Category: Random Crap
Get Instant Access to God via Fiverr
I’ve seen some crazy attempts at monetizing the masses on Fiverr. But this has to rank as one of my favourites.
Proof in the pudding that Jesus is out there… if you’ve got five bucks.
I never thought I’d see the day where praying could be outsourced to an Indian call center for five bucks, but that day appears to be drawing ever closer.
“5 dollar make Him holler, honey boo boo…”
What’s next? I’ll tell you what.
I, Finch, will erase your sins for a pint of bitter and a packet of crisps.
Call me for bulk order discounts. Really fucked up shit will require that you order twice.
Offer must end soon. No time wasters.
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Karl Pilkington: Funniest Man on Television
Everything that I aspire to become in life can be summed up in two words: Karl Pilkington.
He’s the star of An Idiot Abroad, which has to be one of the best comedy documentaries in a very long time.
If you haven’t seen it, go and hunt down a copy. The world needs more realists like Karl.
Season trailer:
Episode 1 highlights:
Awesome Karl Pilkington quotes:
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Get Rich, Get Frozen (Wake Me Up In 2097)
I often get a headache when I think about where to invest my Internet Marketing dollars. I don’t want to be building websites forever. Besides, it’s only natural that the next generation will stumble across a medium even ‘newer’ than the Internet. And what happens then? We become dinosaurs, that’s what. Relics to the new youth.
So what’s the best way to invest for the future?
Should I buy stocks? Should I buy more websites? Maybe I should move strategically in to the world of real estate? You know what… screw that. Who needs a long term business when you can splash the cash on immortality?
By paying just $150,000, you can have your body cryogenically frozen in liquid nitrogen and [hopefully] brought back to life in the future. As soon as your heart stops beating, a team of cryogenic experts will descend upon your corpse and have you whisked away to one of many ‘life extension’ facilities. There, you will be stored at a temperature of below -120°C until some lunatic of the future is ready to thaw you out of your metal home.
I’m not making this shit up. Cryonics is a booming industry. Give it 20 years and Tesco will be selling the bloody thing as a gift experience for your loved ones on Christmas Day.
The great hope for cryonic customers is that science will advance to a point where terminal diseases are treatable; where immortality beckons for the rich. Before that, there’s the slightly more obvious matter of learning how to reverse the cryopreservation process.
There are a few popular myths to be debunked. Cryonics is not a ‘treatment for the dead’. It’s simply not feasible to plunge your spade in the nearest grave, weave a little Frankenstein magic, and revive the corpse as good as new. However, there have been many instances where humans have been pronounced dead, and later resuscitated.
The idea of future scientists being able to revive bodies that have been dead for days is a slap in the face to what’s known as the information-theoretic criterion for death – a term given for bodies where the cell structure and chemistry is so royally shagged that preservation would be a waste of time. ‘Real Death’, if you will.
In modern times, the lapse between a heart that no longer beats and medical death is restricted to a few minutes. Cryonics relies on this window of opportunity (what a morbid term) to immediately preserve the customer so that resuscitation can be resumed at a date in the very distant future.
Time is very much of the essence. If your corpse isn’t recovered swiftly, the shot at preservation is gone. If it’s reached in time, however, the body can be maintained indefinitely in the same state. Decades or even centuries may pass until its ready to be ‘recovered’, but the window of opportunity will still be there. The rest is down to science.
It’s a concept that reeks of science fiction, but one that is surging in popularity across the United States. Christ, just weeks ago, Larry King announced his intention to be frozen. Frankly, I was surprised that he hadn’t already undergone the procedure. Well, if it looks dead and sounds dead…
I find the idea of waking up in a different decade to be hugely intriguing. Maybe that’s because I’ve been watching too much Mad Men, but wouldn’t it be cool to refresh stats on a website you built over 50 years ago? Or is that thought too geeky? No doubt many Internet Marketers would still have zero commission to their name.
There is, of course, a religious debate to be had around this issue. Is it wrong to ‘play God’ where life and death are concerned? Honestly, I don’t have much time for the naysayers. In the last century, we’ve played God countless times in a bid to advance society through sophisticated drugs and better medical practice. We’ve been highly successful. Reversing the process of death is the final frontier, and it may not be as far fetched as it sounds.
If you’re interested, there’s one last dilemma to get your head around.
Neuropreservation vs. Whole Body Preservation
For a ‘budget’ option, you can opt for neuropreservation, which freezes only your head and is about $60,000 lighter on the wallet. Should you awaken in the next century, you will retain your sense of self, but should probably be prepared for some epic counseling that will make John Travolta’s problems in Face-Off seem like a breeze in the fucking park. That’s because your body will need to be ‘regrown’.
The deluxe plan does exactly what it says on the tin. Whole Body Preservation… or as I like to call it, the Austin Powers package. Be sure to embrace death with your best cheeky chappy pose. It’s going to be a long night, so you better give immortality that Kodak moment it deserves…

Is this legitimately what being frozen in time looks like? Answers on a postcard, please. I’d have it written in to my contract that I must be displayed in a glass box by reception at all times, or next to the water cooler…
If you don’t have $150,000 to spare but do like the idea of living forever, fear not. There are life insurance policies that can be taken out for as little as $30/month, with the beneficiary going to your cryonics agency. These fund the entire cost of the procedure.
Most importantly, you must remember to die gracefully. Messy deaths are generally frowned upon. Mowing your car in to a tree trunk, for example, is pretty much just shooting yourself in the balls. Worse, arguably. I would hazard a guess that terms and conditions apply, so please do read them carefully.
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Wanderfly, A Very Cool Trip Planner
If you love to travel, you’re probably somewhat snobbish about the gazillions of trip planning tools. I’ve always been hesitant to use them. Where is the fun in automating your entire trip? It’s nice to get creative beyond whatever Expedia is recommending as a bestseller.
Wanderfly is a trip planning tool with a difference. It’s quite unlike anything I’ve used before, and for once, it shows the unique appeal of the destinations on offer.
You simply select where you’re leaving from and define what you’re interested in (art vs extreme sports, adventure vs nightlife)
Choose a budget per person, a time for traveling, and the intended duration of the trip. Once you’re done, hit the search button and lo and behold – Wanderfly churns out a huge variety of destinations, each presented with a rich illustrated background to give you a flavour of what to expect.
It’s the visual presentation that makes Wanderfly so addictive to use.
Instead of just listing out hotel prices and the things to do – which are only a click away if you need them – each destination is themed in such a way that you can probably tell just by looking if it’s a viable travel option.
My only complaint with the service is the heavy American bias.
There are American cities listed that must surely only be desirable to travel to if you’re actually living in America and on a very tight budget.
It skews the results somewhat, in the same way that a UK based service would seem very out of touch if it recommended Skegness to anybody outside Skegness.
No offence, Skegness. I’m sure you’re beautiful inside.
The occasional dodgy recommendation aside, Wanderfly is well worth a look if you’re feeling the travel bug on your Friday afternoon.
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One Website That Launched My Career
A common trait you will find in many online professionals is the background of being self-taught. It’s something we seem to be very proud of, a sort of retrospective fuck you to academia.
Perhaps the single greatest appeal, and challenge, of making a living online, is the ease of which you can get started. There’s no degree necessary, no interview process, and each individual takes on full responsibility for his or her self.
We should consider ourselves lucky that money can be made with just a modem and a little common sense.
Unfortunately, modems are in heavy supply. And so is the number of would-be entrepreneurs who think they have what it takes to make a living online. It appears that some people are better at self-teaching than others.
I made the decision when I was just 16 years old that I wanted to run my own business. It didn’t happen overnight, and thank god it didn’t. I was a trainwreck through the mid 2000s. After dropping out from school, I spent the next 18 months lurching from one disasterous idea to the next – both in my personal life, and professionally.
When Facebook Timeline is released, don’t be surprised if 2004-2007 is obliterated from my records. It already has been in my head.
My only other job to that point was a 3 month stint at Wickes in Hayes. If God decided to stick the vacuum in the arse end of society, he would probably start with Hayes. It’s a genuinely ugly place.
I wanted my own business, and I wanted to work online. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my days surfing double decker buses straight out of a stabbing scene on the Uxbridge Road.
There aren’t many IT companies that would take on an 18 year old who dropped out of school, and the IT industry was where I saw my future. So I had to develop experience and knowledge on my lonesome.
Private classes were expensive (Baker Street, London…ouch) and they still left me short on opportunities. I went to a couple of job interviews but was finding myself squeezed out of the reckoning. Too young, not enough drive, bad haircut, whatever. I think the most I had going for myself was a strange immunity to taking it personally.
That’s when I stumbled across VTC, a plain looking site that may have just saved my career when it was threatening to flatline.
If you’re going to get a headstart on the kids attending university, you really need information and training materials for your chosen profession. And lots of them.
Back then, when I discovered VTC, it was like hitting the jackpot.
VTC has over 98000 tutorials covering almost every programming language, application or software you’re ever likely to use. For anybody with web development tingling their taste buds, it’s an excellent one stop resource where you can learn as many basics as you can put your mind to.
Eventually my crazy self-teaching binge paid off and I was able to capture a junior web developer job on the back of my portfolio (and probably my desire to learn).
Two years later and I was hired by an agency in Central London, again as the youngest employee in the company. I stayed there for 15 months before quitting to go full-time with my affiliate business. It wasn’t a particularly researched decision. I woke up one morning, checked my affiliate stats, saw my first day of £1000 profit and that was that. Au revoir, mon petit 9 to 5.
I was 21 when I made that jump, right in the middle of the recession. While many of my friends were still labouring through University, I felt an enormous weight of gratitude towards that one site – VTC – which gave me the tools to burst in to an industry that I was a complete virgin to.
If you have the right attitude, the Internet typically has the right resources to launch your career. Remember though, self-teaching is only an option if you have the discipline to execute a kick to your own balls when you deserve one.
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2011′s Craziest Week for Technology and Science?
So who still hates the new Facebook layout?
It’s amazing how the attitude of social network users shifts from hour to hour, let alone day to day. On Wednesday, my feed was a swarm of complaints, awash with keyboard warriors vowing “Enough is enough, I’ll never use this disgraceful clustermess ever again. Consider yourself disowned, Zuckerberg. It’s OVER!”
A few hours later and the same unsettled crowd could be spotted on Facebook Chat, presumably sniffing around for replies and likes to their outbursts.
Facebook seem to be back in everybody’s good books after news of the innovative Timeline, which seems to be a scrapbook of sorts allowing every facet of your life to be captured and spotlighted. It has definitely been interesting to watch the reaction, and you can activate your Timeline today by following these steps.
While the social web is busy working out how to set Spotify to avoid posting their One Direction fetishes to Facebook, the rest of us have been evaluating what this means for businesses going forward.
How will marketing on Facebook change?
I think the most significant development, addressed here by Christopher Penn, will be the isolation of how we actually reach customers. ‘Liking‘ has proven to be a profitable viral beast over the last year, but it’s tough to see how the new interface will allow that to continue with all the signs pointing towards apps as the new prerequisite for trends to go viral.
It seems to me that Facebook is serving up two options for small businesses. Build an app, or buy some ads. For those of you have dabbled in Facebook Ads over the last six months, I think I can safely say that there’s never been a worse time to use the self-serve Ads platform. Escalating click prices, rising competition… almost enough to make me build the damn app myself, whatever it takes to avoid auctioning my left kidney for $2/click.
Will Google+ seize the day and roll out a suitable alternative for businesses to advertise on their network? I have to ask, seriously, what would be the fucking point? The only people who would bother to advertise are those who have something to sell to Robert Scoble or Chris Brogan. Last time I checked, they were the only people showing up in my feed.
Social sniping aside, the last few days have been eventful. Facebook certainly isn’t the only big news of the week.
Some scientists managed to break the speed of light. Pretty impressive. The most I ever broke in science was a Bunsen burner and a few pencils on my head out of boredom. How times change when you’re no longer a 15 year old prat with bridges to burn.
I hate to blow stories out of proportion, especially on the subject of science (which I massacred at school), but this really could be huge if the results are verified. The sort of revelation that leaves Einstein blushing in his grave.
If time travelling atoms aren’t enough of a seismic mindfuck for you, how about the ability to record your dreams and play back the footage on a screen? That’s what this UC Berkeley experiment seems to be paving the way for.
Clearly it’s been a pretty incredible week for technology and science enthusiasts alike.
So go ahead and make the most of your weekend, I’m sure we’ll be back to stock market scaremongering by Monday.
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Got a book, service, product or something entrepreneurial you want showcased on this blog? Traffic has grown over 300% on the site in the last month alone. Check out advertising rates, or get in touch if you think it’d be suitable for an honest unbiased review.
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Subscribe to my new FinchBlogs RSS feed. And if you don’t already follow me, add Finch to your Twitter. Merci beaucoup!
Retire At 21, Feel Like An Idiot At 22
Dear Trusty Employees,
It is with great sadness that I announce my impending departure from our Company. I have decided to retire from all business so that I can put my feet up in the leafy suburbs, desperately attempting to convince myself that there’s more to life than work.
I’m sure you will have many questions. Why now? Why so young?
Please accept my decision. It shows that I’ve achieved more than you in a shorter space of time.
I am greatly looking forward to tackling the next challenge in my life: puberty.
Yours truly,
Young Retired Dipshit
Many people consider retirement the reward for a lifetime of turmoil. It’s the bucket of gold at the end of the rainbow. The day of reckoning when we can say “I’ve done my bit“, and stop worrying about surviving from one pay cheque to the next.
The Internet age has spawned a generation of online entrepreneurs who are capable of retiring in their 20s. Does Mark Zuckerberg need to worry about his financial future? I suppose he does if he likes to keep track of his billions.
Even though Zuckerberg can retire, I’m positive he won’t. And there’s good reason for that sentiment.
The next step after retirement is death.
Who would want to retire in their 20s? The idea gets bounced around with prestige and glamour. There are websites dedicated to the ambition of retiring young, but I shudder to imagine how somebody capable of assembling the finances so young would react to the transition of pottering around a garden and writing Christmas cards in September.
It’s a paradox if ever I heard one.
When you have nothing left to work for, you have nothing left to live for. Anybody who believes otherwise might as well go hang out with Macaulay Culkin. Smoke some pot, watch Home Alone 2 and revel in your own waste of potential.
Time and time again, I have friends cross-examining me on the nature of my work. In their eyes, I’m retired. I make money online, which is as good as twatting around on Facebook while the dollar bills grow in my fridge, right? They’re wrong.
Even though I work in comfort, there’s rarely a second in the day where work isn’t close to my thoughts. It follows me around like an infection that just won’t shake, so why don’t I learn to forget about work and switch off? It’s simple. I don’t see work as a bad thing.
If you take a human being and strip him of his desire to work towards a goal, what do you have left? An empty shell that’s retired and ready for death. There isn’t much of the person left over.
Work doesn’t have to be employment as you and I know it. It can be charity-based volunteering, or even just a commitment to stay busy. However, the retirement yearned for at unhappy office cubicles is no more than a desire to believe the grass is greener on the other side. It rarely is, and retirement is seldom the experience you crave.
What you really desire is work that you can believe in. You want to spend energy completing tasks where you give half a shit about the end result. Who doesn’t? This is the great illusion of retirement. Giving up a mundane chore isn’t going to fill the void in your life. That void exists because you haven’t felt the passion to get out of bed at 8am out of choice.
If financial independence was all we longed for, millionaires would be happy and averagely paid employees would be jumping from office blocks. Happiness is not a flexible hours agreement, or retirement altogether. It’s the desire to get out of bed. To do something with your plain existence and convince yourself that retirement would only get in the way of all the things you have left to prove.
If that means changing career, go right ahead. We spend a third of our lifetimes at work, or thinking about it, so it makes zero sense to be working for the wrong reasons. The day you wake up and don’t feel an urge to work towards a goal, that’s when you have problems. That’s when retirement will become the death of you.
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Make More Money… By Not Being An Unhealthy Bastard
As far as case studies go, this probably isn’t going to win any awards for innovation.
A few weeks ago, I decided to change my life for the better. I knew that it was time to look myself in the mirror, face up to the truth and ask “Finch, you unhealthy bastard, do you want to be a stud muffin or just a slob who ate all the muffins?”
By saying adios to junk food, crappy eating and lack of sleep, I theorized I could create a lifestyle change that would snowball in to something resembling vitality and full health. This, in turn, would allow me to thrive in the workplace with optimal levels of concentration and focus.
The ultimate goal was an improvement in mind, body and spirit. It was time to say “kiss my balls” to the unhealthy bastard in the mirror, Michael Jackson-style, minus the unhealthy interest in kids.
The Challenge
I spent days, literally days, hunched over a laptop in Cambodia researching the best possible diet to give my body a healing rest from it’s regular abuse. Detoxing is a controversial subject. It’s very hard to strike a balance between listening to the raw food psychopaths who’ll give you dirty scowls for even glancing at a cow in the wrong way, and the All-American Americans who believe eating an entire livestock of chickens isn’t just a delicious choice, but what the chickens wanted.
I decided on a 4 day fruit detox, followed by a slightly more lenient diet that would be more sustainable for my non-commital ass in the long run. Minimal processed foods, minimal caffeine, no added salts and sugars.
I haven’t tasted alcohol for over 6 weeks now, so that was never a problem. No doubt my tolerance will be tested when I return to London, however.
Surviving The Detox
For those of you who haven’t tried a fruit detox, the first effects are typically a raging headache and the growing despair that life is not worth living. “How am I to survive if I don’t find a kitten to kill soon?”
Detox symptoms vary from person to person. The heavier the symptoms, the more toxins you’ve accumulated in your body that are struggling to come out.
What follows is a detoxing process known as “retracing”. This is where your body undergoes the strange sensation of re-experiencing recent illnesses and weaknesses. If you didn’t know any better, you’d assume that the detox is adding to your woes rather than working for the greater good. But it’s all part of the recovery so don’t go quitting while the going is tough.
Your body is actually flushing harmful toxins in to your bloodstream at a rapid rate, much faster than the body can dispose of. The toxin-filled blood rushes to the brain and creates a surreal sensation where you experience many different pains and illness symptoms in short bursts.
The symptoms were always there. But it’s only when your body is in “recovery mode” that the organs can actually deal with them. Of course, this triggers the instinctive “I feel worse than when I started. Somebody get me a burger. Cheeseburger. Shit, it’s getting worse. Get me some extra cheese with that…”
This period of headaches, fatigue, volatile stomach reactions and irritability lasted for a couple of days on my detox. Caffeine withdrawals can lead to massive headaches, and if you like your sugar – which I don’t – you’re also going to suffer. My longing for food with meaty texture almost lead to the butchering of a gecko outside my hotel room. It’s not easy to fight your cravings under a barrage of physical aches and pains.
But when the symptoms begin to pass, and here’s the big incentive, you truly do feel a million times better than you did before. Your body begins to accept and use the nutrients of the fruit to your advantage, unleashing enormous swirls of energy and a sense of clarity the likes of which I’m still wondering how I ever did without before.
It probably helped that my detox was aided by an endless supply of fresh coconut and grapefruit juice, two of the most renowned superfruits in the world. I have since re-introduced lean meats in to my diet, but never at the expense of leafy greens and an overcompensation of fruits. I’ve replaced alcohol with smoothies, diet coke with water, and coffee with green tea. The effects are here for me to see, and I’m very happy with them.
33% Diet, 33% Exercise, 33% Rest
No healthy lifestyle can be sustained by simply eating the right foods. It’s just as important to exercise and get a sufficient amount of sleep. Even though I have a gym and swimming pool downstairs, I’ve often found my work “too pressing” to find time to exercise as much as I should have. That is changing by simply forcing a work-out in to my daily schedule, no matter how many servers are crashing and burning around me at the time.
My sleeping habits, ironically, were fixed when I started my detox. The overwhelming fatigue that I felt after a few days of eating only fruit was enough to get my body clock back on track. The sensation of waking up naturally at 8am, fresh, energised and blessed with clarity is a million miles from how I felt just two months ago. Then I would slip out of the bedroom at 1pm, feeling just as lethargic as I had when my body finally passed out the night before.
A good sleeping pattern makes such a huge difference to what I feel capable of achieving in a day, and certainly to my attention span while I’m trying to achieve it.
Many entrepreneurs argue that they’re “not morning people” and work most efficiently at night. While this may be true for some, I would bet that the majority are simply closet insomniacs making the best out of a bad situation.
Finch’s Sickly Generic Final Thoughts
Striving for a healthy lifestyle isn’t something that should be born out of wanting to make more money. There’s no point in stacking towers of dollar bills if you don’t have the health and peace of mind to enjoy them. This is something I have struggled and grappled with for a while.
I see it as a common trait of young entrepreneurs. We have so much money, and such little sense of value. If your work ethic is harming your health, the only future you’re contributing to is your own self-destruction.
While I can say that the changes definitely did improve my focus, concentration and work productivity, these are secondary to the satisfaction that came from looking after myself and actually feeling a sense of working with my body, rather than dragging it kicking and screaming through the night against it’s will.
Western society, particularly America, is riddled with quick fix cures for conditions that can’t possibly heal with the popping of a pill. Papering over cracks is the term that springs to mind. But that doesn’t stop people from trying. Many of us will find any excuse, or quick fix, to continue living unhealthily, until it becomes impossible through the damage we’ve already inflicted to ourselves.
If you’re going to try a detox followed by a change in lifestyle, be prepared for several days of complete and utter Hell. It gets a lot worse before it starts to get better.
Be truthful with yourself, get educated, and find ways to cut out the crap that’s holding you back. Your mind and body will reward you by working at their full potential. And if you’ve been operating “half-arsed” for as long as I had, this can feel like an incredible burden lifted.
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