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’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.

The 4-Hour Workweek

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!

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.

I used to think the idea was kind of foolish. If you want to change something, why wait til the beginning of the year? Why eat bad or not work out for a few more days so that you can wait til the start of a week, or a holiday, or birthday? I’ve changed my mind.

The day serves as a marker. More than that; an anchor. It’s a clear, definite thing. Saying “I haven’t eaten any flour since that Wednesday at 2:37pm” isn’t very inspiring, or easy to remember either. But everyone knows what a new year’s resolution is, saying “wheat-free since 2009″, and even counting the days, then weeks, then months, then years is easier when you choose a notable day to start the diet.

I was celebrating my birthday this weekend, and I had a slice of pizza. I decided, one more, end the year with a bang. And some indigestion, and some questioning of why I’d want to eat crappy pizza anyway. But I can also say: this year, since I turned XX, I haven’t eaten any flour or drank any soda. Right now that’s not much, just a few days, but the start of a new year of my life carries some weight. It carries more weight than “that Wednesday last April.”

Some people have an easy time making these changes. I don’t know why I don’t, but I know I’ve had problems. I’ve cheated now and then, gone back to old bad habits, and flirted around with dodgy interpretations of the rules. Will it work this time? It has so far, and it will continue by god!

I also bought a coke. It’s sitting on my dresser. I talked with a friend yesterday about giving up the habit, and I was thinking I’d just swear not to buy another one. He suggested that I buy one, and put it at the front of a fridge, as a reminder. I like the reminder idea. I find it much easier to keep to a promise when I’m constantly reminded of it.

Cheating is a mental dodge. You know you’re not supposed to, you know it’s a bad idea, you’ve seen all the dozens of reasons to stop. But if you just push it out of your mind a little, just blank out a little bit, evade the reality, forget the truth, and pretend…. yeah, that’s cheating. My can of coke is a crutch.

Really I’d prefer not to use crutches. I’d like to walk around free, confident in my strength, in my ability to not use them. But more than that, I want to not eat flour or drink soda. Fuck ego. Forget about fortitude, resolve, and discipline. I don’t want to eat that shit.

Writing things down also helps, as does telling friends and strangers. When you take a commitment you made to yourself and tell other people about it, it’s harder to break it. They’ll know. Whatever tricks it takes, I want to be healthy.

I’ve been riding small parks lately, getting used to the jumps, doing boxes, and trying out the pipe. I’m comfortable with the jumps and boxes now, and I’m thinking: where next? How do I progress? My two choices are to continue in the easy bits for a few more days, or to try something steeper, longer, and scarier.

Fear is obviously a great motivator. I don’t like falling hard. Most of my falls are soft enough that I don’t even feel sore, but a hard injury (like a bruised tailbone) is annoying enough that it makes me not want to try anything risky for a few weeks. That’s what’s kept me out of the more difficult parks. Plus I could be doing more even in the beginner parks, like spins — I haven’t even done a 180 yet.

I did challenge myself a bit more today. Not much; just some boxes I had avoided before, mostly because I had to come at them with speed after already having hit a few jumps. There’s a semi-pipe in the park I rode in this morning and I tried that a bit.

Bleh. Really, the question is: should I push myself to do more in the comfy place, or go try someplace new and see what happens? I guess it really doesn’t matter where I go as long as I’m pushing myself, and learning something.

I’m off to go hit the park, then. Maybe 11 (Disco Park) then 12 (for some blue runs), or 7 (for a more difficult park). I’ll decide between here and the bus stop!

My first day out since the day 10 review, I realized I was having trouble making turns. I went to June with a friend, and right turns were just spooking me. I wasn’t making the transition from left to right turn smoothly. My board is set up goofy, but it’s fairly neutral. I frequently ride switch. Actually, I’d ride switch to give my feet, ankles, and legs a break — ie to work both legs equally. Plus, get used to riding switch. So I was having trouble transitioning heel to toe when switch, and toe to heel when regular: ie right turns. Which was weird, because it wasn’t a heel-to-toe thing, or toe-to-heel; it was right turns. Anyway, despite the fact that I had been going down blue-black slopes, I decided to return to gentler slopes and start making a bunch of right turns. It took me a couple days to figure it out.

That’s one of the fun things about snowboarding to me. It’s all balance. Lean forward, lean back, lean right or left, tilt the board, pull up on the nose, whatever. Riding well requires a good sense of your own body and it’s a feeling I really enjoy.

I want to get into park and pipe riding, so after a couple days of just making simple turns, I rode into one of the newbie parks. My first day, I just went over the rollers (a mound of snow with a fixed cross-section left to right and a rounded profile when going over it). It took be a couple days to get used to hitting the rollers straight on, and with speed.

Then we got some powder, and I spent a day riding through the trees and the ungroomed bits on the side of the trail. It was a ton of fun! I hunted for untracked paths through the trees. I rode a bit of powder before, and this wasn’t too deep (about 6 inches), so I wound up working on making turns in the powder, especially on steeper slopes. I know I’ll need more practice in steep powder, but it was great to head through the trees, dart across a trail, then back into the trees again!

Then it was back into the park. At this point, I was more comfortable going left-foot first (which would normally be called a regular stance, cept for my board being mounted goofy means that this is actually switch). So on the non-park bits, I’d ride right-foot first to get better at those turns, then back to left-foot-first for the jumps and whatnot. Terminology is confusing; I wish there was an accepted term for riding left-foot first, for riding mounted-forward-foot first, etc. Really there’s just “goofy” (board is mounted backwards) and “switch” (riding reverse to how the board is mounted), and everything else requires a lot more words…. I figure most people rarely ride switch. It’s a big deal in tricks, and evidently not something most people do much, but … meh. Anyway.

I hit the rollers for a couple days, then started hitting jumps, then got more comfortable hitting jumps at speed and getting air. I’m still not jumping much over the jump; ie pumping my legs to get a boost. There’s a couple small parks; one (Disco) has smaller jumps on a shallower slope, so easier to learn jumps. The other small park (Wonderland) is a bit steeper, and the jumps themselves are shaped a bit more aggressively. I’d usually ride one for a couple hours, head across the mountain to the other, then hit that one for a bit.

Although I’d ridden a box or two before, today was really the first day I did boxes. Still haven’t hit a rail.

View from the top

I also went back to the steeps today. It’ll take me a couple more days to really get used to it. And I also took the gondola up to the top of the mountain. It was incredibly beautiful. They have a great center in the station at the top of the mountain which points out nearby peaks and has a bit of history (both human and geologic) of the region. I peered down the slopes and… couldn’t see it. It’s not a cliff, but it’s effin steep. I got back into the gondola and rode that down.

Next weekend, I’m taking a park-and-pipe camp. Should be interesting. Before that, I’ll be working on both steeps and the park, going for rails, longer boxes, and bigger jumps. They do split the camp up according to skill level. I have a feeling it’ll be me and a bunch of 13-year-olds, but what the hell! hehe

See ya on Monday.

Burton Cattleman's Rail Jam

There’s a rail jam here in town on Saturday. I’m not competing, but one of my roommates is. Until you get to the big pro competitions, they’re really structured for entrants, not spectators. I think the rail jams are a bit different; footage and photos I’ve seen of other rail jams look like parties with some snowboarding going on nearby. There was a Gatorade Free Flow Tour event here a couple weeks ago, which is an amateur event for the 21-and-under crowd. Spectators? Feh! Spectators can go f themselves!

When I played “pro” chess, it was the same way. There wasn’t really room for families and friends, and of course no effort made to draw the public in. But chess isn’t much of a spectator sport. But is that because they don’t try? I played in some video-game competitions and they were the same way, even though there was a much larger group of spectators — usually friends and clan-mates of the competitors.

Online coverage of tournaments is mostly the same. Some info for competition entrants, tables of results, but no flavor, no reporting, no hype, no info for spectators or people that just want to follow the sport.

Magazines like to push personalities. This was one of the keys to the success of poker on television: drama. They turned the players into characters (or characatures), then pit them against each other and exaggerated past conflicts, as if there was something personal going on behind the scenes. It worked for the Travel Channel; they were able to make money from it.

Money would be the obvious reason why it’s difficult to be a sport enthusiast. No-one’s figured out how to make money from it. No-one wants to offer me coverage of upcoming snowboarding competitions, competitor profiles, behind-the-scenes looks at training and tournaments, and info for spectators that want to go watch a competition live. As with poker coverage, I think that it’s a Field of Dreams thing: if you build it, they will come.

The “obvious” answer would be to go offer that stuff myself. Sadly, I don’t have the time. Could I outsource it, 4HWW style? Hmm.

1. synthetic T4
2. natural thyroid extract (Armour Thyroid)
3. low-dose naltrexone
4. nothing

Doctors will ask for a TSH test if you think you have hypothyroidism, or if for some other reason they suspect that you might be hypothyroid. TSH stands for “thyroid stimulating hormone”; it’s put out by the pituitary gland in response to the production of TRH by the hypothalamus. Patients with hypothyroidism and low free T3 and T4 levels will have high TSH levels, but I haven’t found any research directly linking T3 or T4 to TRH production. It seems to make sense, but there’s no knowledge there; just theory. For the most part the theory works. But not always.

And that’s really why I’m writing this post. Some people with hypothyroidism report that some symptoms improve when they start taking synthetic T4 (basically bypassing production from the thyroid), but that other symptoms persist. These people report much improved symptoms when they switch to a natural thyroid hormone replacement (ie Armour Thyroid), which contains not a synthetic T4 but a natural T4, as well as T3, and a bit of T2 and T1. T4 is the storage form of the thyroid hormone; T3 is the active form used by cells. (The number indicates the number of atoms of iodine in the molecule.)

Some people have trouble with T4-to-T3 conversion; some have adrenal fatigue; there’s a whole range of problems. Most doctors give you a TSH test, look at the number, then prescribe Synthroid and tell you any remaining symptoms are just because you’re a lazy fuck and should stop whining. Yeah, I haven’t been happy with my doctors, and many other hypothyroid patients haven’t either. Anyway, the most common cause of hypothyroidism is what’s called Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis; it’s an autoimmune disease, in which your own immune system attacks your thyroid, preventing the production of thyroid hormone. Research on molecular mimicry by Dr Loren Cordain suggests that this process is started when foreign proteins cross from the digestive system into the bloodstream; prevention is to not have a leaky gut, perhaps caused by grains, one reason why us paleo people avoid eating them. And one damn good reason why you should never feed grain to your kids.

The third treatment option is what’s called low dose naltrexone. I won’t write much on it here other than to say that the theory behind it’s effectiveness is to tell the immune system to calm the f down, which then allows the thyroid to do its own thing.

The fourth option isn’t really an option. That is, I don’t suggest it. I did feel great when I went off of my meds for a couple months, but I also changed my diet and started some serious exercise, too. If the molecular mimicry theory is correct, then once you’ve got Hashimoto’s, you’ve got memory B cells that know what the antigen looks like. What happens in molecular mimicry is that a protein gets from your gut into your bloodstream; the immune system recognizes the protein as foreign and produces antibodies. Hashimoto’s is when that foreign protein is a molecular mimic of thyroid gland cells. (People with different genetics or different proteins will get other autoimmune diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis or multiple sclerosis.) To the immune system, the foreign protein and the thyroid look like the same protein; the immune system then attacks the thyroid. Reducing the presentation of foreign proteins to the immune system might help reduce symptoms, but it seems that there is no cure for Hashimoto’s; you’ve basically vaccinated yourself against your thyroid gland, and there’s no way to remove those memory B cells.

Eating iodine-rich foods or supplements might help; some recent talk in the blogosphere suggests that 8-50 milligram range iodine supplement is needed; Lugol’s and Iodoral were two suggestions in the comments over at Richard’s site.

My current T4 refills are up in another month. I plan on switching to Armour. Meanwhile, I take iodine, but crappy microgram amounts; I’ll try and find Lugol’s and do that for a month.