what i've been reading

I'm not linkifying these. Give those search engines money! Ha!

Online, daily:

• Seattle Times
• Techmeme.com
  

Online, regularly:

• TheAtlanticCities.com
• SeattleBikeBlog.com
• SeattleTransitBlog.com
• CapitolHillSeattle.com
• sdotblog.seattle.gov
• sports.yahoo.com/nfl
• The Big Picture
• The Onion
  

Print:

• The Atlantic
• The Economist
• Yale Alumni Magazine
• Cascade Courier

random thoughts

No, I don't always keep $200 hidden in my shoes.
It's great that I'm finally in a time zone where my friends are awake when I am, although they still won't be awake for at least another few hours (it's 6am on Sunday... EST).
It's great that my phone is no longer a fire hazard (as it was with the AirTel SIM in India).
I feel like I've spent more time working at Gate 90 at Newark International Airport than I have back at the office these past weeks.
Mmm... Dunkin Donuts
I have a presentation to give tomorrow. Maybe I should get started with that. Or maybe I'll do that when I get home.
If I know you, but I don't want to see you even if I had to travel halfway around the world and you happen to be there, you shouldn't be a facebook friend.

a year ago…

http://blog.paulip.com/2008/03/day-12.html

Maybe I should get around to posting all of my Egypt photos.

maybe i won't fly american again either

United and US Air are the airlines that I first thought I would really try to avoid. Recently I had my first experience flying American and was pretty disappointed, but I figure I could give them the benefit of the doubt. (details here)

Seems like I was pretty lucky (well... kind of). If I had taken the same flight about a week earlier, I could have had a more memorable negative experience. Read about it here.

bookcase

I went to IKEA today in search of a sofa, coffee table, TV table, dresser, a desk lamp, shelves, random kitchen stuff, and another chair. I only got the TV table, shelves, random kitchen stuff, and the chair, but that's probably a good thing. My car was completely full. Miraculously I played tetris with the boxes and got everything to fit. I could even see out my back window and my side mirrors.

Anyway, it's all assembled. I just need to new TV to show up and perhaps get cable. Oh... and get the sofa, dresser, and coffee table.

New bookcase is built and loaded, meaning that I have yet another room that is almost *complete*. I got a fancy looking one. 16 cubes in a 4x4 arrangement. It was actually interesting to build. Very repetitive, which is great for later in the evening.

Top row - Personal stuff:
1 - Good books worth re-reading + my queue (2 books... one that I've started... over half a year ago)
2 - Books that I've read (or planned to read) that are "meh"
3 - History (history books, yearbooks and the like)
4 - Travel and language

Second row - professional stuff:
1 - Good readable books + queue (10 books, 3 that I've "started")
2 - Good useful books
3 - Good but irrelevant books, or relevant books that suck that I keep "just in case" [someone throws some meaningless marketing term that I've blocked out of my memory]
4 - Dated, irrelevant, or otherwise dead to me

Third row - TBD
1,2 - empty
3 - records that aren't in my file. why is it on paper anyway?
4 - misc. Yale stuff

Fourth row - Class materials
1 - Useful stuff from CMU, and random stuff from training at PGR
2 - The good stuff from Yale
3,4 - The good but irrelevant, or relevant but not good stuff from Yale

packing

Interesting challenge these days. I need to pack for a sequence of trips.

• A week in Cleveland (drive)
  
• A wedding (drive)
  
• A week in Seattle (fly)
  
• A month of driving across the country, visiting cities, ball parks, national parks, and a ton of driving.

End result? I know what I'll be wearing to JT's wedding already. I also seem to have gotten everything to fit in my bag. It's a bit big, but I can swap some things around if for some reason I feel like I need more than one pair of shoes for Seattle (doubtful).

Yeah... boring post. Better than nothing, right?

real fake friends

This may be a touchy subject, but what the hell. It's 1:50am and I have a 8:15 class tomorrow (my last class here in business school!). But anyway... I was thinking about something that happened today that I'm a bit irked about.

Now how can I do this without being anything remotely specific but still get the point across...

OK... so maybe I should start by saying what I mean by a fake friend. A fake friend is (in this case at least) someone who asks to be your friend on facebook, but they aren't really your friend. In fact, not even someone you would consider an acquaintance. I may know who you are, but I have no real expectation of talking to you, hanging out with you, or doing anything with you. BUT, for the sake of social "norms" and to avoid offending people who actually do consider me a friend/acquaintance, I accept.

So what's a real fake friend? I'm a believer (not to be confused with evangelist) of the theory that if you act in accordance to certain expectations, it'll become a reality. At work it would be how filling in bigger roles can lead to a promotion. In this case it would be if you act as if you're good friends with someone, it can actually facilitate the "friend-making" process. A real fake friend is someone who hasn't really made it to the friend level yet, but has this mentality. So when duty calls, they fill the role accordingly.

Tonight I had my first interaction EVER with one of these fake friends. Needless to say, I wasn't impressed. Rather than casual friendliness to be expected of people (ANYONE... not just friends or fake friends), what I got was a bit of hostility and belligerence. Fake friend in this case seemed more like an aspirational enemy. What the hell?

Periodically I go through and purge my fake friends. Tonight I made a special occasion to delete this false link. No hard feelings, fake buddy. I'm just following the social norm called reciprocity.

Also, I'm not sure how well connected this person is, but it's generally not a good idea to randomly create conflict with people. Now, I'm not going to go around slandering your name in public because of this. I'm not really into that. But, don't expect me to forget this if you decide to ask me for favors down the road either.

Perhaps if I feel nice in the morning I'll forward this post to the person I'm talking about.

great weekend... till now?

Karaoke
Brunch in Jamaica Plain
Samuel Adams Brewery tour
Bowling
Awesome Red Sox game at Fenway
Helped SOM/FES win the IM Ultimate Frisbee Championship
Ice Cream Social

Now I need to write a paper or two. Damn.

five nights

Wednesday: 7pm through 12am @ Beer tasting and Hot Tomato's
Thursday: 6pm through 3am @ LDP, Black Bear, and Club Med
Friday through Sunday: Bachelor party.

Seems like spring is here.

student loans

I remember the day when I was debt free. It was great while it lasted.

So due to the crap going on in the market recently the sweet deal that we get through our lender has disappeared. No more 0.5% rate reduction for paying on time (or whatever it was that we were getting). Either way, I now have to pay the full so-so 6.8% on my Staffords and the even more so-so 8.5% on my GradPLUS. I'll milk the former for what it's worth (although it's nowhere as nice as the 1-2% rate I had undergrad) and pay off the latter as quickly as possible.

One thing I will do though is pay off my accrued interest before it gets capitalized. (Reminder to self - pay $5,000 since that's what I can afford and still have money to travel and buy furniture before I start getting paid) One thing they still do that's nice is that additional interest doesn't get capitalized (so the interest is interest free, if that makes any sense at all). In normal speak, if you don't pay it before a certain date, it would be like getting an additional loan your interest.

Oh... and for '09ers and '10ers, you get stuck with paying origination fees - another few grand to the cost of education. Blame the bankers.

the best of times, the worst of times

The worst day this week - Monday:
8:30 - Wake up
9:30 -10:30 - Start preparing for 10:30 Negotiations meeting
10:30 -11:30 - Negotiations meeting
11:30 - 1:00 - Student Government meeting
1:00 - 2:20 - Class - Behavioral Perspectives on Management
2:40 - 4:00 - Class - Consumer Behavior
4:10 - 7:10 - Class - Negotiations
7:30 - 2:00 - Yearbook
and an 8:15 class the following morning!

Best day this week - Thursday:
7:45 - Wake up
8:15 - 9:35 - Class - Product Planning and Development
10:00 - 11:00 - Gym
11:00 - 1:30 - Football, frisbee, then more football in the courtyard, bid on items in the Internship Fund Auction
1:30 - 2:20 - Free good Indian food in the Hall of Mirrors
2:40 - 6:00 - Class - Strategic Leadership Across Sectors with CEOs from Blackstone, MBIA, and Webster Bank, plus others from Charlesbank, Credit Suisse, and ex-SEC chairman/SOM Dean Donaldson
6:00 - Haircut and change of clothes for the Internship Fund Auction
7:00 - Hang out with the guys in our apartment building's courtyard
7:30 - Show up at the auction
2:00 - Go home
and I needed to be at SOM at 9am today!

And now, I'm off to the FOURTH Study Group Celebratory dinner, a late celebration for Mamoun's offer at American Express!

observations

Being able to get home by 7pm is awesome.
Being able to do nothing for several minutes without jeopardizing your ability to meet a deadline is awesome.
Buying four sets of plane tickets in the same month makes for a pretty nasty credit card bill.

friends map

Interestingly, but not surprisingly, my best friends are in the middle of nowhere. Why? Because they've managed to meet friends from other circles.

yale, i hope this is worth the effort

creepy

I saw a photo from Halloween of me throwing a football the courtyard while wearing my Riddler costume. I now know exactly how scary looking I was.

cheap!

Total expenses for Spring Break: $1565.40

Egypt portion: $1378.82
NYC portion: $186.58

Daily Egypt cost: $98.49
Daily NYC cost: $186.58

to do

1. Take fewer than seven classes in my last half-semester of business school
2. Stop buying books that I don't have time to read
3. Shave off that ridiculous facial hair
   

bizarre air travel experiences

Cairo Airport:
Having to wait outside security to check in. We waited for about two hours before we could check in, and only after going through the unecessarily complicated process of clearing security. They asked for a paper copy of our electronic tickets. What the hell? Also, even
though all checkpoints went to the same area, we could only use one, even though there was an open one immediately next to the one I was required to use.

Bucharest Airport:
More waiting for arbitrary security measures. Waited for about ten minutes to pass a security gate for reasons unknown. Guy told all of us to wait while he waited. For what I'm still not sure. Eventually someone came and said we could to through, but not anyone else. Then, we couldn't check in for another four hours (till after about an hour before the flight) because of new check in procedures where some guy has to ask it anyone has done anything with my bags or if I packed any weapons. Not sure what this is supposed to accomplish aside from make the process longer.

JFK:
TBD. Still on the plane. (-:

day 14

Today we hit up our final destination of the trip: Alexandria. Saw the new library, and then walked along the coast to Fort Qaitbey, where we people watched for a few hours. After that, we headed back to Cairo.

Right now we're sitting in the airport waiting to check in. We're a little early, and we just blew the rest of our Egyptian Pounds on a driver to get here. In other words, no more local cash, no more cheap falafel, no more koshari. )-:

Today's expenses:
Train tickets: E£58
Food: E£11.25
Drive to airport: E£22.25

fort qaitbey in alexandria