Bus error: Jake Billo’s weblog

Tomorrow I write my database exam. Now, some of you who know a thing or two about me know that:

• I’m not half bad at using database driven applications such as forums, WordPress, etc
• I’ve actually coded a weaksauce CMS before using MySQL

Now, taking that into account - one would assume this course would be a breeze for me. Not the case dear sirs or madams. While the assignments and even the project were relatively easy - pulling me marks between 75-100 percent - both midterms managed to completely ruin me, as I failed them both. How, you might be asking yourself, is this possible? I can’t tell you any names, but it is through a certain person that this has come to pass. A certain person who is employed by a certain university, who teaches a certain course.

Certainly.

This man/woman [I'm not narrowing it down anymore] can not teach worth shit, and they are very aware of it. As such, the course materials - including assignments, midterms, and projects - are allegedly taken almost verbatim from the website for a database course offered in Hong Kong. However, this professor was slightly ashamed of their blatant thievery - so they attempted to change the wording on our final project. Instead of doing so, they managed to horribly muddle the task’s description and cause severe confusion as to how the implementation was to be handled. Magically I ended up with my lowest passing mark in the course - the 75 - from that project.

So I have faced for the last few days, the task of studying for this exam which is sure to test me on things that my professor did not teach [though it should not be implied that my professor actually taught something else, they more so tried and failed miserably to teach something else]. As such, I’ve spent most of my time reading the textbook for the course, and hoping that somehow I’ll have achieved enough of a broad knowledge of the book to scrape by with a pass in the course.

Now that really won’t happen, but I’ll post in the comments once I finish failing the exam to fill you in. So here’s to bell-curves; saving my ass since ‘05.

For Business 121, one of the major projects for the term is to develop a marketing strategy for a company offering a new product or service. Our group developed a concept for an offshoot of Curves, which offers fitness facilities and quick workouts for females.

“The Man’s Gym” is a male-oriented gym that avoids the traditional approaches of isocentrism and healthy lifestyle maintenance. Rather than focusing on pumping iron and bodybuilding, or cardiovascular training, The Man’s Gym employs unique activities such as:

The presentation is intended to be tongue-in-cheek: we rotated pie charts to display statistics with more favourable outcomes and slides are (generally) only on screen for about five seconds each. I tried for a Steve Jobs keynote feel with this design, and it seemed to work out pretty well.

Download “The Man’s Gym” presentation

Hit the picture below to grab a PDF copy of the slide deck. While the accompanying business plan document is significantly more dry (and thus not worth publishing), the presentation was worth a 96% and that’s really what counted in this effort.

The accompanying audio ad for the “Radio Ad Sample” slide that I whipped up in five minutes with GarageBand can also be acquired here, and should be playable in iTunes or any other utility that plays AAC audio files.