Still going after all these years.
… to our friends Kristen and Greg, who were married yesterday on the Cape. (George was there—look forward to the update on Monday.) Greg is one of those b-school students who got shafted by the bear economy and was still looking for the right opportunity at graduation; hopefully things will turn around for him soon. (If anyone reading this blog has a startup who needs someone to work connections with VCs, Greg is your man.)
Update: George writes about the wedding.
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Almost forgot: congratulations to Charlie for finally landing a job in one of the worst MBA job markets imaginable. Better yet, it’s in Cambridge, so he and Carie won’t have to move very far!
MIT Center for e-Business: “Optimal Bidding in Online Auctions”. Dmitri Bertsimas (who taught my class on data mining), Jeffrey Hawkins and Georgia Perakis investigate published data on eBay auctions to identify optimal strategies for winning auctions–both one at a time and multiple auctions. They identify some winning strategies using dynamic programming algorithms.
Now, all I need is a way to implement the strategies so I can finally replace the busted DVD drive on my laptop…
George Chang: Fishing Monomoy Island. George, having revitalized his blog, is focusing his attention on fishing in the greater Boston area, starting with Monomoy Island off Chatham, MA. You can subscribe to George’s Tightlines series here.
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George Chang, my Sloan classmate, is updating his weblog again. Great picture, George! Might have something to do with his having gotten around to registering Radio. Glad to have you back on the scene.
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Two years ago I was junking a promising career in IT consulting to put myself heinously in debt chasing an MBA. I was afraid I’d be losing my career momentum and my geek cred.
Today the jury is still out on the former, but I think I’ve answered the latter with a definitive yawp. Plus, thanks in part to this blog (which turns one year old, as a blog, next Tuesday), I have also regained my voice. Granted, I’m not writing poetry any more, but honestly some changes are for the better. 🙂 I think it’s been worth it.
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Given Clear Channel’s financial difficulties, now might be a good time to point to the Sloan E-52s’ version of the Velvet Underground’s “Rock and Roll,” available for download in MP3 format, lead vocals and arrangement by yours truly. Lou knew thirty-two years ago that Big Radio was coming:
Jenny said when she was just five years old
There was nothing happening at all
Every time she puts on the radio
There was nothing going down at all
When we perform that song, I can’t resist adding after that line, “Must have been a clear channel.” 🙂 Other tracks from our live in the studio recording session are available.
The E-52s did their most amazing performance today for the mikes. We recorded our repertoire in a tight two hour session—a far cry from sessions I used to do with the Suspicious Cheese Lords that would take two hours to cut one song. Of course the standards were much higher at those sessions. Here we wanted songs for archival, memory, gifts to families, and possibly on line promotional purposes, which made the pressure much less and we had a lot of fun.
I finished my last class yesterday, turned in my last assignment. I’m finished with my work for my MBA. No more MIT classes, alas. But on the other hand, no more cases to read. It seems unbelievable that it’s all over except for graduation.
It’s time to refocus on other things. Like, finding a house in the Seattle area.
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The New Product and Venture Development track is having a reception at the Hotel@MIT (the former University Park Hotel in Cambridge) and I’m blogging this from a new iMac at the reception desk. I’m done. 🙂
The MIT $50K competition held its award ceremony last night. Congratulations are in order to my classmate Jeremy Bender and his team, Ancora Pharmaceuticals, who won the grand prize. $50K may not be a lot as far as seed money goes, but it’s a spectacular win for Jeremy and his team. For the record, their team “specializes in the development of complex carbohydrate drugs,” according to the summary posted here.
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This is the second to last day of classes here at Sloan and I’m feeling a bit pressured. I had a semester paper due for Technology Strategy, a final paper for Power and Negotiation, and a final “quiz” (they couldn’t call it an exam by Institute policy because it was given before Finals Week), and I have one last final paper due tomorrow.
And after tomorrow I’m done. Then comes graduation, the move to Seattle, and the new job (along with the resumption of an income). I’ll probably have more thoughts about all of the above shortly; right now I’m still kind of in shock that it’s almost over. I feel like I just blinked while two years went by.
A few days and three papers left, and I can’t finish one of them yet because the landscape is moving too quickly. Our technology strategy paper on the video game console industry has been hit hard in the last two days—between Nintendo finally deciding to go on line (News.com) and Sony and Microsoft preparing to go into a price war (New York Times), we can’t update the paper fast enough to keep up. Thank goodness it’s due tomorrow. I can only imagine how the analysts feel.
So I’m really a geek. I have a set of Fridge Code (think Magnetic Poetry, but for geeks) that used to adorn the outside of my locker at Sloan (yes, world, you too can return to the high school experience with your very own locker! Just send us your GMAT scores and pony up your tuition!). People kept moving it around and I finally took all the words down except for one that I would rotate in and out. This weekend I grabbed one at random and put it on the front.
I looked at the word today after I completed my transition with the new leadership of the E-52s. What word had I picked? Deprecated. It’s perfect! Much better than lame duck or short timer. “Sure, you can ask Tim to do that, but he’s a deprecated interface these days so don’t count on him to actually finish it.”
The Spring Jam last night was astonishingly fun. Our guest group, the MIT-Wellesley Toons, were spectacular as expected.
But mostly our group pulled together and put on an amazing show. So to Don Hyun, Holly Hacking, Hey-Sung Han, Ruxandra Tentis, George Chang, Jayne Tan, Jessica Santiago, Clay Jackson, Priscilla Sato, and Mario Yearwood, my hat’s off and my heart’s thanks.
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