Terry Howard

More Lame Biz Stock

2008-04-10T00:04:00.005-04:00

"Lamar, despite being blind from birth, tried his best to fit in with the guys at work by pretending (and often a little too over zealously) to enjoy the occasional communal workplace porn viewings."

Lame Biz stock

2008-04-03T12:54:00.003-04:00

"You see, these glasses allow me to see right through Janice's blouse here..."

Full Sail University

2008-03-25T23:19:00.003-04:00

Full Sail is now officially a university, Full Sail University, and well deservedly so. I've had the extreme pleasure of being employed by this dynamic company for nearly 10 months now and I'm truly excited to see be a part of this milestone. I did have one comment, though, to those odd individuals with axes to grind with Full Sail University.

Full Sail's default rate, an education industry measure of the percentage of students who can't pay their student loans used to analyze the earning potential of graduates, the current satisfaction rates, and the percentage of graduates who are currently employed in their respective industries are all publicly available (and incidentally exceptionally favorable) metrics. I'd suggest anyone with said dull axes and potential students review them. Nothing like cold hard facts and figures to put sour grapes in perspective.

Trailer for Sale

2008-03-02T12:49:00.003-05:00

My sister-in-law is selling their flatbed trailer. If you are looking for a hauling trailer in Rapid City, SD, you're in luck!

Colleges on University Blvd? WTF?!?!

2008-02-19T08:58:00.003-05:00

This relates to my employer, Full Sail, in the spirit of disclosure, but it applies to people who complain about UCF expansion as well. This quote says it all:

"They need to consider the impact on the community, especially an area that was never designed or intended to support a sprawling campus," said Anna Telleria, a resident who was against the school's expansion.

Oh, you mean that area along University Blvd that has neighborhoods called things like University Commons, University Place, etc... Seeing as how both schools, Full Sail and UCF, have been around since at least the 70's and those homes were mostly cow fields around that time... Yeah, an area that was never designed for growing campuses (or is it campi)... sure.

But maybe those residents are right, it would be far more ideal to have large employers with a customer base that also supports hundreds of local businesses leave the area. Then the University Blvd area could descend into a gang infested poverty stricken cess pool. That would be wonderful for your property values!

Hillary, The Problem is YOU!

2008-02-10T23:00:00.001-05:00

Hillary Clinton released her campaign manager after Obama swept the weekend's primaries. Hillary, the problem isn't your campaign manager, it's YOU. You represent the same old lousy shady politics that people complain about all the time. When you get up to speak you come across like an angry shrew who is raising her voice to chastise all us bad children.

You make grand impossible promises like universal healthcare that you know isn't feasible. When the plan fails we know you'll just blame the people with the wisdom to block it, claiming you tried to give us free healthcare but the green meanies stopped you once again. It's just your little way to not have to live up to your campaign promises.

But the biggest problem is you don't inspire. Not one bit. You do nothing but complain about Bush (what's the point, he's gone) and go on angry grating tirades that make me dive for the remote. Obama on the other hand makes people want to listen. People make musical art out of his speeches. He uses words like hope and change and he sounds like he believes in it.

I'm not a liberal by any stretch, but I'm not a Republican either. Just a guy pointing out the obvious. Your campaign manager is fine Hillary, it's your candidate that sucks.

Pimping Your Ignorance

2008-02-08T22:58:00.000-05:00

MSNBC's David Shuster expresses his negative opinion on Clinton using her daughter to call celebrities and super delegates on her behalf by using the phrase "pimping out" to describe the strategy. The result? Everyone goes apeshit.

I don't know if I agree with his opinion or not, but I do know that Shuster wasn't suggesting Chelsea was actually being used to exchange sex for votes. It's a figure of speech folks, and a pretty common one. Anyone who took issue with the statement merely on the basis of the phrase "pimping out" is a big fat idiot. Why don't you discuss the point he raises instead of incorrectly taking a figure of speech literally and then arguing against that.

Reporters Fail At Reporting

2008-01-23T20:30:00.000-05:00

Oh my god, sushi will poison us all with mercury!

oh wait... no, Marian Burros just sucks at reporting.

Took me exactly 0.06 seconds to generate 97 Google News results for "tuna mercury" which contained both sides of the story and gave me a more complete and balanced understanding of the story. It probably took Burros the better half of the winter to piece together that lopsided alarmist falsehood-fiesta.

Welcome to the global network reporters, where we all learn just how hard you fail at reporting the news!

Man Up America!

2008-01-20T20:22:00.000-05:00

Sitting here watching the Packers and Giants face off in a classic frigid playoff contest to see who will face the Patriots in the Super Bowl, when amid all this classic football manliness I am taken back by a commercial. This commercial touts Ryan Seacrest's hosting of the red carpet during the pregame festivities for the Super Bowl.

Waaaaaaah?!?!?! Hoooold on... When in sam hill did the Super Bowl, the end all be-all contest of skull cracking, QB sacking, TD celebrating American football, get a freaking "red carpet"? Who, I would like to know, let our pure celebration of raw sports adrenaline become associated with a fashion show parade of who-gives-a-rat's-ass-alebrities hosted be none other than Mr. Garbage Reality Contest Show TV himself? Who?!?!

We gotta draw the line man, this wussification of all that is holy to American culture must stop. First you crack down on endzone celebrations (I'm sorry, I thought this was a form of entertainment, and if you don't like it, don't get scored on!) and now this... a red carpet pregame hosted by Ryan Seacrest... Lame!

Nuttin' But Stringz

2008-01-13T07:36:00.000-05:00

Today's kids shows can be truly awesome. One show my daughter really loves is Noggin's Jack's Big Music Show. This morning I was introduced to an entirely new and jaw dropping duo of artists. My hat is tipped to these two young guys who show that hip hop is not about guns, money and tired melodies that are the same as every other rap recording of the day.

I give you, Nuttin' But Stringz:

Way to go Rach!

2008-01-09T14:57:00.000-05:00

My wife has been named "Pop Candy Reader of the Day", go check it out!

Geocaching Rocks!

2008-01-06T10:58:00.000-05:00

My wife was listening to the Philip's Phile on Friday and heard a caller who was discussing the recreational sport of "Geocaching". You can read all about it here on the official Geocaching site, but the gist of it is that you find caches on this website which provide latitude and longitude coordinates and maybe a hint on locating them. You then use a GPS device to make your way to the general area and then hunt around for your treasure. A cache always contains a log for you to sign and read who else made their way to the cache, as well as various prizes for you to take (though if you take, you must put something back in.)

To us it sounded like a great way to get out of the house and get some exercise, maybe explore some new places. When I checked the site there were dozens of caches within a couple miles of our house! Like 2,000 within 10 miles. We used my Blackberry 8830 and located a couple, one that we had to hike along the edge of the Indian River to find. Pretty cool stuff, I think we found a new weekend hobby!

I Eat Pardoned Turkeys

2007-11-21T13:45:00.000-05:00

Pardoning turkeys is stupid. Turkeys are for eating. In fact, I think I would vote for a presidential candidate who vowed to eat the turkeys given to them for the length of their term. I also want a shirt that reads "I Eat Pardoned Turkeys".

Some Advertising Fundamentals

2007-11-16T23:04:00.000-05:00

A coworker wanting to learn more about some of the basics of paid search advertising asked me to explain a few terms, such as CPC, CPA, CPL, Conversion Rate, and ROI. I thought my response might be of help to others who wanted to know some of these things as well...

CPC = Cost-Per-Click
CPA = Cost-Per-Acquisition (we call this CPL, Cost-Per-Lead, for our purposes, in any case it's the cost per "conversion", but CPC is already taken!)

CPC is just the average paid for traffic, or clicks on your ad, irregardless of what they do after that
CPA/CPL is a measure of how much you had to pay before you get a lead or sale (on the average)

The conversion rate of your CPC gives you a CPL. So like say you are bidding $1.00 for a term. That term got clicked 100 times and it just happened to be $1.00 everytime (for arguments sake). The average CPC was $1, but your overall spend was $100. Let’s say 5 out of those 100 clicks bought something. You had a conversion rate of 5%, and your CPA was $100 (your overall spend) divided by 5 (your total orders), which gives you a CPA of $20. You literally had to pay $20 (averaged) to gain 5 orders.

Your ROI now is something you can only really determine in short order for immediate sales type conversions. Leads could in theory be quantified as an ROI but we’d have to take our average revenue generated by a successfully cultivated lead, divide that by the conversion rate of our leads (how many leads become customers) and get an average value for each lead. We could then use that as our “conversion value” in an ROI equation, which is:

ROI = net revenue / costs x 100%

So in our above example you have 5 orders (or leads), let’s say they were for $400 a piece (or for every 5 leads 1 will become a customer that nets $2000, making your average lead value $400) . Those 5 orders/leads brought in $2000. Now we spent $100 to earn that $2000, so our net revenue from the campaign was $1900 (gross – costs). Now take that net, divide it by the cost again, which gives you 19, which means your campaign was effective by a factor of 19, or more commonly represented as a percentage (x100%) which gives you an ROI of 1900%.

You could then take that number and use it for projections. Given all factors the same we might could expect that plugging in $2000 at a ROI of 1900% would yield $38,000 ($2000 x 1900%.)

Alton Brown's Fried Turkey

2007-11-15T20:06:00.000-05:00

This is the process by which I will be frying the turkey. I'm following Alton Brown's recipe, who is my favorite TV chef. He's by far the most knowledgeable cooking expert on TV and always explains the whys and hows of cooking.

Mmmmmm Fried Turkey

2007-11-07T21:27:00.000-05:00

Getting geared up for hosting our first Thanksgiving and looking to put together the perfect menu. We want to do the traditional Thanksgiving feast but give it a little something extra and unique. We'll be frying the turkey, which is not all that unique these days (but oh so tasty,) and stuffing and mashed potatoes will surely be in attendance. Just watched an Alton Brown Good Eats where he showed how to make a from scratch souped up version of the green bean casserole that looked fantastic.

I thought about doing some fishing the weekend before and seeing if I couldn't put some nice fish dishes on the table for something different and with a local flare. Anybody have some good interesting fish recipes or any other unique ideas for Thanksgiving?

The Most Evil Pumpkin

2007-11-01T21:51:00.000-04:00

What is more evil than Stewie, the conniving infant of the Griffin clan? The Stewie Pumpkin! This was the Full Sail Marketing Department's entry into this year's pumpkin carving contest at the staff Halloween party here at Full Sail. While he didn't win any awards, he was the largest entry and he did manage to disrupt the proceedings by blurting out classic offensive Stewie phrases via the iPod Shuffle hidden on his person. Eventually they figured out how to silence him, but not before he managed to get his voice into most of the footage shot early on. Great work guys, proud to be a member of the most creative marketing team around! See the Flickr set for Stewie.

Razor Blade in Candy, OMG!

2007-11-01T21:30:00.000-04:00

Seeing as how in the history of mankind nearly 100% of reports of tampered candy have been the result of either a hoax or by the parents themselves, you'd think the news media and the police would not be such gullible dopes. But casting common sense aside, we buy this teenagers obviously made up story and the hysteria of tampered candy revs up once again. Sigh... When we do finally find out that this jackass is making it up, can we collectively kick him in the nuts for being an uncreative retard?

Orlando Weekly: Grow Up

2007-10-24T21:10:00.000-04:00

Last week 3 employees of the Orlando Weekly, a local cultural and "alt-press" publication, were arrested by the Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation for allegedly selling ad space in their paper to prostitutes, specifically "aiding and abetting prostitution" as the charges were laid out.

Their response? This excuse for journalism. Here's the deal guys. You got caught knowingly taking money and placing ads supporting a blatant criminal activity. The response of a 2 year old is to say, "but other kids were doing it to" and begin to point fingers around the room. The next step of an immature child being confronted with wrongdoing is to start bawling and say, "you hate me, you're just being mean." Guess what guys. That whole article, yeah, it was like listening to a 2 year old caught doing something wrong and acting like 100% a big fricken baby. Grow up and take your punishment like a man.

And freedom of the press arguments? Uh, that's lame. Freedom of the press doesn't give you license to profit from criminal activities. It just doesn't. I've been plenty critical of police organizations for various issues. But you know what? If I was running ads for crack cocaine alongside those articles and the hammer comes down, well, I would deserve it.

Gooruze Needs To Go Back in the Oven

2007-10-17T21:50:00.000-04:00

I learned about Gooruze, a new social network for online marketers, from Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim blog. Andy is partnering with this venture and the public launch of the site was earlier this week. It is such a good idea initially, it's like the incredibly useful and addictive Sphinn (Danny Sullivan's Digg style news site for marketers) but one step beyond and towards the FaceBook model.

So I jumped right on board when I read the initial launch press release. But I find myself having to just stop going to the site and try it again in maybe 3 months or so. After realizing that mine and everyone else's initial activity has been nothing more than pointing out the endless myriad of bugs, missing critical features, design flaws and on and on, I just have to ask myself: Why am I bothering?

It's a great alpha, but you guys opened this site up before you bothered to even implement relevant title tags, RSS feeds, or even basic cross browser testing for CSS issues. This should never have been launched in this state and presented to the online marketing industry of all people. You target audience should never be your beta testers.

Maybe .NET Needs Spell Check Too

2007-10-08T15:54:00.001-04:00

So I'm working along in Microsoft AdCenter and suddenly the .NET monstrosity stops working. So I try to navigate back and get ASP errors thrown at me. Next I get 500 errors. Finally I get some kind of actual system delivered error page from the homepage of the service. It looked like this:

It had two misspellings, one right in the headline! The items are highlighted. Microsoft, you are too big a boy to be told that you need to perform quality control and spell check your public pages. But, there you have it. Perhaps I'll let customer support know about the error, if I ever get to log back in. Been about 30 minutes now and the whole service is still down, 3pm EST on a Monday. Wow.

ESPN Knows Consistency

2007-09-06T23:37:00.000-04:00

When it comes to fantasy football, ESPN is more consistent than anyone. Year after year they continue to deliver the same promise of botched live scoring on day one and complete system outages.

But, they upped things this year, and added in blaming the NFL stat feed for the problems. Nevermind that both Yahoo and CBS had no problem with keeping the scoring rolling, it's clearly NFL's problem. Nothing says integrity like throwing your content partner publicly under the bus at the first sign of tech failure.

But the fun didn't stop there! Predictably the users hit the message boards to voice their complaints and just try to learn what the heck happened. Instead of spending their time going into the boards and trying to talk to your users and explain what happened and when they might expect corrections, they went about the task of deleting posts and entire threads to try and cleanse the boards of any negative comments. As I perused the message boards trying to get information I was watching how conversations blink out of existence about as fast as they were created. Way to go ESPN!

For consistently sucking at a level most people can barely fathom, and to provide your users with increasing levels of disregard, I award you the prestigious honor of being named "Douchebag of the Week". Sunday is another week, so we are all on the edge of our seats to see if gameday brings you another consecutive back to back win in that category.

Whudafxup with Truth?

2007-08-29T13:04:00.001-04:00

My friend Mike pointed this out to me. He was watching a Truth commercial and saw for a moment on screen the phrase "whadafxup". It's also the domain for their accompanying site and pretty much the focal point of their current anti-smoking campaign aimed at teens. Now, I have to ask, whudafxup with that? So the tobacco companies have to hand over money to the government which we then dole out to this Truth group and they use what is essentially tax payer money (don't give me this, it's the tobacco company's money, it was awarded to the state) to generate advertising utilizing profanity on FCC controlled distribution channels aimed at our youth. Nice job!

So we can expect the FCC and the government to pull the plug on this anytime now, right? I mean, Janet Jackson shows a pasty and all hell breaks lose, but government funded youth targeted advertising can utilize the word "fuck" as the center piece of a mutli-media onslaught?

More Mahalo Musings

2007-08-28T12:20:00.000-04:00

So obviously recent events has me thinking more about Mahalo and their proposed model of organizing information. It's spectacularly flawed not just in scalability, but in it's core concept. Consider the following:

With the Mahalo model a given result is created by an editor. It is up to that editor, or group of editors, to be the sole decision maker in what businesses get exposure. You have to wonder how they will make this decision or gather their pool of options to select from. My guess would be they'll search Google, which is just a big fat bit of sad irony. But regardless of that, with this small group of people crafting these results you are likely to get a page heavy with big name manufacturers and big box retailers, people everyone has heard of. In Scoble's HDTV example that is exactly what you have. So I guess if you are a new product entry into the market, or a comparatively small fry in the retail space, you are SOL. Maybe you could send an email or flyer to the editors: "Hey, please review my new business for consideration!" Or...

You could use an algorithmic based engine that allows the chance for everyone to gain momentum and climb in the rankings as their popularity driven by their marketing efforts dictate. The big guys with the big names and the big popularity will be found among the top. But mom and pop have the opportunity do some clever marketing and get a little time to shine and hopefully gain traction to build their business. SEO helps businesses compete and get exposure and anybody can do it, big or small.

Mahalo, this is what we call a "free market", which is different than the Oligarchy-like marketplace you envision as Utopia. I wouldn't expect you to understand, as a search of "free market" on Mahalo yields the familiar "We haven't written a result page for 'free market' yet. Why?" Ooo! Me! Me! Because you don't have a clue!

As a side note, people who think in terms of "utopia" usually end up committing genocide on their own people right before the free market practicers of the world push them back into a bunker where they put an end to their grand schemes with a lead bullet.

Scoble, We Hardly Knew Ye

2007-08-28T00:43:00.000-04:00

So this series of Scoble videos are making the blog rounds and well, Scoble pretty much caught a nasty case of foot-in-mouth disease if you ask me, brought on by a nasty Calcanis infection. Apparently Mahalo is going to end Google in 4 years (as well as Yahoo! and MSN) and SEO is entirely devoted to spamming the engines.

Wow, now I haven't seen that level of reckless ignorance since, well, earlier today when Michael Vick said he thought his torturing dogs to death after laying wages on battles-to-the-death was childish. Yeah, that's the kind of stuff kids do in their care-free summer days Mike, adults usually grow out of that.

So back to Scoble, who has with this string of Al Queda style low budget video pod-craps ended any chance of hanging on to any long term relevancy that might earn him the right to be played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in a made for TNT movie. Others have done a better job than I could of picking him apart statement by statement, so I'll just stick with a couple things that popped into my head while watching what of his videos I could stomach.

Scoble mentions that nobody uses any of Google's hundreds of services, which I found funny as I came across a mention of his videos through some blogs I read completely through Google Reader, which I access from my Google Homepage where I can also see my latest Google Mail. I'm pretty sure I'm not Google alone in that Google area. He also boldly claims that if you are looking at the video then you haven't gotten there via search as the ONLY way you can find that video is by someone first hand (you see, Scoble intentionally tried to un-seo his video page, that rascal!) Really? Google is not going to index the articles and blogs that mention your video and link to and derive the keyword relevancy from that? Have you not heard of the affects of Google bombing? What am I saying, you are the Mainstream Tech Media (MTM tm), why would you ever have a full comprehension about that of which you write?

So Scoble starts talking about his comparison of "HDTV" result pages from Google and Mahalo. First off, seriously Scoble? You are this supposed tech guru and you search like an 80 year old granny's first sitting at a computer? I'm pretty sure you throw at least one qualifying statement in there so I'm going to chalk that demonstration up to staged setup. So let's try something useful, like say looking for tips on how to shoot a video podcast that does not sound and look like you are making a ransom video. So pop say "video podcast audio tips" into Google and Mahalo. Google gives some noise, but some good results in there too. Mahalo gives you... er... Google results... and links to other pages on Mahalo they think might be related, such as Veronica Belmont (who is now in production on a daily podcast for Mahalo), How to Speak French, Twango (which has nothing to do with podcasts) and a general page about Podcasts where upon halfway down I find, ah, what I was looking for "Podcast Tips and Tricks". So with Google I got a page that was geared towards my words, a handful on the first page that were dead on what I wanted, and with Mahalo I got some irrelevant links, something that looks like blatant promotional linking (we call that SPAM), a link to ANOTHER page that does hold what I'm looking for, oh, and then Google results that does hold what I'm looking for. Actually Mahalo missed a perfect opportunity to unite me the searcher and my query with that click and some scrolls away relevant info, all the needed was some kind of system that could have systematically paired what I searched with content they know about. Some kind of, I don't know, algorithm. I guess I could always wait for a Mahalo editor to create the page and then they'll be happy to email me. Super!

The last thing I'll comment on will be Scoble's over the top swipes at SEO as an industry. What the hell dude? How uneducated can you be? Here's a quick primer: SEO helps sites with information relevant to a given query be found for the query. The keyword here is "relevant". If you are spending time doing things that are presenting your site as being relevant for a term OTHER than what your page/site has to offer, that's not spamming, that's stupid. You can call it spamming if you want, but I would just call it poor SEO that is going to drive in bad quality traffic that doesn't convert. So what's left is people helping people find the information they are looking for, which is pretty much what your bed buddy Mahalo claims to do. SEO just uses the existing vehicle of algorithmic search to accomplish that. You say SEO like it's a dirty word, but all SEO is is helping the poor schmoe's at your HDTV manufacturers with their unindexable flash monstrosities reach the customers who are searching for them. I suppose in your world we could just wait for Jason Calcanis to write a page about every industry on the planet, but in the world we all live in, we're just going to do some SEO so everyone can get on with their lives today.

I don't know Scoble, maybe it's just sour grapes, perhaps you are finding your profession of journalist has become sort of a four letter word these days and you felt the need to take someone else down a notch to make yourself feel better. Whatever the case is, perhaps next time you'll search Google to get your facts straight and maybe a few tips on making a video that doesn't suck. You sure as hell ain't going to find that info on Mahalo... well, maybe in the Google results fed in.