My Current PC

Here is my current PC (Actually I got two new ones since I last updated)

Alienware M17X laptop it's a 2.8 Ghz Dual Core, 4 Gig Ram, 800 HDD of space, 4870 GPU Laptop that is now a very expensive DVD player. (My main rig crashes this and this laptop sits in my living room and acts as a DVD player to my TV)

I have the 17 inch screen, and then it's hooked up to a 40 inch TV

My next rig is what I call my baby :)Build it myself

It's a I7 920 GPU at 2.8 GHz, 5870 GPU (I depise ATI and when the next gen Nvidia cards are launched i'm upgrading.) 6 gigs of ram, and my HDD space is massive

I got 3 1.5 TB HDDs and 1 500 HDD and one external 1.5 TB HDD for a grand total of 6.5 TB.

Been a few years uh

So I was googling around my name to see what I could pull up and I found my old blog. Well let me sum up what's happened.

1. My business Total Digital Perfection (TDP) (God I love that name) failed, I built maybe 6-7 PCs made an average of like $60 or $70 a PC...Yea it didn't go so great. (it generally took 4-5 man hrs to create to include research/ordering/building/preparing
2. I did complete my CISCO networking class, and did get my CCNA and it expired (that alone took 5 yrs from taking it to it expiring)
3. I've moved a few time since I last updated, then I was in Ramstein Germany, I moved to Baumholder Germany, Camp Bondsteel Kosovo, and now Daegu South Korea.
4. My German girlfriend I had turned out to be a complete nut case, she was my first though so I guess that'll give her a special place. Outside of that she was a nutter...We broke up about 6-8 weeks after we started dating. I'm currently dating a Korean girl and she now lives with me and we've been together for about 6 months now.
5. I'm currently working as car sales man (for 3 yrs now actually) and it's going great.

I'm fairly confident no one actually reads this, but I did enjoy updating it!

Cheers guys!

Acer P235 Mointor Review

I currently use a 15.4 inch laptop monitor at a resolution of 1280x800. Hardly impressive and often restrictive. So this black Friday I got an e-mail from my favorite company saying they had a black Friday sale on monitors.

Back in Germany I had a 22 inch monitor at a resolution of 1650x1050 with a 17 inch also and loved it! (if you ever go dual monitors you will never want to go back) So I decided what I wanted, something bigger then 22 inches, and something with more resolution then 1650x1080. I went on Newegg (which is an awesome site and we'll be talking about them later in my blog) I found an awesome monitor 23 inches, 1080p resolution, everything I wanted sale price of $150 I did a bit of research and came to find that it was very popular. So I bought it, think I ended up paying around $200 or so shipped (I live APO and big items like this cost a lot to ship) , either it was a steal considering the BX here was moving 22 inches at $220+.

I was a bit worried about the shipping, I didn't want the screen to get kicked in or anything like that when in shipment, lucky me the box arrived a little missed up however the monitor inside was just fine.

Unpacked it, set it up, and was a complete breeze had to do some minor tweaking but that's normal.

The monitor simply looks stunning, it really does no other way to say it. I played a HD movie on it and loved it. And right now I’m using it to help in my multi-tasking. Another nice thing is I use my PC for everything including TV I now have a big screen TV.

There is one thing I went back and looked at. Back in 2007 I bought my 22 inch monitor for $300. At the time that was a good deal too. That again was an Acer. I owned that monitor faithfully for over 2 years and loved it. I dragged it around with me to LAN parties all around Germany and it always performed as it should.

The point is not that Acer makes good monitors (well it sorta is) but the point is I don't have any favorite brand in the monitor area. I really don't care something big and nice works that doesn't cost a ton. Last time I went shopping for monitors I wasn't shopping by brands either, I wanted something bigger, nice, and not spend a ton of money. What this goes to show is Acer makes some great monitors at a great price point and this second monitor has made me a devote fan of Acer monitors.

In short if you’re looking for a large, but not so large budget monitor you can't go wrong with the Acer P235.

Great Marketing!

I love an example of wonderful marketing.

What takes great marketing? Many things to be exact. You have to be just at the right moment, with the right product, in the right setting.

Now i'm a gamer and I follow games. So when I heard Modern Warfare 2 wasn't going have dedicated servers, I was upset.

A side story, a few years ago I bought Battlefield 2, played it got bored haven't bought an EA product since.

Back to present day, I was upset with no dedicated servers in Modern Warfare 2 and therefore canceled my pre-order. Now I hadn't bought a EA product in quite some time, especially from DICE. However Dice came out and did an example of brilliant marketing.

I would like to define a few examples of solid marketing
1. It has to have a solid rate of return
2. It has to be at the right moment
3. It has to offer the right product or feature
4. It has to make as big of an impression as possible!

Now I don't think DICE decided to do this all because of what Modern Warfare 2 decided to do. I think DICE marketing people just say the outlash (as was expected) against IW and went "uh, we aren't doing that let's make sure everyone knows!"

Here's the press release:

http://blogs.battlefield.ea.com/battlefield_bad_company/archive/2009/10/26/dedicated-to-our-pc-players.aspx##

What DICE has done is clearly said "Yes, everything will the same, no we aren't changing anything, and we are here to support you!"

What happened? It went Viral! Forum posts on IW own forum went "Cancel pre-order buy Bad Company 2" reviews all over the net focused on Bad Company 2! The entire community shifted focus from Modern Warfare 2 to Bad Company 2. I canceled my pre-order and pre-ordered Bad Company 2!

Before this I didn't even know Bad Company 2 was in development, I wasn't even interested in it. However DICE saw the chance and seized the moment. Showing you, how great marketing works.

So let's go back to what makes great marketing.

1. A Great ROI: I'm sure DICE didn't spend a whole lot of money posting this. I mean they wrote up a blog entry consisting of 536 words. How much did it cost them to get the person to write it, host it, everything? Maybecause of bandwidth $1,000? I mean i'm completely guessing here however Bad Company 2 sells for what $50? That's 20 copies they need to sell. I'm sure they sold several thousnad at least. Let's just assume as a direct result of that press release they sold an additional 10,000 copies at $50 each. Thats $500,000 or an ROI of 500:1
2. They did it at the right moment, right after IW came out and screwed us!
3. They offered the right product, dedicated servers
4. Make a big impression? Um, yea it did.

So great marketing on DICE part!

Infinity Ward, Greed, and why MW3 will fail

In my humble I feel Infinity Ward game devs would of loved to put in dedicated servers in their next hottest title Modern Warfare 2, unfortunately due to greed and desire to make more money they thought that excluding Modern Warfare 2 would benefit their bottom line.

Let's first establish why dedicated servers are so important. They provide a central location for communities online to meet and play at. They have server admins, and mods to customize the game to the way the community likes it. Because they are located in data centers with a big ole pip to web they produce very low pings and only run what they are supposed to run. They have become the way online gaming is organized in the PC world.

Let's discuss the foundation of a house. When you build a home do you start at the roof or the foundation? Your answer of course, the foundation. However what happens if it's not solid? will the roof be solid as well? No not at all. Let's ask ourselves, what is the foundation of the Call of Duty series. The PC community (now before you console gamers go nuts let me go on) yes, I understand Console games now sell more copies then PC games. However wonder where IW got their ideas for new features?

Call of Duty became popular with the PC community using dedicated servers. What happened on the dedicated servers? It extended the lifetime of the game allowing modders to modify the game to their specifications. This setup a solid foundation, dedicated servers being a part of that foundation.

How did the PC community benefit MW2? Simple the PC community benefited Modern Warfare 2 by producing mods on Modern Warfare 1 on their dedicated servers, which IW devs played on loved and therefore copied.

Do the devs of the mods really mind? Most likely normally not really. They are glad to see their work get recognition, however what allowed those modders to do what they did? The fact that they had a dedicated server to host their mods on so other people could experience this.

The community no longer has it, and although Modern Warfare 2 was built on the success of Modern Warfare 1, Modern Warfare has no solid foundation of modern Warfare 3 to sit on
top of.

I'm sure Modern Warfare 3 will be a success on the consoles, I however doubt that Modern Warfare 3 will be a success on PC. The PC foundation for the game has been removed, therefore resulting in a unsuitable game.

Who I am

Who I am, maybe one day someone will wonder who I am the object of this entry is to let you know who I am.

My name is Niklas obviously, I'm 20 years old at the moment and currently work in Kosovo at Camp Bondsteel.

I sell cars to the troops and contractors here and travel around the balkans selling cars to other troops and contractors.

I believe in honesty and integrity, which to some may sound odd considering my profession, I however would like to point out the fact that even if you tell the truth 1,000 times and only lie once your reputation is ruined so best never to lie.

I'm a firm believer in common sense, on a day to day basis I rarely tackle problems with what I know, but what makes sense.

I hate celebrity news, it really frustrates me. I remember when the Paris Hilton sex tape or something along those lines came out. I remember watching several of the major news stations doing reports on it and on the ticker below it's highlighting N. Korea intentions to build nuclear weapons. Now in my opinion news about a country gaining nuclear weapons is far more important then someone having sex with someone else and recording it.

Same goes with Tiger Woods, the guy screwed some chicks great fine wonderful not my business, let's move on.

How was I raised, where was I raised, where I am from?

I was raised in a middle class family with a Mom, Dad, and a younger sister. I was raised in a very open household meaning nothing really was taboo in my house. My parents felt if they made something taboo it only made it more attractive which is true. I saw many of my friends who were raised in stricter households have more problems with drugs, and other addictions then myself.

I grew up all over the world, to give you a time line here it is

Ages 0-1 I lived in Germany, i was born there to a German mother and American Father

1-2 lived in Nebraska in the states (I think, this is still early on)

2-5 lived in Guam (this is where I have my first memories)

5-10 lived in Germany

10-16 lived in the states in Warner Robins Georgia

16-19 lived in Germany

19-current live in Kosovo

So a little bit about me!

Time to stop, enough about me.

Sales

Congratulations, you've just found your new number one resource to improve your sales and marketing career!

Come back often so you can reap the benefits of learning more about sales and marketing making you more money!

Now of course this blog isn't solely dedicated to my career in Sales and marketing, it however is a important part of my life. However why did I start out like I did? Simple, I wanted to make a sales tip.

Did you have to notice in the first paragraphs never once was I, We, or Us used? It was you, you, you. How did it feel seeing all those yous?

That's my number one sales tip, I, We, Us, is like cussing.

Enjoy my blog :)