It is almost frightening how this infographic turned out…

Sorry for making you click more to view, the full size image destroys the blog.

I have been searching for Northern Virginia technology meet-ups and events for sometime now (admittedly only for a brief moment from time to time).  Yesterday a friend of mine, Jonathon Perrelli, had mentioned a meeting he had with a local entrepreneur and angel investor.

Naturally I went to the Google gods and searched to learn more.

After reading briefly about this person (who I won’t name because I don’t know them) I followed the links to Twitter, from there I noticed another local techie.  Curious, I viewed their profile and behold — the DC area tech meet-up mother load!  Granted I live in Northern Virginia and would prefer something more local, but we’ll take what we can get.  See the links below for DC area tech meet-up events and festivals:

http://www.dctechevents.com/

http://digitalcapitalweek.org/

An email has been floating around the internet for years saying Bill Gates presented the aforementioned rules to a group of High School students. Unfortunately for the email creators Bill Gates did not make these eleven rules, an educator by the name of Charles Sykes did in his book “Dumbing Down our Kids”.

Nevertheless, these rules are very true and worth mentioning here.

RULE 1
Life is not fair – get used to it.

RULE 2
The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

RULE 3
You will NOT make 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice president with car phone, until you earn both.

RULE 4
If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn’t have tenure.

RULE 5
Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping they called it Opportunity.

RULE 6
If you mess up,it’s not your parent’s fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

RULE 7
Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

RULE 8
Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

RULE 9
Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.

RULE 10
Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

RULE 11
Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.

Gerber has an online baby photo competition with a grand prize of $25,000 for college tuition. Last month my wife submitted our 11 month old daughter’s picture (Genevieve).

Yesterday I visited the Gerber Generations site to locate Genevieve’s photo. To my surprise there are THOUSANDS of baby photos. ( I should have known )

There are many cute pictures, you could easily spend all day trying to review them. Rather than spending all that time I would like to help you by providing a link to the cutest, Genevieve. Okay, I may be a little bias.

If you read this, and have 20 seconds to spare (really, it does not take long) please go here http://bit.ly/genevievejohnston and vote for Genevieve. They require your email address to verify and they will send a verification email. Please make sure you click on the link in that email otherwise your vote does not count.

Thank you for your help!!

In May of 2010 I developed a small Joomla v1.5 module that would display a FormSpring box allowing visitors to ask questions directly from your website.  You can now download the module here.

Once the module is installed you need to first edit the module and provide your FormSpring user name then select enable and save.  Simple and effective.

If you like the module please rate and comment on the JED.

Today I launched a new version of www.neighborhoodrecovery.org. Neighborhood Recovery is a company I founded that provides investors with tax credits in exchange for equity investment into a financing entity.  The entity in-turn makes loans or equity investments in projects located in low- to- moderate income communities.  Check it out and let me know what you think.

I’ll make a promise to you NOT to post useless videos!  Now that I’ve made that promise, if you are a music lover, especially 90′s hip hop this 4 minute video is a much watch!  Enjoy

I thought I would take a moment and share with you a few blogs I read on a daily basis and why, in no particular order here goes:

A sales guy - http://asalesguy.com/ – The thoughtful insights of Jim Keenan a proven sales leader.  Jim frequently updates his blog with one or two posts daily.  Most revolve around sales, sales technique, hiring sales people, etc.  If you are a sales person or a manager of sales people this blog is a must subscribe.

Chris Brogan – http://www.chrisbrogan.com/ – Chris is a successful entrepreneur, speaker, writer, and all around pretty interesting guy.  His posts normally revolve around being successful and include valuable insight into how to become and maintain success.

Startuplawyer – http://startuplawyer.com/ – Every startup needs great legal advice, for this I choose Ryan Robert’s blog The Startup Lawyer blog for initial insight.  Less frequently updated than the previous two blogs, Ryan provides priceless information in every post.

AVC – http://www.avc.com – The personal blog of Fred Wilson a principle at Union Square Ventures a VC firm in NYC.  If you want a few great blogs in your reader that consistently provide high quality content this is a MUST subscribe.  Fred updates his blog at least once per day and has guest posts on Monday’s.  I frequently make this my first blog visit of the day.

There are hundreds if not thousands of high quality blogs for a variety of subject matters, these are just a few of the many I subscribe to.  Visit and enjoy!

In an effort to persuade users with a bit more “oomph!”, Facebook updates the “Like” tag, see image below.

Okay!  Sheesh, all you had to do was ask nicely.

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The great people over at founders space were kind enough to feature myself your humble blog enthusiast in their August newsletter as a top contributor.

“RJ Johnston is another one of our top contributors. He is not only excellent at answering questions, but he has a highly amusing and informative blog. He has three projects in the works: RoosterX.com LLC, Neighborhood Recovery LLC, and Neighborhood Recovery and Reinvestment Corporation. Yes, RJ is a busy man!”

Here is an exerpt from their about us page:

Founders Space brings together founders, angels, VCs, attorneys, CFOs and other experts to answer the questions all founders have.

Our mission is to connect founders with advisors and get startups the help they need. Whenever an advisor answers a question for one founder, the answer is shared with the entire community and preserved in our database. This way the advisor is actually providing assistance to tens of thousands of founders now and into the future.

I would have to say the two co-founders Naomi Kokubo and Steve Hoffman are doing a fantastic job of accomplishing their goal.

If you have not yet visited the site be sure to at http://www.founderspace.com