Cognitive Metaphors

If it wasn't, it should have been. In this blog, i want to detail what I experienced because it could be a very niche, long tail type, marketing tactic. On the 23rd, I saw an ad for a $300 brand new MacBook Air. My trusting Catholic nature holds out 70% hope that it was a legit offer that I just missed out on.

True story. I love Macs. Actually, I love Commodore Amigas but that battle was lost over 15 years ago. Recently, my family computing backbone took a hit when my iMac 17" G5 passed away. It had survived a power supply transplant but died seven months later for good. That left me with my Macbook and a Mac Mini I had purchased mid year. With 3 geeky daughters who are all Mac/Internet literate, I often find myself without a Mac to use. Plans are to buy a fully loaded iMac in March when my company bonus comes in. In the mean time, I have added to my weekly human internet surfing routine an activity to scan craigslist philadelphia for Intel based iMacs and MacBooks.

In my past scannings, I noticed some patterns of folks who would be selling Intel based computers hacked to run Mac OS for a slight margin on the cost of the PC. Others were selling older technology Mac models. Others were selling more recent models but needed the money - i.e. students. I have not yet bought anything from Craigslist but have heard people with good experiences. I've also heard stories of people having anxiety when going for the pick up having in the back of their mind a Craigslist killer or scam based scenario. You get to see certain patterns and forms opinions as to which ones are legit. 

Christmas Time Urgency

If you hadn't noticed from going to the local malls or strip malls, the day before Christmas is crazy and the prices are not really all that great. Well, I bet that pushes a whole lot of people to scan online for bargains. I bet it creates a great urgency for people who are hardwired by our culture to respond.

The Bait

So I find this Craigslist ad for a $300 MacBook air. It looks legit. The guy won the thing but doesn't like Macs. He'd rather have quick money and you can pick the computer up in Philadelphia. MacBook Airs go for $1499 on the Apple website. It's a too good to be true 500% discount over retail. I did what any good American would do.

The Switch

The next day, I receive a response back from a real guy. You can read the response below and judge for yourself. Notice the redirection to a website that collects my email with the promise of winning a computer. They guy already had my email but of course it's important to redirect to a site that has an email collection / submit button that can prove I submitted something with the express written consent for receiving all sorts of additional spam. Here's the response.

Hey what's up, I got hit with tons of replies and the computer's gone...sorry The guy is on his way over to get it now, Sorry... I'm telling you what I've been telling everyone else... I know it's not gonna help you out for x-mas but...if ya can get a free computer out of it who cares right, I won it online a couple weeks ago, they might still be running it, I don't know...you'd have to check it out It was some kind of  market research thing or something and...all I know is I put my an email in and some shipping info, and when I got home from work 2 weeks ago, there was a Fed-Ex Box on my doorstep, and there it was in the box. Check it out if you want, that's all I can tell ya... It might be worth a look...It's up to you. http://www.mytrax.info/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=278&t202kw= Good Luck and Happy Holidays,XXXX

The Cleanup

The ad was removed from Craigslist so I couldn't show you the original. It fits every pattern of being legitamate. I even have the guys email address and it looks normal. If any of my friends don't know, one of my side committments is to help my friend Sushant as COO of 3Touchpoints.com.  I'll have to add this one to our advanced 3Touchpoints.Com playbook of things we might help web marketing agencies test and measure - a real looking, niche based, long tail themed, holiday timed marketing campaign.

It's been a while since I blogged. The article title comes from a Maya Angelou quote that I saw the other day at a Michael's Craft Store on a wooden imprint block. It reminded me that though I don't have my dream solution out there, I have a song and a process for synthesizing ideas from all the talks with my friends. Friends of mine lately have been talking about the idea of starting an "analytics agency of record". It's a while away but it gives me a target to focus my ideas for building "analytics centered communities".

I'm thinking of reorganizing around two main themes - Analytics and Virtual Web Internships. Web interns from virtually anywhere can help me implement the things I need to build this analytics centered communities framework. I'm focusing on the Philippines but anyone U.S. or other country college student who came to me and was a good fit would not be turned down. I've put some priority around it in that I've recently been promoted at work. I can't afford to leave work but I've got extra vacation now which I can use to spend time bring this to bear in 2010. Also, any extra dollars in raise and stock options I get can feed taking on more interns. I invested some money in my old company, GSI Commerce. I bought in at $20 it susequently went down to 12 (should have bought more) and luckily came back to $25. All in all, I have a few dollars there that could fund another 5 person Filipino summer internship.

I've asked my previous interns to advocate for me to set up an accredited internship with their school, University of Santo Tomas in Manila. I'm hopeful that this March I will have that. It means that my new batch of interns can work up to 40 hours on projects I define. Previously, my interns worked my intership as a second internship with only about 10 hours a week each to spend.

Get rid of some of these bottlenecks and things really start to move. In the new year, I hope to use these interns to help my projects for 3Touchpoints.Com,ForeignTrainedDentists.Org, and JoyAndCareGiving.Org. My mom also wants me to apply this type of training program to a technology center (essentially an extra room build in Saint Anthony's Development and Learning Center).

I've gotten great training, learning project management on the job, and executive coach at work this year and this will come in handy. I've learned to take ownership of the things I am not doing to meet my goals. Sure, I can sooth myself about all the good accomplishments but with better planning, I could have done more.

I am hopeful for making an even bigger splash in the new year and continuing to sing my song and get a little bit of a regular member glee club to metaphorically sing along with me. The songs next year are going to be tight!

I've just finished a great 3 day session at Drupalcon D.C. 2009. On a sad note, in the last hour of the conference I lost a gold cross pen that I bought on my first date with my wife. It had my name on it so my outside hope is that someone will look up "Anthony Garcia Drupalcon" and find my profile and contact me. Either way, I'll going to take the sentimental energy I had stored up in that pen and turn it into a lot of Drupal energy.

At the conference, I learned alot of new techniques to do cool things with data and Drupal and visualization, Integrate Drupal with Facebook,  my special interest in Education/Church sites, the business side of Drupal and more. I've met the Drupal luminaries. I especially was star struck by the Lullabot folks. Now, it's time to go back home to apply it. I thought I'd write up an action plan on practical ways I could apply what I've learned in short, medium, and long term ways. I'll put together a list below of things specific to what I am working on rather than made up stuff.

I strive to understand how much my household is burning on expenses - our burn rate. If you know this, you can set a goal to fund a 6 month break from work, a sabbatical. Your break might be funded partially by severance and unemployment. This all depends on how you lose your job. It's not such a bad thing. Right now, I'm pretty comfortable in a job that I enjoy and am challenged by. But who knows what tomorrow will bring in this economy.

There's a parallel universe. I picture a me doing something very different but equally successful to what I'm doing now. Perhaps I'm going back and forth to the Philippines training a team of developers and then traveling the U.S. promoting their services. I actually try to keep at least a few toes into the pool of this parallel universe. I buy books to learn new technologies, I experiment with outsourcing work to my nephew and friend in the Philippines, I set aside extra money for the express purpose of moving some of the ideas faster. I also try to maintain a good reputation and contacts. At times, I've had trouble spreading myself too thin.The answer to that is to stop accepting money for side projects. I make enough money at my real job so I can take on some real projects in the future without pressure or expectations and work out the kinks in my ideas.

A friend from grade school turned me on to the Four Hour Work Week. I'd like to employ some additional virtual assistance to advance a few ideas.

a. ForeignTrainedDentists.Org - create a forum for dental reform and an easier path for foreign trained dentists

b. Some sort of community for amateur movie making

c. A community at my work to promote innovations in the Energy business. Perhaps I'd like an external community for things like recycling and local community borough politics. I also live close to a major energy entity - PJM - I'd like to build up more expertise on them. I've decided my work focus will be on energy so I'm reading up a lot on the subject matter lately. I've given up on e-commerce, medical, and data warehousing.

d. I'd like to spend some time strengthening my programming skills with some of the later technologies iphone development. I also need to build up my microsoft programming skills for work.

A friend of mine found my old Cognitive Metaphors site from 1995. Just 2 years out of college and I had quite a few grand visions. Ariel, my friend, and I even wrote a grant proposal to NASA for math/science education. It's affirming to see that I still follow those ideas I had back then. In the past two years, I designed,developed, and implemented a Coal Profit/Loss logistics system at NRG. I just got through with training 20+ people on the various parts of it. Right now, I'm doing screen casts of the training. I still follow these 6 step below. They've served me well.

At work, I believe I've proven that I could innovate solid logistics systems that smart people can use to navigate their companies through rough waters.

In 2009, I want to build on that with front end interfaces that make it even easier to use what I've built in the past 2 years.

I will be pursuing two technology stacks and re-writing my white paper on agile decision support systems. Maybe I'll change the name to Adaptive Decision Support Systems.

The two stacks

SQL SERVER - SHAREPOINT - netIQ/netIQ Aegis/EXCEL/VSTO/SSIS/SQL Server Analysis Services. - Blackberry

MYSQL - DRUPAL - PENTAHO - iPhone

The Microsoft technology is what I have available to me at work. The open source stack is what I prefer to use. Through both stacks, I will be implementing the same ideas on how social networks of analysts will team to build adaptive decision support systems valued as a competitive advantage.

I'll startt out with small prototypes and iterate further. My development skills are beginning to atrophe so it's imperitive that I set out a set of milestones and small victories and meet them each month.

If time permits, I would also like to introduce Amazon EC2 clustering so that solutions I put together become scalable. This may be more of a Phase II thing.

I'd like to continue my focus on Pentaho and Drupal. I'd also like to continue looking for ways to build capabilities of Cognitive Metaphors by utilizing U.S. and Filipino resources as interns or value added collaborators.

I'm currently working on 2 projects - one Drupal e-commerce site for a small Europeon company and one small Pentaho assignment for a small company that wants some reporting to support a software product they developed. I'm happy to help advance these guys efforts and in turn, I get real requirements to work with to advance the platforms I am promoting - Pentaho and Drupal.

"We must become the change we want to see in the world." - Mohandas Gandhi

It seems that a lot of people are talking about a lot of things. Gasoline prices are one of those things in the public conscience. Years ago, I never thought about gas. Now, my awareness is raised. Each time I fill up, I reset my trip miles so I can track how many miles I went for the gallons I bought last time. I'll put together some graphs on this later. But it turns out that I'm averaging 24 miles to the gallon (I drive a lot of highway miles to work in Princeton from Conshohocken). It costs me about $15/day in gas and 2 hours of my life in transit lately under some hot sun. My car is now 10 years old and nearing 200K miles. So there's lots of data to consider for decision making of buying a new car. Should I hold out for newer models? Will the cost of these newer models go down with more competition?