Creativity Arrested

So it was a normal night...until I almost got arrested thanks to ENGR 407.


The idea was simple. Play beer pong for 1 dollar and win 2 dollars if you made it in the cup.
Our goal was to prey upon the drunken populace of state collge. Whether or not they were of age or not we were to make money off of them.

We made 1 dollar before the shit hit the fan.

I dressed up as Jack Sparrow....a popular Halloween costume from this year in order to promote our little game of chance. It took 10 minutes and 1 dollar before we were apprehended.

The Police:

One police officer...probably high off his power trip walked up to myself and my partner and announced...almost as loud as I was announcing our game..... that we were "soliciting illegally without a permit". That was fast huh?

He tried to bust us for solicitation and when we brought to his attention that it was for a class he mentioned the fact that our sign said "beer pong for cash". I ensured the police officer that it was not actual beer, in fact it was snow in the cup which is not very intoxicating at all.

At this point he threatened us with"False advertising" as our sign said "beer pong for cash" and according to him since there is no beer involved we are advertising falsely......right.

Anyway friends learn from this mistake:

Don't solicit without a permit downtown as the cops are relentless when they are bored. Seeing as a permit costs upwards of 200 dollars the team will no longer be attempting this act downtown.

Come on creativity.....I need a winner now!

Scratching at the walls of creativity

A curious exercise was had in the Entrepreneurship class the other day. The Problem statement went something like this:

Here is 5 dollars. In the next 45 minutes you need to make as much money as possible with this 5 dollars.

Great...I have to be creative. Now lets be rational here: At some point in an entrepreneurship class you will need to be creative. I know this but I have prematurely deemed myself incapable of creating any product that could gain enough interest to have people want it. Its not that I am not creative (see: guitar playing, and what some may call a maniacal mind). Its just I never had to harness that creativity to make money. I never had a golden egg of an idea and thus never assumed I would be any good at it. Lesson 1: no golden egg is needed, even a dirty ass chicken can lay an edible egg that can be turned into a meal.

Alright...panic is over...lets move on.

So I propose teaming up with another team and both going after the same prize together thus increasing our reach and hopefully our money. This makes sense right? The more you have to invest the more you can make...hopefully.

We decided to buy roses for 1$ each and sell them for 2$. This is where failure number 1 occurred: More expendable resources means wider reach. If you have a shit ton of people working for you and you have them all doing the same thing...in the same place...you are wasting time and therefore money and that is exactly what we did.

For the first 15 or so minutes the team stuck to one location and it wasn't until later that we split up to cover more ground. By splitting up we covered a larger market (thank you Hammond building staff!) and made more money in a shorter time.

The lesson:

1) Selling roses isn't very creative but the way by which you sell them can be. This applies to everything that we could possibly sell for the actual assignment (same deal but in 2 weeks time).

2)We had one dirty ass egg of an idea but it worked. It wasn't that creative but it sold and we made some decent cash. From this I learned that the real trick lies in your delivery. Someone could make the most amazing invention out there but if they just stand there with a sign proclaiming its total awesomeness then they will get beat by the guy hustling around with roses.

I'll keep everyone posted on what the team decides to sell in the next week or so but until then leave some feedback! Do you have any ideas on what we could do? If you were a cold college student with only 15 minutes to spare between classes what would you like to see out there?

And for making it to the end of such a long post I now reward ye with the evil hamster. Creative...not so much. Funny.....yes. Shit ton of views and international stardom....hell yes.

Introductions: Nice to meet you

So this is day 1 of the phenomenon known as Ryan's blog. I suppose I will use this post to go through a bit of background info and then get into the stuff promised in the description some time later this week.

Who am I?

My name is Ryan and I study civil engineering at Penn State University. I am in my senior year and my final semester....well hopefully not my final semester. I have applied to the graduate program here for water resources and hope to attend in the fall. Wish me luck!

I grew up south of Philadelphia in the burbs of Aston. Not much to say about that other than its fat city USA. I'm talking about a Wendy's across the street from a Brewsters and a Dunkin Donuts all down the road from a Burger King, Pizza Hut, and various burger and pizza joints mixed in between. Notice I excluded Wawa from that mix due to its awesomeness.

Random Stuff

My favorite color is green, I like to play the guitar, and am a huge fan of anything video games. Hopefully I will be able to write a bit about some titles I've been playing soon as that was one of my failed dreams: To be a video game journalist.

I live with two crazy assholes who certainly create some...strange yet hilarious situations that I will be sure to post about here.

So heres what you have to look forward to with this blog:

~Personal input on current events
~Crazy stories of Penn State insanity
~Video game journalism at its finest
~And well, in reference to the title of this blog, a general stream of conciousness (wiki it)

Until next time