Well I have been extremely busy lately with school. Accounting has eaten up a lot of my time with Marketing coming in a close second. These next couple of weeks are the last of this semester so things will start to slow down and I’ll finally get a break.

I somewhat have an idea of what I want to do with the site and have laid some of it out on paper. When things start slowing down and summer starts coming around, then I will be able to implement some of this stuff.

The Java programming class I am taking is going fairly well. We have covered error handling, which was something I think should have been done earlier and with more depth. I have a project due in there next week that deals with the Swing package and error handling, shouldn’t be too hard.

I think I know the absolute worst way to treat a customer now. I went to a food chain (that will remain nameless) and the lady taking my order just acted put out by the fact that I was interrupting her ‘doing nothing’ time. If I am interrupting you so much, just get someone else to take my order, do not try and make me feel guilty because you have to work. We have all encountered this scenario sometime in our lives, and we all hate it. It is very frustrating to have someone act put out with you just because they are working and you are not.

I am currently reading Creating Customer Evangelists and it brings up some good points about the 4 “P’s” (Product, Price, Placement, and Promotion) not always having to be the focus of a companies’ marketing strategy. Does a good product sell itself? Should it? Let’s say you are a bank, what are you selling? You are selling service, support, and satisfaction, so basically, nothing truly tangible. So does a bank need to advertise? Probably not as much as other businesses. Why? Well banks are a good example of word of mouth advertising. People who use a bank and are pleased with it will basically advertise to their friends, coworkers, and family members about your bank, even if you do not have the best rates. So you basically get FREE customers by keeping your exsisting customer base happy. Easy enough right?

Service is the name of the game nowadays. However, there are still a lot of people who shop based solely on price (homogenous shoppers), so how do you reel them in? It’s a hard problem to solve because lowering your prices too low causes your product to look cheap.

I am working on a project for my Intro to Java class and it is the perfect example of why Object Oriented Programming is not always the best way to go about things. For this assignment it is basically overkill because the entire system could have been built in little modules with methods doing all the work, there is no need for the abstraction that OOP provides. I will post the code sometime later, so you can see what I mean.

I am still in limbo about what exactly I am going to talk about with the Lubbock Developers and Networking User Group. I told them Web Services with PHP but they said that the topic may be a little advanced for some of the audience… WHA?! Whatever, I’ll dumb it down.

Well, I just got back into Lubbock this morning from a really good Easter break spent with my family and Lyndsay. I went and saw “The Passion of the Christ” and let me just say it has to be one of the greatest movies ever, period. I do not care what anyone says about Mel Gibson, he did an amazing job creating this film and portraying it the way he did. Too much blood?? Only for those who do not live in reality. When someone is whipped or beaten, they bleed, the critics need to realize this. Anyway, it was definitely worth seeing and will be worth buying when it comes out on DVD.

It is going to be a busy and interesting next couple of weeks. I have exams out the wazoo and I have to speak at this month’s Lubbock Developer and Networking User Group about some different topics (mostly PHP and some Java). So that’s my next few weeks in a nutshell.

Well I have been informed by numerous people that I need to update my ‘About’ info. I will update it as soon as possible. I just haven’t had time lately to revamp this site and probably won’t have time for a while.

My Marketing professor spent most of today continuing to prove everything everyone has learned in Economics wrong. The fact that demand is not a function of the supply boggles my mind. He also went over some interesting facts about advertising and whether or not sales are actually effected by advertising campaigns.

I guess the best question he asked was, “Do sales increase with advertising or does advertising increase with sales?”. It is an interesting concept simply because with more sales you have more money to spend on advertising but with advertising you sometimes get more sales. He raised the point that maybe those two things have no relationship whatsoever, or that the relationship between the two is so distant that isn’t noticeable.

Well I finally finished my first article for WebDevReviews.com. You can view the entire article here. I will be finishing up my second review fairly soon and when I finally get this site up and running the way I want I will have some articles/tutorials.

So what does the future hold for http://www.badice.com? Well for one, I am changing the site from a blog type site to something with actual content. I have not totally nailed down exactly what the content will cover but it will probably have something to do with Marketing, Programming, and technology in general. I may decide to throw some Java, PHP, or Python tutorials into the mix. Right now it’s all in the planning stages though, so we’ll see.

As noted by Chu Yeow, Google has a new look. It is a very subtle change but a good one overall. Chu Yeo also mentions Personalized Google which allows you to create a profile and have your search results conform to that profile. Pretty neat stuff actually.

So I am really looking into this internship for the summer. Basically, a job in NYC making $2,900 plus a stipend at the end of the job. Still looking at the details and putting together a resume to send to him. To me this would be an awesome job, I mean, come on, working in New York with one of the best Marketing minds in the world??