d.c.Holth

Preface: I am not a member of the Minneapolis branch of Events and Adventures, have never attended an event and cannot comment on the actual value of the club or its members. Under normal circumstances I would not post things like this, but after being left with such an insulting and sour taste in my mouth, I felt I had to write about the sales tactics used to recruit new members. Although I have not found bad reviews about the Minneapolis branch, I have read several bad reviews about other Events and Adventures franchises, so I encourage members of the Minneapolis branch of Events and Adventures to comment about their experience with the club below.

If you live in Minneapolis and listen to the radio, odds are you’ve heard about Events and Adventures. They claim to be the Twin Cities premier network for singles.  Being single and not having much luck with the internet scene, I decide to give them a call. One of the first things I ask about is membership fees.  I am told Events and Adventures can’t discuss membership fees over the phone (red flag number one). I make an appointment for an in-person interview for the next day.

When I arrived at my appointment, Events and Adventures explained that they are a very selective club for people looking to meet “high quality” singles.  We talked about goals, a bit about past relationships, and what hasn’t been working with my current dating strategies. I learned that standard membership is about $2000 for one year, plus an additional $30 per month. So in total, the cost is approximately $2360.  But wait!  That’s not all, Bob.  If I order today and pay in full, they’ll reduce my membership fees by $300 AND give me 2 months of membership dues free!  So, my total cost is now only $2000…. wait… only $2000.  That’s a lot of money.

Despite the high cost, I actually did sign up. I was told I was getting special privileges by having three days to cancel.  What wasn’t made readily apparent was the fact that  EVERYONE gets this.  Written into the contract is a three-day cancellation period, which also happens to be a MN state law. This isn’t necessarily shady, but it should have been brought up more accurately in the meeting.

After I got home, I started to crunch the numbers. In the meeting, it was explained to me that membership dues cover the cost of ensuring quality members and a portion of the event costs. Additional cost is determined per event. There are 1,500 members paying about $166 a month each, for a grand total of $250,000 a month — that is $3 MILLION per year. What kind of events are they hosting with that budget?

Looking at the calendar for July, the majority of the events are outdoor games such as softball, kickball, hiking, BBQ, canoeing, tubing, etc… All very fun activities, but virtually free. There are a few exceptions on the calendar, like a cruise on St. Croix and Tandam Skydiving for an additional cost (see below), but the vast majority of the events are very inexpensive.  To their credit, winter events may be more expensive to host, especially if an indoor venue needs to be rented. But again, if they are making $250,000 a month, this shouldn’t be an issue. I expect more from my dues than softball games.

As for the events with an additional charge? A “gourmet” dinner would cost me about $25. Sky diving around $150.  Having been sky diving before, I can tell you that they’re only covering about $50 of the cost. What are the membership dues actually going towards? Certainly not the events.

However, my biggest complaint is the 12-month required membership. There are many problems with having such a long membership period. If I meet someone through Events and Adventures and we get married, great, money well spent. But if I meet someone, stop attending events, and then we break up after my year membership is over, I would feel like I wasted a lot of money.

When I had brought this up during my meeting, it was explained to me that you can still come to the events as long as you are not married (another red flag).  So wait a minute…  I’m in a singles club, and there will be members who are in COMMITTED RELATIONSHIPS?  I’m paying $2000 and yet still have to question the availability of the women in the club.

I decided to go back in to see if Events and Adventures could accommodate a shorter contract. They offered to make some phone calls while I was there to see if that was a possibility.  I told the rep that even if she could accommodate that, I would still need to think about it. This didn’t sit well and she made some comment about doing “all that work,” trying to get me “special privileges” and I still wouldn’t sign up?  Her demeanor had quickly turned from sweet to passive-aggressive.

After I decided to cancel, she made a comment such as ”So it really comes down to the money, right?” I told her that I don’t want to spend $2000 for a year subscription on something I haven’t heard anything real great about, never experienced, and could possible be just a waste.  I also mentioned that I was starting a small business and this probably isn’t the best place for me to put $2000 at the moment.  She replied snidely, “So, really, you just can’t afford it?”

Its not about what I can afford, it’s whether or not I see value in what I’m buying. She would have been much better off just letting me turn in my notice, telling me she was sorry to see me go and that it’s really a great club.  But instead, she turned it into another high pressure sale (buy today!  buy now!), and topped it off with an insult. I know lots of “quality” singles who couldn’t afford a $2000 membership, and I know lots of wealthy jerks.  Being able to afford their pricey membership in no way indicates if someone has a character of “high quality.”

If I spent that amount of money buying drinks for women at the bar – that’d be a drink for 5 different women every Saturday night for one year – odds are I’d find a “high quality” woman and have as “high quality” of a relationship.

As I said at the beginning, I could be completely wrong on my impression of the value of the club.  It could be the greatest thing since sliced bread.  What could Events and Adventures do to change my mind?

1. Offer shorter memberships. If the club really is so great, people would continue to go month after month because it is a great value and experience.  If people ended memberships because they found the man or woman of their dreams, success!  Success breeds success.  A major component of eHarmony’s success is showing REAL PEOPLE finding REAL LOVE.  Last I checked they have 90 members married a day.  You can’t argue with that type of success.

1. Reduce membership dues.  As I noted above, with the exception of a few, the events themselves don’t seem that spectacular, and it’s disappointing that the really exciting ones still cost a significant amount of money.  Reducing membership dues would also attract more people (1,500 singles spread between men and women really is not that many), since I know a lot of quality men and women who simply could not afford this.

I’ve been playing around a lot with Flash Player 10’s rotation XYZ.  After doing a series of experimentation and actually implementing it into a new project, I had some doubts about Adobe’s implementation of 3D.

Experiment #1: http://blog.dcholth.com/beta/RotTester/RotTester.html

The images are laid out in a grid, with each image’s rotations (XY & Z) being set to the values of the numeric sliders at the top.  As you can see, each image’s perspective looks different, because they are placed in a 3D environment with the ‘camera’ being set to a specific point.  I had a heck of a time figuring out how to set that camera!

If you look at http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/langref/flash/display/DisplayObject.html#rotationX  it says “Indicates the x-axis rotation of the DisplayObject instance, in degrees, from its original orientation relative to the 3D parent container.”

Well, in the example above, each image is placed in its own Canvas - my best guess was that the parent canvas should be its ‘3D Container’ so the rotation should be based off of that, but clearly it was basing off some other point at the Application level.

I posted my frustrations with this a few places, and finally fellow Universal Minder, Ryan Graff came to the rescue, with the missing piece:  PerspectiveProjection

Setting the PerspectiveProjection of your target’s Transform will give you the results I believe most developers will be looking for.

Experiment 2: http://blog.dcholth.com/files/PanelTest/PanelTest.html

The image in the TitleWindow on the left has its PerspectiveProjection set to be the center of the TitleWindow, where as the image in the TitleWindow on the right has the default properties.  Notice that dragging the TitleWindow on the right around the screen results in distortion of the image, where the image on the left remains tilted exactly how we want.

Experiment 3: http://blog.dcholth.com/files/RotatorTest/RotatorTest.html

Back to our grid of images, here we set the images PerspectiveProjection to point towards the red dot.  Drag it around the screen to see how it effects how each image is percieved.

In conclusion, I believe that most developers will want to take advantage of the PerspectiveProjection’s properties when working  rotations of UIComponents in 3dSpace.

Flex offerers a wide range of utilities to make working with complicated components and applications simpler. One such feature is the use of States. States are often thought of as only visual or GUI related, but in they are perfect for dividing up logic. In my current project I am building a series of learning activities, and some have activities within activities… needless to say it can get complicated quickly. While breaking up the logic into separate components was one option, I didn’t want to have any risk of ‘flashes’ of GUI while pieces are refreshed, moved, or risk messing up data by passing all these pieces around.

I started to build out my activity component using states. One state for when you enter the activity, one for each of the three phases, a cleanup state and finally an exiting state. As I developed the components and created their enterState and exitState functions, as well as many functions only used while in a specific state, I realized that my component was getting to be well over a thousand lines of code and a bit unmanageable. To find the logic pertaining to the current section I was working on, I had to sift through hundreds of lines of code. I decided there had to be a better way… and there was!

I started by creating an AbstractActivityState that extended the State class. This had had any common properties and logic, as well as a bindable “Activity” object. This worked well for accessing the public variables of the activity. The problem came with private variables. While I would have had access to these if I had written all my logic within the Activity MXML, since I was passing the Activity object into my states, they were inaccessible.

There were three solutions I found for this problem:

1. Make all the properties you need access to within the state public, and break encapsulation rules.
2. Add additional Bindable properties to the the custom state classes and pass in the bindable private variables.
3. Create a StateMiniModel that had all the bindable properties I needed and simply pass it to the custom state. This is handy if you don’t want to break encapsulation but have a great many common private variables to be passed to all your custom classes.

To make things even more simple, I added some listeners and protected ‘enter/exit’ classes to be called from within the AbstractActivityState so I when declaring my states in MXML I didn’t need to give it anything other than a name.