I gave up on clearing my throat to get the attention of others who are preoccupied. It has lost its effectiveness in these modern times, so as a course of action, I’ve evolved and developed a new method of getting attention.
I now make retching noises. This has a highly effective 100% success rate. No longer do you have to clear your throat multiple times to get the attention you deserve. My retching noise method is guaranteed to work, every single time.
As an added bonus, it will get the attention of multiple people if there are more than one person in the room with you. So if you have something really important to say, my method works wonders. Practice isn’t even necessary, a beginner will also attain a 100% success rate.
I highly recommend you try this method at your next family gathering or company event, and be amazed at how superior it is over the old throat clearing method.
Note: Disregard the look of sheer horror generated by this method, it is a necessary side-effect for achieving your goal — getting attention.
I’m one of those gamers who has the severe stuttering problem with Dark Messiah. It’s been a week and a patch still hasn’t come out. This stuttering situation is the same problem that occurred in Half-Life 2, and was a problem for me in The Ship and the first SiN Episodes game. Other games using the Source engine has given the stuttering problem to other gamers. Which is why I am not confident it will get fixed by Arkane or any other developer who likely realized that sales of their games will be hurt by this stuttering problem inherent with the Source engine powered games.
With a non-existent refund policy on Steam, it’s “shame on me” for purchasing The Ship and SiN Episodes without trying them out. My mistake? Wanting to support the developers. However, when I can’t enjoy those games, it makes it a moot point when supporting the developers, because I had basically donated the money to them, which isn’t what I wanted.
So what is a gamer to do? Piracy is certainly not an option, that’s a road of ingratitude I don’t want to traverse, so I figure I only buy games in which I played the demo and enjoyed it. Then I can dip into my pockets, and fork over my hard-earned money to the developers to support them, and also enjoy their game.
As I’m reading the latest issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly talking about Gears of War, I saw the words “hardcore gamers” in a sentence. I scoffed at the notion of console gamers as hardcore gamers. There’s nothing hardcore about console games and the gamers that play them, with maybe a very slight exception to fighting games, but I’ll get to that.
You see, there’s a reason there’s a very, very forgiving damage model in most action-packed console games. It’s the limited control scheme that a gamepad gives you. The gamepad are great for platformers like Super Mario 64 and Ratchet & Clank.
Here’s a case in point: My sister’s boyfriend has been playing Call of Duty 2 for months on his Xbox 360 and has beaten it three times. I watched as he took direct hits of 2 grenades and an ungodly amount of bullets, yet he still trekked on, oblivious to all the damage done to his on-screen persona. I was amazed, becaused Call of Duty 2 on my computer was a lot less forgiving (not to mention I play on the hardest difficulty.)
I’m not one to really mull over bad calls in a sports game, but when it affects such a stellar performance by a freshman, and nearly costs the team the game, it has me really annoyed.
Here’s a video of the bad calls that was the reason why the game between the Florida Gators versus the Tennessee Volunteers has the Gators on top 21-20. The Vols should send a thank-you note to the referees for keeping them in the game to the very end, or at least ask them where they were when they almost lost to Air Force.
SEC officiating wasn’t just horrible in this game, but also in the LSU vs. Auburn game, where LSU ended up getting the short end of the stick.
I firmly believe that the new rule changes to the time for NCAA football games has the referees making bad calls (or not making any at all where there should’ve been one) because of these rule changes. They are pressured to save time in a football game, all so more TV commercials can be displayed.
A lot of people dislike lawyers, they have a bad reputation among the plebes of the world. That’s understandable; the vast majority of them are greedy, conniving bastards. However I wonder why people in marketing and sales don’t have as bad a reputation as lawyers. Those in press relations annoy the hell out of me. They lie, stretch the truth, use semantics to mislead, and do anything to sell a product or service, even if it means being wholly unethical.
Edward Bernays, a supposed pioneer in the field of public relations, said, “When I came back to the United States, I decided that if you could use propaganda for war, you could certainly use it for peace. And propaganda got to be a bad word because of the Germans.. using it. So what I did was to try to find some other words, so we found the words Council on Public Relations”. Bernays saw public relations as an “applied social science” that uses insights from psychology, sociology, and other disciplines to scientifically manage and manipulate the thinking and behavior of an irrational and “herdlike” public (from Wikipedia). In other words, people are stupid.
Even if you don’t assume a lot of people are stupid, as a marketing “guru” you rely on statistics to earn your paycheck. Even if 1% of a million people believe your sales pitch, you’ve convinced 10,000, and the pitch can utterly outrageous, but statistics doesn’t care. I heard a press relations representative at a trade show tell his fellow co-worker his favorite quote, “A sucker is born every minute.” I wouldn’t doubt if this was a personal motto of a lot of those in the marketing field.
Take spammers for instance. They know spam is unanimously hated by the world, and most people delete it without a mere thought, but 10,000 people out of a million will open it because they are either too old to know better (Save on your mortgage!), desperate (Increase your penis size!), or not used to the concept of spam yet (Holy cow, woman has sex with horse!). Keep spamming millions, and you earn massive profit, no matter how stupid the sales pitch is.
Anyone can go into marketing and be largely successful. Why are there college courses and degrees for it? It’s a braindead profession that requires skills that any human being can develop without education. Skills such as being deceitful, ignoring a guilty conscience, sleazy use of semantics to mislead, and a well-rounded grasp of the common language. Show me the top marketing guru in the country, and I’ll show you any hustler on the street peddling drugs who is as good, if not better.
These days, competition is fierce in a number of industries, and to survive, even well-meaning companies with solid products better than competitors still try to use seedy marketing tactics to stay at the top. When you have investors breathing down your company’s neck, the problem is exacerbated.
When a company has a product/service that a competitor does better, at a lower price-point, then the more aggressive the marketing tactics, and the more likely to border on unethical. Companies get away with it all the time, because once again they rely on statistics. People may catch on, Newsweek may bash the company, internet sites may point out the sleaze going on with a company, the reputation may suffer for a bit, but the vast majority of people won’t ever know or care.
In closing, I’ll acknowledge that not all those in the field of marketing and press relations are dishonest, conniving idiots. There are those who represent the best in the field, who are honest and passionate about their job. They usually belong to companies with good policies and know how to sell a good product/service, and doesn’t resort to aggressive marketing tactics when a competitor does better. Just like there are lawyers who are good people, willing to help, and some even do pro bono work. Unfortunately, I feel the good people are in a field where the bad ones are more successful and lucrative, thus they are more prevalent.
I can’t check my email because Google has decided to lock me out. According to Google, I’m using a 3rd party application they don’t support, except I’m using their own provided software, Gmail Notifier, to check my email. This is the message they give me:
Our system indicates unusual usage of your account. In order to protect Gmail users from potentially harmful use of Gmail, this account has been disabled for up to 24 hours.
If you are using any third party software that interacts with your Gmail account, please disable it or adjust it so that its use complies with the Gmail Terms of Use. If you feel that you have been using your Gmail account according to the Terms of Use or otherwise normally, please contact us at gmail-lockdown@google.com to report this problem.
I’ve had nothing but praise for Gmail, but this latest incident of locking me out wrongfully has me really wondering if I should try another service. I rely on my email for important business, and personal communication. A search on Google shows that a number of other people are having this problem too.
While checking out Internet Explorer 7’s (beta) ability to render webpages, I’ve found that GoDaddy won’t let me use their site without telling me that my browser is old, and isn’t standards-compliant.
The first mistake they made, is assuming the browser I’m using is old. The second mistake is that they claim it’s because the browser isn’t standards-compliant. It may not be fully compliant, but the whole reason why standards existed was to prevent websites like GoDaddy from using a browser detection script and selectively feeding data to the browser you’re using. Since the script doesn’t recognize the new IE7 browser, it had no idea what to do except to give that default page saying your browser is old and non-standards-compliant.
Here’s a screenshot of the page they gave me when visiting with IE7 beta:
Update: I wrote to GoDaddy using their form on that page about this, and got a response. Read more to read what I wrote and what their reply was.
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