omouse's blog

Marketing Stuff

During the summer last year (2009), I was taking two online courses for management and marketing. Both were useful but I haven't had a chance to really apply what I learned in them. With the marketing, I kept tripping up on market segmentation and targetting.

To get away from all the computer programming, I decided to start reading through a different marketing textbook, Marketing Management 12th edition by Kotler and Keller. It seems to me that it's a far better book than the one I had to read for class, but at the same time, it's a little repetitive. There are only so many ways to say that you need to procure goods and turn them into final products and that you need to sell them. I'm only on chapter 2 though so it might get better later on.

I'm particularly interested in figuring out the target markets and segmenting markets process. Like how do you reach that particular audience and how do you know that they're important enough for you to market to?

WTF is going on in Britain??

They're inventing all sorts of weapons to get youths away from public spaces and are monitoring almost everything. The density of CCTV cameras is ridiculous. Now they're turning to A Clockwork Orange and using classical music as a weapon against kids:

In January it was revealed that West Park School, in Derby in the midlands of England, was “subjecting” (its words) badly behaved children to Mozart and others. In “special detentions,” the children are forced to endure two hours of classical music both as a relaxant (the headmaster claims it calms them down) and as a deterrent against future bad behavior (apparently the number of disruptive pupils has fallen by 60 per cent since the detentions were introduced.)

They do the following in some malls in North America:

Across the UK, local councils and other public institutions now play recorded classical music through speakers at bus-stops, in parking lots, outside department stores, and elsewhere. No, not because they think the public will appreciate these sweet sounds (they think we are uncultured grunts), but because they hope it will make naughty youngsters flee.

It's disgusting that they're using music of any sort in this manner.

I'll never go to Britain if I can avoid it. It's just way too Orwellian now and I wouldn't be surprised if they start abusing the sciences and start taking notes from A Brave New World.

Olympics and Drinking on the Ice

The Canadian Women's Hockey team won their game against the United States 2-0 and after the fans left the building, drank some champagne and smoked some cigars. The trouble apparently is that a few of them are under-age! A blog on the Globe and Mail talks about this, saying it's just another puritanical thing.

The deeper problem is with the journalism of Associated Press. The journalist is the one who chose the words "swigging" and "guzzling". They didn't have to, they could have said "sipped" or "drank" or some other word with less of an alcoholic connotation. Instead they wanted to emphasis a supposed conflict between the IOC protocols and the celebration. Later in the article the journalists points out another athlete "guzzling" beer and holding the pitcher with both hands. How else could he hold it? By saying that explicitly, it's meant to have a negative connotation.

The Associated Press are also the ones who informed the IOC about the celebration.  They seem to be going out of their way to make the team look bad...

Tutoring is awesome

I was slightly early for tutoring yesterday even though I had been drinking a lot the night before at my girlfriend's birthday party and I had gotten a few bruises from paintball and even though I woke up with a headache! It was pretty amazing, no hangover and I actually helped the student figure it all out.

The awesome part is that the student has another few courses I can tutor him in and ones in which I really understand the concepts and material being covered. One of them is about C and UNIX and I've taken a few courses (one at college and one at university) about them and I've used them for a long time. In another of his courses, they're learning the Scheme programming language and I used to read the specification for the language on the way to college a few years ago! So I know my stuff.

In other news, I lost yet another ship in the game EVE and haven't gotten any reading done for about a week now.

...new year!

So I haven't been blogging here for a while and I haven't been writing in my journal for a while either. A lot of things have happened since October but I won't get into all of them.

I went to paintball for my girlfriend's birthday and it was awesome. The best part was the after-party because it went extremely well. The house didn't catch fire though she tried hard to make that happen using a Greek dish where you set some cheese on fire. I can't remember the name but it's extremely tasty and worth almost setting things on fire.

What I really liked was that I didn't misbehave, heh. Especially with the beer drinking, I paced myself and things turned out alright.

I liked it and I've been looking into Getting Things Done lately and re-read the book. It led to a cleanup of a bunch of books I had lying all over the place and hopefully it leads to a Toronto-based Free Software (and open source) group being formed...just have to figure out a location and what it will be more concretely about.

There are now four blogs where I can post: here, Linux.com, typepad, and neverfriday. Also, I have a LinkedIn account, a twitter account and an identi.ca account. Lots and lots of social media stuff to update and I'm not sure I'm getting much out of any of them except for Twitter, identica and neverfriday. Maybe I should delete some accounts? :/

PowerPoint Lectures

Note: Linux.com hasn't posted this blog post yet, so I decided to put it here.

In the previous post [at linux.com] on business computing, I wrote that I didn't want a PowerPoint clone at all.

I've taken many courses where PowerPoint was used by professors and it was horrible. The amount of information on each slide is too low. It doesn't matter how much text there is, there will always be too little information on it. The worst was a database class I took at college. The instructor had all the important information on slides. It took more than 5 slides to say to what could have been said in a single paragraph. It's next to impossible to learn from slides like that. There's no room for examples, no room for comments, etc.

I think the reason PowerPoint is used by professors is because of the sales, marketing and business types that invaded university campuses. As someone said (can't remember who), PowerPoint is the tool of the salesperson.
It lets you instill a sort of tunnel-vision in your audience.

The best lectures have been given without the crutches of PowerPoint or overhead projectors, and many of them were written down and published in book form. I have a book of Noam Chomsky lectures on linguistics and there is a lot of information in it. I'm amazed that people sat through long lectures like that.

Avoid PowerPoint if you can. If you must have slides, only put headings or a few brief points on each slide. If you're going to distribute the slides afterwards, also try and have a speech or notes for your speech prepared. Basically, pretend you're giving a grand old lecture in a grand old lecture hall  or an intimate discussion in a small study in a historically significant university.

Just tried out Warhammer Online

I think I'll stick to playing EVE. One MMO costs more than enough time/money already haha.

Warhammer Online seems like an endless grind. At least with EVE Online I don't feel like I *have* to do any missions at all.

 

EVE: the cooler spacey choice. The corporation/guild I'm in right now is headed towards 0.0 space where all the big battles are. I'm still getting my gear and cash ready to go and help them.

Linux.com, reading short stories

Ugh, yet another blog eh?

I'm writing some short posts related to GNU/Linux on the Linux.com blog.

My first three posts:

• Semantic Patching
• Hardware Problems
• Lots of focus on business computing

I found a few nice posts on there about OpenOffice and its features. I really think it's a solid competitor to Microsoft Office, at least for the basics though I did use Apple's Pages word processor for my last assignment (it was for a marketing class, I wanted it to look nice!)

The posts about OpenOffice:

• Create a database and data entry form in OpenOffice.org Base
• Lesser known but very helpful features in OpenOffice.org Writer

In other news, I spent some time reading a few short stories. I read Ursula LeGuin's Those Who Walk Away From Omelas and am making my way through Herman Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivner. The first was very interesting and nice to read while the other was slow to start.

Right now I'm writing down notes for the important part of a book review. It's centered on two particular chapters and it's so strange to notice the theme of a book. It's almost a history book but not quite and has its own bias but I think it would really open the eyes of people when it comes to technology.

I'm looking over a list of words that should be cut out or replaced and hope to make use of it for this review. The writing process is to take notes all over the place and then when I'm writing the draft of the review, to refer to it and paste and re-arrange whole paragraphs into the draft. Then I have a solid starting point and can add/delete where necessary.

Listening to My Bloody Valentine right now and they're great at that "wall of noise" effect. I should really listen to them more often. But after this next song I'll be switching to the Nine Inch Nails...

Oh, and the book I'm reviewing is Geeks Bearing Gifts.