Mines an Inspiron

Oddly enough I don't feel the need to check whether or not all Dell's machines suffer from this problem

Lucking out

I popped in to talk to the PR person here at the school earlier this week to talk about ways of publicising the Oxford Business Forum. Following a bit of a chat and the story of how successful my coverage of the Oxford Union debate was I've been asked to try the same thing for the Silicon Valley comes to Oxford event. And, as an added perk I get to go to the press lunch.

Doesn't sound like much, but here's how it works. There are eight of these high powered silicon valley folk coming to talk. The press lunch will be them, three professional journalists, and me. I imagine a few faces from the school will be there too, but basically its an incredible opportunity and I'm going to have to spend the weekend doing my homework so I can talk knowledgably about all kinds of stuff to these guys.

First on the reading list, this new paper outlining Microsofts shift in its policy on privacy. Summary here.

Real time skills training

Snowball training consultants have just pointed in my direction and said that the reason I took out my laptop was because I was bored by the deliberately boring clip they showed. Thats not quite true. Its more because I'm bored by 50% of what they're saying and have decided to devote the rest of my time to blogging whats happening here.

To date we've had a slide on the need to build logical presentations >> good stuff. We've also had several slides on the history of european logical thinking. It was, if nothing else a sound demonstration of why you should never let your undergraduate degree burst onto the stage during your professional life. Following on from the deliberately boring video we're being shown a John Cleese presentation on Proportional Representation which is a great deal better. I imagine they'll tell us why in a minute. I'd imagine its at least in part due to some of the half baked arguments he's just rolled out. Never let the facts get in the way of a good argument.

About now I should probably tell you what these people are like. If nothing else they're reminding me of Trinny and Susannah, two style gurus who tart about on UK TV telling people how they're terribly badly dressed while believing that someone somewhere might care. Kind of like this lot, Snowball is an all woman company, they deliver their fairly average skills training as if it was manna from heaven (they're just explaining why) and there are a bunch of really quite bored MBA students watching this now.

Ah, one or two people have started having a go. Always happens when someone loses the class, you can either sit around being bored or give the person on stage a hard time. They're now talking about how to end a presentation, sadly I'm trapped in here for another 75 minutes. This could be my longest blog entry ever...

Oh, KISS = Keep It Simple Stupid, not Keep It Sweet and Simple. Surely? Surely the first is the original and the best.

Only 8% of audiences do inference and deduction apparently. The rest are dumb and need signposts....

The strident bossy one has just been replaced with the slighty apologetic one. They've shown us Ballmers monkey man appearance like its something we'd want to do. Or indeed like it was something he wanted to do. Steve MonkeyMan Ballmer, added a lot to his prestige didn't it? Then again, I used to start presentations with a video of high school children being torn apart by ravenous wolves. No really, it was an advert for Cyberian Outpost, but it woke people up.

Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King. Not one of them had powerpoint. Just a thought.

They're rambling a bit now. Introductions, visuals, we've got rhetoric to look forward to apparantly. In true Platonic tradition I hope. They're also just realising that no-one can remember their last presentation very well. Oh dear. Still, it was six weeks ago. I swear you could get this lot into half the time. Questions have started again, the natives are getting restless.

Oxford Business Forum Gathers Steam

Six weeks ago nobody on our course knew what the Oxford Business forum was. Since then we've organised ourselves into teams, booked hotel rooms, designed (but still not printed) brochures, and invited guests. Today we got our first reply, and it was a positive one. Sara Weller, assistant MD of UK retail giant Sainsburys is going to be coming. Good stuff.

I spent a good hour and a half today talking to the schools PR department about what they can do for us on this, and somewhere along the way mentioned the benefits of websites like this one, and all the traffic I managed to score by covering the Oxford Union debate and... Well anyway, next Monday is Silicon Valley comes to Oxford day, on which some serious luminaries from the valley will be descending to talk to us about just how you go about making money in todays networked world. I mentioned that I'd be writing this up for you guys and five seconds later I'm invited to the press lunch - t'daaa. That's me, a couple of journalists and the cream of silicon valley, you've gotta love this place. So I promise you all top notch coverage of Silicon Valley in Oxford - top stuff.

So, I've signed up to talk to Raymond Nasr of Google and Jeff Skoll, but now I get to meet the rest as well...

First 'exam' today

Took first mock exam today for financial accounting. Some things went well - like the essay questions where you can rant vaguely for ten minutes and pick up marks. Dislike the fact that I forgot how to calculate profit margins - about the one thing I knew how to do before I started the course...

Ah well, think I scraped a pass so there'a hope that I'll be here next term yet.