Reed Olsen

PROVO, Utah – Jun 24, 2009 – Brigham Young University information systems students reeled in eight awards this spring with their problem-solving strategies and technological expertise at the National Collegiate Conference for the Association for Information Technology Professionals in Oklahoma City.

From left to right: Reed Olsen, Dave Wilson, Robert Mount, Devin Collier, Landon Cope and Bryce Clark stand with the awards they won at the competition.

Competing against 61 other universities, some with more than 20 student entrants, the six BYU seniors held their own, leaving with more awards than any other school. The two-man teams won: first and second place in the business intelligence competition; second place in the office solutions competition; third place and honorable mention in the system analysis and design competition; third place and honorable mention in the java competition; and third place in the application development competition.

“Our core experience really preps BYU students for high-pressure, quick-turn-around competitions,” says Craig Lindstrom, assistant professor of information systems and adviser for the competition. “The depth of the subject material taught in information systems courses helped them do well.”

Students who competed were Bryce Clark, from Calgary, Alberta; Landon Cope, from Tucson, Ariz.; Devin Collier, from Provo; Robert Mount, from Provo; Reed Olsen, from Weston, Mass.; and Dave Wilson, from Highland, Utah.

While most teams only registered for two to three competitions, BYU’s teams signed up for all six time slots. This schedule made the competition even more rigorous with some students spending as many as 13 hours competing in a single day.

“The entire competition was a test of mental endurance,” says Olsen. “After eight hours of competing, I could hardly think straight. However, we just pushed through for the remaining five hours of the contests and it paid off.”

The Marriott School is located at Brigham Young University, the largest privately owned, church-sponsored university in the United States. The school has nationally recognized programs in accounting, business management, public management, information systems and entrepreneurship. The school’s mission is to prepare men and women of faith, character and professional ability for positions of leadership throughout the world. Approximately 3,000 students are enrolled in the Marriott School’s graduate and undergraduate programs.

(From http://marriottschool.byu.edu/news/release.cfm?article=462)

One of my favorite new features in Leopard is the ability to search all of the menus in a given application. This is extremely helpful when you don’t want to dig through a whole much of nested menus to find the item you’re looking for.

If you’ve read my other posts, you know that I’m big into keyboard shortcuts and hotkeys. Here’s how to open up the help-menu without using your mouse

Command + Shift + /

Or you can think of it as

Command + ?

Note that this doesn’t work in some applications (e.g. FireFox, which is just one more reason for me to switch over to Safari…)

Devin, Dave and I working on our submission for the App Dev contest.

This year, I was selected to travel with six other ISYS students to represent BYU at the AITP National Collegiate Conference in scenic Oklahoma City. We flew out on Thursday, and competed in 6 different competitions for three days straight:

• GIS/Business Intelligence
• Microsoft Office Solutions
• Systems Analysis & Design
• Database Design
• Application Development
• Java Development

The trip was awesome, and we competed well in many of the events. Here are some photo highlights. (Thanks to Landon Cope for being the VP of trip documentation.)

Bryce, Landon and Robbi (not pictured) made us proud and brought home a lot of awards.

At the Awards Banquet with our spoils. 9 awards for 6 students in 6 contests!

I know, I know. Enough with the Speed Charades already! But someone asked me to post this presentation that I did, entitled “Speed Charades: From Start to Finish”. It’s a really brief overview of some of the challenges that I faced while writing it, and the resources that I turned to to get help.

The meat of the presentations isn’t really in the slides, but here they are for reference!

http://www.reedolsen.com/presentations/scpreso.html

You heard it here first – Speed Charades is available for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Check it out at the App Store!

I’ve recently added a new section to my site to feature my iPhone App(s). Speed Charades is the only one in there right now – check it out here

I really like the caption feature that Wordpress has added into their framework. Unfortunately, many themes don’t support the default formatting or image alignment by default. By pasting this code in your theme’s styles.css file, you can easily add captions with Wordpress’ built-in image adder.

.aligncenter,
div.aligncenter {
display: block;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}

.wp-caption {
border: 1px solid #ddd;
text-align: center;
background-color: #f3f3f3;
padding-top: 4px;
margin: 10px;
-moz-border-radius: 3px;
-khtml-border-radius: 3px;
-webkit-border-radius: 3px;
border-radius: 3px;
}

.wp-caption img {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
border: 0 none;
}

.wp-caption p.wp-caption-text {
font-size: 11px;
line-height: 17px;
padding: 0 4px 5px;
margin: 0;
}

p img {
padding: 0;
max-width: 100%;
}
img.centered {
display: block;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}

img.alignright {
padding: 4px;
margin: 0 0 2px 7px;
display: inline;
}

img.alignleft {
padding: 4px;
margin: 0 7px 2px 0;
display: inline;
}

.alignright {
float: right;
}

.alignleft {
float: left
}

David Wilson presenting during the Omniture Web Analytics Competition.

PROVO, Utah – Jan 6, 2009 – Two Brigham Young University Master of Information Systems students think they’ve figured out how to make successful online retailer Overstock.com even more successful, and the judges agreed. Reed Olsen from Salt Lake City and David Wilson from Highland, Utah, took first place at the fall 2008 Omniture Web Analytics Competition winning $10,000 and HDTVs for their project. Olsen and Wilson, who called their team Group X, also won the crowd favorite award.

More than 150 students gained hands-on experience using Omniture’s SiteCatalyst software to analyze online traffic and how consumers shop at Overstock.com during the two-week competition. They then prepared a presentation for Omniture executives on how Overstock.com could optimize the shopping experience and increase profits.

“The OWAC gives students the opportunity to participate in a competition that closely resembles a situation faced in the real world by marketing and strategic consultants,” says Thomas Gosney, student lead of the competition. “This opportunity prepares students for future situations and tests their ability to work in a difficult and stressful environment.”

Group X put in long hours to pull off a victory in the competition. With only two weeks between the competition kick-off and the submission deadline, Olsen and Wilson spent a total of 70 hours preparing their recommendations.

“We have complementary skills that allowed us to work really well together and made the presentation cohesive,” Olsen says.

Of the 85 teams that entered the competition, 22 teams presented in the preliminaries and only four made it to the finals held in the Tanner Building where they presented in front of three judges from Omniture.

The team Lost Cousins placed second and received a $5,000 award. The third place team, Analysts on Demand, received $2,500 for their project.

The Omniture Web Analytics Competition is held twice a year. The next competition will take place during winter semester 2009 and is open to all BYU students.

The Marriott School is located at Brigham Young University, the largest privately owned, church-sponsored university in the United States. The school has nationally recognized programs in accounting, business management, public management, information systems and entrepreneurship. The school’s mission is to prepare men and women of faith, character and professional ability for positions of leadership throughout the world. Approximately 3,000 students are enrolled in the Marriott School’s graduate and undergraduate programs.

(From http://marriottschool.byu.edu/news/release.cfm?article=427)

A couple of weeks ago, one of my good friends and former coworkers performed a survey of “what others think of him“. I thought it was an awesome idea, and decided to poll my family, classmates, coworkers and close friends to find out what they thought about me. This was not an experiment to fish for compliments, nor was it an excuse to be narcissistic. I am merely trying to establish my personal brand. Here’s what I found:

Breakdown of response categories:
Classmates: 6
Coworkers: 6
Friends: 5
Family: 11

Most frequent responses:
Smart: 5
Witty: 5
Apple: 4
Creative: 4

Much thanks to http://www.tagcrowd.com for generating the tag cloud for me, to those that helped out with the survey, and a huge thank you to Scott for letting me piggyback his great idea.

WordPress kept bugging me and telling me that my installation was out of date, and I’ve never really cared up upgrade. However, someone shared the InstantUpgrade plugin with me, and it blew me away!

http://www.zirona.com/software/wordpress-instant-upgrade/

The whole process took me less than 5 minutes. Zirona – you guys rocks.