Category: Sloan

Found on Tracy Adams’ blog, notes toward a free Sloan/MIT Weblogs program based around Manila. Tracy contacted me a few months ago to tip me off about the project and ask if she could use my weblogs.com high water growth data for the presentation. Sounds like it went OK.

George and Becky are getting ready to leave Boston for the cooler climes of the Bay area. Now we have no excuse not to visit California. He also has some kind things to say about a kite dealer in Kitty Hawk.

Another Sloanie has come to Redmond. I got an email yesterday from Peter Doulas, who was in my MBA class at Sloan, letting me know he’s joined Microsoft to work on server marketing. Welcome!

No, not that red pill. Shuman’s started a blog. He’s handcoding it and he only has four entries and no permalinks, but hey.

Oh, and for the record, I disagree with him about The Two Towers. If it made more money, it was less about marketing inertia (though they certainly didn’t have to work as hard this time around to establish credibility with all the opinion leaders (i.e. Tolkien fanatics)) and more about the fact that, objectively, it was a better movie. More going on, less slack in the story, the amazing Helm’s Deep sequence, Gollum. Anyway, welcome to the blogging world, Shuman.

Last week I went to an MIT alum event at which Nicholas Negroponte, founding director of the MIT Media Lab, spoke. It was less… revelatory than I would have expected. In fact, Negroponte, who said he doesn’t do that sort of stand up talking very often, largely eschewed the techno-prognostication that made him famous except for a discussion on the merits of open spectrum.

Instead, he talked about:

• The Wired article (“You’d think that they could have chosen a more flattering photo… however, the article was substantially true.”)
• Efforts associated with or partly sponsored by the Media Lab to wire third world classrooms (the Digital Nations project)
• The international expansion of the Media Lab
• The growth of the Media Lab from an organization funded, in no small part, from UROP fees to the heights of the late 90s, and the difficulty of raising the last bit of cash for the new building now that sober fiscal reality has settled in
• On working with corporate research sponsors (“The only complaint I ever heard from the corporations was that we weren’t crazy enough… Have you seen what really creative people look like and how they act? Would they survive in a corporate environment? They were outsourcing that uncontrollable creative energy to us.”)

A great talk. I need to come back and blog more of the things he said about Digital Nations and about WiFi and mesh networks, but that can wait until later.

…to Priscilla and Scott, who were married today in Las Vegas. Hope you have a lifetime of joy together.

I wasn’t able to watch the ceremony—I was in meetings all afternoon, went straight from work to rehearsal, and got home after the Internet video stream had expired. But I’m sure the service was more solemn and wonderful than anything in Las Vegas has ever been.

It’s George’s birthday today. Our mutual friend Charlie told me over IM (hyperlinks added by your editor, IM nicknames changed to protect Charlie from all his stalkers):

Charlie(8:06:04 AM): hey, it is george’s birthday if you didn’t know. we were going to go to the sunset tonight, but are postponing due to weather… apparently he was born on president’s day so his parents named him after a george that featured fairly prominantly in our country’s early days.
tj (8:07:42 AM): no i didn’t know that’s really cool!
tj (8:08:10 AM): well i already sent him his birthday scrapple
Charlie (8:08:21 AM): no worries. can you see george as an abe? i think his parents picked the right president.

George writes today that he left his Scrapple in Philadelphia. He also notes that it’s hard finding the time to blog. George, the reason it’s so easy for me is I think in blog posts now. It’s all about practice, practice, practice. Plus I tend to want to write more when I’m drinking good beer, which is why I started doing the beer reviews. Right now I’m working through a backlog of Belgian and other brews from the beer club, but once I get the shelf cleared out I’ll be checking out some more local products…

Jay posts his first update in a while to bemoan short holiday vacations. I suppose there’s an answer to this—perpetual student life, or unemployment—but I certainly sympathize with his perspective. George chimes in with a “welcome to the real world.” George, talking about the real world is one thing, but mentioning it a few moments after discussing scrapple: something else again. I’m not sure the concepts real world and scrapple can ever coexist in a meaningful way.

I should also mention (and blogroll) George’s other weblog, where he now keeps all his writing about fishing.

George writes about his and Becky’s experience driving back from Vermont to Massachusetts in the middle of the Christmas snowstorm last night:

We started the morbid road game of tracking the whackos passing us at 50+ mph.  Not just SUVs, add minivan drivers to that list.  We watched a minivan fly by, only to see them off the road in the median about 10 minutes later.  A 3-4 hour trip turned out to be 7, but we made it home.

I’ve had a few trips like that one. One with my parents from southeast Virginia up to Lancaster County, PA, and one a few years back from northern Virginia to Lakewood, New Jersey. What should have been a four hour trip was about twelve hours, starting with two hours to travel fifteen miles on the beltway. Needless to say, I was quite happy not to be driving anywhere in snow this year. We’ve even had respite from the rain out here.

At long last Livens! Jay comes up for air today to admit what many of us suspected: in addition to having time consumed by the job, he is also deeply engrossed in Xbox Live. Glad to see that nothing has changed, Jay. He also has some interesting thoughts about administering Linux vs. Windows 2000 Server.

George isn’t sure if he’s part of the keiretsu. The way I figure it, he’s part of my keiretsu, and so are Esta and Greg. So are Esta and Greg part of George’s?

This is one of those crazy questions about Internet content association that don’t come up in online communities. If we were all in a common community and interacting with each other in this way, George and Esta would start interacting with each other directly at some point. In this respect, it’s easy to see how closely blog relationships resemble the relationships between their authors.

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Jay just got a job offer with a storage company in Cambridge. Congratulations, Jay! Now it’s George’s turn…
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George is thinking about photos, too. He just launched his photoblog with a slew of fall photos. I like the pumpkin shots.
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Random coincidence of the day: fellow 2002 Sloanie Mike Parduhn was born in Newport News, Virginia, my home town. He says he doesn’t remember much since he moved to Chicago in pre-school years. In my cynical days, I think that I don’t remember much about it because I moved out after high school and never looked back. But it’s not true. Comic books, bicycle rides, the drive along Rt. 60 from Denbigh to Colonial Williamsburg, all the good and bad school days, leaves burning in the fall, the Methodist Church’s autumnal brunswick stew sale, listening to …Nothing Like the Sun… through headphones for the first time, bike skidding out in gravel on Sylvia Court, waiting for the bus, learning about Violent Femmes, Ronnie and his mohawk, singing in the church choir next to my dad, learning about music theory from my mom in her basement studio, devouring the library one book at a time, learning about the wonders of college libraries at William and Mary…

Sorry, rainy days do this to me. It’s either nostalgia or look for a small, warm, close pub.
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