Category: Sloan

Would you like herring with that solo?

I forgot to mention: the E-52s had their inaugural gig on Thursday. It was surreal. We were singing for penguins. No, real penguins. The faculty party was at the Boston Aquarium, and it was a hideous performing space. Think cement cube with balconies facing into the center, which has a column of aquatic exhibits going up to the roof and a spiral ramp around it, and a pond at its base with rocks and penguins. The best option for singing was on a small alcove on the first floor facing the penguins. No one could hear us. But it was fun anyway.

What I’ve been doing in my spare time

Long time no blog. It is, as I’ve mentioned recently, the end of the semester in about two weeks. Tomorrow I’m doing a presentation on the future of Web Services and how it will affect the Internet and the business of software. The website will be available by the 12th; I’ll link it when it comes on line. I don’t have anything to do directly with building this website; for once I’m happy just to be a content provider.

Closure on a class

My last Finance II case writeup was completed today. This is a fairly big deal. I was dealing with a pretty big Black Dog last spring when I first tried to take Finance II, and facing incredibly complicated cases with lots of computation, no road map, and no teammates was about to send me right into the frozen Charles. I dropped it and decided to take it again this fall. It’s just about bearable this time, in spite of the fact that I’ve fatally screwed up just about every case so far.

The irony of course is that I had to finish the last case on my own, and so completely missed the instructions that I had to value the company using the APV method rather than WACC.

It’s a good morning

And I have a lot to do. I’m trying not to let it get to me today, though. Doing some writing for my marketing professor, meeting with some folks on e-MIT things. Still working on getting my financial aid in order too. When I have a chance I’ll write more about that today. And E-52s rehearsal tonight. As Dave used to say, Dig we must!

Wah wah wah

So I’m feeling pretty sorry for myself this morning…we have no classes but I’ll still be working my butt off. So I’ll probably update the page in dribs and drabs over the day as I start to feel better.

Salmon Days

Light blogging day today. My workload at the end of the week is always unpredictable. Today I have more competitor research to do for my E-Lab company, to straighten out some things about getting paid for the curriculum development work I’m doing, and to start a paper that’s due on Monday.

One quick link: the Register is running a live TV show about the perils of tech support. It’s called Salmon Days, about the perils of days when you spend the whole day fighting for your life upstream against the current. The trailer is hysterical (though it contains lots of bad language and even some partial nudity). The best part? “It looks like you’re writing a letter!” “I’M NOT WRITING A ****ING LETTER!!!!”

Boomerang Year

I started writing this weblog this summer while I was in Seattle for an internship between my years at MIT Sloan. At the time, I thought the stay in Seattle would be just a summer, and I didn’t know when I’d return.

Now I know. Yesterday I signed an offer from the company I worked for this summer. I’ll be returning to the Seattle area after graduation.

It’s good, but strange, to have a semester and a half left of school and not have to worry about recruiting. Many of my friends have been in full blown panic job search mode since mid summer, when they found out from their investment banking or consulting firms that they wouldn’t receive offers after their internships ended. And our career development office calls us “unmotivated.” What gall. Would you line up to interview with a banking firm knowing it had turned down ten of your very gifted friends after a summer internship, just so that they could boast that they turned away one hundred applicants for each of the two vacancies they did have?

The CEO of DoubleClick spoke to one of my classes yesterday via videoconference. He stated he thought that there wouldn’t be a recovery until third or fourth quarter next year. “This is the worst year to have graduated with an MBA in the US, ever,” according to Chuck Lucier, the “chief growth officer” of Booz, Allen & Hamilton (as quoted in the Financial Times). And I’ll be moving to the other coast with a job. Mixed emotions abound.

Today’s music? In Metal, by Low:

Partly hate to see you grow
And just like your baby shoes
Wish I could keep your little body
In metal

Rock Solid OS, Jell-O Economy

Glenn Fleischman wrote this review of Mac OS X 10.1.

I’ve already posted my thoughts about the upgrade, but it’s worth repeating. Mac OS X 10.1 is my everyday operating system. At any given time I’m running half a dozen apps — Mozilla, TextEdit, iTunes, Word Test Drive, GraphicConverter, Palm Desktop, Excel, OmniOutliner, Mail and/or Eudora — and it’s been smooth. That’ s not taking account of the ssh server, Postgres SQL server, and streaming audio server that are running (generally unused) in the background. Last night I watched “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” in a window while I did some email and web surfing — the other activities were a little slower but the DVD didn’t drop any frames. Very cool.

Life Without Wheels

We’re going to try living without a car for a while starting in December. It’s not like it’s a totally new concept for us, since we have mostly been walking or using public transportation since we got here. But now we won’t have a safety net.

I’ve been thinking about trying Zipcar. We did a project on them for my marketing class, but if anyone out there has experience with them, I’d appreciate hearing it.

Dot-Com Love in the Time of Cholera

It’s an interesting time to be involved in entrepreneurial classes and organizations (like e-MIT). There’s a huge article in the New York Times this morning about the withering away of venture capital. It echoes things I’ve heard before. We had a senior executive from Softbank visit last spring. He had interesting things to say about his job, like coming home and having to tell his kids that they pulled the plug on Kozmo.com. Like I said last week–lots of heartbreak all around.

A little too late to make the early edition–this brilliant article at Textism going a lot farther than I did about some of the insanity of the last three years. “You, sir, are irrelevant, irrelevant, irrelevant.”

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

Listening to the new Wilco album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, in streaming audio from their website. It’s a very different album from the predecessors, but I like what I’m hearing. I don’t think their old label, Reprise, did, though–they’ve been dropped and are currently shopping for a new home. I’ll be looking forward to hearing them next week at the Avalon. I haven’t been hearing as much music as I did in Seattle (after all, I have to go to classes!) but I’m still getting out when I can.

Any guesses on the meaning of the album name? I still get a giggle from an interview with Jeff Tweedy where he revealed that the name of their previous album, “Summerteeth,” came from the fact that a lot of the members of the band had severe dental problems while recording the album. “You know the joke: I have summerteeth. Some are teeth and some aren’t.”

Still playing with the website. I think I’m going to turn the front page of the site into a proper news bits format, like Dave uses on scripting.com. Maybe then I’ll update more frequently. The nice thing about that format is it works much better for syndication than essays.

If you haven’t looked at what’s been keeping me busy lately, check out “e-MIT” and the “E-52s”. I’m looking forward to Thursday’s general e-MIT meeting and finding some people who want to continue the work I’ve been doing on the operational strategy and execution for the website. And we should be announcing a new E-52s lineup tonight.