Let it Be Known
Sick of Bad Ads? Does clicking help?
I work in advertising. I make banner ads for a living and thus when I’m working I click a lot of ads, my own and competitors. I’ve noticed that at work, when I surf the good sites, I see a lot of high quality advertising from major manufacturers. When I go home I see ads for Evony, teeth cleaners, and “how to get ripped”. CRAP.
Now, a few things might be happening here. I might go on sketchier sites at home (very likely), but it also might be true that I’ve been cookied by the ad servers at work and they know that I actually click on ads. While at home I surf click free.
Because they know their clients are looking for clicks, they serve the good stuff to “clicky me” at work, and the crapy to “non-clicky me” at home.
I have no proof. But the experiment begins now…. cache cleared!
Microsoft Wins, Loses
Having just finished doing an MBA I can tell you in no uncertain terms that MS Office is an amazing suite of software. Powerpoint has a lot of the basic functions of Photoshop, yet is simple enough for the non-techy to use. Sure, they are really overly “interfacey” preferring sub-menus and wizards to more natural usage, but these are to meet the needs of the non-tech-savvy who use the software, and I’m prepared to power through that and learn the keyboard shortcuts that will make my use of it fast and easy.
With all of that said, the programs could be so much better! The feature that seems like the biggest missed opportunity is SmartArt in PowerPoint. If you’ve never used that feature before, basically it’s a little menu that will help you make the nice graphics that make bullet points so much easier to digest. The problem is there are only 88 that come by default. After 2 years in school, I had pretty much exhausted all of the good ones. For people who make presentations as part of their full time jobs, I imagine they got sick of them within months.
But there is an easy way to fix this. If they had included a way for a person to build their own SmartArt and then share it with others, then we could all design our own, or for the less image-inclined, browse a site with thousands of them. Open source or creatives commons licenses lead to free exchange and lets users “remix” to customize their experience. Who would have thought that PowerPoint had a potential social media angle, albeit an unexploited one?
However, MS is so controlled with their products that they don’t have the imagination do this. I’m not an MS hater, but I wish they would take more chances on their products in favour of openness. I think in this case we’d all be better served.
Not Soulless, It’s Life
I was having a conversation with a friend of friend the other day and he was asking me about my MBA. It was basically the question “so why an MBA?” As if the MBA is the height of disgust. (This was implied, not explicit.) My answer to him was simple. Because what you learn in business school are lessons that can be applied to the rest of your life. What is business but an institutionalized version of things that we do everyday? The give-and-take, the working together, the borrowing and saving. (i.e. economics, but in a more social context.)
Sure, b-school graduates get a bad rep because they go into finance and build a giant house of cards that collapses to destabilize the economy, then still take their big bonuses. Yeah, I think we can all agree that those people aren’t heroes.
But understanding business helps you to gain perspective on the decisions you make and the decisions that get made for you. Although b-school trains you to think in dollars and cents about even human lives, more importantly, it teaches you to think about it. It teaches you how to dissect and evaluate the problem and think about all the parts that go into it.
The analysis may be soulless, but its the person applying it to life that makes it interesting.
I’m Not a Felon
I had a good thing going with this blog. When you put my name into Google, things related to me and only me dominated the results. I’m sure the other Kara McIntosh’s of the world were angry, but unless they wanted to put the time and effort into it, they were just going to fall down in the results.
Then this happens! Some woman in Maryland commits mortgage fraud and suddenly my whole image is tainted. (Not that this post is helping).
Hopefully this will blow over quickly and I can go back to to front page domination.
Hobbies to Rediscover Pt. 2
A while ago I posted about hobbies I wanted to rediscover once every spare second wasn’t spent on studying for that MBA thing. It’s only been a few weeks since my last exam, but I wanted to give a progress report.
The 5 things I was going to do were: read fiction, practice music, learn French, code and do some photography.
On the fiction front I have been devouring books on tape. So far I haven’t sat down and actually read a novel, but I did read a book of lectures by Richard Feynman. So on that front, I am becoming a normal person again. (+1 for Kara!)
I did buy sheet music and tried to practice, but damn it was boring. It’s so hard not to multi-task. I’m sitting at the keyboard doing the same progressions over and over and I get so antsy. The internet has ruined my concentration. But, kind of the whole point was to re-learn concentration. So I’m not giving up yet, I will force myself to do something boring and not feel bad about it. It’s for my own damn good, dammit. If only school hadn’t been so damn interesting. (-1 for Kara, and damn)
Instead of French, I’ve been trying Spanish. I’ve got an audio podcast I’ve been listening to and a friend is going to get me a book. Next step on that is to set up some goals and a game plan to get there (+1 for Kara!)
No coding has yet been done, nor do I have a coding project on the horizon. I await inspiration. Ditto on the photography, since it is cold and no one wants to see shots of my condo and that’s the place I’ve been hanging out the most. (-2 for Kara)
I’ll give myself a month on these goals, then re-evaluate and see if I need new ones.
What I’m Good At
I just did my last group assingment at MBA school. I think it’s a good time to reflect on what strengths emerged over the course of 2 years. Here they are in reverse order.
5) Cheerleading! – Even after midnight when we had no clue what was going on, my team could rely on me to assure them that they could do it, and they always did.
4) Refocusing conversation when it goes off topic ( but sometimes talking over good ideas) – I can be very focused on the end goal, which is awesome when you know how to get there, but can kill the good ideas that come from wandering conversation. A total trade-off, I’m aware.
3) Talking really fast during the wrap up portion of a presentation ( which is invariably over time) – Hey, I’m a fast talker and I get to the point. Naturally I should be at the end.
2) Organizing the work and dividing up tasks – Once a project manager, always a project manager
And number one….
1) Making slides pretty! – “Line up your text! Stop mixing fonts! Add a picture! Use a graphic!”
Yes, you can see how truly invaluable I was.
p.s. this was a test post of the WordPress app on my iPhone. Hence the unnecessary picture.
Things I Learned At School
Another thing I’ve learned while doing my MBA is that having understood roles or hierarchies are VERY necessary to get work done. I’m so close to the end and the closer I get, the bossier I get with my groups.
While I’ve learned that authority or respect is never given, it is earned, the short time periods that you work with people at school don’t afford you the time to develop respect and for clear strengths to emerge. Thus, it is in my best interest to just take charge and steer the group where I think they need to go. While sometimes this will hinder the group, it is overall preferable to the wishy-washy uncertainty that happens without a dominant leader. Who’s got the time to fiddle and figure it out?
The Fog of War
Heard the news today that Robert McNamara has passed away. By coincidence, Marc and I just saw The Fog of War two days ago. I would describe the movie as “chilling.” Robert McNamara is clearly a thoughtful, intelligent, reasonable person. Yet in the movie he describes his involvement with fire-bombings in WWII – actions he admits would be “war crimes” if the U.S. had lost. He is the secretary of defense during the Vietnam war, and oversees the escalation there.
Overall, you get the picture of someone who is caught up in larger events and is unable to wrestle with them. The larger machinations of nations, and the prejudices and assumptions that go unchallenged, seem to carry him along with them.
I find it scary. I may be naive, but I have always hoped that with small steps towards rationality, every generation will get better at peaceful conflict resolution. Yet, the mistakes and thinking that he reveals are so simple. “Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning” is one of his lessons. Don’t we know this? Shouldn’t people in power have checks and balances on how they make decisions?
It’s all very scary. I hope that McNamara’s legacy is for future leaders to learn from his mistakes, but I don’t know how likely that is.
Proud of This One
Marc and I volunteered to build a website for the building we live in. It’s built on Wordpress and it’s my first experience with user demands. I had to install 9 plugins to deal with all the requirements.
The funnest thing is the theme, Atahualpa. It has an additional interface where you can customize a lot of the elements that you would normally have to do with code. That was really important to me because at some point I’m going to have to hand this thing off to someone else.
Anyway, check it out. It’s at 388districtlofts.com
