Today the Starbuck outlet at work has opened for business. They know about good promotion on how to attract customers. Each of us got a coupon for free coffee. When I first received the coupon, I thought it is only good for one cup. It turned out that it is one free cup each day for this week, what a brillant marketing idea! Just a cup of free coffee won’t give you much incentive to spend $2 for something you can get for free in the cafeteria, even though the coffee from starbuck tastes better. However, giving you one cup per day is a different story, it slowly builds up your addiction to their coffee. I had a large cup today, and I didn’t plan to finish it. Somehow I just slip the whole cup bit by bit without knowing it. I think I should resist to this evil marketing scam tomorrow and give up my free coffee. The moral of this story is positive out of expectation works quite well in convincing people to your favour.
All posts by hevangel
mensa
Today I went to the Vancouver Mensa AGM. It’s my first time going to any Mensa event after joining for almost 3 years. It is held in the basement of one of the member, he kindly provides refreshment (i.e. beer) for the meeting. As expected, the meeting is kinda boring, just went over the house keeping items one by one. Most of the members presenced are old folks, there are only me and another young member. I am a bit disappointed that the members all look pretty normal, hardly can tell they have higher than average IQ. I think I will give it one more try before stop wasting moeny on the membership fee. I will probably participate in one of the social events, see can I find more interesting people other than grandies to hang out with in Mensa.
wasted day
My today is pretty much wasted, didn’t had much work done on my studies. Although I had walked Charlie in the afternoon, cooked dinner and did my laundary. The biggest problem today is I had turned on TV when I was having my dinner. Then I just glued to the couch, watched Enterprise and followed by the re-run of Minority Report. I finished an article on gay marriage using commercial time though. Maybe I should consider cut off the basic cable too. I really have to make up the work tomorrow. Kinda feel guilty now.
jumping the boat
I went to 3 farewell events for my colleagues in one day. First it’s the farewell lunch for Renee, then afternoon I went to beer and wings for Scott, and at least I hopped to the pub for Renee’s party again. There are many people leaving the company lately. Almost all the capable people are gone and join some startups. Somehow I have a feeling my boss will be next one to go. He was recruited into PMC by Scott, and now Scott and a VP who once wanted to promote him to manager had joined that startup, if they need a verification head, who are they going to hire?
Tonight is the final session of Life in the Spirt Seminar, I was expecting something exciting to happen. Instead of miracles from the Holy Spirit, all I got is a really boring mass with a long-winded priest. In conclusion, the only benefit I got from 7 weeks LSS is having a better relationship with Pat. I don’t think I had changed much spiritually. Since the average age of the class is over 50, maybe I’m just too young for these supernatural experience.
research
Today after the meeting with Dr. Hardy, on my way back to Burnaby on the skytrain, I gave some advice on research to first year grad student. I’m kinda surprise she does not even know how to use IEEE Explorer, yet already has a paper published in a conference. Internet really is the most powerful research tool, all you need is type in keywords, then the papers will magically show up. Actually one of the problems is there are the search result is too long. I really have to filter out the useful ones to be efficient. Using citation identify the “hub” that everyone else is referencing to is the key. Unfortunately I just know this method not too long ago, and wasted a lot of time reading useless papers.