Applying to business school is, apparently, hard work! All of my free time this week has disappeared into recommendations, transcript requests, and the various administrativa of assembling my applications. Recommendations have a particular focus, not only because they form such a key part of my application but also because I want to give my recommenders enough time to write.
It’s getting cold as winter hits even Southern California, so I wanted something nice and thick and warm for dinner this week. Lentils are a great winter treat, and I recently received a gift of some masala spices from Mauritius, so making Dal, an Indian sort of lentil stew, seemed like a great idea. I found “a fun-looking recipe online”:http://www.epicurious.com/run/recipe/view?id=14900 and all would have been good from there had I not, you know, messed everything up.
For all its ubiquity, the Web is not the Internet’s killer app — e-mail is. Every day, more bytes of e-mail messages than bytes of html documents transit the net. Given how much most business rely on e-mail, it’s surprising how awful most e-mail clients are at organizing the daily stream of information that bombards users daily. IBM researchers have “fascinating ideas”:http://www.research.ibm.com/remail/ about how to build a better e-mail client.
Business school applications have a lot of pieces, and I sure don’t want to miss any of them. So I decided to get organized. Getting organized is a wonderful thing: either you get your act together, have everything in the right place and are ready to forge ahead, or you create a great deal of the old sturm und drang and can at least tell yourself you’ve been working.
I have the tremendously useful ability to eat the same leftovers day after day for nearly an entire week. This is convenient and money-saving, because I can buy food in discount-size quantities, cook a single meal from the food and make that my dinner for four days while freezing leftovers for other days. But there’s only so much turkey, stuffing and cranberry sauce I can eat in the days after Thanksgiving, so I’m always looking for ways to use those leftovers in new and tasty ways. This Thanksgiving it was gumbo — I had to make some kind of soup once I managed to secure the turkey carcass.
After a brief but successful flirtation, I’ve been asked to uninstall “Mozilla Firebird”:http://www.mozilla.org/products/firebird/, which I had been using as my primary browser. Unfortunately (but quite reasonably), the IT department was not prepared to support (including backing up bookmarks and preferences) a new application for just one user. Now I’m back to IE at work, but I actually enjoy Firebird so much I may consider replacing “Safari”:http://www.apple.com/safari/ on my Mac at home with this new and promising browser.
I had to make a visit to the doctor’s office, so I climbed the stairs to the fourth floor of the building. I’d been to this office before, and I hated going — at the top of the stairs was a railing, and I had to climb over this railing and walk along a thin ledge jutting out next to a four-story drop in order to get to the hallway the doctor’s office was on. When I got to the top several people were climbing over the rail to go to the doctor, but I suddenly became very scared as I approched the railing. A nice blonde technician in scrubs said that many people become scared climbing over this railing and helped me get to the office.
After I left the office, I ran into my mother — who also saw the same doctor — in the waiting room, and we left together. She planned to take the elevator down, so we walked to the elevator which was just down the hall. There was a small hatch in the wall leading to a small shaft in which an elevator barely large enough for two must have traveled. I was apprehensive about taking this elevator and proposed using the stairs, but my mother assured me that the elevator was OK. The man in line ahead of us opened the door to the elevator shaft and reached in — I told him to watch his hand because the car might be coming. He shot me an odd look with his head cocked to the side, then pushed a button inside the shaft. A large platform rose through a hole in the floor and my mother and the man stepped on. I joined them, and the platform began to descend. It turned out that my mother had worked with the man, who was a lawyer, in the past; they talked about stories of the case they had collaborated on.
Suddenly, the elevator gave a lurch and the platform tipped sideways. The man was undisturbed, but I had to grab the floor to keep from falling. I yelled to my mother to hold on, but she fell into the shaft. We were only about a story down, so I feared she’d died in the three-story plunge. The man was totally unperturbed. I frantically asked him if he thought my mother would be ok, and he said yes; then, up the shaft came her voice: “I’m ok!”.
Then we reached the first floor.
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