War Games and Sunday Morning Analytics

I woke up this morning and happened to catch the movie "War Games" and realized two things.  First I must move to Seattle in order to hack into the WOPR to play these war games, second there is no way that hot girl would ever like a nerd like Matthew Broderick, third it's crazy how far technology has come since the dial up Modem, and finally we can't always let data and machines make our decisions for us

I remember watching this movie as a much younger man without any sort of real context of the powers of technology I just knew it was cool that he hacked into the governments crazy large computer.  Watching that movie this morning made me realize that this movie was about the resistance of the old guard in implementing new technologies, countered by the arrogance of techies with a misplaced trust in everything machine at the expense of human judgement. 

Having grown up in more of a tech heavy enviornment with computers, nintendos and email, it's easy to forget that there is more to making decisions and solving problems than what machines and data may tell us.  Many times it's important to listen to the voice of a human along with a pile of data, as the human persepctive may give us a different insight than a large aggregated set of data. 

Listening can often offer us the correct persepctive, rather than just a dry data driven one.  It worked to avert World War 3 in war games, and got Mathew Broderick the girl..so the same could probably be true in web analytics and web marketing as well.  There is always more to the story than just the data.  It's important to test, listen, test again, and openly discuss issues and decisions, never relying just on the "WOPR" to drive decision making.

Dont Get Too Depressed, MSU Football Is Average

Having been a Michigan State fan for quite some time it's failry easy to get upset at the consistent failures of the Football team.  Performing much better than expectations for the past two seasons had given many a Spartan fan hope that this year the tide was finally about to turn for football in the state of Michigan.  With the program down in Ann Arbor heading injto tailspin, this would be the year State would rise back to the prominence once held in the 50's and 60's and reclaim football glory.  Sadly this all came crashing down with a defeat to Central Michigan early in the season, ushering in with it the memories of the previous 19 seasons.

When looking back at the previous 19 season MSU has enjoyed only a fleeting success having sustained only two seasons in which the football team posted consecutive +.500 records, those took place in the previous two seasons.  More often than not MSU has been a six win football team.  In only 7 of the previous 19 seasons has MSU won more than 6 games, and those seasons usually tilted heavily towards upper classmen filled rosters.

 

<--- Click here to see 20 years of mediocrity

 Given the slight setback this year and a roster full of younger offensive players, the team should rebound and return to where they were in the 2007 and 2008 seasons as a 7 or 8 win team, given the relative weakness of the Big Ten Conference, should we as fans expect more than that? Probably not.  What is the big take away here then?  MSU Football is average so don't let them ruin your weekend like they have so many of mine for the past 12 years.

A decision has been made.....

I figured i'd settle on datayoucanthandle.com as a way to post some in your face commentary on everything most people don't like to hear.  Like how awesome i am, or how Michigan State Football now owns Michigan and so on and so forth.  I look forward to doing fun things here, learning new things about the internet and mostly sharpening my skills in the world of Web Analytics and such.