Woo hoo! 1 year down, 1 to go. I truly feel like a different person than I was just 9 months ago. I’ll be back in NYC in mid-late May and I’ll be living in midtown west. I’m very excited for this summer.

I heard a story about this on the radio Saturday and it cracked me up. Talk about taking “fear in the media” to the extreme… I’ve heard about murders and robberies, floods, tornados, etc. But when was the last time you heard about the end of the universe? This NYT article does a great job of explaining the story from both sides, keeping a bit of tongue-in-cheek but also a bit of genuine concern. An excerpt:

…Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.”

I pretty much went into hiding since January because I was devoting 99% of my free time to finding a summer internship. I applied to 18 companies, and I had seven interviews (some were two-part interviews). I decided this week to accept my offer from Unilever to assist their marketing efforts this summer in their Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey office.

If you aren’t familiar with the company, they are the firm behind personal care brands such as: All, Axe, Caress, Dove, Degree, Q-Tips, Slim-Fast, Snuggle, Suave, and Vaseline… and they are also behind food brands such as: Ben & Jerry’s, Bertolli, Breyer’s, Country Crock, Good Humor, Hellman’s, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, Klondike, Lipton, Popsicle, Skippy, and Wishbone. I do not yet know which brand I will be working on, but I’m excited just to have the chance.

Frankly, I’m amazed that they gave me the offer. As a former software developer, it is not easy to convince an interviewer that I want to go into consumer packaged goods (CPG) marketing. Thanks in part to the conversational format of the Unilever interview, I think I was able to get across my genuine interest in working for them, so I’m extremely glad it worked out. I will not disappoint them this summer!

Your view of what’s right or wrong is entirely based upon what you already believe. Therefore, changing your perspective requires a leap of faith or discovery of some unconscious belief.

I just read my alumni note in the newly-published Dalton Alumni magazine. If you came here after reading it… hi! Long time no see! How are you?

Also… I feel obligated to mention that I never actually wanted my Web address in the magazine but it’s not a big deal. Just don’t expect anything great!

One of my professors had a funny comment regarding antitrust and politics:

“The Democrats think that every move a big corporation makes is anticompetitive, and the Republicans think that if a big corporation does it, it must be good for America! Neither view is correct.”

What a great idea: a Web site where you get to learn vocab and donate food to the hungry for free. Check it out: http://www.freerice.com/

I swear this is too funny to be real, but it was in the NY Times! I felt like I was reading an Onion article. Here is the article, and here are my favorite quotes:

Tim (12 years old) explained the game’s allure: “It’s just fun blowing people up.”

“We want to make it hard for teenagers to go to hell,” Mr. Barbour (Minister) wrote in a letter to parents at the church.

… Mr. Barbour (also) wrote that God calls ministers to be “fishers of men.” … “Teens are our ‘fish,” he wrote. “So we’ve become creative in baiting our hooks.”

Playing Halo is “no different than going on a camping trip,” said Kedrick Kenerly, founder of Christian Gamers Online, an Internet site whose central themes are video games and religion. “It’s a way to fellowship.”

“If you want to connect with young teenage boys and drag them into church, free alcohol and pornographic movies would do it,” said James Tonkowich, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a nonprofit group that assesses denominational policies. “My own take is you can do better than that.”

Hundreds of churches use Halo games to connect with young people, said Lane Palmer, the youth ministry specialist at the Dare 2 Share Ministry… The organization recently sent e-mail messages to 50,000 young people about how to share their faith using Halo 3. Among the tips: use the game’s themes as the basis for a discussion about good and evil.

In rural Minnesota, Mr. Drexler said, the church needs something powerful to compete against the lure of less healthy behaviors. “We have to find something that these kids are interested in doing that doesn’t involve drugs or alcohol or premarital sex.” His congregation plans to double to eight its number of TVs, which would allow 32 players to compete at one time.

India, now an expert on outsourcing, has figured out that it makes sense for it to outsource work that has been outsourced to itself! Here is the NY Times article.

It makes perfect sense since the data/work is already in the perfect form to be outsourced from the target firm… what’s the difference where it’s actually made? So Indian firms have it done in even cheaper places than India.

Sometimes the most difficult aspect of perfecting a skill is unlearning all those bad habits we unconsciously developed along the way.

I was innocently doing my laundry when one of these bad boys flies onto the door of the dryer I was loading up:

This thing was about 2 inches long!!! I have never in my life seen anything remotely like it! It did not take much for me to realize what I had to do: I slammed the door shut on the monster… It doesn’t take an MBA to figure that one out. Meanwhile, my friend Scott was confronted with a raccoon when he was carrying his laundry upstairs from his basement. This kind of stuff would not happen in New York!

Warren Buffett gave a great speech at U Florida in the recent past (not sure exactly when). His advice is solid common sense and well worth listening to. You might want to grab a soda, this is a long video:

I am just about settled in at my new apartment in New Haven! For the first time in my life, I have my very own apartment. This is also the first time I have not had to share a bathroom I’ve walked around a lot of the Yale and downtown areas and I really like it. The environment is extremely pleasant and the architecture is amazing.

I will continue to blog whenever I have something worth saying, but I think it’s a safe bet that my blogging frequency is going to drop pretty low. If anyone has any questions about Yale School of Management, MBA life, New Haven, or anything feel free to comment on this post.

If you’ve read an earlier post of mine, you already know I think SecondLife (SL) is, for most purposes, a huge waste of time and money. Blogger Randolph Harrison has written several negative articles regarding the financial and economic troubles inherent in the business model of SL. I could not say it any better than he has, so go ahead and read his comments on why he believes Linden Labs will probably end up offering SL for sale (then be bought for far more money than it’s worth by Fox, and then get transformed into something completely different).

Why do I dislike SecondLife?

For the participant, I believe it is a waste of time to establish a virtual life unless there is some valuable takeaway. People may become very much attached to their virtual persona and I simply don’t believe that’s a healthy dependency. First and foremost because I believe there are better ways to have a good time, and secondly because Linden Labs is effectively a God of their virtual universe and can do whatever they please with your virtual life. This wouldn’t be an issue if I didn’t honestly believe they were going to sell out in the next few years. If you want to have a good time, play a video game, read a book, see a movie, chill with friends, etc.

For the investor, I think it’s a waste of money and time to expect any benefits (either in terms of money or reputation) from your dealings in SL. Like Randolph said, the easy money has already been had. You’re too late to make it big. On the other hand, if you are looking to extend your brand into the virtual world, you’re too early (i.e. it’s too risky for big-name brands). It’s natural psychology to associate things which appear together, and you might have some very unwelcome visitors at your virtual store. Would you like to make the decision of whether to hire people to actively supervise your store and ban the people you don’t want (risking backlash from those you banned)… or to allow everyone inside and risk the possibility of naked furries having sex in your unsupervised virtual store and then having an article about it sent all over the Internet? Currently SL is mostly populated by people who would rather create their own merchandise than buy yours and my sense is that they passionately hate marketers and salespeople anyhow.

When I posted a YouTube deathwatch I was absolutely dead wrong… they got bought for a ton of money and are stronger than ever. I never said I disliked YouTube, I only said it couldn’t exist without breaking the law and that it can’t make money. I still can’t believe Google will ever profit off of YouTube until bandwidth costs plummet. I am going to agree with Randolph on this one and predict that SL gets bought by a major media company. I doubt SL can remain in a “pure” form and sustain its costs of operation. It will have to sell out eventually (unless it gets bought by Google )

I feel like I should make a note of it on the blog… I just got back from an awesome ten-day trip to the Netherlands (including one day in Brussels). E-mail me if you’d like to see photos from my trip!