LI Philly/Central NJ Networking Event, F 08.22, Morrisville, PA
The LinkedIn Philly/Central NJ Networking Event will be held on Friday, 08.22, starting at 6:30 PM, at
Concerto Fusion, a fine sushi/Chinese restaurant at 2 South Delmorr Ave. in Morrisville, PA, just across the "Makes Bridge" from Trenton, and jazz and top-40 music will be provided by
DJ Fatha Ramzee. There will be door prizes, and (maybe) a round or two of "speed-friending." The cost will be $45/person -- a bargain!
Plan on bringing your business cards and other paraphernalia to trade, but don't plan on much time for selling anything other than your winning personality. :-) :-) :-)
Here's the menu:
- SUSHI -- choose from volcano roll, asparagus roll, dragon deluxe roll, eel roll, yellowtail guacamole roll
- APPETIZER -- choose from spring roll, crab Rangoon, satay chicken on a stick
- MAIN COURSE -- choose from mango chicken, Thai salsa beef, and Bangkok basil shrimp
The restaurant will provide soda and iced tea; there's also a cash bar.
Here's a map and directions.
You can send me a check (156 Durand Ave, Trenton, NJ 08611) to pay for your seat, or you can use Paypal, below.
Labels: diversions, internet
How to ask a question!
Most people haven't thought about this, because we've asked questions all our lives. It's how we learn. But the fact is that we aren't very good at it, and because we're not very good at it, we don't usually get the answers we're really looking for. So now here we are in the age of blogging and social networking, and in these environments we ask questions the same way we ask our best friend when we're sitting at the bar.
Not me, man. If I'm going to go to the effort of typing up a question, I'm going to make sure I ask one that will get me some good answers and not make me look like a bloomin' idiot. This was a skill people had to master in the days when
Usenet filled the role that social networking plays now, and I (at least) have not forgotten it. So here's how to ask a question properly:
- Don't leave hints as to what you believe is the "correct" answer. Be neutral, or someone who might've helped you will leave off.
- Don't leave terms undefined. This of course includes jargon and acronyms, but also includes any term with multiple meanings. Be explicit.
- Ask one question at a time. Don't throw in extras with "oh by the way" or "let me also ask." Don't confuse the issue.
- Don't use the question as an ad for your services. You ANSWER questions for THAT.
- Do thank people who take the trouble to answer you. And be polite about it. Some people will give answers that have already been said by someone else; some will give trivial answers or will say something that reflects no knowledge at all. If you act like you're put out by that, others will see you as using people instead of valuing their opinions.
- Do summarize what you hear for the benefit of all. That's what Rhetoric for Engineers is all about: a collection of summaries. This satisfies the dozens of people out there who have the same questions you do, but for whatever reason have not asked them. It's OK for them to depend on you.
It may not be your primary goal to keep your name out there, if you're using your blog or membership in a social networking site to get your questions answered, but it can be a good secondary goal. If you do a good job of asking and answering questions, your name will get out there. You'll find some people will even want to know you for it.
Labels: internet, recommendations
Making new friends via social networking
I ran across
a blogger named Scott Bradley who has thought long and hard about first contact in the social networking Web sites. Here's a summary of some of his most critical points:
- Of course, he starts off by sending the friend requests.
- But he follows up with a personal message. This is of course possible with the major social networking engines (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace):
When sending the friend request put a message in there saying, "Hi _____(their name) I saw you in the _____________(name of the group) and wanted to add you as a friend. I am a (_______) (entrepreneur/business person...etc) who likes networking with other like minded individuals. If you would like to talk feel free to IM me on my screen name [...]. I hope you have a great day!
Here is his line of reasoning:
- You are just sending this message personally to the person saying their NAME...not just some huge message that you generally send out.
- You are edifying them that they are someone that is worth getting to know.
- Are showing them that you have an interest in networking.
- [You] give them the freedom to contact you if they are interested in talking more.
And he goes on to describe numerous random contacts he has gotten as a result. One key he does not emphasize, but that it it is obvious he holds on to, is that he believes so much in the power of the random contacts that he is always ready to move on them. To start a conversation on something relevant.
Now one thing that you have to be aware of...is that it takes a lot of requests for this to happen...but...those that do come to the surface are awesome people.
Those who use the dating Web sites know the same principles are working in meeting potential dates online, but I think we don't see how well the same principles apply with professional contacts. I have only just started to see it myself.
Labels: internet
Dr. Ron makes a widget!
If this works for you, as it does for me, then widgets are really pretty easy. And no doubt if I can make one, as I have done here, you can make a better one. :-)
Just copy the following and stick it where it goes. LOL
There is a problem with this widget: I cannot publish it on
MySpace. It looks like MySpace has trouble with iframe and object tags. No use even trying.
Labels: internet
The worst way to keep time
Standardized tests require teachers and professors to "keep time" for test-takers by writing the number of minutes left on the blackboard. Am I the only person on the planet who sees that this method is only good for exactly one minute?
Hey! ETS! And you other standardized test makers! Find a way to the 21st century! You can put up a Web screen in the classroom with a simple, easily readable
Javascript timer, that'll be good for the duration of the test! So why isn't it happening already?
Try this one. You could add a beep pretty easily.
It does have one weakness: I want to suppress the number of days and the author appears to have overriden me. Hmph. I might have to write my own before the next wave of tests. LOL
Labels: education, internet
Common mistake freezes the office
The work-day was half over today when half of my department (including me) learned we were on the hook for an all-day meeting tomorrow. There go our plans for the rest of the week; we have to do alternative planning to be out of the office tomorrow, and the alternative plans have to be wrapped up by close of business. One colleague had to scurry around to arrange alternative child care as well.
The people running the all-day meeting knew about it three weeks in advance. So why, you may ask, did we learn so late? Here's the clue: the e-mail we got (I read it at lunch, only after hearing there was one) contained a "reminder" of the meeting. So... if we're "reminded" of a meeting we're hearing about for the first time, that is a sign that...
...the original e-mail was sent to the OTHER HALF of the department, which has gone through the meeting already, TWICE. And their two e-mails -- each identical -- included read receipts. Those read receipts should've been a sign that the sender made a mistake.
And it's a common mistake: the sender had two lists for the same message, and instead of sending it once to each list, she sent it twice to the same list. Why should the people who received the original message guess what's wrong? THEY were informed as they should be, though they were inconvenienced by extra read receipts. The sender made the mistake, and the read receipts should've tipped her off.
Funny, I mentioned that this mistake is common to one of my colleagues, and she looked at me like I was from Mars. Tough darts. It is. This is essentially no different than sending a message to an entire listserv, when it's intended as a response to one person. The colleague's counter-point? That even if any of us could do the same thing, the mistake still brings consequences. The one who made the mistake should be reprimanded. The reprimand didn't happen, but the sender of the undelivered message had to receive nasty return e-mails from several of those who were put out.
Entrepreneurs must be especially sensitive to this mistake, because we can't afford to inconvenience our first few customers with multiple repeated e-mails. They might even think of us as spammers if we're not careful.
Labels: internet, office space
The New Nigerian Scam
I was approached online by someone who named herself Stacy (artist's conception shown here), saying she was from Brooklyn, but after traveling to Nigeria her parents were killed in a car wreck, and her passport was confiscated. She claims to be 31, (incredibly) single, (even more incredibly) white, and (still more incredibly) looking for her "soulmate," who will (of course) help her return to the USA.
(I listened to this for educational purposes, being oh, so intimately acquainted with most previous incarnations of the
Nigerian Scam.)
But she has major ESL issues, even for someone raised in Brooklyn. :-) :-) :-) Consider this excerpt from the "background" she sent me:
Furthermore,after the death of my parent i wish to come back to states but the people i thought they can help me denied me when i called them for help that is why i decided to used the little money they left to send myself to school of nursing where i have just finished as last two month.Now that i have finished as nurse i thought i can get job here but its a pitty that there is no job here ,then i started going to the embassyoffice just to seek for there help but there is nothing come out of all what i have been looking for, so i made up my mind to splitted the money left with me into two, i used one to pay for the hotel where i m living now cuz i have no place to stay and no one to stay with and used the rest to deposited for the flight ticket with aim that i can get job so i can pay it before i can get someone to stay with in the states but ordinary persona to stay with i mean solumate man to lean on forever .
I'm posting this as a public service: this Stacy is most likely a black Nigerian man, looking to scam stupid Americans, as did "Miriam Abacha" before him. He may also be a Muslim, though I think that's neither here nor there -- I just heard the other day that Nigeria was mostly Muslim. The difference between this scam is that it is targeted at chatters rather than e-mailers. There have, of course, been any number of other scams pointed at
chat rooms and the like, but this one is aimed at those who may not only be stupid, but vulnerable as well. A word to the wise, assuming I have any readers at all, much less wise ones. LOL
Labels: character, internet
The zigzag
Someone I work with wanted to know about broken axis graphs (like the one pictured) -- where you put what I call "the zigzag" on the axis. Is there a name for that zigzag? Are there special cases where you use it? How in the name of GTFW do you create one of these things?
You've got data that doesn't fill the entire data range. If you show the entire data range, there is a chance that you won't be able to see interesting features the data contains. So I posed the question to the Rhetoric for Engineers mailing list and got the following responses:
Lisa Henn broke out her old drafting book (Giesecke is the author) and found that
[C]ertain circumstances require special consideration to avoid wasted space. For example, if the values to be plotted along one of the axes do not range near zero, a 'break' in the grid may be shown... [W]hen relative amount of change is required... the axes or grid should not be broken, and the zero line should not be omitted. If the absolute amount is the important consideration, the zero line may be omitted.
And Lisa herself adds,
On graphs, you'd want to put breaks such that there is still a gap shown in the data. In other words, you wouldn't want the data points crowding the break too much.
She finally points out that
Edward Tufte probably addresses the issue.
Glen Hadley argues that it's not just that we want to ignore empty parts of the data range, but that we may want the data range to appear fully populated as well. This is an appearance issue, meaning that we might not be interested in an axis break for analysis. It's for presentations. So there are several sites where educators and consultants have found ways to fool Excel into creating axis breaks (why wouldn't Microsoft make that a standard option?) -- this is a long and tedious process, and you can be sure most engineers will never bother with it. I did it myself with the graph above, to make sure I could follow directions, and it took me 20 minutes. I also added a trendline to the original data, something the people writing on this subject didn't add to theirs. Here are the sites where they work this issue:
Everett Greene throws in a complaint:
It's too bad the financial world doesn't read this. The economic, stock, and such graphs (almost) always show the top 0.1% of a curve which magnifies the miniscule noise into major ups and downs making it appear that the noise is significant when it isn't.
Preach it, brother!
Labels: education, engineering, internet, rhetoric
Worst search engine EVER! (and also maybe the best)
Ann writes in her Blog about her favorite search engine (not
Google). Pah. A paltry analysis. (No offense. :-)) I can go one better: the worst search engine EVER.
It's at
my local public library. You can't use it for a search. If you enter two search terms, it will search on the first one and ignore the second, meaning it will never find anything requiring two terms (in my case, books on the
#1 Ladies Detective Agency, by
Alexander McCall Smith). Forget that. The only terms among those which will yield any results at all are "detective" (several hundred) and "smith" (thousands). And of course, you can't page back -- the previous page is nearly always expired.
I asked the librarians about these phenomena and they told me (a) their interface to their database is different from what's presented to the customers, and (b) they can't find anything on the customers' search engine either. So. Why even bother to have it? Why not use those terminals for the Internet instead? And ask the librarian to help you find a book?
NOTE: Ann deserves credit for her analysis. (I was only kidding about the "paltry" thing.) Her favorite,
GoodSearch, channels advertising dollars to charitable organizations -- Ann's favorite is
Save Darfur. I just entered as a charity
September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. :-)
Labels: character, internet
Problems with e-mail we may not always think about
I had a discussion with a couple of colleagues in the
TCNJ Writing Program, and the subject of
e-mail came up. I'm not the only one, or the most prolific, to have written about e-mail etiquette, but I'm also not closing the door on learning new stuff about this.
At today's [meeting] we talked about emails from students and "reasonable" levels of accessibility in the online environment (do you respond to student emails on weekends? every day? etc.). [...] Two other issues we discussed were: (1) how can we use the email environment to teach attention to audience (among other things), and (2) how can we mentor students in email etiquette.
I have always said a few words about business e-mail as part of a larger discussion of
e-commerce. But I've never thought about the simple exchange of e-mail as an opportunity for "teachable moments." Another teacher, at another university, said
In fact, at the end of last semester, one of my students confessed that what he had learned from the class was that his tone was often unintentionally abrasive and his written communication was often unclear.
We can only get this learning when we actually look at e-mail actively and critically. As I work with younger students, I have the opportunity to develop the way they look at
instant messaging as well. Heaven knows we can develop the way we handle THAT. :-)
Labels: internet
New "Engineer as Hero" Hall-of-Fame members
We'll be placing
Harrison Ford and
Jodie Foster in the
Engineer-as-Hero Hall-of-Fame, just as soon as I finally see
Flightplan and
Firewall. Each has played an engineer in a previous film, and to play those roles and do a good job is how you get in. :-)
Foster will only be the second woman in the Hall. We need more geek women in the movies! Where are they?
Labels: internet
Does TCNJers follow the history of Usenet?
Comparing the history of
TCNJers to a history of
Usenet groups such as
sci.engr (greatly accelerated):
- we start with the original group, small but committed
- discussion topics start out specific but gravitate to general, except for ads for meetings that may or may not be of general interest
- good discussions bring in more users
- occasional announcements from those who drop in just to make them
- flame wars break out but are quashed by those who want a nice group, and occasionally by group veterans who are trying to maintain a vision
- as the group grows, those interested in specific discussions break out into other groups, keeping the participation in the original group close to constant
- but most of the thoughtful people break out into the other groups
- and the original group is gradually dominated by a few "personalities" with spam on their mind or axes to grind
- the remaining thoughtful people are chased off by flame wars
- the original group becomes a polluted sandbox dominated by spam and the pronouncements of the personalities
If it's true that TCNJers follows this history, we are currently proceeding toward stage 6.
My former student Mary Anne, who's responsible for forming TCNJers, I don't think ever dreamed that she'd have a community of more than 150. On a campus of 6000, where many students are far from activist, this is significant. Some of the subscribers are potential students; a few are alumni; some participants claim their parents even occasionally look in. (Heaven forfend!) I would consider this a classic example of
word-of-mouth marketing, as Usenet once was.
Labels: internet
Urban Legends: B1FF
Once upon a time, when
Usenet was young, there was an anonymous (and many people think "pseudo," meaning in this case "intentionally not serious") article-writer named B1FF.
Wikipedia calls this article-writer "the prototypical newbie," in that it seemed as though B1FF's mission was to ignore as many guidelines for newsgroup writers as possible. Some say that B1FF was a
13-year-old boy; others say he was a seasoned Internet veteran masquerading as a newbie. One guy even wrote a
B1FF translator! But why? Because in those days there were "guidelines" designed to discourage people from writing like B1FF:
C0WABUNG4 D00DZ!
...consider what B1FF did:
- wrote in all caps, the Internet equivalent of shouting;
- misspelled words intentionally, to inflame the somewhat better-educated readers;
- threw himself out there without being part of the conversation's context.
The chief technique people used to prevent this sort of thing was to flame the writer. Unfortunately,
the tossing of insults usually did more harm to newsgroups than good. B1FF would have written
Y0U SUCK S0 THERE!!!
But writers who know their stuff will often cite B1FF as a precursor to the kind of informal Internet-based conversations held today, especially by teens and college students, in
chat rooms and on message boards all over the world, and within
AIM and Yahoo Messenger. Some writers and teachers think that is a sign of the coming apocalypse; me, I'm just glad to see people communicating AT ALL.
Labels: internet
New e-book on the way!
I am working on creating a new e-book,
The Student Entrepreneur's Experience, based on (a) the contents of this blog, (b) my own past experience, and (c) the current experiences of the
IMET Corporation,
Juterphusion Recording Solutions,
Holcombe Chassis Works, and whoever else comes along. It'll contain both a chronicle of those companies' development and some how-to information based on what we have learned from them. I hope to have this book ready for downloading in about a month. :-)
In the meantime, if you would like to see excerpts of these companies' business plans, let me know and I will send you info.
Labels: internet
Trudeau doesn't think much of bloggers
Today's
Doonesbury gives Garry Trudeau a chance to tell the world what he thinks of bloggers. We're all underworked, bitter losers, he says. He does beg the question, though: how is it knuckleheads like HIM get paid for telling the world what they think?
He's an example of the reason that I, having politically liberal leanings myself, don't hang around with other lefties. They're often just not the kind of people you can have a beer with. And right now, I'd rather be reading
Mutts or
Frank and Ernest than
Doonesbury.
Labels: internet
re:invention shuts down!
Rotten luck. Kirsten Osolind says
re:invention is shutting down its blog. No word on whether or when it'll be back. Hers was one of the better ones. :-(
Labels: internet
e-book offered by Commonwealth Capital Advisors
There was a promotional offering of a free e-book from
Commonwealth Capital Advisors entitled
Raising Capital for Start-Up and Early Stage Companies. I'm looking at this book now, and of course it's an impressive piece of work. BUT... you have to be careful when you use it. These guys are making the assumption that "any company" looking for seed funding is looking for something in the range of US $100K to $500K. And that could hardly be further from the truth. There are new companies out there that are looking for no more than a few hundred dollars to get off the ground.
Which is how you can tell the e-book is written by a venture capitalist. Anyone looking for that small of an amount of money isn't in the crosshairs of a self-respecting VC. A VC won't give out advice for anything that puts less than a few $K in the VC's coffers -- in a single day, in some cases.
That doesn't mean the book isn't useful. You just have to recognize that the author may not recognize your company as a real, valid start-up.
Labels: internet
The inner workings of e-commerce, part two
The biggest needs in online retail? Here they are:
- Navigation. Customers have to find what they're looking for. They have to find it where they think it belongs, not (necessarily) where you think it belongs. Many grocery stores carry nuts in "candy and nuts" and in "produce." How do I know which nuts are which? If I am confused in the store, I may head for "customer service". If I am confused online, I head for another site.
- Interface. Customers don't want to have their senses assaulted. You may be able to sell something else besides what a customer wants to buy, but that's no excuse for pop-up ads or blinking images. If your Web site is database-driven (and in retail it should be), then when an item is picked that database entry should suggest others to put on the screen. Amazon is very good at this, and I liken this behavior to seeing the Weekly World News in the grocery-store checkout line. Only without "Batboy". And as long as you are considering your customers' senses, choose site color combinations that make it easy to shop. Test your site on multiple browsers, not forgetting Mozilla Firefox.
- Interactivity. Customers are willing to give feedback. So you want to solicit it at every opportunity. Feedback on the shopping process and feedback on product quality or variety -- those are the big issues. They want their opinions heard.
- Credibility. We all know your primary goal is to sell what you're selling. But in-person sales often works because the sales reps have personality and use it. So you will too. Your Web site will reflect your personability and approachability, and you'll be seen in other places too. That means being seen in blogs and discussion groups relevant to your industry. It also means use of some otherwise dated promotional techniques, like reciprocal linking. What are you willing to do for customers who have links to you on their sites? What can you do to get vendors and business partners to give you the same consideration?
- Security. There are still a few people out there who rank this as the most important thing, but I think that number is shrinking. The use of tools like PayPal for collecting payments is helping.
You'll want to take a look at
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox or
Steve Krug's Advanced Common Sense for ideas on making your site easy to use.
Labels: internet
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