IASTED Life continues

Life here at IASTED is continuing on with a few new twists. Today we had a potluck in the office, and everyone was encouraged to bring something from home. Considering that our office is very multi-cultural, we decided that everyone should bring a dish that was somehow related to their country. As for me, I brought a Japanese dish called "Onigiri". It was not too difficult to prepare. Although, in retrospect I should probably keep that information to myself since people were impressed by the exotic dish that I had brought. The food was very delicious, and quite filling. I even decided to dress in traditional Japanese clothes to mark the occasion. I wore a Japanese suit called a "Samue", special sandals called "geta", and a headband called "hatchimaki". Everyone was impressed by my traditional clothes. However, I was a little dismayed to find that not everyone had worn clothes according to their own traditions. I was a little embarrassed at first, but that feeling soon passed as my coworkers voiced their pleasure at seeing one of their fellow workers dress in a traditional style.

I have recently had an interesting learning experience on the marketing side of things. While still working on improving my html skills for the online newsletters that we produce, the director asked me to prepare a newspaper ad for a conference that was to be held in Washington DC. Looking back it was a very interesting experience for me; although, I was perhaps a little carried away by the recommendations of the sales staff working with the local Washington newspaper that we were to advertise in. In the end we decided that less is more, and went for a single ad in the specialized Health edition of the newspaper. We are still trying to determine the reason for its ineffectiveness, because despite our best efforts the advertisement was largely unsuccessful. We are still trying to perfect our methods of advertising; however, it now seems that print ads are not the right medium for reaching our target audience. We will continue to experiment with online mediums of advertising; nevertheless, I still feel that had we advertised more frequently, given enough advance time, we could have done much better. The main drawback to print advertising, as we discovered, is the high cost.

In other news things continue on normally with the other tasks that I have been assigned. Recently memberships to IASTED have been swelling with the increase in conferences that we are hosting. I am happy to be involved in creating advertisements for these conferences, using my newly learned skills with photoshop to get our message across. I look forward to future posts and future opportunities to learn.

ciao