International Baccalaureate

You know you’re doing the IB when..

• # Relatives that have been dead for years come visit you and suggest that you get some sleep.
• # You say the same sentence over and over again, not realizing you’ve said it before.
• # While writing a TOK paper, you begin to actually understand the material.
• # You have great revelations concerning Life, the Universe, and Everything else, but can’t quite find the words for them before the white glow fades, leaving you more confused than before.
• # You can spell “Baccalaureate”.
• # You go to bed at 3AM and think, “Oh, it’s an early night!”
• # Social life? What’s that?
• # You write sentences on multiple choice tests.
• # It’s okay to fail, so long as you are not alone.
• # You frequently catch yourself saying “What?? We had homework??”
• # You finish your extended essay shortly after midnight. Your smile of satisfaction fades when you remember to start on your World Lit. Paper.
• # Your books weigh more than you do.
• # You skip breakfast so you can get to school early to get in some extra cramming time to gain that “upper edge” on the rest of the class.
• # You come into school at 6:00am to do Biology and don’t complain.
• # You no longer speak English — You speak a combination of English, German, Spanish, French, Portugese, Swedish, Dutch, Chinese, Russian, Norwegian, Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese, Korean, and Polish.
• # You have theological discussions at parties
• # This number means something: 42
• # You use logic to justify the color of your nail polish.

Smile

Push University Guide

Although it requires a £14 or £15 fee for more detailed information, I found the Push Guide to be really useful concerning the universities I have applied to

I’m currently applying to :

UCE Birmingham: Advertising & Human Resource Management
East London: Media & Advertising
London Met: Advertising & Marketing Communication with Retail Management
Manchester Met: Advertising Management with Brand Management
Arts London: Marketing & Advertising
Worcester: Business, Advertising & Human Resource Management

And What I hear about each and every one of these…

University of Central England, Birmingham
“Get ready to gasp, this University’s got eight campuses,” [oh dear god] “there’s booze and Balti galore” [sounds promising] “and all non-local first years are guaranteed a room in halls, native Brummies may not be so lucky” [hah]

University of East London
“Forget a party lifestyle – over three-quarters of students are study-minded” [sounds good]. “Sports facilities are a bit thin though, but will be bigged-up as the 2012 Olympics roll ever closer. Students have not-quite-enough accommodation to meet demand, but living out is cheaper than most of London.” [ooh so no halls for me?]

London Metropolitan University
“Both campuses benefit from being in the thick of things, with the delights of the ultra-trendy nightlife of Islington and Camden on the doorstep for folk in the North. International students are extremely well provided for, with a special welcome programme and guaranteed accommodation. The University’s keen as Colman’s when it comes to sport and more than happy to throw money at their teams and facilities.“

Manchester Metropolitan University
“Manchester Met’s a bit calmer and more grown-up than its older brother. The gazillions of pubby, clubby delights in the 24/7 city still distract some from studious contemplation and there’s always a boozy buzz in the SU bars and club nights. Academic facilities are always getting beefed up and first years get accommodation guaranteed (including insurance)“

University of the Arts London
“The students tend to be similar in many ways: trendy in the extreme and committed to their courses. When it comes to nightlife, the sexy new SU ‘Hub’ has given students from different colleges a chance to mix ‘n’ mingle and cut down on the number schlepping off to drink in Goldsmiths instead. Most first years can be squeezed in to (mainly 60s) halls. Probably the most well-respected, kudos-laden arts institution in the country“

University of Worcester
“The compact University campus is built on the site of an old RAF base and exudes unassuming charm. The campus functions as a small village and feels like one…more. Worcester’s become a rising star in digital arts and sports science. Worcester’s good for pubs and, to a lesser extent, clubs. There isn’t much Uni accommodation, but only a handful of first years go away unhoused. “

discussing meta-language

Three events this week caught my attention concerning gestures and how we perceive them.

There was some recent fuss over Tony Blair’s speech to the Labour Party conference as described by Jonathan Freedland . To make a long story short, if you follow him to where he says that withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan would be a ‘craven act of surrender’ you’ll see that he is met, not with silence, but with applause. Besides the somewhat logical explanation, it’s hard to avoid the fact that we’re being told that the war in Iraq should not have happened, those are 12 seconds of applause that weren’t taken into account. Wow. I can only imagine someone who only read about this and hasn’t heard the actual speech part.

The second event was Steve Balmer’s (Microsoft CEO) reaction to the iPhone and third but not last, Stan Sigman’s speech during the Apple 2007 Conference.

There’s this wonderful post over at Presentation Zen which I enjoyed, about how the speech was constructed. Jobs was all smiles while talking as well as his partners and execs, except one of them, the Cingular representative, Stan Sigman. To quote the post, there are some details:

“Stan Sigman strolled slowly across the stage, hands in his pockets, in a manner you might expect from, say, a legendary football coach from the SEC about to face the press before the big game. He spoke slowly with a friendly laid-back manner, and at first he spoke from the heart. Then the cue cards came out, the head went down, and it was all down hill after that.”

That didn’t make a very good impression on the audience it would seem, as people reacted : painfully bad! A sign that you should stop improving when you’re that big?

Normally, any gestures and actions are highly subjective, both for the person and situation. But this seemed really shameful, especially being compared with previous speakers. What a delicate situation for someone who hasn’t really mastered his speech techniques. He is to blame of course, but I sometimes wonder if Steve Balmer insisted that it should be him and not anyone else from the company or he wanted to do it himself…

But probably the worst case of being rude this week is Steve Balmer. The wall of shame awaits, Steve. Why? For laughing at the iPhone. Huge price, no keyboard, pfft, people will never use this and they will buy cheaper products. I think it’s a sign that he didn’t watch the Macworld conference, more precisely the iPhone part of it.
Very rude. Laughing isn’t the best thing to do as you never know when you’ll be the subject of a monkey boy video yourself, Steve. Nokia responded too, but simply by saying “it is a 2G device, not 3G, which was a surprise”. Nothing fancy, just a simple thought and not a sign of being nervous about competition. Fourth quarter of 2007 is still somewhere very far.

I wonder when people will control their gestures and realise how much more they mean to the outside World. How running your hand through your hair or scratching yourself aren’t things you should be proud of…

Advertising in the last century

AdAge made a very big list of icons, slogans, people that have brought their contribution to last century’s advertising. I don’t know the criteria behind it, but it’s rather refreshing to see Leo Burnett’s creations still standing high : Tony the Tiger, the Marlboro Man and others…

“…these advertisements, most of them, are something else, too. They are treasures. For one, they are important artifacts in our culture”

Technorati

Setting up my Technorati Profile, w00t

Slow Down Week

Describing my life as it was lately, this week seems to be Slow Down Week. I’m so in!

And after that, maybe now we will know why we’re so stressed 80% of the time

the problem with curse

Curse Gaming, oh the story behind it.

Curse was a guild site at first. Relatively soon after World of Warcraft release, the addon listing was made for the WoW guild because people were complaining that they couldn’t find any mods. The site was linked in the IRC channel on QuakeNet – which at this point already was quite big (200+ people) – and from there the traffic to the site grew fast. At this time, it began getting linked to from the official WoW forums, and “shit hit the fan”. Popularity and traffic went sky-high.
It kept developping until the European WoW was released, adding quite a lot of functionality, but then went back to gaming. For around 1 year, Curse did not perform any active improvements on the website, while the use of it still grew rapidly from day to day. After about 1 year of active traffic, it moved from one low end server to 7 high end servers, still at this point having no advertisements as form of revenue to finance the steadily increasing hosting costs. When the costs got way too high for a non-profit business to handle, advertising was implemented in order to solve the hosting problems.

Anyhow. What Curse is going to do now, with the new version of the site launched, is to extend a lot, creating separate portals and forums for different MMORPGS such as Vanguard, Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, Guild Wars and Darkfall Online.

In the meanwhile, what the official history doesn’t say is that Curse, the World of Warcraft guild has had an enormous success, despite having a rather huge fight over who should lead it and other minor issues that never made it to the outside world. They were well known for their Naxxramas movies and the epic Blackwing Lair movie, which can’t be downloaded anymore.
So you might be asking yourself, where’s the problem here?
Well, the problem is ‘What should Curse be doing next?‘. Focus on the forums which the World of Warcraft users are crying for or keep extending to the point of buying other minor modding sites for games such as Vanguard in order to put them all under one umbrella?

The usual ‘We have a brand. What now‘ problem I’d say.

1. Who are these users?
   I think no one bothered much with the ‘community’ part and creating forums and forum subcategories, user groups and more detailed profiles. There’s a lot of time and neurons to be invested in order to see who Curse members are (the ones that actively use the website). The better you know the people and what they actually want, the easier it is to find out what they have in mind.
   “While I don’t reply to everyone on the forums, I like to think a few people know who I am“
   Why doesn’t it work? Because it looks so damn confusing! (“Make a separate forum“)
2. Honesty is the best policy.
   If the forums won’t be up in the next three weeks for the WoW guild, there should be something telling you that angry users aren’t … well, happy users. All they will do is talk about how baad the site is and given it’s down because of hardware problems, if it’s down for more than four hours, they will immediately seize the oportunity and block it off their lists. And also whine on other boards about how bad things are.
3. Focus, focus, focus.
   If it wants separate portals for every game, these ’separate portals’ should look less like the main portal which confuses things quite a lot. Just because of a ‘vg’ or ‘aoc’ instead of ‘wow’ change in the URL they should make them have their own personality concerning the left bars: relevant things in relevant places, not at the bottom of the screen. Given they keep wanting to please all the users by making them look more or less the same, they will please none. If point 1 was taken into consideration, it would be a lot easier to identify who cares more about their portal and who is more involved. Is it the Vanguard community or the WoW one?
4. Be the first or be different!
   So there are a lot of IGE sites and gaming hubs of epic sizes such as gamespot. If Curse has its reputation ahead of it from World of Warcraft, keep it a MMO site! No consoles, no other games allowed. It already has a character since most perceive it as ‘that addon site’ or ‘that imba guild in WoW’. It’s the outlaw, the ‘no life’ kind of person that is up to date with the news at any hour of the day. So far so good, only a few games are present. It could also try with Lost Colony, Huxley, Battlefield 2142 and Thrones of Chaos perhaps. So be the first to compile all these MMO’s in one big umbrella portal!
5. Follow the trends
   For one it would mean seeing what’s relevant for the users. For example, the era of Warcraftmovies is over. People aren’t downloading their movies anymore and FileFront has become almost obsolete. It’s the streaming era, damn it. YouTube and Google videos are now used in syntagms such as ‘Did you see that hit? Maan it was the biggest fucking crit ever, I 1-shotted him’ – ‘Googlevid or it didn’t happen’. Trends are everywhere. Find it before others do, like world of raids did when it found out people are avid for information about The Burning Crusade and interviews + photos of people that have no life outside their pixels. People don’t need DKP sites and raid management anymore. Ad if they did, they need ones where you don’t just sign up and roll for a spot. Where you can add a comment related to your presence (‘I’m doing this before so I might not make it, have someone else in mind for my spot’  / ‘I’m not yet attuned so probably I can’t get in the raid’ / ‘In this raid we need healers so we have cut down the number of warriors to 3 instead of 5′)

Anyhow, a very interesting experience which was fun to read about and find out more

GAP’s failure

Although old news worldwide and even @ Stefan Stroe or in the Digital Bulletin , I think I can write about this in order to fulfill nenorocitu’s tag, to write about a brand autopsy.

Gap, one of the older brands out there was founded in 1969 because there were no fashionable stores at the tim. The name is an obvious reference to the ‘generation gap’, the bridge between teenagers and their older relatives, be they parents or grandparents and so on. It didn’t have its own line for quite a while, the company running around with a motto that said something about Levi’s – they were distributing jeans and had this peak in sales during the hippie movement. No wonder, ‘fall into the gap’ they used to say. It extended a lot and I think it extended the wrong way. A few of the names of their brands were Ga, Gap Outlet, GapKids, babyGap, GapBody, GapMaternity, Old Navy & Old Navy Outlet, Banana Republic, Forth & Towne and the Piperlime shoe store. I don’t remember others but there were quite a lot more.

Its story is quite sad: In 2004 the founder and chairman of the board retired, letting his son take over the business, hiring Paul Pressler as CEO (he used to run Disney Theme Parks). Then this news comes in and stirs things. Possibly no more GAP soon and in my opinion GAP is dead just like punk is dead; still people to listen to it but not powerful enough to make a comeback!

Despite this AdAge article (‘How Would You Fix The Gap?‘) where people give out suggestions on how to fix a business on its way down, I think the only possible thing that would fix them is embracing the fact that the term ‘gap’ no longer exists as it used to – in a modern World of melange between teens and adults (you never know where one starts and the other ends), it might be a solution to focus on what they had when they started and on Old Navy : jeans, khakis, sweaters. You know, the basics. Any person can tell you how hard it is to find a decent pair of jeans. GAP used to be okay when it wasn’t making clothes for skinny teens. Oh well, even the Budget Fashionista is a bit mad about this

Things could be fixed but they will never be like they were back in the day!

The Google Master plan

“Google’s master Plan had been erased but the Undergoogle blog kept a hight resolution picture of it for you. Take a look and enjoy the crazyest plans from their engineers in the complete version of the tech world’s most famous whiteboard:“

Google Whiteboard

This reminds me a bit of what our work used to look like when we were trying to figure out a campaign for self-defense! It extended from ‘full media coverage’ to celebrities militating for gun usage using their breasts… (no unfortunately it can’t be seen here)