Miss Saigon w/ cousin Will
Now Playing: still playing KCRW
Topic: Personal or Reflective
Cousin Will (of the Volvo beast fame) plays in the orchestra for Miss Saigon and they'll be in Buffalo this Sat. night. Can't wait to see him and watch the show; hopefully we'll go out for a good meal and a drink afterwards. I don't know Buffalo so if you'r ein the know, email or comment below with your suggestions.

Current Reading: Creative-Class Struggle article in Fast Company magazine

Current Listening Stereo MC's, "Set it Off"

3rd Annual How to Make Friends on the Lift
Now Playing: New Ground on KCRW
Topic: Personal or Reflective
The Lounge's 3rd Annual How to Make Friends on the Lift went down Sat. night at HotShots. Despite the annoying, intermittent rain, there was a great turnout. The event was a benefit for Boarding for Breast Cancer so it was nice to see people out for a fun event that was supporting a good cause.

The rail jam started at 5:30 or 5:45 but I was late so I'm not exactly sure but it was in full swing when I got there. A scaffold setup, about 12ft off the ground, was the strap-in and runway area leading to 45 degree before the actual jibs. There were two jibs; an up-flat-down box on the right that didn't see much use and a double-barrel rail on the left that saw the majority of the action.

I heavily Photoshopped for bright/contrast, levels, and color balance b/c it was raining and dimly lit last night. My digital wasn't doing well with those conditions. I switched to video and was able to capture the action a little better b/c there wasn't the same delay that I suffered shooting stills without a flash. QuickTime clips below:

Backside 180 out

Backside lipslide

Nosepress

Backside lipslide 2

After the rail jam ended, things moved inside for the movie premieres: Burning Bridges, The Community Project, and FutureProof.

Burning Bridges had a lot of rail/jibbing and acid drops that made my knees hurt but I got tired of seeing rail after rail sequence. The movie was quirky, I'll give them that, but it seemed more like a home video than a snowboard video. That may have been their intention, the un-snowboard movie, but it meant there was no continuity or flow, just disparate clips slapped together haphazardly. Here's TWSnow's review, they give it more credit than I do but maybe that's b/c they know the guys that made the movie.

The Community Project was the best of the three movies: big names and big tricks. It showed that some foresight had been put into achieving the theme of a snowboard movie. The city, transition, and lifestyle parts the blended into the movie made it visually appealing in addition to the great snowboarding. I was on the edge of my seat but then again, I love watching snowboard videos. The highlights were the Japan segment (a little Lost in Translation feel and boundless powder as far the eye could see) and the film's last segment where Travis Rice spins onto a spine to backflip off and then a double-backflip off the last 60-70ft kicker. Although I've seen the stills from this sequence, it was no less amazing that seeing it in video format. Here's TWSnow's interview w/ Rice about the movie.

Futureproof looked like an amazing film as well except that people were standing in front of the screen (holdovers from when free schwag was thrown into the crowd). I couldn't see everything and with a few beers on board, I yelled at them to move. [Disclaimer- I love snowboarding and don't mess around when it comes to watching snowboard movies; I'm there to really watch & analyze the film so I have little patience for those shooting the breeze or and hanging out during the movie]. There was lots of backcountry, big air sequences and incredible straight-lining of AK chutes that had me silently thinking "damn he's hauling ass..." I'll have to watch this movie again. Here's TWSnow's review.

For all of the downtime, there was tons of free schwag thrown to the throngs of teenagers. I stayed in my seat and kept drinking $2 Molson Light specials to dull the pain; just show the snowboard videos, that's what I came for. The saving grace of having to wait before and in-between the different movies was the beer and the DJ Battle, which DJ Artie K definitely won. He got the crowd into it, which is saying a lot considering high school kids won't often dance in public for fear of looking uncool.

Overall, a great event and a fun night. Props to Josh at the The Lounge and to HotShots for putting together such a great event for the western NY snowboard community.

Posted by cph19 at 2:04 PM EDT

Updated: Sunday, 23 October 2005 8:03 PM EDT

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Assorted Links & Events
Now Playing: Rob Dickson - My Name is Love
Topic: Personal or Reflective
I wanted to post last night but it was too late and I had other work to finish but I Gmailed myself a to-do list for my next post. In no particular order:

1) Arlo Guthrie is playing tonight in Ithaca

2) Podtech.net podcast w/ Ray Kurweil, talking about the future of computing in our society: imagine always having the internet in the palm of your hand or in your thought processes. Download a new firmware to your brain and possess new knowledge in an instant.

3) Noticed that Lessig spoke about municipal wi-fi recently. I posted about this subject after talking with an old boss who's the assitant city manager for the city of K.C., so it's nice to know that I'm thinking about about the same subjects as Lawrence Lessig.

4) I wouldn't call myself a lefty (this is for someone out there in the blogsphere, maybe she's reading this) because the terms "liberal" and "conservative" are have so maligned/perverted that I don't think they're meaningful terms or labels anymore.

I do, however, consider myself a broadband liberal. My younger brother, however, is a lefty and below is an excerpt from the Rolling Stones' article on his organization's head honcho [emphasis added]:

---

" Other Clinton veterans are even more pointed about Emanuel's assets. "He's got this big old pair of brass balls, and you can just hear 'em clanking when he walks down the halls of Congress," says Paul Begala, who served with Emanuel on Clinton's staff. "The Democratic Party is full of Rhodes scholars -- Rahm is a road warrior. He's just what the Democrats need to fight back."

Friends and enemies agree that the key to Emanuel's success is his legendary intensity. There's the story about the time he sent a rotting fish to a pollster who had angered him. There's the story about how his right middle finger was blown off by a Syrian tank when he was in the Israeli army. And there's the story of how, the night after Clinton was elected, Emanuel was so angry at the president's enemies that he stood up at a celebratory dinner with colleagues from the campaign, grabbed a steak knife and began rattling off a list of betrayers, shouting "Dead! . . . Dead! . . . Dead!" and plunging the knife into the table after every name. "When he was done, the table looked like a lunar landscape," one campaign veteran recalls. "It was like something out of The Godfather. But that's Rahm for you."

Of the three stories, only the second is a myth -- Emanuel lost the finger to a meat slicer as a teenager and never served in the Israeli army. But it's a measure of his considerable reputation as the enforcer in Clinton's White House that so many people believe it to be true. You don't earn the nickname "Rahmbo" being timid.

---

Currently Listening: Rob Dickinson - My Name is Love

Chum Still Feeding the Blogsphere
Now Playing: Snuff - Nick Northern
Why comment on this when so many others already have?

Cheney 'cabal' hijacked foreign policy
"In a scathing attack on the record of President George W. Bush, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Mr Powell until last January, said: “What I saw was a cabal between the vice-president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made."

As of 1:10 EST, 1,731 posts and counting for "Cheney cabal." Not all are related to this article but let's see how many posts there are by the end of the day.

The Week Ahead
Now Playing: Brazilian Girls - Don't Stop, Josh Rouse- Directions
Topic: Creative Class
I've been at Spot Coffee a lot lately, trying to get out of my apartment while finishing my Capstone project for school. While I have broadband at home, my desk is small, cramped, and a bit isolating for the 4-5 hours spent sitting there after work doing more work.

And I'm not alone. There's a univeral need to venture out for a little bit and be social, even if it means going to the coffee shop with your notebook, typing away or reading while the headphones keep motivating (I call it cranking) music thumping in my head. Here's the cranking playlist.

Wired's article describes this feeling pretty well. It's a topic one of my best friends and I have discussed before: is going to the coffee shop with my notebook and headphones and sitting there typing away sociable? Needless to say, we disagree.

I don't always end up chatting with someone but more often than not I do as the Wired article suggests. The kind of people at coffee shops are typically of a different nature. Do I go because I want to hang out with people who are like me or is becauset I want to hang out with people who are intellectual, creative, and otherwise cool people?

I'm looking for a place with energy and although Spot Coffee is an osais, Rochester as a city does not have energy. Although I've posted about Richard Florida before, the excerpts below clarify what I so uneloquently described above. From his speech at CC almost a year ago:

---

" You have to understand, I’m pretty darned conventional. I have no idea what’s going on. I’m going into it with an open mind, then I start asking people, especially young people graduating colleges and focus groups. We start to ask them, “How do you pick a place to live and work?” Young people, and we’re assuming they want a good economic opportunity, and I start to hear this weird thing. “We want to move to a place that has energy.” “Yes, we want to go to a place that has energy.” ....

...As one of my interview subjects said, “This isn’t about playing. It’s about recharging our batteries, about becoming more focused on work, about release… regenerating ourselves.” We’re getting ready, as she said, to work a second working day. A second 8-hour day. So people wanted to be involved, and in arts and culture, the same thing...

...I put my two boys through Purdue, and they graduated Purdue and they had a ton of offers in the Indianapolis area, and neither one of them stayed. And when I asked them, ‘Boys, why didn’t you stay?’ They said, ‘It’s not enough for us just to have a great technology job. We’re creative. We’re creative. We want to be challenged in arts and music. We want to be challenged by the sports we do. We want to be challenged in the other people we meet.’” He said, “My boys moved to Seattle and San Francisco. They’re challenged when they walk out their door in the morning in all facets of their life.” Challenged...

...Creative people don’t want to have stuff handed to them. We compete on merit. That’s what these focus groups tell us. We compete on merit. We AR meritocratic people. We want to know we’re gonna get by on our skills and our capabilities and how good we AR, not on who mom and dad AR and how many connections we have. That’s what people were looking for, and these were the visual cues that they could go to a town, they could go to a town and see that it was based on merit, because there was all these people part of the mix, and it was open. "

---

Event from Last Week: Dr. Brian Greene speaking on String Theory
Event for this Week: The Lounge's Snowboard Movie/Rail Jam on Sat. night

Flickr Happy
Now Playing: Positively 10th Street podcast
Topic: Personal or Reflective
More late nights and early mornings and it has come to this, a Landshire chicken salad sandwich (I use that term loosely to describe this thing):

Another good Flickr hack, using it to post & tag business cards. I keep the business cards that I've collected, with notes on the back, in a little box on my desk. But why not digitize them (make them private of course) and tag the hell out of them for later use. It's a great idea consider my recent reading from Inc magazine on power networking.

Here's the last few weeks in photos, in no particular order of importance other than I had my camera phone on me at the time:

More on Municpal Wi-Fi Initiatives
Now Playing: Boojo Bajou - Take It Slow
Topic: Web 2.0
Well my last post came at an opportune time as Wired just published this article on a huge wi-fi network blanketing Hermiston, Oregon. And my old boss was right, politics is the stumbling block to municipal wi-fi initiatives:

" Asked why other municipalities have had a harder time succeeding, he replies: "Politics."

"If we get a go-ahead, we can do a fairly good-sized city in a month or two," said Ziari. "The problem is getting the go-ahead."

"The 'Who's-going-to-get-a-piece-of-the action?' has been a big part of the obstacles," said Karen Hanley, senior marketing director of the Austin, Texas, Wi-Fi Alliance, an industry group. "

Municipal Wi-Fi Initiatives and RSS & Mashup mp3
Now Playing: John Mayer/Alicia Keyes mashup mp3
Topic: Web 2.0
Citywide broadband infrastructure projects have been in the news for some time, perhaps since Philly started an initiative and was almost shut down by Verizon's protest. Despite the legal wrangling in PA (Verizon waived its right of first refusal, part of a new law that says cities must submit a written request to the local telcos before starting a municipal wi-fi initiative), several other cities including San Fran & Google, are exploring the idea.

I briefly talked to my old EDC boss (now the assistant city manager in KC) about the prospects of that city starting a wi-fi initiative. Too political, he said, remember the telcos are big supporters of local and city government, you'd need to have real guts (or a lot a political capital in reserve) to pull it off. Well the idea itself must be getting traction or be a hot area for future growth because the Yankee Group just started a Municipal Broadband Market Research and Advisory Service.

Check out C|Net's big picture view of this story and the web of related stories. Reminds me a lot of tag clouds, ala Flickr, Technorati, or Del.icio.us, but I haven't seen it applied to news stories before (is Google listening to this, visually representing its Google News). Kudos to LivePlasma for powering this, it's a cool (and probably a useful) tool that should be integrated into academic research databases to find related information or sources.

---

Soon after Apple introduced Podcasts to iTunes, I stumbled upon this mp3 mashup RSS feed via Del.icio.us. The first song that I heard was this John Mayer/Alicia Keyes mashup and I really liked it (I put it on repeat as I often do with new songs). That was my first experience with the power of RSS, finding great content (music in this case) from a completely unexpected source, pushed right down to iTunes for me.

Though I loved the song I didn't understand the podcast side of iTunes well enough to know that the mp3 remained on my system. I thought it had been inadvertenly deleted or replaced when the feed refreshed with newer mp3 files. I was pleasantly surprised to find it again tonight and it sounds as good as it did when I first heard it back in June-- John Mayer (Daughters) and Alicia Keys (If I Ain't Got You) mashup mp3 compliments of MashupTown.com

How Could I Forget Toastmasters
Now Playing: The Flaming Lips - Ambulance Driver
Topic: Personal or Reflective
Yeah it was a great weekend (see my post below) but how could I forget how such a wonderful weekend started. Friday night we hosted a Toastmasters District Contest at work. In the office from 8-9pm was what it meant for me but the contest went well and it was the other club officers that put so much hard work into the successful event. I barely got the name badges right, even though that used to be my specialty/job back in Colorado.

Here are the photos from the contest and congrats to Rich and Erin for their second places in the Evaluator and Humorous Speech contests, respectively.

Last but not least, the wild adventures of Grant Kaye. He's a legend as a founder of the Freeriders Union of Colorado College and he's living the dream while most of us aren't (myself included...but I'm working on the dream as we speak). He's a crazy guy who lives life to the fullest and if you don't believe me, check out his recent adventure that included schralping, Burning Man, Hawaii, and everywhere in between.

Copyright Grant Kaye 2005

(Amazon link to the new Flaming Lips album, which includes Ambulance Driver)

Guiliani & Jon Stewart
Now Playing: Engadget Podcast, 9/30 & Frou Frou's
Topic: Leadership
Sat. afternoon was an action-packed day, first Giuliani, then dinner with mom and the bro, and then Jon Stewart.

The recap from Giuliani's speech, mostly points from his book on leadership. Here are the six parts of being an effective leader:

What are your beliefs: can you set goals and objectives, and talk to people about where you want to go. Who you work for, especially early in your career, can influence what you believe.

Be an optimist: besides, life's more fun that way. It means being a problem solver.

Have to have courage- it makes you accountable

Relentless preparation; how can you minimize risk to improve your chance of success. If you anticipate everything that you can and are prepared as much as possible, then you'll be prepared for the unexpected.

Teamwork- as a leader you have to know what your weaknesses are and work with people whose strengths make up for your weaknesses.

Communication- being a good communicator comes from studying the five traits above

Do you love people? Leaders love working with people.

Now on to the other main event..perhaps there's some insight here as well: Jon Stewart sold out long ago, packing house while Giuliani still had tons of open seating, hmmm...

I didn't take photos at the Jon Stewart show b/c I assumed the RIT crowd would be all over it. But I spent five minutes searching for any others who blogged/Flickr-ed the Jon Stewart show. I only found this MSN Spaces blog and these Flickr photos. IceRocket found these and here were Technorati's results.

The funny thing is that the girl who took the photos was sitting right in front of me, but look at the picture of her waiting in line. I walked in right before 8pm but found a single seat and was probably only 30 rows back. Ha ha, one advantage of flying solo, you can always hustle to the front and find a seat.

Among all the jokes and social commentary, which were hilarious (his impromptu fun with the person working the closed captioning for the video screen was awesome), the most point on the state of the populace or at least among the youth, was the crowd's answer to Stewart's question on our outlook for the future. Almost everyone booed, someone yelled life sucks, and essentially the sentiment was that people were pessimistic about the future. I sat there shaking my head at this, thinking life is good, if only Americans knew how truly lucky and we are. We have so many opportunities that others would do anything for and yet we don't realize this standing in the world. What a shame.

Posted by cph19 at 4:24 PM EDT

Updated: Monday, 10 October 2005 12:13 AM EDT

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India versus China
Now Playing: Kelly Clarkson - Since U Been Gone (Jason Nevins remix)
Topic: Outsourcing

From the newest CIO Insight, an associate dean from HBS discussing the IT environment in China as compared to India:

"First, China has a much more robust internal IT structure, networks and so forth, than does India. They've had a massive telecommunications expansion, and they have more networking capacity than people think. All of that has been a direct result of national economic policy."

This one surprised me but it shows that a coordinated, country-wide initiative from the central government (whether it be a free market or mixed economy), can be more successful than only allowing the market to decide. The current debate on whether U.S. municipalities should be offering wifi services as a public good, either in cooperation with or in competition with the telcos, raises the same issue.

"The biggest risk I see is political. All of the growth in China has been heavily concentrated on the eastern seaboard. That has intensified the divide between rural and urban life. But as long as the government can deliver 7 percent or 8 percent growth annually, the poorer people will remain patient. The Chinese government's problem is trying to maintain a fast-enough growth rate that the citizens on balance will buy into it."

I delved into some of this for my undergrad thesis on the international trade patterns of Chinese imports and exports and the economic vs. political factors involving globalization. China has taken a very different approach than Russia underwent following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Russia went full 100% liberalization, both economically and politically, and the combined shock of both was too much for the country to handle. China has taken a different approach, preferring to liberalize the economy while maintaining a strict, centralized hold on the country's political environment.

The challenge for Chinese leaders is to maintain the economic growth to appease or mollify a populace increasingly unsatisfied with the lack of corresponding political freedom that other former communist, not liberalized, countries enjoy. What happens if they can't maintain the economic growth?

"The worst case scenario is that you have a revolution."

Here's The Economist's take (password required, try BugMeNot) on China versus India from back in June 2003.

Posted by cph19 at 6:45 AM EDT

Updated: Friday, 7 October 2005 6:48 AM EDT

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One for Schneier
Now Playing: Jay-Z & lincoln park - Izzo/In the End
This one is for Bruce Schneier, one of the world'st foremost computer secuirty experts who alwyas stresses the critical importance of human factors when analyzing secuirty. A warning email sent to my school account:

Fake job listings on online job boards are being used to gather and steal personal information from RIT students.

Description of Threat

Campus Safety recently investigated an incident involving an RIT student who applied for a Data Entry position on www.monster.com. During the application process, the student was asked for and provided her bank account number, driver’s license number, and was given specific instructions by the manager of the company to wire transfer money to an overseas bank (emphasis added). (The student was also given the opportunity to be a Merchandise Packer, Payment Processor, or Wire Transfer Agent.) The job seemed to be too good to be true, and actually was—eventually the student was investigated for inappropriate transfer of funds which were reported stolen by a brokerage firm. Monster.com is investigating the incident and provided us with links to protect you when searching for employment on their website.

Wish I Was at Web 2.0
Now Playing: Dj Shadow vs. Keane - We Might As Well be Strangers
Topic: Web 2.0
Yeah, I wish that I was at Web 2.0 but instead I'm at the coffee shop working and reading, not that there's anything bad with working and reading. I'm going next year, regardless of what the heck the conference is called, Web 2.0a or Web 3.O. Here's Wired's take on the conference:

According to Ross Mayfield, CEO of SocialText and the company hosting the conference,

"Web 1.0 was commerce. Web 2.0 is people,"

By chance I listened to the newest Podtech.net podcast with Mayfield before coming down here to work and here's a quick roundup of his thoughts on wiki:

Wiki at its essence is a webpage that anyone can edit. So rather than programmers editing it like in a traditional coding setup, the regular users of the content contribute and develop it

Wikipedia is like open-source software (OSS) because it's "group editable"

Wiki-powered search results, the future threat to Google? (a rehash from this post from a couple months back)

OSS is a vertical contribution model, in that one part of the code directly links into another section of the code down the line to create a top to bottom functioning program. Wiki is different; it's a horizontal contribution model, where your piece of code (information, content, etc.) links to other pieces of code in a citation manner but it doesn't depend on these links to function overall

Wiki aims to make the webpage the application

I've been trying to become better acquainted with the world of wiki because I tried pitching it at work. Thanks to Fred Wilson I got into the Long Tail theory last week, reading Joe Kaus's posts and digging into JotSpot. It hit me that JotSpot would be a perfect solution for creating a collaborative platform for all of the procedures and information that we create and update during the day. We've talked about other software packages but they cost money and have a steeper learning curve than a more intuitive, web-based WYSIWYG environment. It would be heavy software with maintenance costs and the downtime from Citrix & client/server issues that plague our other applications. It would take forever to get an official, closed source package (read Microsoft product) up and running for our team. With JotSpot or some other wiki platform, we'd be able to collaborate w/o a damned shared network drive and email chains back and forth. It'd be quick, fast, easy...in essence, simplicity.

More than just a collaborative environment (i.e. more than just Lotus Notes), we could use the wiki for creating our own intranet. We wouldn't have to send drafts for the web team to update the content; we'd be creator, reviewer, editor, and publisher all at once. Can you use Notes or SharePoint as an intranet or content management system (CMS) in addition to is collaborative environment platform? Look at the points above for the big-picture advantages of using wiki.

Lastly, updated my desktop wallpapers on Flickr. I really dig the black bubbles photo. A total fluke that I can't even remember the details on, take it as it is. Guiliani & Jon Stewart this weekend at RIT's Homecoming. It's shaping up to be another great weekend.

Posted by cph19 at 9:29 PM EDT

Updated: Monday, 10 October 2005 12:16 AM EDT

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It was a good weekend
Now Playing: Louis Armstrong - Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?
Topic: Personal or Reflective
Friday night was the Sabres vs. Wild pre-season hockey game at Blue Cross Arena and yesterday afternoon was Custom Brewcrafters Fall Festival of Ales.

For those lucky enough to be at John and Becky's wedding, he finally posted a link to the official wedding photos. Well he did it on 9/7 but I only noticed it early this past week and haven't posted since. It was a long week (two all-nighters, mostly my own causing), tiring but productive.

I turned on AM 1370 at 6pm specifically for This American Life but had already the current episode so I scanned their archives and listened to two of their recent Hurricane Katrina-related shows.

The end of the second show, "This Is Not My Beautiful House" (9/16), featured a song perfect for New Orleans but also perfect for the mood of a late Sunday evening at home: Louie Armstong song, "Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?" (mp3 download). Turn up the volume a little, make sure that you're in your comfortable corner chair with the reading lamp on and close your book for a second. Tap your foot and whistle along for a little bit.

Photos from The Mexican
Now Playing: Nada Surf - Concrete Bed
Topic: Personal or Reflective

After emailing a cousin in CO the photos from funny moving weekend back in July, I noticed the Flickr blog posted on The Mexican, who I stumbled upon and posted a few weeks ago.

The photo still gives me pause; I hope that it always will.

Best analysis of Web 2.0 so far
Now Playing: TimG - Bloc of Nails (NIN & Bloc Party mashup)
Topic: Web 2.0
Fred Wilson's VC Blog has been one of my new favorite blogs lately, not the least of which is his "Positively 10th Street" podcast that he does with his family. I've have quite a few good music suggestions from listening to his podcast (including Josh Rouse, Bloc Party, and M. Ward) and have to compliment Fred and family on their musical choices. I've never met him but given his taste in music, he must be a cool guy). I hesitate to use the word charming because that sounds too quaint; refreshing and inviting may be the best ways to describe the podcast.

Fred continued with his eBay/Skype post, referencing Reed's Law, which I've never heard of. Dig deeper by reading and looking at Umair's graphs at Bubblegeneration, which shows Metcalfe's Law (a linear network-value relationship) and Reed's Law (a exponential network-value relationship). I wonder if John Furrier at Podtech.net has read any of this material?

Fascinating ideas I think, wish I had made the connection myself. This analysis is still a work in progress but its exciting and energizes me about what's coming on the tech/internet horizon in the next couple of years.

Oh yeah, the word on AJAX is out (was I the only who didn't know this?), read a blurb on it in Business2 magazine. And here I was thinking that I'm ahead of the curve, oops. At least I'm still cool, though, because now my blog has this neat ribbon making fun of people using Internet Explorer. Ahh, I feel better now...now it's time for bed.

Bloc Of Nails (Nine Inch Nails vs BP bootleg by Tim G) mp3

WSJ's MBA Survey & Rankings
Now Playing: Podtech InfoTalk series (Podtech.net)
Topic: MBA, B-school
The WSJ's MBA Survey & Rankings came out today, including this podcast (iTunes link) by their MBA writer, Ron Alsop. Here's a quick summary:

1. Huge proliferation of part-time, Executive MBA or online programs, has increased the options for obtaining an MBA, resulting in decreased application rates for regular full-time MBA programs

2. WSJ’s survey asked recruiters to rate the success of part-time vs. full-time MBA students and the recruiters believed that full-time students have much better skill sets & experience:

30% said executive not as good as full-time was more effective

35% said part-time was not as effective as full-time

40% recruiters said online MBA programs are not effective at all

3. Ron Alsop, the WSJ’s MBA writer, has found that schools with a collegial atmosphere, which develop team and communication skills, are more successful:

Recruiters want the communication skills (the distinguishing factor), the soft skills (how one relates to others, works in teams, and has leadership skills)

4. The University of Rochester’s Simon School MBA program is seeking to raise application rates through an experimentation with an online scholarship contest, trying to create a sense of innovation around its MBA program.

Grand prize is one $70,000 full-ride scholarship

Why Simon needs help: a survey of students found that less people were applying because of the U of R’s location, upstate NY: the weather and other factors surrounding its location discouraged applicants

5. People still have sticker shock over the cost of an MBA program (just this year, Stanford and Wharton broke $40,000 a year)

6. There are still questions over the value of a MBA program (and how good is the school?) and the criticism is coming from within, professors at MBA programs themselves are questioning their peers.

And for my grocery store reading roundup (yes, the magazine aisle is my favorite aisle in the grocery store-- I see a great name for a website there, hmmmm...), it's time again for The Economist's Technology Quarterly and their tech cover story, "The meaning of free speech" discussing eBay's acquisition of Skype. Here's their take on Web 2.0 (I've seen it called AJAX, the newspaper-- The Economist is a newspaper not a magazine--calls it mashups).



If anyone is out there, let me know if I'm glossing over the differences between "mashups" and AJAX, I'd be interested in someone explaining the differences.

Posted by cph19 at 9:39 PM EDT

Updated: Saturday, 24 September 2005 3:26 AM EDT

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Screenshot Love
Now Playing: Boozoo Bajou - Take It Slow
Topic: Personal or Reflective
First, behold the power of BitTorrent for distributing large files quickyl and efficiently: that's 340KB/sec for a 130MB file, download speeds that I've never even come close to via my cable modem connection. I was excited with 100KB/sec back when I downloaded the Jon Stewart on Crossfire video. The file is a new Creative Commons album by Try^d, "Public Domain." Here's Lessig's post on it and here's the torrent for the music file.


Second, look at this Sage Art, compliments of my Sage RSS reader in Firefox acting up when I went to the CIO feed, it rendred the entries as this cool upside-down pryamid shape. I like it

(link to the Boozoo Bajou - Take It Slow mp3 file)

Free Techie Books
Now Playing: Bloc Party - Two More Years
Topic: Personal or Reflective
What a combination, two of my favorite things, free and techie: FreeTechBooks.com (hat tip LifeHacker)

While we're on the subject of free, go grab Bloc Party's new song, Two More Years, from Fred Wilson's A VC blog. I've been listening to this song for over two weeks now, mostly on repeat while doing work at night, and it's great. Wish I had found the song sooner.

Griz Mauling
Now Playing: Daily Source Code Podcast
After Pyszka told me about his trip to Glacier and being on the same trail at about the same time as the father and daughter mauled by a grizzly bear, I stumbled upon this interview (need IE to view video) of the two. I'm amazed that the two survived given Mike's description of the attack.

And I'm not sure why spawned my interest in posting these covers, but maybe it was this Brian Williams story on electricity temporairly coming back on for the presidential speech Thurs. night. The Economist's scathing review of our response to Hurricane Katrina, summed up by these two covers: