With the sun breaking the clouds, yesterday's melancholy tunes were finally replaced with the rousing music genre of Acid-Jazz. With nothing better to do, I decided to continue writing and reading the rest of the afternoon. Sometimes, a quiet and uneventful afternoon is a bliss.

Day 4 (Excursion to Wine Country)
With a strong desire to release the energy that was lay dormant for the last 6 months due to the sedentary lifestyle at NYU Stern, Siobhan insisted on going for a run at 6:30 in the morning. Unfortunately, being running freaks, Brian and Chris were more than happy to oblige Siobhan’s wish. Reluctantly, I went with running with them. After the run, Brian went to work while Siobhan and I went for an excursion to the wine country - Napa and Sonoma Valley - with Brian’s car. Since this is a day trip, we skipped Sonoma Valley and went straight to Napa Valley. For anyone who is planning to visit Napa Valley, I highly recommend purchasing the non-topographic map depicting all wineries in Napa Valley from the Napa Valley Visitors Information Center for $3. It is well worth acquistion as all wineries are clearly marked on the map while on the backside of the map, you get a grid of all wineries and their operating information like operating hours, tours availability, etc. We managed to visit Rutherford Grove, Beaulieu, Duck Horn, and Van der Hayden wineries. Being impressed with the wines that I tasted at Van der Hayden, I broke the bank by purchasing several bottles of wine from the winery. Conversely, our trip to Napa Valley also coincided with the Supreme Court’s decision of allowing wineries to ship to out-of-state consumers. While this news received applause from the wineries, I couldn't help wondering why they didn't celebrate this landmark decision by offering Siobhan and me free wine tasting. Nonetheless, I can now order Napa Valley wines directly from Massachusetts. Nice!!!

Day 5 (Being Tourists)
Siobhan and I did the tourist thing by taking the cable car from Powell St. to Fisherman Wharf. We spent a good portion of the afternoon walking around the wharf and looking at the sea lions at pier 39. To complete our anarchic experience in San Francisco, we visited the infamous City Lights bookstore at the North Beach district of SF. After dinner, Brian, Siobhan, and I went to Canvas for amateur stand-up comedy.

Day 6 (Departures and Toastmaster)
I felt an absence of energy as soon as Siobhan left San Francisco for NYC earlier that day. It was a slow day yesterday as I did some reading and blogging in the afternoon before rushing out the house to meet Brian to attend a meeting of the Toastmasters Golden Gate chapter, of which Brian is a member. After the meeting, Brian left for Sacramento to visit his mother who will undergo a surgery on Friday. So, for the next 3 days, I will be staying all by myself at Brian's apartment.

Day 7 (Lunch with Sumer)
I took the BART to East Bay to visit Sumer, an ex-colleague, ex-boss, and MIT alum who influenced my earlier decision to apply to MIT. Since leaving MIT in 1997 he had started 2 new companies. He is glad that I am now attending MIT and taking the entrepreneurial path. It was good to catch up with him. For tonight, I plan on participating in a Yoga session at a Yoga studio a few blocks from Brian's apartment. I haven't done Yoga since I ended my marathon training last year. But the real motivation for Yoga is really the disproportional high number of beautiful women at the studio.

5/19/2005 7:50:59 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [14]

Travels

The melancholy tunes of Radiohead are aptly appropriate for the gloomy and rainy afternoon in San Francisco. As the afternoon ticks by in this fog and rain drenched city, I slowly begin to recall and write about my experiences in San Francisco since my arrival last Friday.

Day 1 (Day of Arrival)
Arrived in Oakland International Airport on a Jet Blue flight, which I had redeemed with my frequent air miles 2 weeks before. Brian and Siobhan, whom had arrived half a day earlier from New York, picked me up at the airport. We then went to the UC, Berkeley to grab some beers and food.

Day 2 (Drunk by Sake)
We went to Haight-Ashbury (or Hippie town) to stock up on the accessories and attires that we need for the Bay to Breakers event on Sunday. Besides visiting the countless costume stores in the Haight district, we also had lunch at Kan Zaman, which serves cheap and delicious Middle Eastern food. Later that afternoon, Siobhan, Brian, and I met up with John and Chris for a game of billiards in Daly City. Siobhan left shortly after the game as she headed back to San Francisco to meet her cousin for dinner. The boys, left to their own devices, celebrated Chris’s 29th birthday at a sushi restaurant not too far from Chris’s apartment. It was a really fun night as the 4 of us got hammered after several rounds of good sake.

Day 3 (Bay 2 Breakers)
Brian has been inviting me to San Francisco in the last 3 years to participate in the Bay to Breakers running race where runners are dressed up in costume or not being dressed up at all. In fact, one of my motivations for my visit to San Francisco is to see the hype surrounding Bay to Breakers. But saying "wow" is an understatement as Bay to Breakers is more than just an event, it is an extravaganza of running, partying, parading, and drinking. It is nothing that I had ever seen. But I shall defer further description of this event as I have to leave the computer to meet Brian in downtown San Francisco an hour from now.

5/18/2005 6:37:48 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [3]

Travels

John, our illustrious leader of my $50k team, was defending his PhD thesis in conductive polymer yesterday. Since his thesis is highly applicable to our $50k business venture, I went to his thesis dissertation (first one ever) to better understand the technology behind our business model. I thought the presentation was smooth and very insightful. I have actually been thinking about focusing my engineering part of my SDM program in material sciences and engineering lately. Consequently, I may actually take a number of electives in Course 3 - Material Sciences & Engineering (More about the rationale of this plan later...). In any case, it has been a while since I dealt with material sciences, it was actually refreshing to hear the word "volatile" in John's presentation as a substance that vaporize quickly to vapor as opposed to management's definition of "volatile".

5/13/2005 2:27:50 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [9]

School

This is not good. I missed the first round of Sloan bidding yesterday due my procrastination over weekend. I may not be able to get into certain management electives that I had planned on taking next fall semester. My only hope is my preferred classes won't be closed before I start bidding in the second round of Sloan bidding.

5/10/2005 11:03:02 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [12]

School

Not much happened at school today. We had a guest lecturer, Paul Garvey, for my ERBA class today. The talk was fairly interesting, in which he mentioned that every cost estimation should include unknown variables like price fluctuations, unexpected events, etc. Because of uncertainties, a cost benefit analysis shouldn't be modeled as a point estimation but rather as a cumulative probability distribution of system cost.

After class, I met up with Yoav, a fellow member of my PDD team, to talk about filing for a provisional patent for our project. I will try to work on the patent application tomorrow.

5/9/2005 11:47:41 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [16]

School

Sometimes, I am amazed at the amount of energy I have. Take yesterday for example, instead of taking a nap after spending 9 hours sitting through a series of class presentations, I decided to swim at the Z-center. My PDD team was supposed to get together for dinner to celebrate our successful product completion later that night, but nobody called. I think everyone was just beat or probably overslept from his nap. Still feeling energetic, I went to the nerdiest event that I have ever gone to - the Time Traveler Convention. This ragtag event has garnered attention from the media like Slashdot, NPR, and New York Times in recent weeks. Indeed, the event was even mentioned on Weekend Update in Saturday Night Live last night. To paraphrase the news announcers on Saturday Night Live:

Students at MIT organized the first time traveler convention earlier tonight. Unfortunately, they have not reported any time travelers visiting from the future because the people in the future heard that the party sucks.

I really enjoyed the event, which featured three professors Farhi, Guth, and Demanine, superstars in Theoretical Physics at MIT. In particular, Professor Edward Farhi's talk was delivered like a comedian giving a live stand-up comedy performance on Einstein's relativity and time traveling. I was literally in tears listening to Farhi's hilarious talk.

I left the convention early to meet up with Blanche and her 3 girlfriends at Cuchi-Cuchi for some Mojitos. I ended the night at Grafton Street Bar to meet with Michelle, Brian, Eimear, Roberto, and Angela. For the first time, I thought that Grafton Street Bar isn't as pretentious as I had previously thought. It is a good place to hang out on Saturday.

5/8/2005 7:50:39 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [9]

School

My team made our final presentation and demonstration of our product (still no public disclosure as we are still in the process of applying for a patent) in our PDD class. For a change, the joined RSID/MIT faculty had decided that the final presentation should be held at Brown University in Providence, RI to accommodate the Providence-based RISD students who has been attending the semester-long course at MIT.

The presentations in general were much better than I had anticipated. Many teams incorporated films into their presentation to market their products or demonstrate their product development process. Some of the films like the James Bond film for the virtual office briefcase and the one-handed nailing product played to the tune of MC Hammer's "U Can't Touch This" were notably hilarious. In general, I felt that the presentations from the 1 pm section were better delivered and more creative than the ones from the 4:30 pm section. I also have to respectfully disagree with Robbie on the presentation format. It may be hard to decide how a team should pitch their completed product. Should one present the completed project as a product or as a new business? Our team initially structured our presentation to venture capitalists but went against it later because the class is, after all, about product development, not creating a new enterprise. The presentation, therefore, should be structured to market our product, illustrate the product development process, and describe any future product development.

Kudos goes out to Christian, our presenter, who effectively incorporated humor to our team's presentation. We got the crowd clapping and screaming, "Demo! Demo!" before we had barely even finished our presentation. In closing, it has been a PLEASURE working with you guys - Christian, Dave, Eugene, Matt, Spiros, and Eugene. Great work, team 12 and thank you.

5/8/2005 7:12:34 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [16]

School

For three weeks in a row, we have been having rain and abnormal cold temperature on the weekends. This has really ruined the weekend for me.

5/8/2005 6:01:55 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [15]

Rants

Yesterday was Susan Hockfield's inauguration as MIT's 16th president. After Technology Strategy class, the SDM Muddy Charles crowd went straight to Killian Court where the inauguration was held. Unfortunately, the inauguration was over by the time we got there. Nevertheless, there were plenty of catered Hors D'oeuvres to go around. I was pleasantly surprised by how tasty the food was. After spending 15 minutes at Killian Court, I departed from the group to meet up with my $50k team at the Muddy. At the end of the day, I went to the Z-center to swim but the entire athletic center was closed to students for the inauguration dinner. Bummer...

5/7/2005 1:23:31 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [16]

School

I am so glad that my Technology Strategy class is finally over. I was literally counting down the last few minutes of the class earlier today. Don't get me wrong, I really love the subject but I thought that the delivery of the class was poor. The class has become very repetitive in the last 3 weeks. Every week, each team of two analyzes and writes two case studies before discussing them in class on Friday. During class, the professor never really lectures on the subject. To be fair, this class is actually labeled as a seminar, so a discussion-based class model is perhaps more appropriate than a lecture-based one. Even so, I don't think the professor has really done an effective job on engaging the students or stimulating their thoughts. As Matt said earlier today, this class definitely has the potential to beyond the limited 3 strategy frameworks that we learned from this class. Nonetheless, I got a good breath of understanding in business strategy, which should come in handy in my future management endeavors.

5/7/2005 12:36:17 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [17]

School

After 2 weeks of suspense, the finalists for the MIT $50k Competition were finally announced on Wednesday night. Sigh... Sorry to say, my team didn't make it to the finals. I was disappointed but the competition was a great learning experience for me and it certainly kindled the entrepreneurial spirit within me.

For old time sake, John, our team leader, organized a get together over a few pints of IPA beer at the Muddy Charles in the afternoon today. It was consolatory to note that none of us was dwelling on not making to the finals. We identified possible weaknesses in our business plan and outlined a 6-month plan for our venture. In hindsight, we were probably a little optimistic with the revenue streams in our business plan, as well as being 6 months too early in making a pitch to venture capitalists with our business. Nevertheless, everyone in the team still believes that the business and technology of our venture is viable. We'll see where this venture takes us.

5/6/2005 11:46:06 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [22]

Entrepreneurship

I am going to start today's blog with a rant. I have been a faithful user of TaxCut since 1997; but I have been having sore experience with their rebate system. I have not received my well-deserved rebate from H&R Block, the makers of TaxCut, in the last 3 years because somehow, in the eyes of H&R Block, I managed to screw up my rebate application every time.

What a contradiction, when it comes to advertising their mail-in rebate, H&R Block didn't hesitate a bit to print the words, "Mail-in Rebate" in large boldface to entice your attention to buy the most expensive version of their software. However, when it comes to the rebate filing process, that's a whole different story. Not only was the rebate coupon buried in a stack of other similar sized coupons, the printed instructions for filing the rebate were vague and in fine print. Worse, I have just received a letter from H&R Block informing me that I didn't follow the instructions and so my rebate application was disqualified. Well, they say "three times a charm" or "three strikes and you out". Based on this, TaxCut is certainly out. I am switching over to TurboTax when I do my tax return next year.

In closing, let me offer a food for thought. If a company is serious about passing the savings to its customers, why not offer us an instant rebate?

5/5/2005 11:47:50 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [19]

Rants

I was talking with Eimear at an Analog Devices function when Ray Stata, the founder of Analog Devices and the one who was honored in the naming of the Stata Building (Bldg 32) at MIT, walked passed us. Being partly goofy, I reached out to Ray to offer my hand for a hand shake. Surprisingly, he obliged and we started chatting. I have a lot of respect for Ray for cultivating a culture at Analog Devices that strived for innovation and learning during his watch as CEO. I was indeed an honor to meet him in person.

5/4/2005 10:17:49 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Comments [0]

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