Entrepreneur's Conference

The second annual Oklahoma entrepreneur's conference is going on today and tomorrow, so we are in crunch time to prepare for it. The conference begins today at 12:30 p.m. and goes until 7 p.m. tomorrow night. NEDC is hosting two tables to promote the eTec incubators and hopefully find new tenants.

I have prepared a new brochure over eTec incubators and created a sign printed on foam board to hang above the tables. I sent in the order for the sign yesterday, then had to reformat it a little bit to ensure clear printing. Today they told me I needed to confirm the order before they would begin printing, we needed the sign by noon. Thankfully when I called to confirm the order and beg them to rush it they informed me it was already printed and ready to be picked up.

Next came finishing, editing and fixing the brochure and flyer followed by printing and folding.

Tomorrow morning I will be working the tables at the convention.

Right now my abstract file is 413 MB when converted to a pdf. Last years was 1.2 MB. Needless to say that's quite a difference, and entirely too large to be able to upload to a Web site and expect people to spend the time to download.

Goal for today: find a way to compress the file to 1/400 of its original size.

However this week I did successfully create another invititation, a bank letter, and a press release.

This week I worked 16 hours.

Onto the education section of the Abstract! Unfortunately most of the information I am finding is from the 07-08 school year, and I was really wanting info for the 08-09 year. However I did find enrollments for the 09-10 year which was exciting!

Overall, Oklahoma needs to work on education. Especially when compared with the nation as a whole. Researching all these different sections for the Abstract has really increased my awareness of the community in general and what we need to work on.

Thursday I forgot to blog, there was a lot going on at work.

This week I learned how to conduct an interview over Skype and improved my Adobe skills is Illustrator and Photoshop. I still need to figure out how to place the ghost boxes behind certain layers of the picture.

I worked for 16 hours.

Housing Data

This week I've been focusing on finding all the statistics needed for the Housing section of the Abstract. While there really aren't that many statistics on this page, they are incredibly difficult to find. I found a bunch of stats on different sites, none of which coordinated and in fact ranged from around 900 homes currently on the market to 1968 homes on the market. I have finally learned how to properly access the information from the City of Norman Web site and am on my way. However I realized all the statistics from previous years listed in lasts years Abstract aren't coherent with what is listed on this Web site, so now instead of simply adding a year I'm having to recalculate all the years from 2000 to 2009.

Thankfully, I have found a report that gives me the year end totals instead of me having to add up every month, as I was doing in the beginning.

Another plus- I now know how all about the real estate market in the Norman area, which will come in very useful when my fiance and I begin looking for a house in a couple of months.

Learning to Save

Yesterday I found all the information for the Health section of the Abstract, typed it in the Illustrator file, formatted it, designed it. Then when I go to shut down Illustrator and save the file 30 minutes later, Illustrator freezes and loses the whole page. Now I realize I should have saved the file as soon as I finished the new section, however I was still working on Abstract in general and the file takes 15 minutes to save. I make sure to save it every hour because I don't want to lose anything, but saving it every time I finish a section would waste way too much time throughout the day.

So today I redid the Health page and searched for housing statistics. I have almost all the stats I need, now I just have to make sense of them and add them to the Housing section. That will probably be a task for Monday as my day is almost done. Next week I also need to finished editing the picture of HealthPlex and work on getting the Summit press release printed in the transcript.

This week I worked 16 hours.

A new week, and I'm still working on this Abstract. I started this project back in November I believe, and while I've gotten a lot designed it won't be finished for quite some time. Actually the overall design is complete, there's just little tweaking done here and there as I continue to add in more information and pictures.

I've also done research one a new large chain looking at coming to Norman and found articles for the next issue of the monthly NEDC newsletter.