short stature, brain damage, or other physical impairments) feel the need to show everybody how awesome they are. That means riding on the toughest terrain, going really fast, and other high-risk endeavors. Why do you ride? Is it to impress your friends? Or because you love it?

There’s risk, then there’s stupid risk. Many snowboarders take big risks, huge risks; inverted aerials, backcountry riding, stuff like that. Other high-adrenaline sports like mountain climbing and skydiving also draw risk-takers. But that’s an informed risk. Stupid risk is a beginner-intermediate snowboarder deciding to throw themselves down the steepest, iciest, and/or most obstacle-strewn path on the mountain in order to tell their friends that they did it. Seriously, is your dick that small?

I stayed on the beginner slopes for a long time because I knew my turns weren’t that great. Sure, I could go down steeper slopes, mostly by side-slipping, but what would be the point? That’s just a notch in the bedpost, not something to be proud of. I’m proud of my turns, of the terrain that I’ve advanced to, because I feel that my skills are appropriate for that terrain. I am proud of the skills that I’ve gained, not of the stupid stunts that I’ve pulled.

The draw of the trees is fresh powder. The demand on turns is not that great of a draw for me right now; riding the trees requires fast reflexes and a lot of skill. I really don’t have that yet. I like to stick to the sparsely-treed areas. One of the things I was thinking today was that I really need to work on my turns. Sure, I can link carved turns, but … not expertly. Plus steep slopes still spook me. Because of that, riding through the trees is a greater risk. Dense and unfamiliar areas are the biggest risk.

That said, I did take a few turns just off the slope today. It really reinforced the risk, and what I want to do. For the rest of the year (Mammoth will be open til July 4th), I’m just going to work on my turns, and steeper slopes. Next year, I can go for the trees and the park again.

One of the ways that I’m making a bit of extra money is selling stuff on eBay. In a latter post, I talk about shipping domestically, but here I’ll be discussing international shipping from the US.

Sadly, about a third of the international buyers that I’ve dealt with have been a problem. The problems included disputed charges (Paypal chargebacks), claiming the item was never received, and not paying for the item (one guy demanded that I ship the item to him and give him good feedback!). Getting scammed, especially on an expensive item, sucks. Some sellers don’t have a problem, others do; it depends on the types of items you’re selling and whether it’s the sort of thing that a scammer might be interested in. You can take a risk with your first item, but if you’re not willing to issue a full refund at the first sign of trouble, then you are going to get burned.

I can send a small item internationally for only a few bucks — but that doesn’t include tracking. Maybe you’ve got an honest buyer, maybe you don’t. A buyer can claim that they didn’t receive an item, even if they did receive it, and without tracking to prove that it was delivered and signed for eBay will side with the buyer. It’s the seller’s responsibility (that’s you!) to guarantee that the item arrived.

The basic problem is that tracking is expensive. USPS Priority International runs about $14, and Express International $25. For something larger than a letter, such shipping options can be $65 or more. For items under $100, that’s a lot of money to pay for shipping — something few international buyers want to pay. Other carries will cost $50 and more for items small & light enough to send in an envelope! The benefit is the item will arrive quickly — but if you’re trying to sell a cheap item, speed isn’t important enough to justify such outrageous charges. It took a week for your auction to end, many buyers are willing to wait another week for the item to arrive.

And then there’s import charges – even shipping to Canada, UPS and FedEx packages might incur custom brokerage charges (a flat $25) regardless of item value or the price that you paid for shipping. Many countries have a customs, VAT, or other tax that adds even more to the cost to the buyer. As a US seller, it’s hard to learn about these charges, but it’s something that can make buyers very unhappy!

Even if you do add tracking, it might not be enough. The customs number you get when you ship internationally through the post office and fill out that little form isn’t sufficient – it only tracks the item until it leaves US customs. You need delivery confirmation to be protected by eBay Seller Protection. And if the item is over $250, then you also need signature confirmation. Buyers of items over $250 can claim the item was never received and, if there’s no signature on file, they get to keep the item and the money!

And what if the item is damaged? Or if the buyer claims the item is damaged, or not as described? You’ll need to buy insurance coverage for that, which adds more to shipping cost. Insurance can be bought for less than $1.50 per $100 of item value from a company such as Shipsurance, or through the carrier itself, although that does mean declaring a large value which can be a big inconvenience to the buyer.

So here’s our problem:

• we want to ship from the US to another country
• we don’t want to pay too much for shipping
• we want to protect ourselves from fraud

The solution? There isn’t one!

There’s no 100% way to protect yourself from fraud. There’s always a way for a crafty buyer to scam you. The best you can do is to make it hard for them, and work to exclude as many scammers as possible. Problem resolution through eBay and PayPal can be slow and painful, and comes with tight deadlines, the cost and inconvenience of gathering proof and faxing it in, and sometimes fees.

First: pay for tracking. You’re going to have to bite the bullet on this one and pay the extra cost, and that will exclude buyers from your auctions. Without delivery confirmation — that is, tracking directly to the buyer’s doorstep — the buyer has an easy out to claim they never got the item. On anything over $100, you’ll want signature confirmation as well. Even if they signed for the package, they can claim that the item wasn’t as described and generally eBay sides with the buyer on those claims.

Luckily, tracking is usually cheap. USPS has restrictions on it (you can’t track first-class letters), but it only costs 80c at most, and if you print postage online it can be as low as 19c. Tracking comes free with the door-to-door carriers, and with USPS’s more expensive delivery methods.

Second: buy insurance. If there is a claim that the item wasn’t received, if the post office (either in the US or the destination country) mangles the item, or if there’s some other scam that means that PayPal takes the money back, insurance can reimburse you. The process is easier when there’s a genuine problem (e.g. if the item is mangled in transit) and the buyer is willing to cooperate, but at the minimum you’re going to have to provide tracking info to the insurance company (see item #1!).

Third: exclude high-risk countries. Sadly, the countries that I’ve been scammed from include Norway, South Korea, and Japan — not exactly high-risk countries. Being scammed from these places is what prompted me to switch to always using tracking and insurance. Imagine what happens to packages in countries with spottier package delivery, legal measures, etc? I’ll leave it up to you to decide where you want to ship to. Note that eBay seller protection is only valid for buyers from the US, Canada, and the UK!

On the plus side, insisting on signature confirmation and insurance will help discourage scammers from bothering with your auctions, since it will be that much harder for them to dispute the claim. They just want to take the item and run; if you make it hard for them, they’re less likely to even bid.

When you ship an item, definitely compare FedEx, UPS, and USPS. And don’t trust the guy at the counter to give you accurate information about whether the service you want to buy will provide delivery confirmation — make a phone call, and keep asking for a supervisor or specialist until you get someone with direct experience with the country that you are shipping to!

Finally, here’s some guides at eBay itself that provide some more helpful info on international shipping:

• shipping to Canada
• avoiding buyer scams
• saving money on shipping costs

Good luck, and happy selling!

NOTE: this post is about adding Amazon Affiliate links to a Blogger-hosted blog. The blog you’re reading now is a WordPress blog so I’m not talking about this blog, but my other blog.

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Who wants to see ads? It’s something one tolerates. Funny TV commercials are entertaining — but just once or twice. After that, even great commercials get old. So adding ads to a blog can be distracting. When I see a blog with tons of ads, I tend to think that the ‘author’ is more interested in revenue than in writing, and usually that means the ‘content’ is just copy-n-pasted from somewhere else. I’m not going back to that blog.

The best ads address your audience. You know those TV commercials that you never want to watch? I’m a guy, so feminine hygiene products just aren’t of any interest at all to me. I don’t want to see those commercials on TV. Don’t tell me about denture cream. I don’t have ED. Bleh. If I’m gonna see ads, show me something I might buy.

In addition to pissing off your customers less, relevant ads also bring revenue to the host. Some of the blogs I read on a regular basis are monetized, but often just through generic ads. Google AdSense provides contextualized ads, but although they might be relevant to the context, they’re not approved by the author. There’s no editorializing in those ads; you might not get a denture cream ad, but the book itself might be completely contrary to the author’s opinions. Imagine if I advertized Ornish or Dr Oz here!

So: what I wanted for my blog was a list of my favorite books; books that were relevant to the blog itself. I like those books. I think my readers would benefit from reading them – not just in a generic way, but really, if you’re reading that blog, you should read those books, too. I feel the same way about blogs; if you’re reading this blog regularly, then I think you’d get a lot out of reading Richard and Peter and Kurt regularly.

I finally found a way to do that, and it’s fairly straightforward. The key is to start at Amazon.com, assuming you have an associates account (which is free to set up and run). The process:

1) Sign in to the Amazon associates page, and make sure you’re signed in to Blogger as well.

2) click on the Widgets tab

3) find the “My Favorites” widget

4) add a bunch of books (or whatever!), then click ‘Next Step’

5) Give it a title and customize the appearance. Save the widget, just to be safe. When you’re done, click ‘add to my web page.’

7) In the popup, select “Add to Blogger”

This will take you to a page at Blogger.com. Select the blog that you want to add the widget to, and click “Add Widget”.

9) Modify the layout if you want, then click “Save” to finish.

Then sit back, and wait for someone to click a link and actually buy a book.

We had a great powder day a couple weeks ago. I decided to go hit some of the terrain that I had recently “discovered” over near Eagle lodge and was having a lot of fun riding through the trees. After four hours I was getting pretty tired, and headed back to the lodge. I thought, one more batch of trees.

I wasn’t going too fast when I hit the tree, but I did hit it squarely. I was wearing a helmet, and I think I knocked my head pretty hard, but my helmet isn’t cracked – I expect without it I might have had a light concussion. The collision knocked the breath out of me, and breathing was effin painful. If you’ve ever had it happen to you, or seen a video of it, you know what it’s like. I kept thinking, dammit, I shoulda bought a whistle.

I was in the middle of the trees. Although I wasn’t far from the lodge, the trees were thick enough that I couldn’t see either the lift to my left or the trail to my right. It took about a minute for me to catch my breath, and then I set to rescuing myself. I took of my board and hiked (through about two feet of fresh snow) about 50 yards to the trail. From there, I could see the lodge. I was tempted to sit down but thought, as soon as I did, I’d probably want to sit there and not get up again. I started walking down hill. Someone did stop and ask me if I was ok but I thought, if I made it this far, surely I can just walk the rest of the way to the lodge…

I got to the lodge (after making many stops), put my board in the rack, and headed down to ski patrol. They looked me over and put me on oxygen and called the paramedics. Assessment: broken ribs perhaps, but the real danger was internal injury. I took an ambulance ride to the hospital and they checked me out.

I broke a couple ribs, ruptured a lung, and did something to my right ankle for which the treatment is “don’t stand on it too much.” That’s pretty much the treatment for broken ribs, too. The ruptured lung, however, took some treatment. The valve (pictured) was used to remove excess air from my chest cavity, and then to reinflate the lung.

Today, 19 days later, it still hurts. The day after the accident, standing up and sitting down was extremely painful. Today, I can get around OK. Walking doesn’t run me out of breath. I still take a mild painkiller before I go to bed, but I get through the day fine.

I plan on going snowboarding again at the start of May, but I’m going to stay away from trees, jumps, and tricky terrain.

This injury spooked my sister, because her kids love skiing through the trees. But don’t be too scared; injuries do happen. It’s a risk. The ways to mitigate that risk are: don’t ski or ride if you’re tired (fatigue is one of the leading causes of injuries), don’t ski on terrain that you can’t handle, and if you do go through trees go with a buddy. And bring a whistle!

I got a lot done today. Product2 is almost ready to go to testers. Product1 is ready to sell. However, I’m taking an opportunity to head out of town tomorrow — leaving nearly first thing in the morning. So, what do I do with the challenge? It’s gonna be a fail, because I’m not going to stay up all night to get parts 1 and 2 done. So instead I’m gonna modify the challenge, pushing the dates back til I get back.

I did enjoy working hard on the products today, though, and I think that’s something that was pushed in part by this challenge. I’m off to bed, see ya… in a few days.

I got some work done, but not as much as I hoped. I’m still on track to release Product1 to the market, and Product2 to testers on Monday. Given that it’s absurdly late here, I’m off to bed. 4k of D3, some fat to go with it, and I’m off.

Lots of self-help type stuff I’ve read, including Ferriss’s 4HWW, suggest telling people about your goals, as a way of keeping yourself honest, sticking to the goal, and providing some extra encouragement and motivation. So I’m telling you now, this is my challenge.

I’ve got two muses almost ready to go. One needs maybe a solid 10-20 hours of work and it can be sold. The second, maybe the same, but part of that time is waiting for reviews (from beta-testers) to come back in, so the timeline isn’t completely under my control. My goal is to get the first one up and for sale by end of day Monday, and to get copies of the second one out to testers at the same time.

I’ve got another five or so on deck. In two weeks, I’ll get teaser pages created and published for all five, to assess which one is most likely to bring in the most revenue.

That’s my challenge. I’ve got to meet all three goals in order to pass. I’ve been updating lately M-F, but I’ll be updating daily for the duration of the challenge.

1) SM up for sale by end of Monday

2) SG out to testers by end of Monday

3) Five teaser pages built & published by Friday March 5th.

See ya tomorrow.

Tim Ferriss’ Four Hour Work Week is about many things. Finding more time to do what you want is probably the core. One element of that is having what he calls a muse — a mostly-automated business that brings in enough money to let you do what you want with the rest of the week.

Finding a muse is hard, of course. If it was easy, everyone would be rich. But also most people aren’t entrepreneurs. I was an employee for most of my life. Starting a business is a risk; there’s a psychological hurdle to overcome before you start something up. Entrepreneurs and inventors the world over are trying to get rich. Generally, the recommended approach is to work your ass off. Ferriss suggests searching not for a way to get rich, to strike it big, but rather to find something that pays for your dreams but doesn’t take time. It’s a combination of finding ways to get your dream cheaply and ways to make money with few hours of work.

Work can broadly be divided into three types: products, services, and reselling. The customer only sees products and services, though; when you resell, you resell either a product or a service. Yet, as the business owner, you have to choose between the three. A product is not necessarily a physical thing; it can be software, a book, or a DVD program. Services don’t make good muses, because what you’re selling is your time. I guess one could explore the sorts of services where one could make a good amount of money for only a short amount of time, but those are niche, technical, or professional things. But I think it’s hard to think of and market something like that. So that leaves us with products or reselling.

Let’s start with manufacturing your own products. What can you make and sell in only four hours a week? Stay-at-home crafts like gift baskets, woodworking, toys and/or stuffed animals, stuff like that… generally, the simpler the skill set it takes to produce the item, the more likely it is that someone out there is already producing it, and cheaply, too. (This is why reselling is a better option for these types of products.) Products themselves are hard. Probably the most bang-for-the-buck is content: books, movies, TV shows, DVDs, video training, porn, blogs, websites, etc. These are all things where reward can outstrip cost. Not all content; small-market nonfiction books tend to pay equal to an average wage. Blockbuster books and movies can work out to a huge hourly wage.

But it’s hard to write blockbuster books, right? Ferriss counters that with the idea of a lucrative niche market; his example is yoga for rock climbers. If you already know yoga and mountain-climbing, you could put together a one- or two-hour DVD in just a few hours of your time, and for a small startup cost. Then, sell it at a steep price ($50-100) to that niche market. Ferriss emphasizes going after easy, lucrative customers. If you sell something at $10, you’ll deal with indecisive buyers, dilettantes, scams, and cheap people that will abuse your return policy. Sell at a higher price, and overhead costs come down.

Reselling can also be a good market, but requires its own set of skills. Maybe I should look into it, but I thought (for me) that content was a much better route. I can spell, type fast, use proper grammar, write code, research easily — it seemed much more appealing to me. Content is my muse. Well, it’s the muse I’ve chosen.

Not this blog, though. My god, this blog is worthless. Mostly someplace for me to type while thinking. But thanks for reading!

Admitting an injury, or a cold, feels a bit like admitting that my theories are wrong. All the other paleo people don’t get sick, why do I? Don’t vibrams mean that I won’t get injured?

I smashed into a box today, while riding in the park. I’ve got a bump on my shin that doesn’t feel to bad, but my shoulder is hella messed up. Hurts like hell. Carrying anything hurts, taking off or putting on a shirt hurts. It’s distracting. It doesn’t hurt hurt, just when I move it. I feel like sleeping for the next two days so that the pain goes away. Ouch.

I’ve been fighting a cold since I moved up here. I don’t know what it is, but I want to blame a combination of altitude, temperature, physical exertion, and the occasional coke or wheat bun. (My coke is still sitting there on my dresser.) Getting smashed probably contributed. 12k iu of D3 seems to be helping, but I still have congestion. Plus a bit of a bloody nose, obviously from the altitude. Bleh.

I pulled my gastrocnemius while running last summer, while wearing my vibrams. I didn’t run for three weeks, and tried to take it easy in the meanwhile. I want to blame it on running itself; on exercise that I hadn’t done — ever, really. I don’t think I’ve ever engaged in this kind of regular physical exercise in my life. Yikes.

I’ve heard that no athlete is ever at 100%; they’re always injured in some way. Injury is a part of exercise. Proper form, stretching, good diet, youth… there are ways to avoid injury, but if you exercise enough injury will come.

I choose to interpret this event as the consequence of eating pizza and drinking coke and not paying attention — because those are things that I want to focus on. Better diet means I skip the mental fog brought on by SAD (and hypothyroidism?), makes me stronger, and helps me heal faster. A cold, even a weak lingering one, is an incentive to eat better, and to stick to what I know.

I’m gonna take some more D3 (and some kinda fat) and go to bed. To rest. Cuz Friday… on Friday, I ride! woooo! god I love being up here.