Bad B-School Decision

Today I realized that I chose the wrong business school not once but twice over. I chose London Business School for its excellent standing, diversity, and global perspective. I found out today just how wrong I was though.

First of all, due to the schedule of the program I was too distracted to make reservations at El Bulli and now the 2009 season has filled completely. Secondly, when Ferran Adria chose a business school to speak at he chose Harvard Business School. LBS had better come through for me in other ways.

Simple Joys in Life

Since moving to London I haven't bought very many kitchen gadgets and forget about counter top appliances. I have very little space and I always worry that I'm wasting money buying electrics that only take 240V. But last week I decided that I needed to replace a few kitchen items that are buried away in storage somewhere in San Jose. While searching for kitchenware stores online I discovered the Japanese Knife Company. I stopped by in the afternoon to this very basic shop in the corner of a warehouse. The shop was the size of closet but filled with rows and rows of pristine steel layered in carbon tempered to 60:62 Rockwell. The man who greeted me at the door holding a 12" knife handed me one knife after another starting with 35 layers of steel to 120 layers of laser cut steel. I must have cut up a dozen tomatoes trying to see which one felt right. I ended up choosing a hand-hammered 3-layer knife made of blue steel. It is a beautiful thing to behold indeed and today I was so excited to come home and cook dinner just so I could cut a few things with my new weapon. I would have been happy to come home and just cut a lemon.

It's nice that there are still some very simple joys in life.

Snow Day

I was born in a tropical country and lived nearly all of my life in Northern California so snow was always something that you had to travel to see. However on the night of Superbowl Sunday this is what it looked like outside of my window.

Between last night and today nearly 1 foot of snow has fallen in some parts of London making it the most snow the city has seen in 18 years. I got emails and texts all day from people saying they were taking a snow day as the buses and most of the tubes and trains weren't running. And forget about driving. When even a dusting of snow falls on the ground the whole of the UK comes to a grinding halt.

Aside from the snow what's been going on with me? I had a small Superbowl Sunday pre-game get together last night to my all-American pride. Why was it only a pre-game celebration? You must realize that the game didn't start until 11:30pm GMT. I was able to catch a bit of it and saw "The Boss" perform at half-time. Lately it's just been a busy mixture of work (prepping for the big launch) and school.

How has school been? The first week was very exhausting and overwhelming. Then came the first weekend and now I've just finished my second weekend. I must say I was still on the fence after the first week but school has improved by leaps and bounds since then. Perhaps the dissatisfaction with week 1 was mostly down to the fact that we were required to stay in a gritty hotel for an entire week. Everyday we would spend 8-10 hours in class together and then would be required to attend social events afterwards together. It was great for the first few days to all be in one place and get to know each other but by Wednesday we were all ready to go home, especially those of use who live locally (10 minutes away for me) and had just come back from traveling for Christmas holidays. Since then the professors have improved (most but not all) and I've come to a point where I really fee like I'm learning. Not that I know everything there is to know about my job, but I don't have many of those "ah-ha" moments at work anymore.

It's been a lot of work so far and there is still much more work to come but I have to say I'm enjoying it and I'm glad to not be sitting in the office all day long.