We have just finished our last lecture of the second term. Gosh, I can't believe that it's already eight months that I've been living in China. Time passes so quickly in this place!
Tomorrow will be the exam in Corporate Governance. Then we'll have a week to study and prepare for the exams, which is what I need exactly, since I still have to write the Strategic Management assignment and I have not much of a clue about what we were supposed to learn during the past few weeks.
Having been visited by various friends over the continuous period of almost three weeks, I haven't gotten around to much studying. And I was rather sleepy in class, too, after taking people to the various hot clubs in town the night before. Add our littlefield simulation and the 24x7 MIT OpSim challange to that and you can guess where about I stand education-wise.
So for a change, I won't go on a scuba diving vacation during the study week, although both the Philippines and the Maldives are currently luring me to their beaches.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
#1 world-wide
For the last few days I was part of a team that competed in an Operations Management challange hosted by MIT.
With the damn thing running 24x7, I'm kind of sleep deprived by now, since we had to come up with decisions and implement measures 'round the clock. I probably slept a total 12-16 hours during the past 4 days.
However, the whole thing is finally over, and after catching up on some sleep, I'm happy to report that my team finished first, before teams from UCLA Anderson, MIT Sloan, Harvard Business School, Wharton, INSEAD and many other well-known business schools. In fact, three teams from CEIBS finished among the top ten. So we really are the world-wide elite, it seems ;-)
It was an absolutely fantastic experience. Our team, consisting of one student each from China, Denmark, India, Malaysia and Switzerland, was absolutely fabulous and we worked together as smoothly as you could possibly imagine.
But the best part was yesterday night, when we took our Operations Management professor out to celebrate and got him drunk as hell...
With the damn thing running 24x7, I'm kind of sleep deprived by now, since we had to come up with decisions and implement measures 'round the clock. I probably slept a total 12-16 hours during the past 4 days.
However, the whole thing is finally over, and after catching up on some sleep, I'm happy to report that my team finished first, before teams from UCLA Anderson, MIT Sloan, Harvard Business School, Wharton, INSEAD and many other well-known business schools. In fact, three teams from CEIBS finished among the top ten. So we really are the world-wide elite, it seems ;-)
It was an absolutely fantastic experience. Our team, consisting of one student each from China, Denmark, India, Malaysia and Switzerland, was absolutely fabulous and we worked together as smoothly as you could possibly imagine.
But the best part was yesterday night, when we took our Operations Management professor out to celebrate and got him drunk as hell...
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Don't believe the rumours
Some people have suggested that I might have bled to death, since nothing has happend on this blog for over a month.
Bear with me. I'm not dead yet, although I did catch a sexy James Bond (or Harry Potter)-like scar on my forehead.
The reason it's been quiet is simple: I had two very busy weeks and I piled up a lot of things to write. Then I got visited by Ursula and I spent every single free minute touring the city with her. At the same time we played an Operations Management simulation which run 24x7 for a week, so I was busy managing my virtual factory. And now I got visited by Roli and Herby, so I spend the days in school and the nights in clubs, which simply leaves me neither time nor energy to write.
And yes, I hate blogger for its clumsy interface without real WYSIWYG preview! Since its so buggy and doesn't let me add pictures to articles I've written in the past, I have to do the stuff first-time-right, so I'm not exactly incentivised to quickly type something and then revise it later on. I know it's lame to blame someone else, but I want to make this place look nice, with loads of pics, not just text.
Next week, I'll catch up on the past. Promised.
Bear with me. I'm not dead yet, although I did catch a sexy James Bond (or Harry Potter)-like scar on my forehead.
The reason it's been quiet is simple: I had two very busy weeks and I piled up a lot of things to write. Then I got visited by Ursula and I spent every single free minute touring the city with her. At the same time we played an Operations Management simulation which run 24x7 for a week, so I was busy managing my virtual factory. And now I got visited by Roli and Herby, so I spend the days in school and the nights in clubs, which simply leaves me neither time nor energy to write.
And yes, I hate blogger for its clumsy interface without real WYSIWYG preview! Since its so buggy and doesn't let me add pictures to articles I've written in the past, I have to do the stuff first-time-right, so I'm not exactly incentivised to quickly type something and then revise it later on. I know it's lame to blame someone else, but I want to make this place look nice, with loads of pics, not just text.
Next week, I'll catch up on the past. Promised.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
My head is bleeding like hell
Honestly, you didn't think that the "peace and love" theme of the last post would last for a long time, did you?
Tonight I slipped and hit my head exactly on the edge of some furniture, resulting in an ugly cut just above my left eye. At first I thought I had just hit my head, but then I started to wonder why my hand felt suddenly so sticky, and what the trickle from my head was all about...
It really was big enough a cut to warrant stitching, but scared of a potentially ugly scar from stitching gone awry, I decided to avoid the hospital at all cost. Instead I patched myself up with band aids tightly closing the gaping wound.
Well, I guess there will be a scar left, but at least it will be a thin line without stitching marks. And this at least leaves a lot of room for interesting stories, such as how the guy attacked me when I chatted up his girlfriend, what the rabid soldier had done to me in Vietnam, how I could barely escape the sabletooth tiger while hiking in the Amazon, etc.
And yes, various girls on campus have already comforted me by telling me that the scar actually looks rather sexy...
Tonight I slipped and hit my head exactly on the edge of some furniture, resulting in an ugly cut just above my left eye. At first I thought I had just hit my head, but then I started to wonder why my hand felt suddenly so sticky, and what the trickle from my head was all about...
It really was big enough a cut to warrant stitching, but scared of a potentially ugly scar from stitching gone awry, I decided to avoid the hospital at all cost. Instead I patched myself up with band aids tightly closing the gaping wound.
Well, I guess there will be a scar left, but at least it will be a thin line without stitching marks. And this at least leaves a lot of room for interesting stories, such as how the guy attacked me when I chatted up his girlfriend, what the rabid soldier had done to me in Vietnam, how I could barely escape the sabletooth tiger while hiking in the Amazon, etc.
And yes, various girls on campus have already comforted me by telling me that the scar actually looks rather sexy...
Monday, March 3, 2008
Life is good
I feel great! Really, I know, it's a long time since I last said something like this, but I feel truly priviliged and happy to be around. Somehow I spent the past few days reflecting on my life a bit, and the past years have been really great!
I've lived in Paris, Aix-en-Provence and now in Shanghai. I've learned French. I have great friends. A lovely girlfriend. I've truly lived my dream by travelling and doing weird things such as working in a restaurant kitchen. Or playing online role playing games. I've had fantastic experiences in my life! Been to so many places. And now I'm living the student life again, learning new things every day!
Yes I did loose a lot of money in the stock market lately - and no, that's not helping my happyness in any way ;-) But this is just a transient glitch, an annomaly that doesn't really impact the real life. And life is what we should all care about. After all we don't have much more than a hundred years to make the most of it.
I've lived in Paris, Aix-en-Provence and now in Shanghai. I've learned French. I have great friends. A lovely girlfriend. I've truly lived my dream by travelling and doing weird things such as working in a restaurant kitchen. Or playing online role playing games. I've had fantastic experiences in my life! Been to so many places. And now I'm living the student life again, learning new things every day!
Yes I did loose a lot of money in the stock market lately - and no, that's not helping my happyness in any way ;-) But this is just a transient glitch, an annomaly that doesn't really impact the real life. And life is what we should all care about. After all we don't have much more than a hundred years to make the most of it.
Two thumbs up!
I just fetched my laptop, and it works like a charm!
Surprise: The problem was the connector! The computer hospital resoldered the connector to the main PCB. Apparently some of the solderings that been broken which explaines the intermittent failures. I paid about CHF 50.- for the repair, one fourth of what is usually charged in good ol' Switzerland to simply have a look and then tell you that "it's not worth to repair it - go buy a new one". So the backoffice did indeed know what they were doing.
Surprise: The problem was the connector! The computer hospital resoldered the connector to the main PCB. Apparently some of the solderings that been broken which explaines the intermittent failures. I paid about CHF 50.- for the repair, one fourth of what is usually charged in good ol' Switzerland to simply have a look and then tell you that "it's not worth to repair it - go buy a new one". So the backoffice did indeed know what they were doing.
Saturday, March 1, 2008
diànnǎo yīyuàn
Careful analysis had finally revealed that it wasn't the memory that was faulty, but the connector that the memory was plugged into.
So today I went to the diànnǎo yīyuàn, the "computer hospital", which is about an hour away at the other side of town. After some unsuccessful trials I finally found myself talking to a yellow-shirted guy who spoke about three standard deviations (99.7%) Chinese and 0.03% English. "Memory hen hao, kashe zhege donxi bu hao", etc, etc.
After a few interactions I finally decided that this was leading nowhere and I called a Chinese classmate for remote translation assistance. What then followed was the ususal humiliation by an IT service desk that doesn't distinguish between computer professionals and stupid users.
NO, it's NOT a VIRUS, it's the CONNECTOR that's faulty. What do you mean, how can I know? It also hangs in the boot menu. NO, the MEMORY is FINE! I swapped it with another laptop and it works perfectly there, I SAID IT'S THE CONNECTOR! NO it's NOT the wrong type of memory, it has been working fine for more than a year! IT'S THE CONNECTOR! YES, I know that viruses cause sudden crashes, but THIS IS NOT A VIRUS, goddammit!
The whole thing then culminated in the guy trying to pull out the memory of my laptop while still in sleep mode (i.e. the memory fully powered on). Reluctantly I finally left my treasured device at the place for further analysis, sincerely hoping that the actual engineers would know what they were doing as much as the front office guy didn't.
So today I went to the diànnǎo yīyuàn, the "computer hospital", which is about an hour away at the other side of town. After some unsuccessful trials I finally found myself talking to a yellow-shirted guy who spoke about three standard deviations (99.7%) Chinese and 0.03% English. "Memory hen hao, kashe zhege donxi bu hao", etc, etc.
After a few interactions I finally decided that this was leading nowhere and I called a Chinese classmate for remote translation assistance. What then followed was the ususal humiliation by an IT service desk that doesn't distinguish between computer professionals and stupid users.
NO, it's NOT a VIRUS, it's the CONNECTOR that's faulty. What do you mean, how can I know? It also hangs in the boot menu. NO, the MEMORY is FINE! I swapped it with another laptop and it works perfectly there, I SAID IT'S THE CONNECTOR! NO it's NOT the wrong type of memory, it has been working fine for more than a year! IT'S THE CONNECTOR! YES, I know that viruses cause sudden crashes, but THIS IS NOT A VIRUS, goddammit!
The whole thing then culminated in the guy trying to pull out the memory of my laptop while still in sleep mode (i.e. the memory fully powered on). Reluctantly I finally left my treasured device at the place for further analysis, sincerely hoping that the actual engineers would know what they were doing as much as the front office guy didn't.
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