A day in the life I always like reading a good day-in-the-life post now and again. So why not from a wee MBA student? Let's see - 7:36 I woke up, cursed the clock, hurriedly got ready for my 9:00am Finance class. Stepping out the door at 8:15 is good enough to have me be only 5 minutes late for a dissection of cost of capital and market betas. 10:45 has me in Managerial Economics getting introduced to game theory and variants of the prisoner's dilemma. Sandwich lunch with a couple new friends, discussing rent stabilization in New York. Brief e-mailing session from my laptop on a bench in the b-school lobby. Then, off to a 15 minute strategy session with a buddy who's entering an entreprenuership contest with me. We whiteboard how the site will look. Marketing Strategy has us in a group discussion of market segmentation and early pregnancy test packaging. After that, I decide to explore the campus a little bit and find the law school kids queueing up for something. Whenever you see a line in Manhattan, there's usually a good reason for it, so you should just generally join the line and ask questions later. In this case I joined the line and it was for a speech by Sandra Day O'Connor. Which was cool, but she didn't say much. Then off to "case preparation workshop" for 90 minutes. Then a 60 minute info session with endeavor.org. A cool program really. Then dinner at 9:30 (Chipotle, reading my HR case). Home at 10:15 to clean and do more e-mail and blog to you. Then Accounting homework 'till midnight. Basically, most of my day has been spent sitting and listening while people talk at me. Occassionally I talk back. And I move from one talking session to the next. That's basically what business students do.  ¶ 11/12/2007 10:20:00 PM 2 comments links to this post

Being green Adam Smith would say that a product's market price internalizes all of its economic inputs. If it takes more energy to fertilize the fields that grow an apple, or to move the apple to market, the price of the apple will go up. Essentially, an apple's market price equals its energy footprint. If that's true, then being a "green consumer" is easy. Just be thrifty.  ¶ 11/09/2007 11:02:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

A VC I met Fred Wilson tonight -- a mildly big deal Venture Capitalist in the New York area. Writer of http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/. He was a solidly down to earth, smart guy, with an MIT / Computer Science bent to him. Not only did this man invest in Geocities, Tacoda, Kosmo, and Twitter, but he's also pretty savvy on the future of the Internet and agreed with my Terminator Glasses theory of the road ahead. I therefore approve of him. Now if I could just get an internship . . .  ¶ 11/07/2007 12:23:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

Spammers Why is it always "Vi@gra" and "Enlarge Your P'eni$!" spam? Don't women need bigger boobs or fewer wrinkles or something? Spammers are sexist.  ¶ 11/07/2007 12:20:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

Speed racer The key to navigating Times Square is that the tourists never think to leave the sidewalk. They think, "sidewalk is for walking, and I'm walking, therefore I should be on it." Fools! I cut over to the street and blow past them.  ¶ 11/06/2007 12:03:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be Having occupied the last 45 minutes looking back through my old blog posts, I'm realizing that I'm generating a lot of content over the years. What was once supposed to be short transcriptions of my daily learnings became a journal, then a travel-logue, then a sort of Big Idea repository. It's a bizarre lens to look at one's life, because of course when one writes a blog, you do so under discrete circumstances: taking a break, sitting at a computer, squeezing in time. If my blog entries were taken as a representative sample of my mood and thoughts over time, there would be massive sampling error. Of course I don't blog when I'm busy, or sad, or traveling somewhere, or whatever. So whatever snapshot of life this blog represents must necessarily be a distortion, a caricature of the actual life that was lived underneath it. Perhaps our collective perception of our history is the same. For a long time history was written for the literate elites, by the literate elites, and tended to cluster around wars and shifts in power. So reading history is often distortionary -- you get a particular angle of the story of human existence, but never the panorama. Nor does reading more help with the problem. The historians record with the perspective of a person who's aloof to the action, taking time to sit contemplatively at his keyboard and synthesize and analyze. Of course, if I want to get really philosophical about it, perhaps there is no "true" story or reality underneath all the writing and analyzing anyway. Digested and analyzed and written data are all that humans can grasp, so whatever "true" life may have occurred is unknowable and therefore beside the point. Nevertheless, a story can at least be more or less complete, and a blog is surely closer to "less".  ¶ 11/03/2007 10:29:00 PM 0 comments links to this post