Apart from 10 hours at work, I had other time at my hand and I utilized it by doing three things. First of them is walking, I walked around 10 kilometers per day. It used to take 2 hours, but it was fun. Daily exercise as well as my second hobby, that is of listening to podcasts. In last 7 weeks, I listened to around 150 hours of podcasts, most of it was Buzz Out Loud and sometimes TWiT and GDGT. I was catching on all the BOL episodes, its tech news so does not make sense listening to old ones but some analysis is worth listening to. That was another great learning experience, now at least I know of few more things to talk about.

Third most important thing was talk with few friends. Lengthy discussion on career path, weighing decision and what to do in future. It was very complex topic, not just discussion but though process that followed. This definitely helped me think clearly on what I want to do in future and I wish my friends also were helped by my suggestions.

Another interesting instance was my trip to IIM-A, best institute in India for management studies. I could not attend the lecture I wanted to attend but had to chance to go visit a pharmaceutical company with the class. Wearing those jump suite kind of clothing and learning about the business was fun too. The day ended with meeting a professor, discussing entrepreneurship and learning how to start a venture. Overall it was a fun trip enjoying a day with best management students.

Now, learning continues but sometime for break too. Would be enjoying next one month in Udaipur, best city in the World, before starting life as student once again.

Plan to apply in few universities – 20% should be dream colleges, 60% should be colleges where you like to go and rest 20% should be your fallback options. Fallback colleges are those where you have very good chance of getting admission. I created a spreadsheet with set of parameters to figure out which colleges I should apply to. Here is a list of few of them

1. GMAT (or GRE) score: Average GMAT score that was accepted last year. This would give you a very good idea of what chances you have based on your score.

2. Average Work Experience: MBA admission is not just about GMAT score, there is always a balance with work experience. Using this parameter you can decide will your score able to compensate for work experience or vice versa.

3. 80% score: This column is crucial for people with low score. They should not know -what was least accepted score? Because he/she can be an outlier. So look at what was the least score in 80% of class. This figure is available on most of the sites.

4. Percentage Acceptance: This data will help you decide the chances of your admission to a particular college. For your fallback colleges make sure this percentage is high.

5. Yearly cost: Very crucial to make the judgment. Make sure when you gather the data, it should be of same type. Either yearly, not just the tuition fee etc. Cost of living varies highly based on location. So it would be better if you get the figure which says total yearly expenditure.

6. Rankings: Ranking of the program that you wish to attend and reputation of the university matter a lot too. If you want, make multiple columns for rankings from various sources.

7. Enrollment: Size of the program is important, can be given low weight. Based on your preference. I feel it is more relevant for MBA students.

8. Placement: A percentage of students placed directly from college.

9. Scholarship/GA/RA/TA opportunities: This number is not accurate, but sometimes some colleges say it up front that we do not offer anything.

10. Location: This is a very crucial factor; I did not realize the importance of it till I joined my program. Many companies will not come if you are remotely located. How accessible is the place from nearest airport, big city etc are some things to be kept in mind before joining that institute.

All this information should be gathered from few websites, cross checked. Usually the numbers are nearly close but if they differ by huge margin just go with the reputation of website. I gathered all the data from BusinessWeek and USAToday.

After inserting all the information, we should give weightage to the parameters and based on weighted mean rank the colleges. This information gathering can be tiresome process but is very effective in colleges that one wants to apply to. I am adding a sample excel sheet that I used while applying to colleges.

Good luck! Listen to podcast on the complete application process.

Sample Spreadsheet

I like the way they think and kind of perspective they bring to the table. In the gadget world which moves too fast and it’s very hard to predict what customer want, they have done excellent job not only reviewing products but figuring out what’s best for consumers. Testimonial for that is the open letter to Palm they wrote few years back asking them to add certain features people would like. Palm followed some of their advice as we see in the response from Palm and in the release of Pre we see most of the suggestions have been taken care of. It is not hard to make a list of suggestion but to have realistic suggestions based on consumer behavior and predicting what people would like to have, is hard and they succeeded in that.

Most of the time when I review product we miss few details or I just see it from few perspectives. Sometimes I am a fanboy and overlook things that I should not have. But these guys view it from different levels, understand the maturity of market, analyze market segments, government regulations, competitions, technological barriers, complexity of implementation and provide us a complete picture. The picture informing us how, when and why about the gadget rather than just praising or ranting about it.

I believe one should have an understanding like that if he wants to talk about that subject. That makes one the best in the business. That is why engadget is my favorite blog and now gdgt appears to be top podcast. Even if you are not interested in gadgets listen to gdgt once, just to understand how analysis of any topic should be done.

And if you are technically inclined you should listen to these three podcasts – This Week in Tech, GDGT and Buzz Out Loud.

Newspaper in PDF

PS: As per my understanding this post does not infringe any copyright law as it should come under fair use. If there is an issue, I will take it down.

As we know, the option is to press ‘F6′ as soon as the windows setup starts and we will get a prompt at later stage to provide RAID drivers. I tried that option and was surprised to find that it asked me to provide a floppy with drivers. I was rubbing my eyes to see if I have read it properly or not, but it was written clearly – No floppy drive found, please install floppy drive or F3 to quit or ESC to install OEM drivers. I thought ESC was the best option but that gives a BSOD in few minutes with error code 0×0000007B. Googling it I figured out a lot of people have faced similar issue.

To solve this problem, one needs to find a floppy drive and fit into the system. Then comes the challenging task of finding a floppy which works properly and does not ask to format every time you insert it in. If you are trying to install Intel Matrix Storage system, you can find the instructions here (PDF). After preparing floppy, it will give few more options and installation will continue in general fashion.

My question to Microsoft is – Why in a advanced server system would you put only floppy as a medium to install drivers? What purpose does that solve? Even if we say it was in 2002 you build that OS, why don’t give other medium to install or provide a patch that will fix the issue and we won’t face a problem in 2009. At what blood alcohol concentration level MS developers work?

source (XKCD – http://xkcd.com/323/) 

I will demonstrate this idea  with an example: I am interested in formula1 and own the account ‘fakeF1’. People, who need to see tweets from me about F1, should follow ‘fakeF1’ because whenever I want to post a tweet, I would be replying to ‘fakeF1’. So, none of my followers who are not interested in F1 will get my F1 related posts till them come to my specific page (which is very rare). For people who do not follow me but just ‘fakeF1’ should put a search filter in their clients to get all the details about F1. We can have handles like CricketTweets, WCT20, OnlyFootball, GeekTalk etc.

Only one person has to create a dummy twitter id and it would resolve problems of many. I believe in wisdom of crowds and think this id can work brilliantly.

Movie documents the 2008 Le Mans race and the victory by Audi team. The movie talks about ‘human element’ involved in winning the race and how with a slower R10 they managed to win a race against faster Peugeot 908. Audi team go as an underdog and win the race with few proper judgements and dedication of complete team. This team also focuses on importance of team and its not just the drivers who win the championship. I liked Howden Haynes, the chief engineer of the team and how he worked continuously for 24 hours to make perfect decisions throughout the race. The last part of race where he argues with race driver to change his tyres is brilliant. He with his data is confident but has to convince driver on track on how the conditions are going to change is nice piece to watch. And when later driver thanks him for perfect choice, as a student of science we feel great. My favorite scene from movie is after the victory, when everyone is enjoying, Haynes just goes away and sits on a pile of tyres. That is the moment when head of the team has called him ’secret weapon’, but he is not overjoyed, he just want to take some rest. Twenty four hours of such pressure is not just on cars but endurance test for humans too.

A must watch for motorsport lover. Either be f1, Indycar or Nascar fan, it does not matter, you will love it. Another aspect of movie that I liked is its narration, I suppose producers chose the best man to do this kind of job, Jason Statham.

Free download from iTunes

Townes Van Zandt

The incident that lessened the fear of dogs happened during Spring Break when I visited Wisconsin. When we started out trip, I was told that I would be meeting St. Bernard. I had no clue about them and I thought of them a just a big sized dogs. Just a quick query on Wikipedia revealed that they are very large dogs which were originally bred as rescue dogs. Still, I could not imagine how large they could be. My first (and only) encountered when we entered the farm, and four of St. Bernard came jumping towards us. I was very scared and did not even come out of the car. When my friend got out, I could compare their size with a human and decided against getting out of car. And then I saw something amazing, one of the dogs pushed the front door of house open. This scared me to limit and magnitude of this can be understood from fact that when I friend returned, she found that I have locked the car from inside.

St. Bernards with my friend

Things changed when I stayed with a family who owned a Bichon named Popcorn. He was very active when I first met but soon realized he was not very active. He would sit in the corner and won’t move for long. One evening I was sitting on couch and I did not realize that Popcorn had climbed the couch and was sitting very close to me. Since I was working on laptop I did not realize how close he was, he kept moving closer inch by inch and in sometime he was almost on my lap. He was so slow and silent that I did not think of him more than a pillow. He stayed in that position for around 15-20 minutes and this helped me gain some confidence around him.

Next day we were in Chicago and the family I stayed with had a Bichon named Marley. When I had stayed previously, they had to put Marley in a separate room because of me. This time I didn’t want to trouble them and wanted to ‘face my fear’, so asked them to keep Marley out. He was trying to “pounce” on me as usual, but they told me, it would be best if I let him familiarize with myself. This dog had a peculiarity that to familiarize he would have to smell your breath. It was pretty hard for me to allow that as it has to come close to my face. I sat down and owner held the dog and brought him close to my face. It took me 5 minutes but he understood me and my fear has reduced. Next two hours, we were sitting and talking but Marley kept coming to me. I had to keep petting him or else he would try to smell my breath again. I had to constantly pet him and he was sitting on my lap also few times.

This helped me make “friends” with at least one dog, but I am sure next time I meet a dog I won’t be as scared. Definitely I cannot handle a dog like Marley from the movie but some dogs like Top Gear Dog (labradoodle), which is introvert as well as intelligent can be easy to handle.

Nine months back, I was at the same airport, completing one part of journey and about to start as a business student. Till now it was a fun ride but the experience I had on Smartway bus was unpleasant. That discussion with few local people about foreign students and how things have changed in Blacksburg wasn’t very encouraging. I felt unwelcoming and out of place. I wanted to catch next flight back home and leave.

In next two days my idea about the place had changed. I was in Hokie Nation and things were different here. People I met at Cranwell International Center and Graduate Life Center changed that perspective. They were good people and made sure international students do not face any issues. I had not expected such a warm welcome and caring attitude 8000 miles away from home.

Classes had begun and I felt out of place. This was mainly because of my engineering background where I am used to see things in particular way expect solutions the same way. Over that my teetotaller and introvert natural were not helpful in mingling with people. I knew, I just had to give enough time and things will work out.

After that the journey has been pretty rosy. I met some good people and made great friends. I traveled with most of them, either in Sunshine State or chilly Wisconsin or just commuting to college and it was great fun. Different mix of people, some with great organization skills, athletes, experts, know-it-all, travelers,  hard workers etc and that helped me learn something new, not just about them but lessons of life too. All this have helped me clarify my thoughts on many topics. People always tell that one learn a lot outside the class in business school, now I would completely agree with it.

MBA classes are very tough, not necessarily in what we do but the amount of work we have to do. This tremendous pressure can’t be handled single handedly, sometimes we just want to vent out our anger, sometimes we need help in coming out of situations, sometimes we are just unhappy with teammates, some ideas needs brainstorming and if we have some good friends this process becomes very easy. Testimonial to this is the comment made by a friend “One needs a friend to survive MBA!” One does not need help academically but the number of front one person is fighting at, can drive one crazy.

I am happy to have good friends here and wishing them a nice summer.

Blogger classmates – Alice and Matt, not my fault that only French blog