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This is my youngest son’s favorite Dr. Seuss book:

What’s yours?

Come out to help us raise Money for the Autism Spectrum Resource Center this Sunday May 1st at Choate in Wallingford. If you can’t make it, you can still donate online at http://ctautismwalk.org

I’ve watched a bunch of videos but this one is the easiest for me to follow:

UPDATE: the press release event page is live on facebook
Update 2: The voting site is live: http://www.communitiestakeroot.com/

Press Reslease from Friends Of Edgewood Park:
The Friends of Edgewood Park invite you to participate in a media & public event launching our campaign for soliciting online votes for a Fruit Tree Orchard Grant that we have applied for, from the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation, (FTPF). The grant will provide us with fruit trees, resources and expertise assistance needed to re-introduce about 45 fruit bearing trees, (plus assorted fruit bearing shrubs), in Edgewood Park. The online voting period will extend from April 15 to August 31. We are excited to have made the 100 finalists, (out of about 425 participants worldwide). As such, we are competing for the top 20 votes gatherers applicants, (out of 100 finalists), who will be receiving fruit tree orchards from the FTPF foundation. 

To further our excitement, The City of New Haven department or Parks, Recreation & Trees has offered its full support behind this initiative by matching this grant with an equal numbers of fruits trees that will be introduced in various neighborhood within the city, (outside Edgewood Park). In so doing, The Department has just rendered this initiative one that is of interest and stand to benefit the various communities and neighborhoods across the entire city of New Haven. 

Event Time & Date: 
Friday April 15, 2011 at 11:00 AM
Event Location: 
The Grove
71 Orange Street 
New Haven, CT 06510

Semi Semi-Dikoko, President
Friends of Edgewood Park, (FoEP)
http://facebook.com/EdgewoodPark
http://twitter.com/edgewoodparkct

Scott Adams the creator of the Dilbert cartoon has a phenomenal article in the Wall Street Journal. You should go read it now!
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704101604576247143383496656.html

Below is an excerpt of an Entrepreneur’s action items:

Combine Skills. The first thing you should learn in a course on entrepreneurship is how to make yourself valuable. It’s unlikely that any average student can develop a world-class skill in one particular area. But it’s easy to learn how to do several different things fairly well. I succeeded as a cartoonist with negligible art talent, some basic writing skills, an ordinary sense of humor and a bit of experience in the business world. The “Dilbert” comic is a combination of all four skills. The world has plenty of better artists, smarter writers, funnier humorists and more experienced business people. The rare part is that each of those modest skills is collected in one person. That’s how value is created.

Fail Forward. If you’re taking risks, and you probably should, you can find yourself failing 90% of the time. The trick is to get paid while you’re doing the failing and to use the experience to gain skills that will be useful later. I failed at my first career in banking. I failed at my second career with the phone company. But you’d be surprised at how many of the skills I learned in those careers can be applied to almost any field, including cartooning. Students should be taught that failure is a process, not an obstacle.

Find the Action. In my senior year of college I asked my adviser how I should pursue my goal of being a banker. He told me to figure out where the most innovation in banking was happening and to move there. And so I did. Banking didn’t work out for me, but the advice still holds: Move to where the action is. Distance is your enemy.

Attract Luck. You can’t manage luck directly, but you can manage your career in a way that makes it easier for luck to find you. To succeed, first you must do something. And if that doesn’t work, which can be 90% of the time, do something else. Luck finds the doers. Readers of the Journal will find this point obvious. It’s not obvious to a teenager.

Conquer Fear. I took classes in public speaking in college and a few more during my corporate days. That training was marginally useful for learning how to mask nervousness in public. Then I took the Dale Carnegie course. It was life-changing. The Dale Carnegie method ignores speaking technique entirely and trains you instead to enjoy the experience of speaking to a crowd. Once you become relaxed in front of people, technique comes automatically. Over the years, I’ve given speeches to hundreds of audiences and enjoyed every minute on stage. But this isn’t a plug for Dale Carnegie. The point is that people can be trained to replace fear and shyness with enthusiasm. Every entrepreneur can use that skill.

Write Simply. I took a two-day class in business writing that taught me how to write direct sentences and to avoid extra words. Simplicity makes ideas powerful. Want examples? Read anything by Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett.

Learn Persuasion. Students of entrepreneurship should learn the art of persuasion in all its forms, including psychology, sales, marketing, negotiating, statistics and even design. Usually those skills are sprinkled across several disciplines. For entrepreneurs, it makes sense to teach them as a package.

I interviewed Kam Lasater this weekend, the founder of Hack Haven and co-founder of SeeClickFix
We talk about what exactly a ‘hack-a-thon’ is and ‘learning from failure’ among other things 🙂

The @bcsrobotics team had an amazing time at the New Haven #hackhvn event yesterday.
Take a look at Stephen's video where he interviews Hayden, Greg and Matt.

p301.mov
Watch on Posterous

Hayden is soooo excited to show his invention tomorrow. I think he has the sales pitch down! What do you think?

I want to try live streaming using Qik so that @alibnork can watch the Biography Breakfast:

I think this embeded Qik player will stream live and then play the last video I recorded.

The catch is, I need to have cell coverage in the town hall….