Category: Writing

Did an Advanced Marketing course the past two days, Sydney Uni. Learnt a lot of new terms and jargon. We had to do several team exercises and think up marketing campaigns. The most interesting bits were how to conduct an experiential campaign and the various ways of measuring a campaign’s success. I was very impressed by the quality of the other students. I have a pretty certificate.

Chatted with a lovely lady at the course who used to present “Relationships and Intimacy” courses at Hillsong.

Continue reading Advanced marketing course

Iceland has no McDonald’s and now no Fanta Lemon. They’ve also cancelled their Comedy Festival cos noone can afford to buy tickets.

With 300,000 people, they reckon they’ve got a sweeter deal from the IMF bail-out than Argentina. And they’ve got mineral resources and an educated workforce. Housing prices have deflated. The foreigners were the first to get sacked so they’ve all left. Iceland’s  resources are being sold to foreign investors at cheapo prices. Utilities are being privatised.

While younger Icelanders are fleeing, older ones with houses and commitments are stuck. One blog post I read said each Icelander should be paying 80 per cent of their gross income to pay back foreigners who lost money in IceSave. The foreigners (Brits and Dutch) aren’t even getting ALL their money back.

Continue reading Run out of Fanta Lemon in Iceland

UK comedy bloke Frank Skinner always dreamt of a Catholic-Anglican reunion but now he realises that only the hard-core anti-gay, anti-women Anglicans want to rejoin the Catholic church. Oh noes! He’s not keen on this.

Was snoozing through a postgrad info evening at the Hilton tonight, as previous stellar alumni were prattling on about how great the uni is, when one of the presenters [I haven’t included his name here, as I might follow it up] spoke about how he’d already had a great uni degree but when he hit his mid-30s, he was working for a big institution and a stream of quantitative finance graduates started giving presentations to the company based on the latest mathematical theories. “I started feeling like an old fogey. I didn’t know what these new theories were. We couldn’t see through the bullsh*t because we couldn’t understand what they were talking about.” He added that on a global scale, “that’s why the GFC happened”.

So several years ago he went back to uni, studied and caught up. ‘”When they came in and did a presentation, I knew what they were talking about. I could point out holes in their theories. They couldn’t bullsh*t me.”

On the study front, he said postgrads should expect to spend three hours out of class studying for every one hour of time spent in class.

‘Undergraduate life was all
about recreation, fornication,
inebriation and application’

he said, warning us “it’s different for postgrads” and we’d all have to work hard and get high marks. Every speaker urged us to do the postgrad courses part-time — classes are held on weeknights and intensives on weekends.

And another thing …