Big Dan’s Site

Winter is officially here in downstate New York. I can tell you that because yesterday I dug out from our first snow storm which dumped about 8″ on us Friday. Today, Sunday we got another 6″ luckily I didn’t have to shovel out of that. After I dug our car out from the first storm, I moved it to the front of the building so the plow man could make one clean sweep of our single lane parking lot, then moved the car back so he could do a clean sweep in front of the post office.  Yes, the weather forecasters have been promising us snow and ice for about a month now but we’ve hadn’t gotten much more than a dusting Tomorrow of course is the first official day winter but it’s been nippy out there for a while. We had a mini heat wave heck last week I slept with my windows open.

Some of you have probably notice I haven’t been all that active on my blog lately. That is partly because I’ve been more active on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. The other part of that is I don’t have much to write about. Right now it’s pretty doom and gloom for me; with the recent down turn in the economy web work has all but completely dried up for me. This year the Christmas shopping fund was meek at best although those whom I’m shopping for are all adults and understand that Christmas isn’t just about presents and will appreciate the gift I got for them. Truth be told, I spent most of my Christmas fund just keeping my head above water. That being said I also have my normal winter blues,  I like winter for a about 5 minutes after the first coat of snow then I’m sick of it. The second I see slush mixed with sand on the roads, I’m ready for April. I can think of 100 reasons why I love the spring, summer, and fall but only a few reasons for winter.

With the introduction of winter comes the soon to be new year. The new year is always a time to reflect on both what I have and haven’t accomplished in the past year and what I hope to accomplish in the next. I’ve been working on a few things  for the new year: The first thing I did was trash my old myspace profile. I went and created a new profile and friended all the people that I keep in contact with at least once a month; everyone else I just didn’t bother ‘refriending’. All too often ‘friends’ or followers become a numbers game people just add you because they’ve had interaction with you in faintest since in order to drive up their number of ‘friends’ some how that makes the superficial people feel more important. I’m not one of those people, if I’m not related to you or haven’t had 1-on-1 contact with in a while I won’t be refriending you. Nothing personal you might be the next Obama but if we haven’t had contact in a while chances are I don’t care what your status is.

With the new MySpace profile comes sort of a rebranding of me: I’ve bought a new domain name, www.coffeedope.com as well as reserved all the of the screen names on the instant messengers and freemail services that I feel are important. I’ve always had a love of blogging for reasons I’m not quite sure of. Some of my blogging has been very successful on other blogs. Most of my blogging here on BigDan.us isn’t followed. I suspect that’s because I’ve had no direction with this blog; I’ve often rambled on about this or that, posted a few tech posts, and maybe a few posts about this or that but BigDan.us has never had any real clear direction. It’s a hodge podge of what ever topic pops into my head. In that respect it will remain that way however CoffeeDope.com will be more on point and attuned to one topic set although I’m not clear what exactly that will be yet. CoffeeDope.com will become my main blog in the new year. BigDan.us will act as both a personal voice for me and an aggregator for all my blog posts across all the blogs that I author whether or not Google likes duplicate content.

That being said along with the re branding also comes a move away from Big Dan. Sure I’ll go by Big Dan on most of the forum I frequent because I’ve changed my name before and don’t want to aggravate the admins with requests for a screen name change. Ever since I can remember I’ve been “Big Dan” the big comes from my size I’m 6′3″ and obese I think that if perhaps I stop thinking of myself as “Big” Dan I might gain a different self image which will help with my weight loss. Coffee Dope was chosen because coffee is my #1 favorite drink and heck coffee flavored liquor is also my favorite coffee just runs through my veins. Dope was chosen as a suffix for a number of reasons, one of them being that everything else I wanted like ‘coffee king’ and ‘coffee man’ was already taken.

Here’s to the new year!!

I’ve always been fascinated by marketing and advertising. Generally, I’m always amazed at what people base their purchasing decisions on and how marketers get people to buy their stuff by selling illusions rather than the product itself. For example Coca cola must taste great because they got polar bears and Santa Claus in their commercials. Oreos are great cookies because they allow grandpa and his grandson to share a picture perfect moment. As a webmaster I need to have some knowledge of marketing or else no one comes to my sites. I follow a few marketing blogs, have read a few marketing books, and am fascinated by the whole pony show. For my part, I don’t think I would ever make a good marketer because I don’t fall for the marketing gimmicks myself therefore how can I make a gimmick that I know others will fall for?

Aside from the  number crunching side of marketing ie how to best use advertising dollars to reach the most people all marketing is superficial. Tune into any late night informerical and you got people basically telling you buy our product and you life will be so much better, they often sell the illusion that X product will make your life perfect. People being people are always chasing perfection in one way, shape, or form.

You have Chef Tony sawing through a hammer with his ‘Ginsu’ knives. Really is any one in their right mind going to try and saw through a hardened steel hammer with their kitchen knives? Then you have Ron Propiel assuring you that his showtime rotisserie will save you money, make your food taste better, and be healthier. He doesn’t tell you that you’ll probably buy it, use it once or twice, and then add it to the collection of junk appliances under your sink, like your popcorn maker from the 80s that you never use.

Moving on to shorter commercials; You’ve got the ‘he went to Jared’ commercials and the ‘every kiss begins with kay’ jewelers commercials both of which assure you that your lady will be so enamored that you thought enough of her to buy her some diamonds that you’ve got a 110% chance of getting laid the night you give her the gift.

All examples above are not marketing but advertising. Advertising and marketing as so intertwined that they’re often hard to tell apart. I define advertising as making someone aware of a specific product. Marketing takes many forms there’s personal marketing, for example making yourself appealing to potential employers or mates. There is brand marketing that is just making you aware of the brand or maintaining awareness of the brand like Coca-Cola and Wal-Mart frequently do. There is product marketing which often collides with advertising by marketing the product to a specific group of people by playing on perceptions. For instance Chef Tony’s knives market to value savvy women by adding pieces to the set piece by piece and stating an inflated ‘retail value’ to sell on the perception of value. How can you not buy this set of knives for $49.99 when it’s really worth over $300? Kay and Jared market to men on the perception that diamonds are a girl’s best friend and will instantly make her melt in your hand. Dude get a hooker, it’s cheaper then diamonds.

I’ve always thought marketers must see the world through different eyes than regular Joe’s; They seem to see the world as how can I manipulate something to make it seem better than it actually is or have qualities that it does not. That doesn’t make them bad people the world would probably be pretty boring if everything were still sold in brown boxes and brown bags with out all the fancy colors and caricatures. I wonder if people actually bought based on need rather then what some savvy marketer tells them that they need would the economy be in such bad shape right now? Would people be in so much debit? That’s the bad side of marketing when your so good that you convince people to buy stuff they don’t need.

Open source means what? If you’ve spent any amount surfing the net, I’m sure you’ve heard the term. Open source in essence means free for you and everyone else. You can download X open source program and use it 100% free of charge. You may also copy (send to friends) or modify the program (if your a developer [doesn't apply to regular people] ) with no fear of the copyright police banging down your door.

Open source is a mantra I’ve identified with many times. For quite a while I used Ubuntu Linux, which is open source..100% free for me to copy, use, and modify as I see fit with the exception of logos and branding.

Open Source is not freeware! Freeware often has distribution and source code limitations. Open source programs like Open Office, Pidgin, and Songbird are great, even awesome! On the flip side open source sometimes includes restrictions on logos and branding just like freeware; It’s often hard to decipher the two.

Open Source is good for the most part. However open source of FOSS (Free and Open Source) advocates are the worst part of open source. FOSS fanatics often preach that any commercial software is bad, even evil and when I say evil I mean devil evil . If you follow the FOSS blogs chances are you will see many FOSS blogs and articles post anti-Vista or anti Office or Anti-X developer ad-nasauem. Many just regurgitate the same things others do. Vista is evil, proprietary formats like doc and docx are evil because they seek to profit from technology. The evil of profiting from technology seems to be the mantra of FOSS diehards. What’s so evil about profiting from others mistakes? People have been doing it for centuries!

In part I do agree; My belief has always been that “Education is key to everything for people around the world and the keys to get that education should be free!!” For me a browser and Google are all I need to learn something. FOSS provides that, as long as I have a computer I can install Ubuntu and search Google with Firefox for free.

FOSS is great however the bashers of commercial technologies just because they’re commercial puzzle me. If you’ve got your own thing going with X Linux distribution why bash the competition aka Microsoft? Some of the bashing for example Vista is a resource hog, is warranted however taking a 5 year old computer and expecting it to run Vista is just plain dumb. You don’t expect a DVD player to play Blu-Ray movies do you? You don’t expect a PlayStation 2 to play PlayStation 3 games do you? Why would you expect a 5 year old computer to run a brand new operating system?? It just makes absolutely no sense. The bashers of commercialism in the software realm would realize that had they taken a step back, and shined some prospective light on the subject. NO ONE, ABSOLUTELY NO ONE expects 5 year old technology to utilize brand new technology in any realm except for the slighted (for the their own growth oriented arguments) open source world.

There is a reason why proprietary formats are well in the is because they just work. A MS Word document I write on my computer will display and print exactly the same on my computer as on a the ancient computers my cousin uses at her high school. For the most part my computer will just work. With open source Linux operating systems like Ubuntu chances are this or that piece or hardware won’t work correctly, someone will post a link to some obscure fix some where, and maybe the fix will work. If they fix doesn’t work people in the community will blame the user ie you’re too stupid to figure this out!

Here is a newsflash for you: People want their computers (and other technology) to just work! They could care less if X company won’t open their firmware so FOSS developers can hack a driver for X piece of hardware. They want it to just work and for what ever the reason with Windows it does just work.

On a personal level the very second someone bashes Microsoft or Apple or <insert “evil” profiting company here> in an argument of causation for using FOSS software it discredits the entire argument and quiet frankly turns me off.

You know I never really liked writing when I was younger. Heck in school I would do practically anything to get out of writing an essay, book report,  or a term paper. Nowadays I write more than ever did through blogs, forum, and other web endeavors some days I write more code then words. Other days I write things that sound logical but when I go back and read them a few days later they sound like  incoherent ramblings.

Most of you probably wouldn’t be surprised and have heard me say that I’m not a good writer. Yet I’ve had many people tell me that I’m a great writer. I think I’ve based my ‘bad writer’ self image in the fact that I’m not good with grammar; I just throw semi-colons and commas around for in my writings for laughs. Often times I do think that specific punctuation mark should be where I put it but I’m probably wrong. I probably should of paid more attention in elementary school language arts classes. Language Arts was the PC word for in English when I went to elementary school. When I got to high school they just called it English. I wonder why.

Anyhow I often will write something be it a blog or forum post real quick hit submit, read it over again,  and then forget about it. A couple of days later I go back to it for what ever reason and realize I’ve made several mistakes yet no one pointed them out to me.  I think most people’s brains auto-correct. I wrote a post on my DJ forum last night an typed ‘got’ instead of  ‘go’ and ‘passed’ instead of ‘based’. It’s something that I catch myself doing all the time even though I proof read, sometimes several times but I never catch it right away only when I come back to it a day or so later.

I blame muscle memory; I type so much and often so fast that my fingers must be so used to me typing got instead of go that they type it and my brain accepts it as go without thinking twice and on proof read my brain is remembering what it thinks I just typed. Muscle memory is no joke, the military uses it to train the troops, I used to think it was a farce but after watching how the secret service are trained I see it works.

Coming back to my writing, I’m generally coming to think that now-a-days I’m a good but could be better writer and the only way to get better at is by writing more and more.

Something that I’d like to improve on:

Using place cards such as anywho, anyhow they’re filler words.

I statements. I notice I use lots of I statements. Back in middle school we had a teacher that would automatically fail a paper with more then 3 I statements. I thought she was a total jerk but there’s a good reason for it I statements don’t engage readers to get involved in the story, paper, or article. Expanding on that we and us statements. If I’m only talking about myself why in the h-e-double-hockey-sticks am I saying ‘we’ and ‘us’

Lastly conciseness. I tend to ramble on, especially about stuff which I’m passionate about. I could stand to loose some of the ‘gory details’

What about your writing habits? Are you a great writer?