Friday, July 08, 2005

farm subsidies ...
OK, one of the key topics with the G8 summit is the use of farm subsidies. The idea being that they essential hurt the growth potential of third world countries whose economies are principly agrarian. This makes perfect sense to me. The subsidies create an artificial price for which the agricultural products of first world countries can be sold, both domestically and internationally. The problem though, as I see it, is if we remove farm subsidies from first world countries, those countries are essentially penalizing the part of their economies that have already been hardest hit by first world development. Just a quick thought.

Wednesday, July 06, 2005

added to blog...
a snippet of code to the template that allows me to display the five most recent posts from the Clear Admit blog. Clear Admit is the consulting company I am working for, and one of our major marketing efforts is to run a blog of MBA news. We get quite a lot of traffic and are now redesigning the blog and wanting to get more central to the MBA community. We will offer the code I included here to other MBA bloggers to display hoping they consider it a resource for their blog (kind of like how weather.com allows you to grab some code to display the local weather). Should be interesting to see where it gets displayed!

Tuesday, July 05, 2005

constructing good questions...
I tried to complete the MIT Blog Survey. The survey tool scans your blog and asks a set of questions about links from your blog. So I had to categorize my relationship with Fembat and Diva Marketing and then it asked me how I knew the author of Introduction to Marketing. Well since that was me, and the answer set did not provide that as an option, I had to abandon! sigh ...

Monday, July 04, 2005

skype...
I just had my first VOIP experience, with Skype. I am working for a consulting company and one of the partners lives in Paris. We set up skype accounts and are now scheduled to chat twice a week via the system.

The quality of the conversation was outstanding (well the sound, the content was pretty good too). The other nice feature was the call was entirely free (other than the $25 I paid for the head set). Apparently there is a feature I can also use to call non-skype users, but I need to explore that a little before I figure out if it makes better sense to use Skype or my cell phone (I am getting rid of my land-line in the next month or so).

So far I am very impressed with Skype!