CEN

In a shameless plug for the future Alma Mater, I wanted to draw attention to the "Sustainable Global Business Strategies for 2005 and Beyond" seminar organized by the Cornell Entrepreneur Network (CEN). The event is being held in NY on Thursday, June 2nd, 2005.

Other than the alma mater thing, I think a sustainable business strategy is something every responsible business should follow. With rising levels of disparity between the third world and the developed nations, we are going to see an increasing backlash from people who face the void. If steps are not taken to help alleviate some of the suffering, the vicious cycle of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer will only grow. Sound business strategy that solves both problems of making a profit and helping people seems to be the way to go.

Do attend the event if you happen to be in the neighborhood.

Movers

These past few weeks have been spent in trying to work out the logistics of our move to Ithaca. I was laboring under the delusion that we could wrap the move inside 3,000 $, boy was I mistaken. We were quoted upwards of 7,000 $ and it just doesn't seem worth it. Oh and this price does not include transporting of the car.

So instead of going with long distance movers, (something people should use only when their company pays for it), I am fast coming to the conclusion that the self sufficient process of renting and driving a U-Haul truck is the way to go. Offcourse I will get local movers to load and unload the truck. After carrying a particularly heavy sofa for a 'friend' up two flights of stairs, I swore never to lift another sofa again unless I was stone broke. The Bay Area unsurprisingly has several cheap 'ethnic' moving companies, that charge as low as 55$ an hour for 2 people with a truck. So I plan to make use of the cheap muscle to load up at this end. I still haven't figured out the unloading in Ithaca, which again unsurprisingly has very few moving companies, but I am quite sure I can hire a couple of brawny undergrads to help me.

The U-Haul route seems to add up to about 3,000 $ including transportation of the car, which is relatively economical. It includes about 10 days and some 3500 miles which is well within the time and distance I have earmarked for the trip. I know some Bay Area Cornell admits were trying to work out a good deal for a bulk move, but that movement seems to have petered out and we can't wait for it to gather steam.

The most interesting thing about the long drive is going to traveling through 4 states I have never been too before, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska and Iowa. That will bring my 'states' tally to 38 putting me within striking range of the whole 50.

Changes

This is a long over due post, that I attempted to complete and send out several times over the last week, but for some reason or the other never could. But enough is enough so here is the post, warts and all.

There have been several things on my mind these past couple of weeks involving my blog. I have been chewing on the age old question, whether to maintain my blog once I start business school or not. Or whether to change the format and make it a personal blog as compared to a MBA related one. Going by Oldman's blogging experience, I am of the impression that it may not be the politically accepted thing to post dissident opinions, especially in a small school like Cornell. I am not sure, I can exert enough control on the content matter I post and it is very likely that I will step out of line very soon. But on the other hand, unlike several of the bloggers out there, I haven't been 'outted'! I have to some extent maintained my anonymity, despite several lapses in judgment and discretion on my part. Besides I am pretty much done blogging about the application process and have gone cold turkey on BW forums and S2S for over 3 months, leaving me bereft of topics to blog about vis-à-vis application issues.

Another thought that I have been working on (more diligently) has been my attempt at dropping blogger. I was getting tired of working around blogger's flaky software, so I decided to branch out and set something up on my own. I have been playing around with this domain I bought a long time ago and have been experimenting with software that will better suit my needs (WordPress is the prime candidate right now). In case you visited my blog last week and noticed some flaky behavior on the look and feel, it was as a result of me trying to transfer all my posts from Blogger to the other domain. I am extremely happy to report that despite all my attempts to screw things up, the process went off albeit with several hitches, and if anyone decides to migrate their blog over from Blogspot to any WordPress supported sites, I can definitely provide some guidance. I am still tweaking the site and the style sheets before I release the URL (if at all).

StarWars???

If you haven't seen this already, take a gander. It is a relatively funny take on Star Wars (Revenge of the Sith), but I practically died laughing when I saw the 'deleted scene'. Even if you don't see the extended spoof, don't miss the deleted scene. Don't want to blog about it since it will be a spoiler but do leave me a comment if you see it.

May the force be with you!

Recycle

Cleaning the study was the tall order of the weekend. In preparation of our move to Ithaca, we decided we would junk most if not all the non essentials. The first on the list were the hundreds of pages of essays that I pain staking wrote out. To give a better perspective, I wrote atleast 10 drafts per essay for Wharton (6 essays), which works out to 60 essays in all. As I went through the pre-final 9 drafts, I made corrections, notes and penned down thoughts on how I wished the essay to flow. So that added up to a stack of papers. All of which was happily chewed up by my shredder, with absolutely no thought to the effort involved in producing the volume of work (pretty much like the Wharton AdCom actually). Also added to the recycle bin were the 20-30 brochures I received and or printed from the various MBA schools out there. The worst offender in sending out SPAM brochures had to be UC Davis. Which for some reason sent me a mailing a week for months, probably wanted me to have a spare copy in case I misplaced my last one, utterly ridiculous.

I did get to go to Fry's, the local electronic department store, whose tag line just happens to be "your best buys are always at Fry's". Note the emphasis on Best Buy, their greatest competitors. While I feel Fry's are definitely cheaper than Best Buy on some big ticket items, the over all shopping experience there is extremely tacky and nothing to write home about. To make a return, you have to stand in never ending lines and the amount of paper they require to complete transactions is a joke. They probably run through a redwood tree a day to meet the demand. Instead of thin small receipts as at most stores, at Fry's they print A4 copies in triplicate. It just so happened that I bought a GB of SD memory amongst other things, from a sales woman who knew nothing of what she was selling. After completing the transaction via credit card, I realized I had a 100$ gift certificate that I could have used. So I tried to get the charges reversed and charged to the gift certificate instead, that obviously was a 'no can do'. So had to stand in line for 30 mins, at the return counter for another 10 while the associate called his boss, who called his boss to authorize the return. After that ordeal, I had to go back to the main counter to re-buy the stuff. But since the SD Card was a 'cage' item, that implied 3 more A4 pages to release it for sale.

Blogger for some reason was extremely slow and painful to use for most of last week. Had to forgo posting because I just couldn't deal with the wait times.

Butterflies?

Behold the Butterfly Planetary Nebula ( Credit: B. Balick (U. Washington) et al., WFPC2, HST, NASA). This has got to be one of the prettiest pictures you have ever seen. It is of a star (M2-9) living its final moments (moments in star time account for some 5,000 odd years), before imploding into oblivion. The wings that you see are the result of a gaseous exterior being cast away. In the center, two stars orbit inside a gaseous disk 10 times the orbit of Pluto.

And to think, I thought I had butterflies in my stomach while waiting for my results.

What is up with Blogger these days? Slow with downtimes in the middle of the afternoon so unlike the usual Google offerings.

Feedback

It totally slipped my mind that some of the schools, I was dinged at, were offering feedback sessions, until I saw this note I had left for myself a month ago. While I have no intentions of contributing to their coffers next year, having invested so much of my soul, time and energy into the process I want to understand what dragged me down. Call me competitive or just anal, but I hate losing and the dings really stung. So now I am scheduled for feedback at both Wharton and Chicago in the next month (must remember to write myself a note for those dates). Appointments for the Chicago feedback session opened on May 1st, and they seem to be running out of spots fast; whereas the appointments for Wharton started being issued yesterday so should continue for another couple of weeks.

I got my grade for the accounting class I took yesterday, and I seem to have done fairly well. While not outright topping the class, I am close enough that the difference doesn't bother me too much. Unlike the first test where I had to fight with the instructor for being anal, this time around, I grumbled about him being extremely liberal, with his grading. It sucks in this instance because it has allowed the rest of the class to close the gap on me. The average GPA for this test was 3.54, compared to a 3.2 in the first test. That paints the picture better than any words.

I am also surprised that none of the accepted candidates wish to blog about the financial loan aspect of the MBA game. I would imagine that, that is a topic everyone would be most interested in comparing notes on. I will have something up based upon my research up shortly. Taking out this huge loan is not my idea of fun, but if it has to be done, it had better be done right.

Ramblings

I am still at it, trying to get the problem reported a couple of days ago solved. It never ceases to amaze me at how humans deal with problems, for instance in this case, the first day I was all freaked out at the thought of a severe customer problem that probably has had some repercussions on their bottom line. But after spending a couple of days on the edge, working continuously under the pressure, something snapped in me today. I am no closer to the solution than I was a couple of days ago, but neither am I so tense about finding the solution.

I find myself taking a break every couple of hours to stretch and shoot the breeze with my colleagues when the thought of spending a single minute away from the computer was unthinkable yesterday. Strangely enough, I find that I am doing more now.

With that out of the way, I stumbled across the hilarious transcript of Laura Bush's speech at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. This is the dinner where tradition dictates that the president make fun of himself and the reporters who cover him.

Some excerpts from Laura's speech:

We met, and married, and I became one of the regulars up at Kennebunkport. All the Bushes love Kennebunkport, which is like Crawford, but without the nightlife. People ask me what it's like to be up there with the whole Bush clan. Lemme put it this way: First prize — three-day vacation with the Bush family. Second prize — 10 days.

and

Now, of course, he spends his days clearing brush, cutting trails, taking down trees, or, as the girls call it, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. George's answer to any problem at the ranch is to cut it down with a chainsaw — which I think is why he and Cheney and Rumsfeld get along so well.

and the funniest of them all

I said to him the other day, "George, if you really want to end tyranny in the world, you're going to have to stay up later."

A round of applause for wordsmith Landon Parvin, who wrote the speech. I wonder how funny the speech would truly be if the President actually had to write it? It is sad that we will probably never forget the immortal lines, "Ask not what your country can do for you ..." and always attribute it to JFK when the person who actually wrote those lines has probably lived and died in obscurity.

With that it is back to work.

EDIT: Typo. And while I am editing the page, wondered how many people realized that the date today was 05/05/05. How cool is that?

Anagrams of the day: ALLIV, NELIR, CEMESH and TOARRO.

Bugs

It just happens to be one of those days when you wake up from bed and wonder why you bothered too, in the first place. It all started out by seeing Ants.

While I am pro nature and I really liked the movie Antz, I draw a line when those pesky creatures decide to make my car their domicile. Seeing them walking on the door frame without a care in the world, triggered of something primal in me. I jumped out of the car, and hopped around trying to brush them off with Kleenex. If you have ever tried to brush an ant off, you will appreciate my predicament. Those damn bugs, cool as a cucumber, started walking down my arm using the Kleenex as some sort of bridge. After twenty mins of my Vitus dance of trying to shake them off, I had to get going. So instead of taking the big hint and jumping back into bed with the covers pulled high, I went out to brave the world.

As I got to work, I found out that hell had broken free, with an extra ordinarily difficult customer problem just being reported. Being under my purview, my team was more than happy to wash their hands off it and leave me holding the proverbial hot potato. After working on the bug (yes another euphemistic cousin of the ant) for most of the day while fighting off extreme drowsiness with a couple of cans of Mountain Dew, I managed to blow the production environment. Bringing a complete halt to the repair efforts as well as business for the customer. So now I am in deep crap and it isn't smelling too good. Cornell never looked so good.

Through this entire process, I have been trying to dislodge a couple of intrepid and very persistent ants who have taken residence somewhere in my shirt. As soon as I get home I am going to burn these clothes right before I jump into scalding hot water. Even if I burn my skin, I am going to get those ants. Muhahahahaha!

Hitchhiking

Being a huge Sci-fi buff, had to catch Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy on the first weekend it was released. I found the movie 'interesting', with the usual poetic licenses that directors take while dealing with popular books (a la LOTR and Harry Potter). The audience at the local AMC seemed to be really into the movie, laughing where appropriate without prompting from a laugh track, but I couldn't help but wonder how people who had never read the book could relate to the characters that Mr. Adams immortalized? There just wasn't enough time in the script to flesh out the characters and allow people to identify with them IMHO.

After procrastinating for the last couple of weeks, I finally buckled down under the pressure and opened up my accounting books yesterday. I have a test today and while flipping through the notes, I realized that I dint have the notes from the class I missed while attending DJ early in April, so will probably have to wing it. (Just how I am supposed to wing things like recording Natural resources depletion I am not quite sure, but I will have to figure that out by this evening if I want to maintain my A grade in the class).