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Thinking through video games
2007-03-09 06:52:00
I was reading the Wall Street Journal in bed last night and came across a fascinating article: Mind Control for Video games. You won't be able to see much there without a subscription, so here's the story from another source. This is an interesting step forward in the world of brain-computer interfaces, over an almost-decade since the breakthrough news of the fellow who used only his brain to move a mouse cursor. I'll be curious to see what happens with BCI in video games, and how quickly popular commercial adoption catches on. I mean, the novelty of it...I'm very curious to try something like this. Aren't you?From the WSJ article:Emotiv Systems...envisions players strapping on helmets with electrodes that read brain signals, allowing them to issue simple commands to enhance game play....Emotiv says its technology can distinguish between patterns of brain activity that can be designated to correspond to specific commands. In a demonstration, Emotiv researcher Marco Della Torre ...
More About: Video Games , Games , Game , Video Game

Finals week. Disjointed scribblings.
2007-03-08 03:13:00
Finals week is upon us, and much is happening all at once! My "presidential gestation period" is over as of last night -- we had an official handoff ceremony and the outgoing president, Bonnie, handed me a wooden gavel and a copy of Merriam Webster's Rules of Order. Inside the front cover, there are inscriptions from each outgoing MBAA president, dating back to 2000. I like the historical connection..What else ... my apartment is a mess! Yes, I seem to have had this problem last quarter as well. Looking forward to doing a substantial spring cleaning next week. And I need to clean out my inbox, too ... inbox bloat has struck once again, this time with a vengeance..I got my jury duty hardship letter from the MBA program office today; hopefully that will work. It would be very, very bad if I had to miss a substantial chunk of classes next quarter.Many more things going on, but I need to work on a group strategy presentation, a group macroeconomics paper, and a few other things tonight...
More About: Join , Final , Week , Finals , Crib

Jury Duty
2007-03-07 05:51:00
I have been "randomly selected to serve as a trial juror in the municipal court of Seattle, County of King." I've asked if the MBA program office can send a letter on my behalf indicating it would be difficult for me to complete my degree on time if I serve as a juror. We'll see how that goes.My juror's instructions indicate the following:Waiting is an unavoidable part of jury service....We have desks equipped with Internet access and Wi-fi (wireless fidelity) for jurors wishing to bring laptop computers with them. There is an extensive and current magazine collection but we do encourage you to bring reading materials, crafts, or other projects to pass the time.Sounds like I'd be able to get lots of homework (or popsicle-stick houses? That's all I can think of when I hear the word "crafts.") done down there. But I'd be missing out on lectures and class discussion, and that would really set me back.Tags: MBA UW University of Washington jury duty
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March the first: a historical perspective
2007-03-02 07:51:00
There's a mountain of strategy case reading to do tonight, and a meeting agenda to plan out, but first, I shall creak open the musty memory-books.Fifteen years ago, on 3/1/92, I was working at Dairy Queen, and I used to bring home extra food. And I crowed about my fast-food fortune in my journal:Tonight I got from DQ: 4 chicken patties, 7 chicken nuggets, a large and small frozen shake, and a medium sundae. All this would have been thrown away.Sixteen years ago, 3/1/91, I had a crush on a girl, my neighbor Lyndi. And I was a band geek (trombone).I talked to Lyndi briefly. These past few weeks, I have not been talking to her very much. But after I talked to her today, I started liking her again mass.That afternoon everyone in the band went to see "The Slience of the Lambs." We went to the mall and I bought the first "They Might be Giants" tape, self-titled, made in 1986.Back on 3/1/89, I was rolling in the dough:Dad was in a good mood, and he gave me $10.00! He also gave me $2.25 fo...
More About: Historical , Historic , Stor , March , First

Photo from last week's Silicon Valley trip
2007-02-28 16:30:00
Scurrying out into the Yahoo! parking lot:More about the trip here.Tags: MBA UW University of Washington Yahoo!
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Do messy problems beget messy sentences?
2007-02-28 05:12:00
Nasty day in the stock market today.Is there a correlation, I wonder, between the severity of an imbroglio and the length of the sentence that describes it?"Around 2:00 pm today the market's extraordinarily heavy trading volume caused a delay in the Dow Jones data systems and as a result, the calculation of the Dow Jones Industrial Average temporarily lagged behind the market decline and as we identified the problem we decided to switch over to a back-up system and the result was a rapid catch-up in the published value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average," explained a Dow Jones spokeswoman.I can't help it, folks. It's the editor in me.Tags: run-on sentence stock market imbroglio Dow Jones editing required
More About: Problems , Problem , Sentences , Sentence , Mess

Speaking of Yahoo! coolness...
2007-02-26 08:14:00
My friends in Metaverse Technology directed my attention to something Yahoo ! has been up to lately: Pipes. If only I had some time to play around with that right now! I'll make a note to check it out in detail during Spring break.Tags: Yahoo Pipes
More About: Cool , Coolness , King , Speak

Silicon Valley road show: quick observations
2007-02-25 00:28:00
Thursday night, I flew down to Silicon Valley for a whirlwind company tour with a group of classmates. Bryan Tomlinson, who coordinates employer relations at our career center, did a great job organizing the whole event. The fun companyOur day started off with a quick tour of the Yahoo! campus, followed by a presentation and Q&A session. I was struck by how friendly the campus felt: bright yellow colors are everywhere, both inside and out. I found the employees who spoke with us incredibly funny. At one point the recruiter thanked me for constantly laughing during her presentation. Always the jovial one, that's me.One way they conveyed the Yahoo! culture to us was through a "sucks list": stuff that they're not about:Decaf coffeeBad grammar"Too big for your britches" attitudeEarly meetingsFormality (did I mention that we felt self-conscious in our suits and ties?I left Yahoo! feeling quite excited about the company; I definitely plan on applying for an internship there. Out of the ...
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MBA field trip
2007-02-23 02:50:00
I'm about to head down to the airport to join a group of my classmates -- we're travelling south to San Jose tonight. Tomorrow, we'll be doing a whirlwind tour of three very interesting companies: Yahoo in the morning, Apple during lunch, and Google in the afternoon. Off I go! I'll post more about this on my return.Tags: MBA UW University of Washington
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Case interviews: practice is key
2007-02-18 09:15:00
A few weeks ago, I interviewed with Microsoft for a marketing internship position. A week or so later, they sent me a rejection email. I've been thinking about this and talking it over with folks, and I think part of what sunk me were my responses to case questions. I encountered questions such as the following:What's your least favorite class right now? [I said econ.] Ok, how do you market that class to incoming students?Suppose you're the dean of the UW MBA program. How do you elevate your school's rank to #1?Assume you are the product manager for the Zune. You have $1 million, and 30 days to spend it. What do you do?I realize in retrospect that I went about answering these questions all wrong: I immediately gave answers. No. This is not how you respond to case questions. As I have learned (after the fact, unfortunately) case questions are meant to invoke a discussion between interviewer and interviewee, a back-and-forth in which the case is constructed. As interviewee, you ar...
More About: Views , Interviews , Inter , Interview , Practice

Inbox bloat
2007-02-08 09:51:00
Oy -- I just noticed that there are now over 100 emails in my Gmail inbox, so it extends to a second page. I'd been trying to keep it under 30, but things got too busy today. I had an excellent informational interview with a Hitachi consultant in the morning, but that was out in Factoria, so I had to do some bus-juggling to get back to campus in time to meet with my team. We spent over two hours discussing our group paper for Strategy, and from there I zipped directly to another meeting......After that was through, it was about 2:30 and I realized I was rather hungry! Had an afternoon sushi meal, came home and took a nap (which was essential), got up at 5pm and basically worked from then until now on our group paper.And now: sleep. Tomorrow starts off early at 7:30 with a breakfast with the Dean ... and tomorrow ends late at 9pm or so, when I finish meeting with my business plan team.
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Hello, midterms!
2007-02-06 06:47:00
Time seems to be whipping right along this quarter. And lo and behold, midterms are here! I like finance a lot, but I suspect this morning's midterm did not reciprocate my affections. We shall see. I'm currently studying at Victrola for tomorrow's macroeconomics midterm. I'm hopped up on coffee and getting crazy with the IS/LM Model.I remember, back last quarter, when I aspired to a stellar GPA. Those days are over, and it's a relief to "embrace the curve" as I hear many of my classmates saying right now. Slaving away for top grades is all well and good, but if you're in an MBA program, you do this at the expense of everything else: student leadership opportunities, projects in the business community, volunteering, interviewing for internships, etc. Those are the things I've been spending much more time with, and I'm feeling good about that.Still, though, it's a balancing act, and I'm drilling back down into the academics tonight. Just for fun (to procrastinate from my eco...
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Six idiosyncrasies
2007-01-27 22:57:00
My friend Cybele recently tagged me with a request that I write a post about six of my idiosynrasies. Here we go:1. I can juggle.2. Just a few years ago, if I drank the slightest sip of coffee I would "go into orbit," to borrow one of my dad's expressions. Something changed (MBA program) over the past year, and now I drink two (large) cups of (strong) coffee per day.3. I am completely allergic to dairy products -- not lactose intolerance, but the full-on allergy. I can't eat anything with any dairy in the ingredients -- whey, etc. This means I check a lot of labels. And I tend to eat a lot of Asian food.4. I was a spelling bee champion in junior high, winning 3rd place in the Western Washington regional spelling bee finals.5. This isn't all that idiosyncratic, but it seems to surprise many of my current MBA classmates: my appearance has changed a bit over the years. In the mid-90s, I had long hair and a beard. (The photo shows my sister and me at a costume party; the beard is rea...
More About: Dios , Sync

Election results
2007-01-27 17:21:00
I won the election for MBAA President! From what I heard last night, it was a close race. Bonnie, the current President, will start discussing the transition with me next week.Tags: MBA University of Washington UW election
More About: Results , Election , Result

Me for president!
2007-01-25 04:36:00
It's been a whirlwind of a week. Addressing one of the questions I was wondering about a few weeks ago, I decided to run for MBAA President . Conversations with the current MBAA executive team have inspired me to take this step. I don't have a traditional business background, by any means, but I'm increasingly realizing that this is an asset, not a liability. (I can talk business!) I do think I've got a lot to offer in this position.So I gave a candidacy speech last night. It went well, because I (miraculously) had two free hours before the speech, and I used this time to find a secluded spot on campus and practice. There were still people walking by, a little ways away, so I held my cellphone to my ear to make it look like I was talking to someone. I ran through the speech about ten times, until I felt comfortable with it. Afterwards, as I walked away, I noticed a fellow camped out with a sleeping bag in the bushes, right by where I had been speechifying. The poor guy probably g...
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The job I never worked
2006-08-21 00:05:00
Regarding the poll that I posted last week, the job from that list that I've never held (although it does sound like fun) is "newspaper technology reporter." Back in the days when kids still did it, I delivered newspapers. The photo shows me in September, 1987, looking rather unexcited to head out on my daily route in Everson, WA. A decade later, I spent a year delivering office supplies in Seattle. And, during my brief healthcare phase, I even spent a few months working as a nurse's assistant in a nursing home. The duties at the nursing home were...not particularly pleasant, to put it mildly. And the pay was terrible. It didn't take me long to notice that I was the only nurse's assistant there who hadn't recently emigrated from an African or Asian country. One of them expressed surprise when I told her that I had a college degree. "Why are you here?" she asked. Why, indeed? During my 20s, I was driven by an experimentalist urge. Ever-flickering in the back of my head was the...
More About: Career , Memories

Green linkalicious: 8/18/06
2006-08-18 19:09:00
All manner of green linkalicious news has popping up lately. It's a lot of fun to follow what's going on in the "world o' green" right now; where ideas and innovations are occurring in a variety of flavors:The September '06 issue of Scientific American is great stuff; it's educational and frankly, quite inspiring. It lays out a realistic plan for reducing world-wide carbon emissions over the next 50 years. I'm such a fan that I'll take the brazenly commercialistic move of putting an ad for the magazine right here in my post. There's plenty of gems on their Web site, too, like this article about the carbon-offset program at the 2006 World Cup.In architecture, the 2030 Challenge encourages architects to design completely carbon-neutral (using no fossil fuel GHG emitting energy to operate) buildings by 2030.Planning is underway for power plants that convert chicken poop into energy. The chicken poop comes from factory farms, which can redeem themselves (a bit) through their p...
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Four interesting developments
2006-07-14 17:30:00
Four interesting developments to watch:Solar-powered marketing. A simple but compelling marketing concept used by McDonalds and the ad agency Leo Burnett.Speaking of marketing, now there's avatar-based marketing: advertising in virtual worlds such as Second Life. See this post in Towering Flat for a nice fleshing-out of this concept. In his book The Singularity is Near, Ray Kurzweil predicts (correctly, in my opinion), that avatars will become an increasingly important part of our lives.And speaking of Ray Kurzweil, he's gone and invented another handy gadget, a scanner-reader for the blind. It snaps a quick digital photo of printed material, scans it, and reads it out loud a few seconds later with a synthesized voice. James Gashel says that he thinks this is "the hottest new technology to be developed for blind people in the last 30 years."Denver's mayor has announced a Greenprint Denver plan. It's a sustainability roadmap for Denver that includes measures such as converting ci...
More About: Interesting , Inter , Development , Men , Interest