I bought my ticket back to California on Virgin America a few months ago and was really psyched about it. The cabin description sounded excellent, and the fact that they let me pay $25 up front to reserve a bulkhead seat with extra leg room was a big win. Here are some more impressions after […]
Personal vs. Social Responsibility
I’ve mostly been able to ignore the subprime mortgage mess. I don’t work in finance (although several of my classmates at Columbia are walking on eggshells), and my investments are mostly long term so the volatility in the markets doesn’t really concern me. But then I read the following paragraph in The Economist: The boldest […]
Peak, by Chip Conley
Amazon link Subtitled “How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow”, this is a book applying the ideas of
Movies vs. TV
I need to take a break from doing class work regularly these days. Sometimes I get home from work and I’m worn out, and I need to turn off my brain for a couple hours before starting on class work for the evening. Sometimes I just want to distract myself for a bit before heading […]
Being thankful
Yes, it’s the cliche Thanksgiving post. As you can see by the total lack of posts this month, it’s been a busy month for me, at work, in class, and even socially (four different out-of-towners visited last week although I only managed to see three). I’m taking a quick break up in Boston for Thanksgiving […]
Being anti-stealth
Charlie O’Donnell has been taking an anti-stealth approach to his new startup Path101, where he’s blogging everything that’s going on with the company, from meeting agendas to funding strategies. His strategy sparked a great thread on the nextNY mailing list about the advantages of being anti-stealth versus being secret. I contributed to the thread, and […]
Finally fall
It’s finally fall in New York. It was still in the 70s last weekend, but rain rolled through during the week, and today is a perfect fall day, sunny and in the 50s. People say they couldn’t live without seasons, but I have to admit that the only season I missed in the ten years […]
SBS Award for CellKey
The Society of Biomolecular Sciences (SBS) puts on one of the most important conferences in the pharmaceutical industry. When I was working on CellKey, it was the conference where the instrument was launched and where most of the papers on CellKey were presented. So it was quite an honor to be informed that the CellKey […]
Common Sense
Bill Simmons, the Sports Guy columnist at ESPN.com, has used the recurring trope of the Vice President of Common Sense which he describes in this column where he derides the choice of Mario Williams over Reggie Bush in the NFL draft: I’m becoming more and more convinced that every professional sports team needs to hire […]
Six Sigma and the Perils of Process
We had to read about Six Sigma process management last week for class. Six Sigma is a set of practices that allow companies to improve their processes towards satisfying customer needs, which is a laudable goal. The basic idea is that you have to first Define your goals, find ways to Measure your performance relative […]
