If you like art, and you like people, you’ll love Craftstravaganza - a rogue art and craft fair for handmade art. My wife and I attended last year and were really impressed with the talent and variety of artists – some really great stuff. Great gift buying opportunities at affordable prices.

At that time our baby clothing project was still in the design phase, so one of our goals for this year was to apply to become a vendor - and am pleased to announce we were accepted. Vendors are judged and a limited number are accepted so we were very excited. Come and say hi, and support our local artists. In fact, I will even offer $5 off any onesie or t-shirt if you mention this post! Preview our wares, http://orangerhinokids.etsy.com

Craftstravaganza takes place this weekend, complete information on the website: http://www.craftstravaganza.com/2008/home.html

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Saturday April 26th, 9am - 6pm
Minnesota State Fairgrounds - Fine Arts Building
Complete directions here

Our booth will be directly across from the band (yes there is music too!), our business name is Orange Rhino
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I had the pleasure of hearing a talk by Jillian Perez recently. The subject was “thinking wrong”, a thought process that forces the mind out of cookie-cutter style problem solving and unlocks your creative potential.

Surprising, Innovative, And Down Right Brilliant Solutions
Although Jillian discussed thinking wrong mostly in the terms of graphic design, the techniques can be applied to many situations. Most projects tackled at work or home will require a problem solving thought process. When this process is gone about the “wrong” way, it can yield surprising, innovative, and down right brilliant solutions.

Keep reading for more insight on thinking wrong and my personal take on thinking wrong techniques.

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I just started reading a new book: “Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a reluctant Businessman” by Yvon Chouinard, The founder of Patagonia.

The book is great. The concentration of the books content is the philosophy that Yvon holds and used for the development of his company. I could talk about the book and the specifics but you should just read the book. What’s most interesting to me is the idea of the philosophy and how he has put it into action.

There are a million seminars and books out there that give you the top 8 rules and the 5 most effective techniques to achieve “X”. The sad thing is most people take the seminar or read the book and then use what they learned once or twice, if at all, and then move on to the next popular thing. (I’m all for education and continuous learning, but this seems like waste of resources.) They never take the time to think about develop the foundation that they need (the beliefs, values, and ideals) so they can espouse the ideas through actions. Yvon’s admitted overwhelming management technique is “management by absence”. What I interpret from this is that day in and day out while he was out actually using and testing the equipment Patagonia creates he spent plenty of time thinking about and his ideas and building the foundation he needed to live and apply his philosophy in action.

The next time you read a current business or management book or attend a seminar, I challenge you to ask yourself afterward, “What foundation do I need to build to be able to apply this in action day in and day out?” Spend some time thinking about it over a few weeks before you dive into something else. Pick the three most important things that struck you as you read the book and let that be a filter that you use to view your world through. I find that this helps me build a foundation for which to apply and integrate new things into my daily behavior and actions.

Additional information:
You can purchase the book from Amazon or you can read an excerpt of the book at Outside Magazine’s website

Whenever hawk migration season comes around, my Dad says, “I want a pair of binoculars that tells you what bird you’re looking at.” Not a bad idea. I’ve heard even the most avid birders bemoan the difficulties of identifying “little brown jobs” (LBJs), a catch-all name for any of the thousands of small brown birds which are indistinguishable to the vast majority of us.

Star identification is undoubtedly astronomically more difficult than decoding the minute variations of LBJs. There are billions upon billions of stars, and unless you have access to the Giant Magellan Telescope, they’re going to look pretty darn similar to one another.

There is no longer a need to be intimidated by the million twinkling lights in the sky. The new Meade MySKY Sky Navigator is a silvery-gray gun-like apparatus with Nintendo-esque red buttons that you can point and shoot at the sky to learn about the cosmos.

It’s not a telescope; it’s a GPS system and database. You can hook it up to Meade’s computerized telescopes to have your telescope automatically align to where you point your star gun.

I would have loved this gift when I was a young’un. If you really loved your star-loving kid, you’d buy it — just don’t look at the price tag.

Through November 26, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) will be handing out two XO laptops per donation – one to a child in a developing country, and one to a child of your choice. The program is called Give 1, Get 1.

Who can resist when Masi Oka is the spokesman?

Additionally, T-Mobile is rewarding donors with one year of HotSpot access, available in about 8,500 locations in the U.S., such as Starbucks, Borders, airports, and Amtrak stations.

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Across the world on Thursday, people learned how to “make life easy.” Yes, there is an entire day devoted to ensure that the services and products important to life are easier to access and simpler to use. While this year’s theme was healthcare, we are going to focus specifically on the Internet, or as some of us like to call it, the Global InterWeb.

The University of Minnesota Office of Information Technology and Digital Technology Center celebrated the day by organizing a free event in the Walter Library on campus with the help of the UMN Usability Services Laboratory. Yesterday’s event included guided tours of the state-of-the-art usability lab, a presentation discussing practical usability practices and a professional panel discussing an overview of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

So what does all of this mean and why is it important?

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I haven’t thought about reputation much since high school, and that was primarily other people’s reputations, not my own. Return Path resurrected this term during their webinar Thursday afternoon titled “Reputation 101: Five Things You Need to Know to Get on the Good Side with ISPs”.

The presentation discussed the importance of monitoring your IP address reputation to better understand and manage your email deliverability rates. Reviewing your email bounce rates is one thing, but understanding why your email subscribers are unsubscribing, or not even receiving your messages is another.

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If you’re in a technology market, or even if you’re not - I highly recommend you check out Flashbelt 2007 - June 18-20. Three days of education and inspiration. I met Dave Schroeder a few years back when we collaborated on a project and have been friends ever since. He had this great idea to promote Midwest flash experts and local technologists. Each year its been bigger and better than the last and this year has some BIG names.

The topics vary and cater to anyone form beginner to serious nerd - something for everybody. Check the official site for details and sign up to attend, you’ll be glad you did.

ArcStone is a sponsor of the event providing the online registration and last year our own Nick Longtin presented his implementation of a multiplayer flash tank game.

A pretty interesting view of of our culture and environmental issues through art. Artist Chris Jordan is working on a series called “Running the Numbers : An American self portrait” - where statistics are converted to images in the form of large format art works. As the description states, I can imagine they are even more impressive when seen in person but these works are pretty astonishing (and startling) at any scale.