EASPORTS really has cranked up the PR machine in anticipation of the November 16th release of EASPORTS Active 2. In the last few months they have announced that David Beckham and Venus Williams will be celebrity spokespeople for the product, and they have also been releasing a steady stream of promotional videos to drive player interest. The latest video, released last night on Facebook, reveals an impressive array of interesting and, perhaps more importantly, challenging looking exercises.
So.
It is almost 6:00 AM on a Saturday morning. I should be sleeping. I wanted to be sleeping. Instead, I had a nightmare that got me out of bed about 30 minutes ago. One of those nightmares you don’t even want to tell the details of because they are horrible and embarrassing. I’m awake now, and sitting here doing that I’m almost always doing at this time on a weekday. Drinking coffee, eating my breakfast of two frozen waffles with peanut butter in between them, and drinking coffee.
If I didn’t have an insanely long (and mostly self-imposed) to-do list for the weekend I’d be even more upset about that.
I am writing this post on October 20th, 2010. The date is important because today has been declared Spirit Day by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. For those of you who have not heard of this, Spirit Day (in the words of the promoters) “honors the teenagers who had taken their own lives in recent weeks. But just as importantly, it’s also a way to show the hundreds of thousands of LGBT youth who face the same pressures and bullying, that there is a vast community of people who support them.”
I want to state right off the bat that I am just as horrified and outraged about the suicides that sparked this event as any other sane human being would be. It is also not my intent to offend anyone who may have been bullied or teased because they were a member of the LGBT community.
The above statement is what is known as a disclaimer.
I follow a lot of folks on Twitter who, like myself, are very active in the social media community. These people, again like me, are very passionate about the importance of social media in the business world and about how valuable of a tool it can be to promote your business. Unfortunately, many of them seem to fall flat on their face when it comes to coming up with a valid justification as to why a business needs to be involved in social media. In fact, they very frequently tend to take offense at the very nature of the question. Which is, of course, a sure fire way to guarantee that the business you’re trying to convince to get into social media never well.
Return On Investment, kids. It’s not a dirty word. Get over it. The whole nature of taking offense at the idea of justifying why a business should spend money on your idea without being able to quantify where it will turn into profits for them is absurd. It is tantamount to an artist claiming that people “just don’t get” their work. It’s a cop out. Sure, it’s all fine and dandy that you might be doing something unique and awesome in your mind, but if you can’t prove to someone that giving you money for doing so is worth their time you have no business trying.
I’ve been doing mini-rants on my Twitter/Facebook feeds about a letter I got from the University of South Florida for the last hour or so. I have decided to encapsulate my frustrations and conclusions here to spare anyone additional spam.
I received my Associate of the Arts degree from St. Petersburg College in December of 2005. I graduated with a GPA of 3.241. Shortly after graduation I applied for admission to the University of South Florida, but I never actually finished the application process. Life got a bit on the busy side, and I let things slide for a few years.
I recently applied again, hoping to finally start working on my Bachelors degree in the Spring. A few days after applying I went to check on the status and was greeted with a “you will be notified by mail of our decision.”
This is never a good sign. I’ve heard that statement far too many times when applying for credit. It always means “we’re telling you no, but we aren’t going to tell you to your face. We have to put this in WRITING.”
So the letter arrived today. Sure enough, I have been rejected. Why? I have completed less than 60% of the classes I have attempted in my post-secondary career. When I first read this I was livid. I ran the numbers and they didn’t add up. I was sure they had made a mistake.
They did not.
I have left a message with the Dean of Admissions, but after pulling transcripts and doing all the math myself here is what I have come up with. I have attempted 135 hours. I have completed 79. This means I have completed 58.51% of the classes I have attempted. In order to be eligible for admission to USF I need to pass 7 more credit hours worth of classes before I am eligible for admission. I am going to discuss this with them and get definite numbers, but this looks to be the position I am in.
I am angry, hurt, frustrated, and annoyed by this. I will not, however, let it defeat me. I still need to get my foreign language requirements in. I have a few grades on my transcript that are F’s that do not need to be taken for my degree. I have some classes I can take to give them what they want, and I will do so.
I will be a USF student one day. I will get my degree. I will not let this hold me back from improving myself.
I won’t.
UPDATE (3:58 PM EST)
Well….This sucks a big bag of flaccid manhood.
Apparently USF counts all attempts toward taking a class in figuring out your attempted to completed ratio, even if you’ve taken the class over again for credit. Saint Petersburg College does not, so those numbers weren’t being figured in to the ones I was working with.
Here’s what I’m facing with USF…
Total hours attempted – 143
Total hours completed – 76
Percentage – 53%
In order to be CONSIDERED for admission under the standard guidelines I need to take and pass 23 credit hours worth of classes. In order to guarantee it, though?
Another 60.
Anything less than 67% requires review by the admissions panel.
I have been told that I would be accepted at any of the other USF campuses. The major I wish to take is only offered at the USF Tampa campus. My only course of action at this point is to write a letter of appeal to the director of undergraduate admissions.
I know for a fact that I can get 16 hours of work in that I NEED to have done for my BA at SPC. Beyond that I am unsure.
This requires some additional thought and decision making.
You discover some interesting things about yourself when you are trying out a colon cleansing program for the first time. You’ll find out whether or not you have enough fiber in your diet, whether you’re drinking enough water, and (perhaps most interestingly) that you’re fully capable of taking a close look at the toilet to see if anything interesting is going on down there. When you’re doing this as a review for a web site, you’ll also find out that you’re going to have to write about that particular part of the experiment.
The things I do for you people.
I have completed my first two weeks of the DrNatura Colonix Advanced Internal Cleansing Program. From the point on the post may, at times, devolve into some slightly graphic discussion. I’m not going to get too terribly detailed in those sections, and as I promised before there will be no pictures, but I figured it was wise to get that particular disclaimer out of the way before we went on.
We’re back!
It took about a week after we got home to fully recover from the utter and complete madness that was Dragon*Con, but your staff here at ShrinkGeek has finally caught up on their sleep and gotten over whatever strain of Con Crud that was running around this year. Unfortunately, for me, there’s still a bit of lingering ick simply due to the fact that, despite my intention to do otherwise, I made some very poor dining choices while we were at the convention. In my defense I really didn’t have a heck of a lot of time to make sure the food I was eating was healthy, though. I was one of the Assistant Directors for the Massively Multi-Player Online Role-Playing Game track and I actually worked 55 hours over the course of the convention. It was fun, but hectic, and when I did have time to grab food I was more concerned with how quickly I could get it than how many calories I was consuming.
The upshot of all this is that I ate a lot of food over Labor Day weekend that I don’t normally eat and I ate way too much of it. I can definitely feel the impact of all that grease, salt, and fat. I’m sluggish, kinda bloated, and my mana bar is almost completely depleted. Now that my schedule is more or less normal again, I really need to buckle down and re-focus on taking care of my body.
Amusingly enough, I got an offer right before we left for the convention that may help me do just that.
It is currently 7:30 AM on Tuesday, August 31st, 2010. I am on vacation, and will be until next Thursday. Krystalle, Rafe and I will be leaving very early Thursday morning to drive to Atlanta for Dragon*Con, but for now I am simply taking some time off and generally trying to relax.
I am…restless.
Recently a friend of mine posted in her blog about some of her first loves. Reading that got me to thinking about my first girlfriend, Lynnetta Boehle.
We dated for a few weeks when we were in the 8th grade. Then she moved. I have suspected on more than one occasion that the only reason she agreed to date me in the first place is because we were friends and she knew that it would only last a short time before she was in another state. The reason I suspect this is because after she moved she never returned any of my letters to her.
What I recall of our brief relationship was pretty awesome, though. She was a great kisser, and she didn’t seem to shy away from the fact that I called her my Black Cat (and I was, of course, her Spider-Man…yes, that’s right…my pet names for us were based on my favorite comic book).
I found out that our relationship was over when she sent a letter to one of our mutual friends talking about her new boyfriend and wondering how she was going to tell me. Considering the fact that she hadn’t said word one to me since she moved I’m not sure exactly why that was a concern, but hey…we were young. I’m pretty sure that she knew I’d find out from said mutual friend.
Lynnetta moved back to the area a few years later and ended up at my high school. In an effort to re-kindle our relationship I took the bold step of “borrowing” my Mom’s car while she was out of town on vacation, picking her up at her bus stop, and taking her back to my place to skip school for the day. In an utterly awesome romantic mood I threw a movie into the VCR to get her to relax and have a good time.
You know what movie it was?
Transformers : The Movie.
Yeah.
In High School. 10th grade, I think. My idea of “woo” was to show the girl I liked a cartoon about giant fucking robots.
I sometimes wonder how I ever managed to actually breed.
Image by geishaboy500 via flickr
It’s a Saturday night, and I am in the process of firming up the fact that I am the best Dad ever.
You see, as opposed to sitting at home futzing around on my computer or even, perhaps, going out on the town I am sitting in the lounge of an indoor Parkour track that is located in Odessa, Florida. Have you not heard of Odessa, Florida? Yeah, neither have I, really. It’s pretty much in the middle of nowhere, about an hour from our house. There are no decent places to hang out anywhere near here, unless you consider McDonalds a “decent” place to hang out (and even that is about 10 minutes or so away). Why am I sitting in this lounge, you may ask? Because my son has recently been intensely interested in Parkour, and he really wanted to come up here and take the two hour class that they are offering.
So. Here I am.