USAction Survey - Did you beat your wife yet?

So it’s that time of year again… political organizations begin taking advantage of the fact that they can slip under the “Do Not Call” list radar.  Most of them, I just answer and hang up.  Or if it’s a survey, I let them know my mind.

I get a call from a group calling themselves USAction who are doing a “survey” to get the pulse of “Americans”.  First off… I consider surveys only to be legit if they are from truly non-partisan groups such as Gallup or Nielsen.  Anyhow, I knew this one was a joke as soon as the “pollster” starts off with a statement along the lines of “Government continues to give tax breaks to big oil while the blah blah blah…” Then, after setting you up with a statement that demands you to be horrified and offended they ask the question something like, “Do you think we should send a message to Washington to stop this?”  The clincher, you must answer “Yes” or “No”.  Come on people… this is just like asking a husband “Did you beat your wife yet?” and only allowing a yes or no answer.  Do I think we need to fix things in Washington?  Sure.  Will stopping tax breaks fix it?  Probably not.  At the very least, don’t expect a “yes” or “no” answer to the question.  It takes a lot more defining than that.

What gave me a chuckle was when I gave the “wrong” answer to the pollster.  I answered in the negative, and did it very firmly.  He actually stopped his banter with an “uh, ok.” Then he got back on track with three or four other questions, all doing the same thing.  Bash the current administration, ask if you think it needs fixed.  And call it a “survey”.  I always thought surveys were supposedly unbiased.

Anyone who has the legal expertise and would like to help me, I’m planning on starting a “grassroots effort” to get PAC’s and any other political organization to have to adhere to the same rules that commercial organizations have to do when it comes to the “Do Not Call” list.  Last election season, I had some union organization calling me to vote for some candidate.  I called them back and asked to be removed from their list.  They kept calling back.  These political groups have no respect for people’s time and it frustrates me to no end.

September 21, 2008 | Filed Under Personal Ramblings | Leave a Comment 

It’s the Final Countdown…

Graduation is May 11!! My project is complete… I am just doing some rewrites before it has to be presented this Saturday. All that’s left is to present my final project (worth 500 points of the 1000 this semester!). I hope it goes well. Then we have an on-campus session right before graduation. During this session, we will be presented a case study and have to somehow demonstrate our MBA learnings with it. I’m interested in knowing what will happen.

The last seventeen months have flown by. Stay tuned for the final wrap up…

April 28, 2008 | Filed Under MBA Journey, Personal Ramblings | Leave a Comment 

Capstone project begins!

Holy cow, I can’t believe I’ve come this far already.  I have completed all my “study” courses of my MBA and now begin my research, culminating in a capstone project.  I was getting a bit burnt out, but the three week Christmas break was helpful.  I’m excited and ready to get this MBA completed!

If I had to do this over again, part of me would not have chosen an accelerated MBA program. Franklin’s Vantage MBA is an awesome program, but it is very intense. The part of me that likes the accelerated program is because I’m not stretching the thing out over 3 years.

Wish me luck, I have a feeling the hardest part of the adventure is just beginning!

January 3, 2008 | Filed Under MBA Journey, Personal Ramblings | Leave a Comment 

Blog down

Not sure what exactly happened yet… I went in to do my weekly entry last night and noticed that my blog had gone kaput. I think all is remedied, but I’m still trying to get my posts recovered from the backups. Backups are a wunnerful thing!

March 12, 2007 | Filed Under Personal Ramblings | Leave a Comment 

Revamping the website

I decided that I’d be daring and upgrade the base for my website.  I originally had it programmed via PHPNuke, but that program has a lot of security holes.  While I never experienced an “attack” on my genealogy site, I did get hacked on another one I was running in test mode for a friend.  I decided to switch to Joomla as the base and so far, I’m very happy.

I have to figure out how to integrate my blog and forum over.  They both work, but they are not tied in at this point.  There are bridges to integrate them, but the first one I tried ended up locking things up.  I’ll just leave them as separate entities for now.

If you want to build a database driven website allowing you to change content easily, Joomla is an excellent option.

January 19, 2007 | Filed Under Personal Ramblings | Leave a Comment 

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