focus

I have a weird set of personal goals for myself while at work, the number of which is continually expanding. A few that I've accomplished or are close to finshing... having an analyst call setup just for me (that's talking to an expert in a particular area.. normally costs a lot of money), working on a project with every person in the department (close.. but there are still a few elusive people) and most recently, observing a focus group!

yes!.. I was one of those guys behind the two-way mirror. VERY cool. I can't get into too many details, but it was a great time. It made me feel all important.

Focus groups are an extremely useful tool in marketing in general, but one of the more unusual uses that I've heard about is in the use of high profile court cases. YES.. not joking. How did OJ get off?.. what about Michael?.. I bet focus groups were the key to their cases. Let me explain. So, a big part of these trials is the jury. And when picking the jury it's all about demographics. Through focus groups, the lawyers can learn what demographics will lean towards innocent and in turn pick the same type of people for the jury. They'll then mimic the jury with a focus group and test things out on them and see how it plays off. Test their opening statement, line of questioning for a witness, closing statement.. it never ends. The only prohibiting factor is the green. But if you've got the green you'll likely get off scott clean. My rhyme for the day.

bye for now

crazy mall

I don't really have any idea what I'm going to post about, but I'll start here and see where it goes.

I finally got a chance to visit the crazy vaughn mills mall up in the boonies as some would put it. If you haven't been, go.. it's nuts.. honestly. It's by far the best designed mall I've ever seen. They group similar stores together in places they call neighbourhoods to hopefully make shopping more convinient and is overall a very large place. One of the more odd stores is a large sportsman type deal. Besides being insanely decorated with stuffed everything you can tell by the crowd that this was a serious hunter store. The big tip off was a sign asking all customers to hand in their "guns or bows" before entering. Ohhhkay.. I didn't think that was really an issue north of Texas but I guess I was wrong.

hmm.. I could go in many directions.. k..
my battery is running out here and I am too lazy to grab the ac adapter so I'll try to hurry up.

I also got a chance to watch finding forrester today. Some would call it a wannabe good will hunting, but I really liked it. I'm always a fan of the unknown genius, sort of like cinderella but a lot less gay. In any case, I especially liked the song the movie ends off on. After some googling I found out that it comes from this famous hawaiian guy. Listening to the song sort of makes me want to take up the guitar. But I'll have to see about that. Here's the website I downloaded it from if you're interested.

http://mediakit.blogspot.com/Israel%20Kamak%20-%20Over%20The%20Rainbow.mp3

all for now.. bye

Stumble upon..

for those who are unaware, stumble upon is a great way to waste time. All you do is click a button and you are thrown to a new and interesting site. Bored, click again. It never ends. I equate it to channel surfing with an unlimited number of channels. I highly recommend the tool. It came to me from beyondschatworth who got it from forr, so I could be preaching to the choir here, but if you're not using it... do it now!!..

a few sites that I have stumbled upon that are of great interest allow you to look at files people have put up but don't necessarily know are publicly available. You can imagine the possibilities. Movies, music, pictures etc.

http://www.filesearching.com/ <-- let's you search ftps, althought most seem to be unaccessible, a cool idea

http://www.googletutor.com/2005/04/15/voyeur-heaven/ <-- teaches you how to use google to find publicly available directories.

This is borderline hacking. My experience with web servers is quite limited but the main idea is that you need an index.html in your directory otherwise people will be able to see the raw files. The raw files are still there with an index.html, but the public has no idea what is there, if anything. This site exploits this fact by searching for the terms seen when you look at the publicly available directories, so terms such as "size", "description", "path"..etc..

If you find yourself looking for something and is not easily found through traditional channels (Kazaa, BT), perhaps these sites can be your answer.

Just thought I'd share...

the team dynamic

teams at work are a lot different than what I'm used too..

in school it was usually the same. The requirements of the task were always clear, we all shared similar goals, and were more or less fairly capable. Of course ignoring POs inability to build a simple ball sorter. [j/k...]

at work, it's different. People may have hidden motives, the requirements are rarely if ever clear and often change, and lastly, people are capable, but usually super busy.

but I consider myself to be a team person. I much prefer it over working independently, which can be at odds with my job at times, so to counteract, I've tried to join as many teams as I can.

A very weird and odd team I'm on is one of those very poorly led ones. The requirements are not clear and often change, meetings always go off track and in general, I rarely feel included or know what's going on. It's a train wreck. And kills my motivation. I never want to do work for the team and don't really care if it succeeds.

On the other hand, I'm on another team where it is quite the opposite. I feel included, know what's going on and the meetings are run well. So my motivation thrives, I go above and beyond what is expected and contribute wherever possible.

Leading me to... where you work, specifically who your boss is, is incredibly important. Although most of this is often out of your control it is good to note that if you find yourself in a leadership position, be aware of your importance.

I guess I sort of went down this path as I just watched office space again. I scored the special edition box set with the mug, mouse pad and red stapler. Still a great movie.

lastly.. I went nuts on Saturday and bought a bunch of coldplay tickets a good ten mins after they went on sale although they were supposedly sold out after 4. I bought a foursome that I'll keep, but I have a twosome I bought for the hell of it. If anyone is a good ebayer or is interested, let me know. I won't lie, the seats aren't great, but it's coldplay.

ohh.... and the oc has turned to garbage. The low point being when ryan went nuts on a punching bag. I was laughing my ass off.

bye bye.

puzzle mania..

12 hours of intense struggle, coupled with moments of dissapointment, bewliderment and sometimes being plain fed up sounds like a regular, lackluster day in the world of a eng sci. But for me, it was tons of fun.

I guess that's what comes with being an eng sci, we enjoy pain and endure it, just so we can get past it for those brief but very worthwhile moments of glory.

The Microsoft puzzle competition was a great time and for the first time in perhaps 6 months that I've needed to push my mind to the limit. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy my job and there are times when I need to be creative and think differently, but for the most part, doing things by the book is the way to go. You might have of heard of the competition from word of mouth, but the main idea is 21 puzzles over 12 hours, which are very difficult (and that's an understatement). The majority of teams, comprised of teams of four from some of the top schools in the north america are lucky to solve a third of them.

The puzzles range from finding that random thing that will blow things wide open to the ones you still don't understand even after the solution is presented to you.

Our team did..... okay. We solved 7 of the 21 puzzles putting us in the upper third of all teams, decent.. but still very far from the front, which was dominated by teams from that school in massachusetts.

I was a tad disappointed in myself as I felt that I was thinking closeminded at times and not as creatively as I used to. That's another problem with working (in my series on business vs research). Most jobs, even the good ones seem to stifle creativitiy. Something I absolutely despise and another reason for going into research. I thought I'd just mention this and if anyone still reads my very infrequently updated blog anymore, please comment and let me know what you think. I do realize you can pursue creative, challenging endeavours outside of work, but I guess that's something I need to do more often on my own as I used to take it for granted that I would get the challenges at school.

moving on.. I also wanted to share my surprisingly successful Friday night. I, an amateur, even beginner won a poker tournament (Texas Hold'em) against 13 good, experienced players!.. a complete surprise... I'm guessing I caught them off guard and were a bit thrown off by my somewhat random, aggressive behaviour.

That's it for now. I'll try to post more often (I always say that.. but this time I'll really try!)