Want to be a super-hero and help save the world? Now’s your chance!

I am delighted to announce a new eco-initiative for this year. In 2008 we tackled the North Pacific Garbage Patch by reducing our use of disposable plastic cups, water bottles, and grocery bags. In 2009 we reduced our carbon footprints by walking more and driving less (or rowing more and flying less, in my case). So how were we going to top that?

We decided to round off the Pacific eco-campaigns by inviting you to become an Eco Hero. All you have to do is to log at least one Green Deed every day. For each Green Deed you’ll get points, and as you move up the points scale you’ll be awarded medals. Do more than one Green Deed a day, and you win more points!

Each week, the greenest of all our Greendoers will receive a special prize, donated by our sponsors SonyEricsson, who are giving away their eco-friendly Green Heart mobile phones, and DaKine, who have donated laptop bags made using their new Re-Gen bag technology. These aren’t available in the shops until the summer – so this is an exclusive offer especially for our Eco Heroes!

Green Deeds can be anything you like – pick up trash from your neighbourhood while you’re out walking, join an eco organization, write a letter to your newspaper or elected representative, start growing your own veg, start composting – whatever you like. Feel free to get ideas and inspiration from other citizens of our Greendom. Your Green Deeds will be scrutinised by the community – thumbs up means you did a great job, thumbs down means your Green Deed needs to go greener.

By playing the game, you’ll be connecting into a worldwide community of aspiring Eco Heroes. We hope that this initiative will take on a life of its own. I am just the first in what we hope will be a long line of Eco Ambassadors, leading the way to a better, healthier, greener future.

We gave a sneak preview to the National Geographic audiences last week, and 1,200 people have already signed up by SMS. The concept has received an enthusiastic response from everyone that we have mentioned it to. We’ll be putting out a press release next week to announce it to the world at large.

So how do you get started? At the moment we’re in the pre-registration phase. You can register your interest by going to the Eco-Heroes website and entering your name and email address. Of course we promise that we won’t pass these details on to anybody else.

Or you can register by SMS, by sending a message to 360-202-6062. Add +1 to the front if you are outside the US. Please use this standard format, to save Brennan from a lot of manual corrections:

Your Name, [email protected]

Please note the comma and space between your name and your email address.

This doesn’t commit you to anything at this stage. It just means that you will get an email from us when we go fully live around the time of my launch. You won’t have to register again. As soon as we go live, you can start logging your Green Deeds, and start saving the world!

Huge kudos to Brennan Novak for all his hard work in making this happen. The Earth thanks you, Brennan!

I’d like to say a huge thank you to everybody who came to hear me speak in Seattle over the last couple of days, and the teams from National Geographic and Benaroya Hall who made it all possible. Thanks, guys, for creating the setting for me to shine. In a way I had the easy bit – all I had to do was turn up and talk for an hour.

Judging by the feedback afterwards – in person at the book signings, on Facebook, and through messages via my website contact form, it seems that the presentations went down really well. So it was well worth the extra effort I put in. I was a bit nervous about the new format – I am accustomed to doing video-talk-video-talk, and this time I had been requested to go for more of a slideshow approach. This exercised a new part of my brain. But my rehearsals paid off and I felt very comfortable onstage, even in front of an audience of 2,500 people.

And the best news is that 1,200 people signed up to our Eco Heroes initiative via our very cool new SMS registration system. Thanks to Brennan for putting in the hours to get that up and running in time. I don’t have time to tell you more about Eco Heroes now, but I promise I will do so in my next blog. But if you want a sneak preview, take a look at our pretty pre-registration page at the Eco Heroes website.

Here are a few photos that Dan Beaupre took at Benaroya Hall last night. Enjoy!

Next stop – TED Mission Blue in the Galapagos in a couple of weeks…..

A few days ago I received the unofficial attendee list for the TED Mission Blue conference, where I am due to speak next month. As my eyes panned down the list my jaw hit the floor. My hair stood on end. My heart pounded and my butterflies fluttered. And my mouth expanded into a huge giddy grin of amazed disbelief.

This was the A list. Big time.

The renowned marine explorer Dr Sylvia Earle, in whose honour TED Mission Blue is being held

They and I will be part of a select gathering of 100 people on board a ship for 4 days together. There is every chance I will get to speak with amazingly famous people – or at the very least present in front of them for my own 18 minutes of fame. I was gobsmacked, terrified, and exhilarated, all at once.

Unfortunately I am not at liberty to divulge any of the names. To followers of my Tweets, the biggest name on the list – a major Hollywood star – is now known as “Insert Name”.

Whether or not Insert Name turns up (and I’ll believe it only when I see it), the implications of this are considerably further-reaching than just a one-off event in the Galapagos. I realised that I am moving into the Big League. So I’d better grow up fast and get used to it. This presentation had better be darned good – but more than that, it was time for me to revisit my vision of the future. I had outgrown my current vision.

6 years ago, when I decided to row the Atlantic (and yes, I knew even then that the Pacific was the likely encore) I had a very detailed mental image of how it would pan out: how I would spend my time, what I would do with the attention around my adventures, what I wanted to say, and who I wanted to be and who I wanted to associate with.

Last year on the ocean, one night as I lay out on the deck of my boat when it was too stuffy to sleep inside the cabin, I gazed up at the stars and thought back over the last few years of my life, and realised it had all come true. When I first had that vision, I had no idea how I was going to get from the life I had then to the life I wanted to have. But somehow, little by little, I had consistently taken step after baby step in the right direction, and now here I was, exactly where I had dreamed of being.

So now it is time to figure out where I want to go next. Aspire, achieve, advance. The achievement is not the end – it is just the stepping stone on to the next, bigger and better achievement.

Blue sky thinking - ample opportunity coming right up

This weekend I went for a couple of long walks to think about it all, and have started to evolve a vision for the next phase of my life. It needs work yet, but I’ve got a 100-day thinking opportunity coming right up, so I’ll have plenty of time to refine it and flesh it out until it exists as a vividly real future reality in my imagination. If you can dream it, you can be it. The subconscious can’t tell the difference between something that really happened and something you imagined, which is why visualisation works so well. Success feels as real as if it has already happened.

For more on this, here’s a blog I wrote from the ocean last summer that mentions my obituary exercise, which led directly to my vision of my future as I wanted it to be.

I also found this video very useful – David Allen on Getting Things Done. Or take a look at his website to find out more about how to take a vision and make it real.

Meanwhile, I’m busy trying to figure out how to impress the socks off this prestigious and influential audience – and how to lose 20 pounds in 3 weeks. For some reason my visualisations of a skinnier me don’t help much when my stomach starts rumbling. Hey, I’m only human!

Buddhism tells us that the origin of suffering is attachment. In a very un-Buddhist way I’ve become terribly attached to my iPhone, and I’m hoping the suffering won’t be too great when I have to go cold turkey when I set out again across the Pacific. Here is how frighteningly integrated into my day my iPhone has become.

[If you don't have an iPhone, there are still some goodies here that run on other smartphones. But be warned - it might make you go iPhone...]

My most-used apps on my iPhone home page

7am: Wake up when iPhone alarm clock (standard iPhone app) goes off. Bell Tower is my sound of choice – not too traumatic. If I’ve woken up before the alarm, I might have spent a few minutes lying in bed checking emails and Facebook – on my iPhone. Review VisionBoard and decide how I can move closer to my goals today.

Get up, weigh self. Wince. Record weight on iStayFit.

Go to gym. Check iStayFit to see what workouts I’m doing today. Cardio first – put in earbuds and listen to podcasts on iPod app, or music on Last.fm. Use PushupFu, CrunchFu, and SquatFu (all available from GymFu) to set workouts and count reps using the inbuilt iPhone motion sensor. Record reps and resistance of weights session on iStayFit.

Home for breakfast. Record calories on DailyBurn.

Head to office (aka Dog River Coffee Shop). Check in on FourSquare. Notice that Brennan is still beating me on points. How does he do it?!

Review To Do list on Things. Synchronise between laptop and iPhone to upload the To Do items I recorded on the phone during yesterday’s meetings. My flight itinerary to the Galapagos has arrived from the TED organisers. I email it to TripIt.com, which will automatically generate appointments in iCal for my flights, and will alert me to any last-minute flight delays.

After working for a couple of hours, drive into Portland for a meeting. Pick out destination from Contacts, and the TomTom application shows the route and verbally gives me directions. I have a few brainwaves during the one-hour drive. Record voice messages on Note2Self, which get saved as MP3 files and automatically mailed to my email Inbox. Think of a few emails I need to send, so I use iTalk2Email to record and send them to the relevant people.

Arrive in Portland. Manage to find a parking space, but it’s a distance from my meeting. Use G-Park to record the location for later reference. Set the alarm to alert me when the parking meter will run out. Use Google Maps to navigate myself on foot to my meeting.

While I’m walking a text alert comes in via TrackThis to tell me that my new solar recharger has been delivered to the house in Hood River.

I arrive at the meeting a bit early so I wait in reception. I’ve had some ideas while I’ve been driving, so I jot them down in a mindmap using iThoughts. The app sends the mindmap in multiple formats to my email account, so I can work on it in Novamind later on my laptop. I still have some time to spare, so I catch up on some articles I didn’t have time to read while I was online earlier. I use one-click buttons in the Firefox browser to save them to Evernote if I’m certain I want to keep them long-term, or Instapaper for things I will read once and discard.

The meeting begins. Instead of exchanging business cards, we Bump our iPhones together and our contact details are automatically posted to each other’s Contacts. Someone doesn’t have an iPhone, so I borrow her business card and use Cardreader to take a photo and the app scans the details into my Contacts using optical character recognition. At the end of the meeting I take a photo of us all with Gorillacam – it has a self-timer so we can all be in the picture. I use TweetDeck to post the photo as a Twitpic to illustrate my Tweet about the meeting. I also send it as a postcard to my mother, using Postino. She likes to know where I am and who I’m meeting.

I’d promised to give Brennan a shout so we could get together to do some more work on our Eco Heroes website, so I check on Vicinity to see what coffee shops are in the area. You’re never far from a coffee shop in Portland. That one looks good, and only 146 yards away – a review on Yelp tells me it has free, fast WiFi. Oooh, I get 5 points + 3 points travel bonus on Foursquare! I use Over Here to send Brennan my location via email. He clicks on the link from his iPhone and it shows him where I am on Google Maps.

During our discussion he suggests a book I might like to read. I use the Goodreads app to add it my to-read list and check out the prices online. This will get synced up to my account on the Goodreads website. I see the book is available second-hand on Amazon at a really good price. Oh, why not? I go ahead and order it for delivery within 48 hours.

After my meeting with Brennan I decide to treat myself to a movie. I check out the top movies on IMDb and try to decide between Sherlock Holmes and Invictus. I watch the trailers on Flixster. Both look good, but I am more in the mood for Invictus. Flixster tells me it’s on at the Lloyd Center at 7.05pm. Perfect. There’s a piece of music in the film I really like but don’t know what it’s called. I surreptitiously turn on my phone and use Shazam to identify the track and download it off the iTunes Store. I’m so impressed by Morgan Freeman’s performance I pick him to win the Oscar for Actor in a Leading Role in my Oscars app.

I head back to Hood River, listening to the Invictus soundtrack. I curl up in bed with my iPhone to check up on a few Facebook friends. I log the day’s progress against my goals in the Habit Factor, and count my blessings using the Gratitude app. I finish unwinding by toying with the lava-lamp-like and mesmerising Bloom app for a few minutes, set my iPhone alarm, turn off the light and fall asleep. Another day in iPhone heaven.

Oh, and sometimes I even use it for making phone calls. But that’s so last century….

Other great apps:

Google for iPhone: the voice search is excellent. Alone among voice recognition apps, it seems to understand my accent!

Urbanspoon: great for finding local restaurants.

StarWalk: gorgeous augmented-reality app for identifying stars and constellations.

Tetris: the classic game. I have to limit myself to no more than one game a day as it’s the most entertaining waste of time ever!

Seafood Watch: to find out if your seafood is sustainable and healthy.

Locavore: find your local farmers’ markets, and what foods are in season in your location.

Odyssey and Distant Shore (both by Blimp Pilots): beautiful and for a good cause.

And last but not least, the RozTracker app from Archinoetics. Get it now for tracking Pacific III!

I took this photo by mistake, but I quite like it. Roz with earbuds. In coffee shop, not Pacific.

Yesterday I received the good news that Audible.com are giving me 10 book credits. This certainly won’t be enough to get me all the way to Australia (or wherever), but it all helps. Leo Laporte is also giving me his latest selection of audiobooks, and I still have a few left from my last row, although I’ve listened to all the ones that looked good.

This is the message that I sent to Audible through their website contact form:

Hi Audible

I am a British ocean rower. In 2005 I rowed solo across the Atlantic, and I am now about to embark on the final stage of a 3-stage row across the Pacific, a total distance of 8,000 miles from San Francisco to Australia.

I couldn’t do what I do (at least with any shred of sanity left intact) without my audiobooks. Each of my ocean voyages takes around 100 days, during which time I am totally alone. The audiobooks are a fantastic diversion for me – they help me escape from the monotony of sea and sky, day after day. My imagination can take off into magical worlds of fantasy and sci-fi, or I can educate myself and expand my mind with works of non-fiction.

I have a rule that I can only listen to audiobooks while I am rowing. It helps motivate me to get back on the rowing seat for up to 12 hours of rowing a day. I listen to between 70 and 80 books on each crossing.

I hope you enjoy this glimpse of how much audiobooks mean to me.

With thanks and best wishes
Roz

My growing collection of book-loaded iPods. I put them in a waterproof Aquapac bag when in use at sea.

I received this response:

Thanks very much for writing to us about listening as you row. In the 14 years I’ve been at Audible, I’ve heard lots of stories about where people listen, but yours is the most exciting. I admire what you are doing and am glad that Audible can play even a small role to help.

So now I have to carefully consider how to spend my precious 10 credits. Last year I got 100 credits from Audible.co.uk (and am still hoping they will contribute again, but am still waiting to hear) which completely spoiled me. I didn’t need to be quite so selective. With just 10 credits to play with for now, I am considering how to get most bang for my buck.

My main criteria for an audiobook are:

1. Length: even if it’s a really great book, a 4-hour audiobook loses out to a 24-hour audiobook.

2. Escapism: edifying though non-fiction often is, on the ocean I’ve largely given up on edification. Life is hard enough already. When faced with yet another day of sea and sky and little silver rowboat, my imagination craves stimulation. Books that take me temporarily into a different time and/or place are a welcome escape from row-row-row-reality.

3. Quality of narration: the best book in the world can be ruined by poor narration. Most Audible.com readers are excellent, as I’ve really appreciated when I’ve listened to some readers associated with other audiobook companies. I have an iPod full of free audiobooks – free because they were written over 100 years ago so the copyright has expired, and because the readers are maybe less than professional.  Project Gutenberg and other volunteer organizations are digitizing thousands of public domain works.  I especially enjoy the bits that somehow missed the edit, e.g. in the midst of a Charles Dickens an unexpected aside like: “oh bugger, I messed that bit up – let’s try it again”. This would never happen on Audible.

I’m attaching my wishlists from Audible and Goodreads (Goodreads, incidentally, has a good iPhone app), and would welcome any comments or recommendations.

Audible Wish List

Goodreads Wish List

You can see the books I read on Pacific Stage 1 on my new Bookshelf page. It’s still under development – my wonderful, long-suffering mother has been charged with the unenviable task of posting the rest of the links to Audible and Amazon.

And yes, if you click through from my site to purchase, I do get a commission on the book and anything else you buy from Audible.com within 6 months. The Pacific II book list coming once I am in the same place as my logbook again – currently it is in San Francisco and I am in Oregon.

(And if you feel moved to contribute the price of an audiobook, please check out the Audible.com website to find out how much your book of choice costs, and use the PayPal button in the top right corner on my website. Thanks!)