School

Finals are being taken by the majority of college students in the next couple of weeks as the last surge towards the end of the school year is upon us. This has lead me to question the need for finals and the American educational system as a whole. A professor recently told me that she could not stand how American students only learn for test, and then proceed to tell the class that we needed to be prepared for a three part comprehensive final that would affect 30% of our grade. Now I understand that finals are to test your level of knowledge over the course of the semester, and see if anyone really gave a shit and came to class, but at the same time, how am I supposed to remember things I learned in early January about Meso-American cultures and how they affects the American colonists which of course lead to the American Revolution which then had something to do with the Civil War...right?

Needless to say, the current American educational system is taught to stress functioning well in a class and being able to comprehend enough material by test time.

Not Outlandish!

Blogspot.com is not an outlandish system. The site provides a very easy registration process, and creating a blog was one of the easiest systems I have ever experienced. I've spent a great deal of time trying to make the site more applicable to readers and hope to continue updating and adding new ideas. The general concept is a bit hazy as of now, but I hope to start implementing new ideas to the site, and blogger provides the exact mainframe that I am looking for.

Thanks Blogger.com for not being Outlandish!

Group Projects

I am a college student with a major in business administration studying information systems, which tell you a lot about this blog. I was recently in a class that assigned a group project to create an e-business, and then present these ideas to the class. My group came up with a very feasible e-business idea which I will not divulge to protect my group members that might want to follow through with the idea, but I will rant and rave about some of the other groups projects and the issues that make them seemingly outlandish.

3rd Place: Wait, I am going to pay $300 for that?
One main issue I had with most of the groups was that most of the ideas already exist. This group hoped to reduce the cost of textbook for college students by selling electronic copies of textbooks, and by selling pocket-size PDA hardware to view these files. Definitely not an invalid idea, some people might like this idea, but I was not as easily convinced. Here my problem, you can buy textbooks in an electronic file format through many publishers, and they have hardware that you can use to store these files and view them at you leisure, it is called a laptop. Increasing number of students bring their computer to class, and a hand held PDA would be impractical for most textbooks because of the multimedia aspects needed. It would be very difficult to store such large files on a PDA device that they proposed would only have 256 MB of storage. This system seems a little outlandish.

2nd Place: Find the cheapest textbooks near you!!
I feared that this group would have the same problem as the group before when they took the reign of the classroom, but I was thoroughly surprised as they shocked me with an even bigger blunder. Their idea was to have a website where local bookstores would be able to post the prices of every book in their store and students (target market) would be able to search for the book they needed for class, and the query would result in a form of where the book could be found and the prices for each store. I go to a college where you either shop at the bookstore on campus, or at the locally owned store just off of campus. The problem arises because these two stores obviously know what the other is selling, and there would be no incentive for either store to give this valuable data to students. As it stood last semester, the off campus store sold textbooks at around $1-$5 less than the bookstore on campus. I understand that textbooks are expensive, but is an entire website applicable to a less than half a percentage discount? I think not. My reaction to their project was simple, Half.com. If you have never used the site to buy textbooks, you are missing out. Save money, and make money very easily with this subsidiary of eBay.

1st Place: It's cheaper than porn!
I became inspired to create this post when my favorite group in the class got up to present. A very optimistic group throughout the semester, this group always had the most positive outlook for the future and always put their game faces on when giving a presentation. Their e-business was simple, get every sports game ever shown on TV and put it on a website. When this idea was presented I could not help but chuckle a little bit. Maybe it's possible, maybe. They gave their argument to how cool it would be to download streaming videos of the Chicago Bulls 1996 championship season, or watch a cricket game (match?) anytime that you wanted, but I failed to see the legitimacy of their plan. My first problem was the shear scope of this project, and all the data and files that would have to be uploaded and obtained. Yes, YouTube has a lot of videos, but that's because they have millions of users that upload these videos every day. This doesn't mean that putting every sporting event ever published on a website would be simple or practical, but again if it actually could happen it would be SWEET!

Add to this the fact that the NHL, NFL, NBA, MLB, ICC (International Cricket Council), AFL, PBA, MLS, CFL, NLL, WNBA, PGA, ATP, WTA, IndyCar, and NASCAR to name a few, would ever agree to giving up these tightly held copyrights to a website that was proposed as being an offshoot of ESPN. There is a reason why ESPN can't air NHL games anymore, its because TV networks love money, and so do sports leagues and all the parties involved. To top the cake off, the group proposed a pricing system that I personally thought was hilarious, by offering memberships at around $50 per year to watch unlimited games from your personal computer. I'm not sure $50 per year would support the royalties for one Yankees inning, let alone a website that's mission is to have available every single sports game in the history of broadcasting and like I said, that's way cheaper than internet porn

The rest of the groups had some pretty good ideas, many were already in place, but these seemed to be the most outlandish of the bunch.

All inclusive??

I will preface this entry by saying that this is in no way outlandish. This system could easily be implemented and would help with some glaring problems that I experienced during my stay at an all-inclusive resort.



I'm not trying to bash the resort for it's shortcomings, or deter from staying at an all inclusive, I just saw some problems that could easily be fixed with simple, readily available technology. The main problem I saw was with the service in the restaurants at the resort I stayed at. It boasted 6 restaurants and had bars at every corner of the magnificent beach resort. My resort is pictured, but for the sake of being fair I will not say which one. It was a great resort, and this should have no affect to the painstakingly difficult job it is to run a first class resort like this one.

Anyway, the service, at the restaurants, was not very good to say the least. Because I do not speak Spanish (Cancun, Mexico is where the resort was) I can blame a little of this service on the language and culture barriers that made transactions more difficult than they needed to be, but the service in general was less than par. The staff was very courteous, helpful in times of distress and made a general effort to supply ample food and plenty of drinks. But it was slow, and sometimes waiters would ignore you, or hand you off to other waiters, or the host would have to take your order because he was the only one not seemingly preoccupied with TWO tables full of people.

I have never been a waiter, nor do i ever want to serve food to people, but have had friends that boast of it's generous pay and often demanding work. Not to sell this profession short, but it is not a very painstaking job and requires little or no mind power or skill other than having some solid people skills. But once again, I do not want to downplay the job, it takes a lot of patience dealing with people and customer service skills are vital to being a good waiter. Regardless, I believe the problem with staying at an all inclusive resort is the fact that waiters are often stiffed tips and do not get the sufficient supplement to their salary as deserved. Yes, I can admit that I might have not left waiters a large enough tip, but I always leave them a tip. I expected exemplary service and when I got it, I was very pleased, and when I wasn't happy I left a smaller tip.

I believe that the tipping problem could be a factor in the level of service that the waiters provided, and could be easily remedied to provide more motivation. The easiest way that I see possible to increase tipping would be to not just have room numbers jotted down in a record book, but to have a simple computer system installed, like those in most restaurants and bars across the USA and keep electronic journals and tipping based on room number. This could be kept quite easily using the same type of system that resorts and country clubs use with Member Numbers.

Although this may be a minor problem, it could help to increase service by giving customers at the restaurants a chance to write their room number, sign a receipt saying that it was them eating, and a spot for a tip. Although this would increase effort, it could also easily increase the level of service that waiters provide because of the greater allure of tips from customers that are given a glaring reminder with a spot for tip. This vacation long tip calculator could be paid at the end of the stay and could easily boost service and satisfaction from this customers point of view.

Master Programmer Needed!

Imagine sitting in class or a coffee shop and seeing the girl (or guy) of your dreams. You don't know this person, and are basing this destiny of love purely on looks. For most people, getting the courage to get out of your seat and talk to this person, would be equivalent to running across burning coals, naked, in front of your family and all their closest friends. If this isn't an option for you, you might try to frantically catch the person's name so you can stalk them later on facebook or myspace, and then fumble around at your computer until you do, or don't find the person online. If you do find the person, you may spend hours debating whether to send them a message, or a wall post, or some other god forsaken way of communicating via the internet's social networking. GOOD LUCK is all I have to say!

My outlandish system today might actually already be in place in some areas, but I thought I would put a much less reasonable twist on it.


Start off with the same scenario, a classroom or a coffeeshop and you see the opposite partner of your dreams. The first step from here would be to grab your cell phone and turn on the bluetooth application. If you don't have bluetooth you are out of luck, and you better hope that dreamgirl has bluetooth. Ok, so the bluetooth is on, next there would be an application that would send out beams of profile information to all bluetooth enabled phones in the area. This could also be accessed through wireless internet systems. If you are lucky you might catch that perfect someone across the room eying there phone and then stealing a quick glance at you. From the initial profile beam users would be allowed to accept or decline the full profile information and then chose to respond or ignore the invitation for chat. There are many aspects of this system that could be used other places such as career fairs, or business meetings where certain types of people are trying to meet.

I have a fairly broad concept in my head of what this system would look like, but as the title implies, NO idea of how to put it together in any sort of working function. With my limited knowledge of HTML and not even a remote clue about C++ there is no chance of me even thinking about designing this system in the near future. If you have the knowledge to design this system, or know of anywhere where this is available let me know.

Why Outlandish?

The inspiration for this blog came on a long, drunken walk home on a regular Friday night. When I walk home drunk I always get outlandish thoughts in my head. I'm not talking about Outlandish the multi-award winning hip-hop group based in Denmark, I don't think about them often, actually ever until I did a google search to figure out what Outlandish really meant. Anyway, the thoughts i have walking home drunk are peculiar, odd, and strange.

On a recent walk home, I was thinking in a systematic way feeling cold and tired, when I got the idea for an elaborate delivery service taxi ride. As the 20 minute walk seemed to drag out longer and longer with each shivering step I was passed by 3 taxis, 2 night ride vans, and 6 pizza/sandwich deliverymen.



Although empty night ride cars, and available taxi cabs that do not stop are a real issue, I pushed this out of my mind and thought of an elaborate system in which deliverymen provide a sober ride for people that need a ride home to an area that the deliveryman is delivering. In this system, delivery men would be in a database and their current location and future location would have to be tracked. Patrons who are coming home from bars or other locations would call this deliveryman taxi service and provide information about where they live and where they are. This is where the system becomes outlandish. The system would then access a database of deliverymen who are in a 10 mile radius of the patrons current location, then of the compiled deliverymen near the location, the one that was making a delivery closets to the patrons home would pick the customer up and take them home.