Huh?

Wow!! Its been a month since I said anything here! Saying that I was all busy with my MBA would be an outright lie. But yeah, a major part of it was spent studying a company named AMD for a course named Corporate and Business Strategy. At close to three decades into your life, getting humiliated in a class of 40 is really depressing. But all in all, I enjoyed the course cause it sort of gave me an idea of the depth to which you should study a company to really understand its strategy.

And besides that some time was spent seeing some movies, seeing the night race, watching videos for a couple of hundred hours on YouTube and of course generally being a pain.

So what were the highlights of the month you ask? Well, let me think…

1. I had the chance to visit the clean-room of a semiconductor foundry out here, and I actually wore the bunny suit. Haha, the clean-room is definitely a wanna-be geek paradise and I sure had fun.
2. Saw the Singapore F1 GP. Nice experience. Force India F1 team however performed miserably. And it was amazingly humid during the race weekend. No rains :( !! I got to see the Backstreet Boys (ahem .. now we should call them Backstreet Uncles …) for free on my F1 Pass.
3. My Microsoft Office died on me. I can no longer open any office documents in my computer. So major part of my month I was stuck in the lab in the school and fell in love with the 19” Monitor of a computer out there. I was about to confess my love for it till I found that it was two timing with a PhD student who would only visit it at nights (after I left the computer lab!).

So this is it. My funny bone has been resting for a while now. I should update my blog soon again. I have less than 2 weeks to finish my MBA now. It was better than what I thought it was. And I hope people who are still contemplating higher education, stop thinking and start doing!

The refrigerator

Oh yeah, I live in this student hostel that is affectionately called Graduate Hell err .. Hall. And we have this one common pantry in the basement where all the hall residents (1/2 the population of Singapore) get to keep their food in a small refrigerator. As you can guess, the fridge is perennially filled to the brim. I remember the good old days of owning a refrigerator, all for myself!!

Today an angry-distraught student posted this note. Some poor soul mistakenly took her eggs (how do I conclude the gender? – Well men don’t use pink markers and men are too lazy to buy eggs and keep them in the common refrigerator).

This is my advice. Use these bags to pack all your food in. I bet most people won’t dare to touch it.

Happy for Force India

Finally after 29 races, Force India scored championship points in style after Giancarlo Fisichella stood second in the Belgian Grand Prix yesterday. Formula 1 for the last 2 years for me has been fun with this dual role of supporting 2 teams:

1. Hope that McLaren makes it to the podium
2. Hope that Force India scores a point

So yesterday’s race was exciting for me. Not only did Force India score points but also it made it to the podium.

Last time Force India was close to making it in the points tally was in the Monaco Grand Prix last year till Kimi ended Sutil’s race by knocking him off from the behind. The Belgian race for a brief time ended up being a fight between Giancarlo and Kimi as well.

This whole event has me super excited for the Singapore Night race scheduled for the 25th-27th September. Now I know which team jersey I am gonna buy this time :) !! Huh .. I can’t hold my excitement anymore…

Freaky

I had soap allover my face and I heard this guy dangerously close to me in the shower singing…

“Every night in my dreams, I see you, I feel you ….”

Eeeks, I poured like a gallon of water on my face and turned around to see who the hell is singing that in a shower full of naked men. Luckily it was a Chinese (East Asian to be politically correct) guy singing the Titanic number with his eyes closed and his shampoo bottle in his hand held as a microphone.

He must be really in love to sing a love song (and probably think about his love) when all he can see is …err… so unsightly. Anyway, now Celine Dion is stuck in my head, and any amount of Rockstar is not helping me get her outta my head. That’s called the start of a really romantic day :) !!

Conspiracy theory

I spent greater part of today morning doing amongst one of the most boring tasks known to mankind – ironing my clothes. We can put a man on the moon 40 years back; we can make a man go faster in water but we still can’t make a shirt that does not crease? You are kidding me right?

This my dear is a big conspiracy. We can make wrinkle-free clothes. But there is a higher power that does NOT want us to have wrinkle free clothes. Guess why? Well because we (the human species) are ruled by a little known race which has manifested itself amongst us as Irons. Yeah, those innocuous looking irons in our homes are nothing but an alien species acting big brother and keeping an eye on all of us. And each time that you iron your clothes, they spray microscopic organisms onto your clothes which keep an eye on you for the rest of the day.

Speaking of conspiracy theories there is one more that I would like to highlight. I bet the per capita sweater ownership in Singapore must be amongst the highest in the world. Errr, considering that Singapore is a tropical country its kinda weird isn’t it? That’s where the conspiracy comes in. Every public place, may it be a mall, a movie theater, the bus or even the train is cooled at sub-zero temperatures to support the sweater manufacturers. So either you freeze to death or wear a sweater.

And do you know that even sweaters need to be ironed?

Rechristened

I was in a hurry to send an email from my newly assigned laptop to my boss today and mistakenly pressed “Change all” in the automatic spell check routine that gets activated the moment I click on “Send”. Rest of the mail went fine (sorta) except that the mail was addressed:

Dear fluke,

blah blah blah blah ….

Thanks and regards,

Girlish Mudguard.

Well I always knew I had a feminine side, but messing with my last name was totally uncalled for!

Frozen

So here is another excellent example of a theoretical framework applied to our day-to-day life. I hereby present the Lewin-Schien’s change theory and their unfreezing-change-refreeze model.

According to this model, for any organization to go through a change, it first has to unfreeze (stop doing what it is accustomed to doing), then change (that is actually go through the change implementation process) and finally refreeze (get accustomed to the new way of doing things). To understand better, you may read the theory here.

My school has taken this model to heart. Presumably, when we all decided to go through this process of doing an MBA, everyone of us got unfrozen. (How else do you explain this sudden urge of quitting my happy life and coming to this place?). The change in us is being brought about by all the courses we are taking, and also by the amazing professors and their insights into the business world.

According to the theory, the only thing we are left to do is – refreeze. The administrative department of our school is desperately trying to help us there. So every lecture room of ours is like being on the south-pole. The moment you enter the classrooms you start shivering and by the time the class gets over, we all waddle out like penguins.

Despite several complains to the admin, the temperatures are hardly ever changed. Now I know the noble cause behind why they keep the temperature so low. This is your first lesson for today – don’t get angry with people unless you understand the motive behind them doing something insane.

Economics of love

Disclaimer: Its not recommended to take advice on love and economics from a moron who's only idea of a romantic conversation is following a celebrity and her dog's tweets.

So we were given this almost 2 month break in our MBA to get *practical* experience of whatever we learnt in the past year or so in our MBA. Being the very serious student that I am ;) I decided to use that to understand my barren and lonely life.

Economics talks about a monopolistic competitive market. In such a market there are many sellers each with a slightly differentiated product. The market permits free entry and exit of sellers until an equilibrium is reached (that is all the products that the sellers have to offer, have a buyer). Any more information you need, I recommend reading Mankiw’s book on economics.

The market for love in this capitalist world of ours, follows a similar trend. Guys in living beings are the sellers and women are buyers (I don’t want any arguments on this considering that in every species the guys have to go and woo the gals while they sit pretty and enjoy the show!).

Now I classify this market as a monopolistic competition because not every guy is exactly the same. Everyone of us is unique in someway or the other (not necessarily good!). So when you go after your target buyer (in this case a girl) you as a product have to appeal to the gal that you are selling yourself to.

The first lesson that any guy in this market has to understand is that there is no first mover advantage. The fact that you noticed the gal who you are going after means that she has already been approached by a million other sellers like you. So for her to show interest in you, you need something called your “competitive advantage”. Something that you can or have different than your nearest competition. That leads us to SWOT analysis of yourself. So before you even think of going after a gal, you have to identify your competitors and do a competitor analysis  and then find your strengths!

If you walk, talk and look like a melodramatic gorilla on steroids and try to be Mr. Nice Guy; you don’t have much of a competitive edge over the nearest Tom, Dick or Harry. This brings us to the other concept of a marginal seller. A marginal seller is the first guy to quit the market because he is already operating at the margin (in this case he has nothing to impress the gal!). So my advice to such people is – if you have nothing to market about yourself – stop praying for divine intervention and exit the market. You might as well channel your energy and your time to chase gorillas.

Finally – my take on monopoly in the market. These are guys who look like Greek Gods and are just too good to be true. You can act pricy and choose the buyers, cause in your case the buyers don’t really have a choice.

So I hope you took my advice seriously. This also brings me to the point that I tried to combine my learning in Strategy, Finance, Economics and Marketing in one single post. My next blog post is going to be on how to *sound* like an MBA while you are bull$hitting :) !!

Run from the cloud

The world is hyped-up about cloud computing. Everything seems to be magically transformed from sitting happily on your desktop, to be hosted somewhere in the "cloud". I know its kinda cool.

Everything, mind you, everything is going into the cloud. Just for simplicity sake look at "my things" (yeah, egomaniac I am) hosted in the cloud:

1. My address book
2. My calendar
3. My resume
4. My friends
5. My chats
6. My photos
7. My hobbies
8. My bank accounts
9. My SMSes (yeah equivalent to that)
10. My thoughts
11. Things that I read everyday
12. Things that I search
13. Places that I visit
14. Things that I buy
15. Absolutely every bit of music that I listen to

Well most of these things were already lurking out there. However two of my most personal things were securely stored in my computer till this month. My address data (in my Palm) and my bank account details (in Microsoft Money). But my Palm died last month and Microsoft decided it does not need to produce Money any more. That means the last two bits of privacy I had, are now hosted in the cloud too.

What does this all mean? Well, my dear friends, I have no privacy left. Everything about me is in the cloud now. That means, some sweet little intern sitting on a computer in a cubicle somewhere in this big bad world, can actually write a simple SQL query and dig a LOT of information about me.

The worst part is, along with my information, I am also posting your information in the cloud (My address book - with YOUR phone number, date of birth, address and place of work).

Its time my dear friend, to be scared, VERY scared :) !! Your personal data is no longer controlled or owned by you! And how easy is it, you say, for anyone to get this information? Well, dear, its just a stupid 6 character password away, which could very well be my dog's name that I use for every account that I mentioned above.

Priority Seating

The local train service (MRT) has something called as the "Priority Seat". Its meant to be voluntarily offered to old/disabled/pregnant women at your discretion if you are sitting on that seat.

All frequent travelers on the MRT know that priority seats are the last ones left empty on a train. The station that I get on to the train generally has only priority seats left empty, if in the first place there are any empty seats left at all. Now comes the funny part. Not giving up the priority seat to the people in need is not a crime. So you are expected to "judge" if a person is in need and give it up accordingly.

There is where the problem starts. So the moment you get up and offer your seat to a person standing in front of you, it automatically means that you consider that person to be either old or pregnant. (Chivalrous behavior is not expected! You are not expected to give your seat to the pretty lady or the fat aunty standing next to you.)

Now lets take the hypothetical case of a 70 year old man. He can beat the hell out of you in running, can do 20 push-ups and 30 pull-ups in the time you can do one. He looks old  though, and imagine offering the seat to such a person. Not only will he be feel insulted but he would prove to you that he isn't as old as he looks.

The second case - pregnant women. In my entire life, I have never been able to figure out if a woman is pregnant till like she is about to give birth to a baby. I know most of you will frown at this statement of  mine. But how do you actually figure out if a woman is really pregnant or she just had a lot of kaya toast for breakfast? And imagine a 20 something standing in front of you who is just fat, and you get up and offer your seat to her. The rest, they say, is history!

So after a lot of deliberation and conscience pricking, I decided that even if I occupy the priority seat, I would get up the moment *I think* that the person standing next to me is either old or pregnant. But then since I think so, I don't *offer* them the seat, but I just casually get up pretending that I don't need the seat anymore; presuming that if the person is really old or pregnant, he/she will get the signal and sit down. If not, they will ignore my gracious offer and then I can stroll back to my seat as if it was the wrong station and I wasn’t supposed to get down there!

I tried that a couple of times this month and I figured the moment I do that, a guy or gal much younger to me actually occupies the seat and there goes my chivalry and courtesy down the drain. Now I get to stand beside the old/pregnant person who gives me a smirk which screams - "Idiot".