Category: Uncategorized

I suppose it’s a little early to be practicing for the case interviews that happen in the management consulting field. Typical case book questions, puzzles, etc. include things like "how many gas stations are there in the US", "why are manhole covers round", "can paper manufacturers be profitable", and "how would you value and price the use of a teleportation machine". Though one can appreciate how the companies test for an applicant’s analysis, business knowledge, logic, reasoning, and synthesis skills, case study prep can drive one to insanity.

So if you need a laugh while practicing for the genres of case that require on-the-spot/off-the-cuff numerical analysis and some basic knowledge of stats, check out this essay on "Why I Will Never Have A Girlfriend". (Hat tip: del.icio.us).

3DTV without funky glasses. Simply cool. In a past life I used to work as a signal processing engineer in the 3D/holophonics area (e.g., 3D sound projected out of two speaker systems). Can’t begin to imagine what this visual experience would be like.

I’m about a third of the way through the book, "The Virtual Handshake" … see some of my thoughts at Internet Stop 1 (at my 21Publish blog).

Based on a request from a reader, I posted on the topic of leadership over at my 21Publish blog. I guess I would add that while leadership may stem from having vision, finding a person’s personal style of leadership may not stem from vision. It’s not like making red wine where one may set out from the get go to develop such and such spicy-type of red Zinfandel or a Syrah/Cabernet blend. To develop my style of leadership, I found that I needed to first become aware of my underlying style. It then became a lifelong craft to hone that style.

But in another sense, leadership may be like wine making. One can’t just set out to make "wine". Similarly, you can’t just say that I want to make a "leader". If you are going to try to make a leader, at some point you need to have a more refined model of what you want to make.

Update (7/28/05): Andy adds on to this thread and refers to some prior posts he’s done on leadership that are also good.

Perhaps I’m a little out of touch with the world these days.

Jenny Jet is a new action adventure for your cell phone. People can blog about, hmmm … well SMS Media Group is launching it, and they say it best in a media alert forwarded to me (as connected to The CIO Weblog?):

Launching this fall on cell phones, television, and the Internet is a new character and series called Jenny Jet. Featuring Alien Greys, Reptoids, the Feds, and a 17 year-old girl named Jenny Jet whose parents were abducted by aliens!

Produced by SMS Media Group Inc., Jenny Jet is an interactive sci-fi adventure that uses text message alerts to get the story out, and then subscribers are able to blog and interact with others on the web. People can post their UFO sightings, share ideas, and any information they might have about the alien/government conspiracy.

I suppose if one doesn’t know what to do with his/her time and if one’s SMS bills aren’t high enough, then the value prop is just right. As for CIO and corporations paying for corporate cell bills, if similar services to Jenny Jet start cropping up, there may be more challenges ahead monitoring telcom service usage these days beyond the day-to-day craziness.

Continue reading “Couldn’t Save This For Friday”

Pretty proud of myself for locating a CIO’s blog (Will Weider, CIO of Affinity Health Systems). I posted about Will’s blog here at The CIO Weblog during my weekly sponsored post. It’s pretty rare to run across CIO blogs compared to CTO, CEO, etc. blogs.

I use Bloglines to read my blogroll of feeds. I think Bloglines knows who I am and what feeds I subscrbe to, but I’ve lost the capability to see which feeds have new posts (and automatically bring them up). Anyone?

Update (7/15/05 – 7:45am): OK – got it back. May be a transient issue or a maintenance thing with Bloglines. Good thing. Last time this sort of thing happened I switched newsreaders. Coincidentally, yesterday a Newsgator (another newsreader vendor) PR person contacted me … maybe a sign for me to switch. Also coincidentally, influential Web 2.0 venture people like Fred Wilson are even looking to drop feedreaders …

The University Chicago may revoke my MBA with my sacrilegious talk at my 21Publish blog about accepting NPV <= 0 projects …