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February 7, 2007 | Filed Under learning from failure | Leave a Comment 

The matador is back after a lenghty injury after being gored by a bull.



Help a felon find employment

July 27, 2006 | Filed Under learning from failure, Practical tips, hard labour, Money making as young | 2 Comments 

Interesting question from a woman who wants her brother in law to find work. He is a felon and is having a hard time getting a job:

 ”This person is 24 years old and is under medical treatment for bipolar disorder and ADD. He is a high school graduate, but has not pursued any vocational training beyond that (this is not a possibility now, either, due to financial constraints and a need to gain employment ASAP to support himself). Previous jobs have included kitchen work in a restaurant, food prep and counter work in a deli/bagel shop, roofing, and warehouse jobs. He has left these jobs due to either conflict with management/coworkers, or a lack of steady hours.

Now, understandably, he’s having tremendous difficulty lining up any kind of work.”

The ask.metafilter community have lots of interesting answers.

Ranging from the unethical, but extremely practical: “The other option is to put “no” to the felony question on employment applications. IANAL but I am almost certain that this is NOT illegal but is simply a civil matter, providing he’s not applying for something like daycare or some sort of licensed trade. The worst that can happen is they do a background check and tell him to get lost. This won’t work for getting a job at IBM of course, but a lot of businesses don’t run checks, particularly small businesses and quite a few entry-level positions. If he starts small, it may not come up later — and even if it does, he has still scored a nice period of employment.”

To more conventional suggestions about going to college or back to kitchen work. It sure is no easy way to solve this, but the man is 24 years old and is ready to make changes to his life. Read the full post here.



The traffic volatility of a start-up blog

July 20, 2006 | Filed Under rich on eBay, learning from failure, Start ups, How to create a successful blog, Practical tips | 1 Comment 

traffic stats for my blog

This is the stats over unique visitors to this blog the last month. The big spikes are due to the post about the “from mailroom clerk to CEO game from 1982.” This post was submitted by myself to fark, reddit, digg, shoutwire, joystiq and other PR & buzz sites and received some attention. If you think you have a post that will be of interest to such sites I see no problem in submitting them.

Not all hot tips from you to other sites are successfull though. My idea about selling 100 signed copies of a celebrity author’s book on eBay did not catch on. I sent some e-mails around promoting it, but no success. It was criticized for it’s unethical flavour and blatant use of child labour.  It was so bad that it did not even generate a single spark of controversy.



Photos: “My icecream business failed”

June 22, 2006 | Filed Under learning from failure, Entrepreneurship | Leave a Comment 

You would think that selling icecream from your van would be a good earner in a beach resort huh? 

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