WOOHOO!! Yesterday was the awardshow at my study. Every year we have to do a project for a real client with teams of students which we make ourselves. The marketing and management students on my study (and by lack of business students also some communications students with management aspirations) each debated to get to be the team leader of one of the 19 projects. Then the communications and production students had to write a sollicitation letter to these team leaders. I sollicitated to 3 teams, 2 teams turned out to be rather lame, 3rd team ditched me from the start 'cause they never got my sollicitation letter so I looked around and what do I know, I find the perfect team! Some cool students I already knew reasonably well and I knew they were very capable, so I joined the team. From that moment on we've been working our butts off for 6 months. Turning a chaotic website with 140 pages of text and 6000 links into a userfriendly online application which will help people analyze their problems. The application will help you define your problem and get a better feeling for all the factors involved, ultimately resulting in more insight on how to fix their problem. Over the course of weeks we turned a completely new method of problem analysis and psychotherapy from a huge collection of stories, and facts into a logical dynamic step by step system that makes use of the human psyche and intuition. Then we put this method to realization by building an website, with background information about the method. An online application which allows people to use this method completely on their own. And finally an encyclopedia with lots of different facts and descriptions of terminology and situations that might appear while using the application. All this backed up with a CMS so our client can easily change, add, remove, and update any content of the application and encyclopedia. According to our team coach (one of the teachers) we pulled off something truely amazing here. Her opinion turned out to be backed up by the other teachers when we got nominated for the so called Golden Dot Award as one of the 3 best teams out of all 19 teams. Well, yesterday was award night! And we have won every award there was to win! WOOHOO!! The professional Jury consisting of people from KPN Mobile, The Box, RVP, VPRO, and Lostboys found our project to be the best project of all nominated 2nd year projects! Then after the professional jury had decided the Golden Dot winner, the public had to vote for the best project. The school set up a sms network and people could vote for the team they thought was best by sending an sms. Well out of all 10 nominated teams from the 1st 3 years of the study we won the crowds award too!! We won with an overwhelming 36.4% of all votes! And that with 10 teams to vote for! So that means we've won every award there was to win! But it doesn't stop there! We've spoken with the jury member of Lostboys and we asked if we could maybe have our work experience program next year by working at lostboys! Although she couldn't immediately say "yes you can get your work experience at our company" she did sound pretty enthausiastic and we have good hopes that we might just get one or two or more students in for work experience next year! So that's really cool too, Lostboys makes online applications and websites and has done some pretty big projects! And just as we thought it couldn't get any better this woman walks up to us and tells us she wants to publish an article about us in the papers and in all the professional magazines about psycho therapy! So we're gunna have our share of press publicity too! She even mentioned the possibilty of sending information about us to a local tv station! Only negative thing was having to spend one and a half hours cycling in the pooring rain from 0:15am to 1:45am to get home because the busses and metro were on strike. By the time I got home I was soaked to the bone! And ofcourse I had to have a few beers to celebrate which didn't really go too well with ultraslippery wet tram rails on the road. As my rear wheel got caught in the slippery tracks of the tramrail that was just making a corner into the street I was cycling through I found myself unable to maintain my balance and made a nice 10 meter slide over the asphalt. Luckily I wasn't hurt too bad and my bike survived too and I could continue my trip.

Well done!

uh oh cool! congrats!!

WooooHoooo! Awesome! (except for the bicycling part) :-D

How many is that few beers ;D Congrats for the awards, I`am sure that youre deserve that:)

lol not THAT many, usually I don't drink at all.. lol I think it was more a matter of bad luck in combination with not being used to riding under influence rather then a matter of way too many beers :P

Congrats indeed. Did a slide like that once, you sound like you got lucky there.

haha well when I was younger I'd slide for fun on ice :P When it would snow and all the cars would drive over the snow so the snow would get all compressed, but the top layer would start melting, and over night it'd freeze back up. I would go and try to slide as far as I could on the ice without falling. Ofcourse I fell many, many times so I learned a bit how to fall without getting hurt too bad.

Woah!!!! I'm so impressed WTG, Ray! In a world where students pass exams that are often accused of being watered-down, it's nice to hear that you guys put in some real work and got the glory. Many congratulations to you and your fellow team-members and my best wishes for a successful future! Oh, and sink a few for me! I can't drink these days...LOL!!

i thought lost boys went bust when they had to move out of obibio?

Message edited on: 06/30/2005 07:30

Well done! Be sure to put that in your resume:)

haha yea I'll defenitely put it in my resume ;)

Excellent! Now you just have to work on your bike riding:-)

Well pleased for ya! One of life's good times...savour it! LOL.

LOL hey I'm excellent with my bike :P this one thing was just a stupid unlucky thing.

Yeah sure you are:-) Excellent with your bike, just not on it LOL!

try daily use and only falling twice in 10 years ;)

Good effort! Ten years! man you must be buff:) Tell us about the other stack.

Nice going Rayraz... winnings well earned. 8)

Well, what can I say, but congrats? That sounds very interesting, something I could use maybe... LOL!! =) I don't drink, can't stand the taste of the stuff, and can't see any real reason to build up a taste for it. But still... did you get a ticket for RUI (Riding Under the Influence =)? Good luck with that press coverage... =)

hehe I didn't get a ticket, I wasn't THAT much under influence. Only 3 beers... "Ten years! man you must be buff:)" hahaha I wish! lol but no, I don't think I have the buff gene.. lol

Congrats, dude. Phoenix, Arizona may have a bus strike too.

Congratulations! Yesterday? We had a terrible thunderstorm here, too. Rained from heaven and earth, thunder was so loud car alarms went off, the wind broke a tree here in my neighbourhood...

well luckily I had relatively little wind. otherwise I'd never had made it back home! LOL

Congratulations Rayraz!! Sounds like you guys worked your butts off, and it was worth it because of your results! Too bad about your little accident(can you say "Rayraz's road-rash")lol.

LOL thanx for all the congrats! :D it's awesome to have all the hard work pay off like this :D

If your team members have your energy...I'm not surprised you've excelled. Congrats Ray!!

Sounds like you are riding on the top of the wave right now, make sure you grab every opportunity that no doubt will come your way as a result of this excellent work. (If your luck wasn't good, just think what the result of bike versus tram might have been.) Congrats!

lol bike versus tram would've been pretty sucky! hahaha But if the trams weren't on strike I wouldn't even have been on my bike :)

See? Even a strike is in your favour!

LOL I don't think so, if there hadn't been a strike I would've been inside the tram instead of out in the pooring rain for one and a half hours getting soaked to the bone. Even my underpants were soaked with rainwater and you could hear the water slushing in my shoes. How my webcam I got at the Golden Dots stayed dry is a miracle

Oh well, in that case you have my full permission to wallow in self pity. gg

hahaha well I'm still glad, 'cause we won the awards ;)

"By George, folks I think he's got it!" ggg

LOL yup I got it allright :P I think I caught a cold >.< stupid rain... oh did I tell I have now officially no more dry shoes left? :P My paperround drowned my last pair LOL

I'm sure there's a radiator in freestuff somewhere.

I'll build one of my own lol :-P I'm a graphics purist ;) oh btw, keep an eye open the next few days for the 2nd version of my red&blue radiosity room from my gallery, I improved it yesterday. Unlike last time this time I actually knew what I was doing with the radiosity thing :-P