Blogging Proceeds Pledged to End of Year 1 Event

Are blogs serious business? Looks like it. A lot of people out there are making money on their blogs as the number is growing exponentially. Most are like me and aren't making very much. But some are making big time money.

IMPORTANT: YOU can help us generate ad revenue! Just surf over to this blog and click around on a regular basis. I'm pledging all ad revenues to an end of Year 1 social event for our class, so we will all benefit! (So far we've raised $20, but recent traffic has increased after our visit to Philadelphia last week.)

This site called TechCrunch is making $60,000 a month in ad revenue, which is incredible:
http://www.techcrunch.com/

Business 2.0 has an article on how to make money on blogging (thanks to my carpool buddy Charles for passing it along in paper format):
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2006/09/01/8384325/index.htm?postversion=2006090812

Now get back to studying OPIM integer LPs and simulations, as well as all those Macroeconomic acronyms....

Thanks,
-Chairman P

FT Wharton MBA is #7 in WSJ Rankings

Here's the link to the NEW 2006 Wall Street Journal rankings of FT MBA programs that has just been released last week.

I've added it in the list to the right on the sidebar.

More Pics...Frank Wins the Psychedelic Pictures Award

These are some additional links to pics from our Philly trip.

Frank definitely wins the Psychedelic Pictures Award: click here

Here's some more from Jenn: click here

If anyone has videos lemme know...

-Chairman P

Thoughts While Leaving the Wharton Mother Ship

(I write this while sitting in the dinosaur position on United Flight 189, so it’s going to be short because it is way too cramped on these airplanes. Especially once the guy in front of you hits the recline button. Credit goes out to Andrew for using the term for this…I love it! It’s so descriptive of what happens when you try to type on your laptop when your forearms are pressed into your chest and the laptop is too high up on the tray table. Let’s just say it’s not that ergonomic.)

Wharton West Class32 is on the way home from Philly after our trip to the East Coast. WOW, what a four day experience! I’m exhausted and ready to catch up on some rest. I think I’ll lock my books in my attic for a few weeks. I am sooo ready to return to my family and be at my own home! But don’t get me wrong, it was a fantastic trip. This was my first trip to Philly, and I really enjoyed it. I can’t believe what happened in such a short amount of time. A LOT happened, so much that it’s overwhelming. It’s kinda like that feeling when you return home after summer camp when you are a kid…it was a total bonding experience.

Words don’t really do it justice, so when I get back I’ll post some photos and YouTube.com videos so you can appreciate what it’s like on the WEMBA East Meets West trip to Philadelphia. (Update: Because of a bug in YouTube.com with group permissions, I AM sharing them on YouTube with the whole world. So you do not need to email me if you’d like the password. And go vote for best performance!) Links to photos and videos can be found on the right panel. Enjoy!

Wharton Karaoke Contest Nominees:

Pretty Woman - Sean
Imagine - Ken Lennon
Unknown Chinese Song - Enoch, Jenn, Judy, Alice
Careless Whisper - Chinese Rock Star Enoch
Call Me - Eyal "The Bachelor"
Singing It - Judy and Manuel

Let me go down the mental checklist of stuff we did: Dinner in City Center, check. (Oh yeah, good thing I didn’t know what the crime rate was when we went there...Waterman covered that in STAT.) Gourmet French dinner, check. 40^th b-day party at Irish pub, check. Consuming Philly cheesesteak at 1am, check. Meeting a lot of our WEMBA East comrades, check. MGEC Prof Smetters sighting while walking to campus, check. Meeting some full-time MBA students, check. Tour of the Penn campus, check. Twenty two hours of class, check. Purchased too much Wharton merchandise, check. Too much class when I was way too tired, check. Passed out around 30 business cards, check. Karaoke singing, check. Videos of classmates singing, priceless!

Some observations:

• Visiting the Mother Ship was really great for us WEMBA West folks. I’m glad we came out here. I’d be willing to do it again in Year 2, since it sounds like it’s a non-starter for WEMBA East to come out West for classes.
• WEMBA East student satisfaction ratings are about 1-1.5 points above WEMBA West students on a scale from 1 through 10. My hypothesis is that being at the Mother Ship is a definitely advantage. Don’t bother to ask me i what my confidence interval is or what n is. Let’s just say that if you survey over a glass of cab, you throw stats out the window and just go by instinct, which is what I did. But I think I talked to enough people to validate my hypothesis. I’ll leave the rest to the powers that be.
• West is very diverse. I had a loooong discussion with a few classmates on the way home, and we agreed that when your class is 1/3 Indian and 1/3 Chinese plus a ton of other nationalities it makes for a richly diverse class. It’s certainly representative of the Silicon Valley technology industry, which is what most of our class is. But what affect does it have on the overall experience when compared with, say, the East Class 32? It’d be interesting to find out what other people think about this issue.
• There is definite interest in meeting up again with WEMBA East. Who knows if it’ll really happen, but a few of us in each class were talking about an unofficial Napa Valley wine tasting trip. Everyone agreed that we didn’t get to spend enough time together.
• WEMBA East is more organized than we are with respect to social activities. Out West, we use cell phones and text messages to find out where everyone’s going out after class. But the WEMBA East folks have flyers printed up with maps, directions, etc. Really organized! We’re more flexible about it I guess.
• Hot breakfast rocks. We want hot breakfast! Cereal and hard-boiled eggs just doesn’t cut it. East has it and we don’t. I made a mental note to lobby John for this one. If you agree, post a comment.
• Snacks keep us going in the West. West gets snacks, East doesn’t. You have to appreciate those cookies, beef jerky and candy bars mid-afternoon during classes. There’s fruit and Cliff bars for the health-conscious, which I try to eat too. But after a full day of class I need the caffeine and suger injections to keep me going. It would be awesome if we could get some mid-morning “second breakfasts”, in the immortal words of Peregrin Took from Lord of the Rings. Extra bagels, donuts, and fruit would go a long way. We gotta go lobby John.
• Having undergrads and FT MBA students around is both a good and a bad thing. The bad: it’s way more crowded and the bathrooms are almost twice as backed up. And twice as messy. You guys know what I mean. What is the problem, anyway? And we don’t get to be the sole focus of attention like we get in the West. The good: having the vast resources and all the incredible stuff going on at campus is really energizing. Those FT students made me feel really great about our tuition when someone said: “At least in the exec program you don’t have to quit your job and pay $120K!” The WEMBA tuition looked much better to me after I heard that! Another good thing: the feeling like you are back in your undergrad days is priceless!
• We need more bloggers. WEMBA East 32 doesn’t have a blogger. Looks like I am the only WEMBA West AND WEMBA East 32 blogger in the MBA Program for Executives. If any of the rest of start, let me know and I’ll cross link over to you. BTW<, I’m planning on creating a Wharton diary on the main page that links here shortly.
• Why blog? #1: it’s great for networking. Well, maybe not great, but at least it’s good in the sense that people have heard of you. I can’t count how many conversations I had where someone said “oh, you’re The Blogger, I’ve heard of it”. Now if they remember your name, then that’s a great thing.

That’s it…. out until after the OPIM final….hey, we got three weeks between sessions? Let’s head out to Poppy Ridge for 18 holes. Anyone in?

-Ron aka “Chairman P”

Wharton West in the East

This week my cohort flew out to the mother ship in Philadelphia to attend classes from Thursday to Saturday. Most of us flew out on Wednesday, which happened to be the day I turned the big Four Oh-no.

We had a fantastic French dinner at Brasserie Perrier in Philadelphia City Center. As full fledged members of the wine club, we all enjoyed a Madonna cab and an Argentine cab. After dinner, we walked over to the Black Sheep pub which was owned by Sean's Irish friend. I was a bit late to my own party, which everyone let me know about. There was a pretty good turnout of about 30 of us there. The evening was capped off by some Philly Cheesesteak sandwhiches at 1am. Needless to say, we were all a bit tired in class today.

Thanks again to everyone who were able to celebrate! Special thanks to Sean for arranging the pub and for Kip for recommending the restaurant, which was excellent.

Pics from the dinner and the party can be found here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/15155043@N00/sets/72157594294558005

Or click on the Flickr badge to the right....

Proof That Our Degree is Not an MBA-Lite

Here's some proof (albeit sample size n=1) that the Wharton MBA Program for Executives is the same degree as the full-time degree...

http://diaries.wharton.upenn.edu/PostDetails.asp?RecordID=2387

-Chairman P

New Words for 2006

Here are some new words for our back row bingo games....credit goes to a friend who passed this one along.

-Chairman P

NEW WORDS FOR 2006

**Essential vocabulary additions for the workplace** **(and elsewhere)!!! *

1. BLAMESTORMING*_ _*: Sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.

2. SEAGULL MANAGER : A manager, who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything, and then leaves.

3. ASSMOSIS*_ _*: The process by which some people seem to absorb success and advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard.

4. SALMON DAY : The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die in the end.

5. CUBE FARM : An office filled with cubicles

6. PRAIRIE DOGGING : When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cube farm, and people's heads pop up over the walls to see what's going on.

7. MOUSE POTATO : The on-line, wired generation's answer to the couch potato.

8. SITCOMs*_ _*: Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage. What Yuppies get into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with the kids.

9. STRESS PUPPY : A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and whiny.

10. SWIPEOUT*_ _*: An ATM or credit card that has been rendered useless because magnetic strip is worn away from extensive use.

11. XEROX SUBSIDY : Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one's workplace.

12. IRRITAINMENT*_ _*: Entertainment and media spectacles that are Annoying but you find yourself unable to stop watching them. The J-Lo and Ben wedding (or not) was a prime example - Michael Jackson, another...

13. PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE : The fine art of whacking the crap out of an electronic device to get it to work again.

14. ADMINISPHERE*_ _*: The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve.

15. 404 : Someone who's clueless. From the World Wide Web error Message "404 Not Found," meaning that the requested site could not be located.

16. GENERICA*_ _*: Features of the American landscape that are exactly the same no matter where one is, such as fast food joints, strip malls, and subdivisions.

17. OHNOSECOND*_ _*: That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you've just made a BIG mistake. (Like after hitting send on an email by mistake)

18. WOOFS*_ _*: Well-Off Older Folks.

19. CROP DUSTING : Surreptitiously passing gas while passing through a Cube Farm.

Links to MBA Blogs...

For those of you who are also blogging about your MBA experience, I've now setup my blog with links to other blogs in the blogosphere. Send your links now! I'm particularly interested in other executive MBA blogs, as there appears to be quite a few FT MBA blogs but not many executive MBA blogs.

Instructions on getting a link to your blog added to my blog:
1. Post a comment on this posting with your school, URL, and graduation year.

Thanks!
-Chairman P

League of MBA Bloggers

I've posted a new link to the League of MBA Bloggers on the right hand side. Click here to check it out:

http://mbaleague.blogspot.com/

Most are for FT programs for MBA schools worldwide. There are quite a few out there.

-Chairman P

Best of Italian Wine Tasting

"Best of Italian" Wine Tasting at Wharton West
Every week after class, there's a wino club meeting at Wharton West. It's been a very popular event for people to unwind after each session.

This week, our resident expert sommelier Avery selected some tasty Italian reds this week after class. Here's my rankings;

1) 1999 Valdicava Brunello di Montalcino $59.99 @ K&L WS 94 WA 93

A deeply memorable wine from one of the most lauded Brunello producers. Wine Spectator: "Dark-colored, with intense aromas of ripe fruit, coffee and toasted oak. Full-bodied, with a depth of ripe fruit and delicious black licorice flavors and silky tannins. Beauty. This equals the quality of the excellent 1994. Best after 2006. 1,600 cases made. (JS)"

Comment: This one was delicious. I wished that I had a nice rib eye steak cooked medium rare with a little butter on top!

2) 2000 Montepulciano D'Abruzzo Marramiero Inferi $29 @ Embarcadero Wine Bar
From a selected vineyard of great importance in structure and size comes INFERI, produced in limited quantities. The ageing of at least twelve months in French and Slavonies oak casks of different capacity and the following refinement in the bottle complete its maturity. Its ruby red colour with dark red sparkling reflection, its intense and vanilla speckled fragrance, its persistent, warm, rich and harmonious taste make it at the same time a distinguished and leading wine. You can appreciate its qualities completely having it with pasta with mushrooms and truffles, with beef and game, with mature cheese, salami and ham, at the ideal temperature of 18°/20° C.

Comment: This one was a keeper as well. I had to go back for a second glass after all the tastings, it was that good. Next time I'm at K&L, I'm looking for this one.

3) 2001 Felsina Berardenga Chianti Classico Riserva "Rancia" Price: $26.99 @ K&L WS 91
Perhaps the best Chianti available. Highly Recommended by Wine Spectator. "Attractive blackberry and cherry character with a hint of tobacco. Medium- to full-bodied, with fine tannins and a long, long finish. Drink now." (10/04)

Comment: I doubt this is the best Chianti available now. It was good, but not great.

4) 2003 Agostino Pavia Barbera d'Asti Bricco Blina $10.99 @ K&L
No oak here, just very zesty and ripe Barbera fruit. Bricco Blina is the most straightforward of the three single-vineyard Barberas made at Agostino Pavia. This is the epitome of the bright acidity and berry flavor that are the hallmarks of Barbera, but low yields and old vines give wonderful depth and concentration, too. Single cru; stainless steel fermentation and aging, bottled before the following harvest.

Comment: Your everyday wine to go with some cheese.

5) Crivelli Ruche $25 at the Wine Specialist, courtesy of Mallika
In the hills northeast of Asti, in the community of Castagnole Monferrato, lies the Crivelli family vineyards and winery. Although it remains somewhat of a mystery, it is believed that this varietal name comes from "roche" (meaning rocks) considering that this vine can be planted in calcerous and clay soil and tolerated dry weather without any loss of the quality of the fruit. This wine was traditionally kept for special occasions because it often had a hint of aromatic sweetness that with age took on the traits that reminded some of old Nebbiolo and others of Marsala. Most producers let Ruchè season in casks for awhile, even though it has a full aroma and flavor when bottled young. With age its basic ruby red color takes on hints of orange, as the bouquet, which reminds one of violets, roses, apricots, raspberry and hazelnuts, evolves in subtle ways. It is an excellent wine to serve with typical autumn-winter dishes, or with well-seasoned cheeses. The dominant and long lasting features in the life of this wine are the endearing sensation of a long lasting taste, the aromatic nuance comprising of a velvety ripe apricot, a slightly withered rose and an apple reserved in syrup and honey.

Comment: This one wasn't noteworthy to me. All the prose above kinda hyped it up too much.

Lost and Found?

Did someone lose this piece of paper that was found on the floor of room 527? It's someone in section 2...

-Chairman P