Apparently, I made the wrong career choice

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In all fairness:

• Not all bankers went to public schools, nor did all consultants go to private schools; Actually, in general, there’s a fairly good chance they both went to private schools
• I wish I could get home by 7:15 everyday…
• My Blackberry isn’t 4 years old (my firm subsidizes 1 purchase every 2 years)
• I really doubt that bankers “create value”; find it, maybe, but “create” is a stretch

You use Excel for what?

I heard the story of a girl – let’s call her Betsy — who started a couple years back at my firm, who had a very interesting exchange with a partner.

Betsy was a sweet girl, and this was her first time doing any business-related work. She had been an art history major in college, but felt like consulting was the right way for her to get introduced into the professional world.

Betsy’s first assignment was to help a partner with some client-development work. At pretty much all consulting firms, consultants spend some part of their careers helping partners pitch new cases to new clients. In this case, Betsy was asked to help build a model in Microsoft Excel.

For those of you who are unsure what that means, financial models are tools used by businesspeople to help determine the financial impact of a particular decision. It usually involves forecasting sales and profit margins for a couple of years, a task which lends itself to being done in an Excel spreadsheet. Successful financial models are those which clearly lay out their assumptions (i.e. sales will grow every year by 5%) and are “soft-coded” (e.g. in the sense that it’s easy to change the assumption of 5% sales growth and the rest of the spreadsheet cells will update themselves automatically).

After spending an entire day working on her model, Betsy proudly presented it to the partner. The partner looked at it – it was a little choppy, but it was her first model after all –and was impressed; it looked very nice. He then asked, “Betsy, what would happen if we changed the growth rate to 10% instead of 7.5%?”

Much to his dismay, Betsy burst into tears. Not sure what was wrong, the partner assumed that Betsy had hard-coded the model (i.e. did not make the Excel model flexible enough to easily change assumptions) and immediately began to try to calm her down.

It turned out that not soft-coding was the least of Betsy’s problems. You see, Betsy had thought Excel was merely a way to format data in a pretty way. She had not been aware that people did calculations in Excel, and so, she had done all the number-crunching with a calculator and pen & paper, and then manually entered the numbers into the spreadsheet.

I’m fairly sure she never made that mistake again.

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Probably the only reason we’d ever want global warming

(Hat tip: Comics Should be Good)

So, when you drive that gas-guzzling SUV – remember, you’re doing it, not because you like being dependent on an expensive substance of limited quantity that is mostly controlled by authoritative and war-torn regimes and produces horrible pollution, but because you want to save the world from that horrible, horrible day when space snowmen will come take us over.

What if Earth had a Facebook account?

What if? (Hat tip: Kevin)

Index Firefox 3 Bookmarks in Launchy

I’ve been wondering why my favorite keystroke launcher hadn’t been integrating well with the latest release of my favorite browser. Apparently, Firefox 3’s new and more sophisticated bookmarks and history engine doesn’t auto-export bookmarks to HTML, which is what keystroke launchers like Quicksilver and Launchy use to index bookmarks.

And, of course, someone out there in the wide world of the Internet has the solution. From hackcollege (hat tip: Lifehacker):

1. In the navigation bar, type in about:config. And “void your warranty” — that’s a joke from the Mozilla folks.
2. Start typing in browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML until you find it. This is the setting for the Firefox-2.0-style bookmark saving.
3. Toggle this setting to “true” by double-clicking or left clicking and selecting “Toggle.”

After that tweak, Firefox will export the bookmarks to bookmarks.html every time you close it.

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Attack of the mini-viruses

Viruses are fascinating little creatures. They’re like ninjas. Ninjas who sneak into your house, and turn your kids into more house-invading ninjas (that is, if your house were a cell, and the process of raising your kids was the cellular machinery).

They’re sneaky. My thesis was conducted on how living cells respond to ninja attacks viral infection – and while your immune system is smart, the numbers of ways viruses have of beating you are far more clever.

But, what if there was a way to out-ninja the ninja’s? What if there was a virus that could attack other viruses? Just published in Nature (hat tip: R. Boyko), some scientists discovered a tiny virus which they’ve called Sputnik which was capable of beating up other viruses.

They found that Sputnik infects the replication machinery in mamavirus [yes, I know how crazy that name is] and causes it to produce deformed viral structures and abnormal capsids. It had a similar effect on mimivirus [what’s with the crazy names?]. Because Sputnik’s behavior so closely resembles what bacteriophage do to bacteria, the researchers called the new type of virus a virophage, and suspect it may represent a new virus family.

Psh. Virophage is lame. I prefer – super-ninja.

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Will.i.am loves him some crackberry

I heard Will.i.am’s song “One More Chance” on the radio, and much to my shock when I checked out the music video on YouTube, I found what was practically a Will.i.am ad for Blackberry (the Curve, to be precise) – check it out (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKqjRZVW5RE)

Crackberry, it’s not just for consultants… Update: 13 Aug 2008 (Removed YouTube Embed as Google knocked it off)

Hamlet in the 21st Century

Hat tip to Christine for finding this, but it brings back memories of a video I made back in senior year of high school. Imagine how the story of Hamlet would have played out had there been Facebook at the time:

HAMLET (FACEBOOK NEWS FEED EDITION).

BY SARAH SCHMELLING

- – - -

Horatio thinks he saw a ghost.

Hamlet thinks it’s annoying when your uncle marries your mother right after your dad dies.

The king thinks Hamlet’s annoying.

Laertes thinks Ophelia can do better.

Hamlet’s father is now a zombie.

- – - -

The king poked the queen.

The queen poked the king back.

Hamlet and the queen are no longer friends.

Marcellus is pretty sure something’s rotten around here.

Hamlet became a fan of daggers.

- – - -

Polonius says Hamlet’s crazy … crazy in love!

Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Hamlet are now friends.

Hamlet wonders if he should continue to exist. Or not.

Hamlet thinks Ophelia might be happier in a convent.

Ophelia removed "moody princes" from her interests.

Hamlet posted an event: A Play That’s Totally Fictional and In No Way About My Family

The king commented on Hamlet’s play: "What is wrong with you?"

Polonius thinks this curtain looks like a good thing to hide behind.

Polonius is no longer online.

- – - -

Hamlet added England to the Places I’ve Been application.

The queen is worried about Ophelia.

Ophelia loves flowers. Flowers flowers flowers flowers flowers. Oh, look, a river.

Ophelia joined the group Maidens Who Don’t Float.

Laertes wonders what the hell happened while he was gone.

- – - -

The king sent Hamlet a goblet of wine.

The queen likes wine!

The king likes … oh crap.

The queen, the king, Laertes, and Hamlet are now zombies.

Horatio says well that was tragic.

Fortinbras, Prince of Norway, says yes, tragic. We’ll take it from here.

Denmark is now Norwegian.

Google Reader Analytics

I’ve mentioned on more than one occasion my love for Google Reader. And here’s another reason to throw into the mix: analytics. While this is a feature I don’t use very often, it’s nevertheless very interesting to look at (translation: I spent an hour looking at it, and feel like if I don’t blog about it, then it was a waste of an hour). You can access it by clicking on the “Trends” link in the Google Reader navigation box, or by typing “g” and then “[shift] t”.

The trends feature gives you a snapshot of two things: (1) your Google Reader browsing habits and (2) details on the blogs and RSS feeds that you subscribe to.

There is a block dedicated to showing how many items you read on a daily basis (I apparently read most of my posts around noon-time with an odd spike around 3-4 PM, and the number of posts I read on a typical weekend is less than half that I would read on a typical weekday):

The analytics also gives me an analysis of which feeds I read the most (I had no idea I read that much VentureBeat):

As well as an analysis of how often certain feeds update, as well as which of my feeds are the most “obscure" (as measured by how few Google Reader subscribers each feed has):

So, who cares? Good question. In terms of how I’ve used the feature, I’ve used it to cull subscriptions from my list — by singling out feeds which updated too frequently but which didn’t have consistently high quality content or by singling out feeds which I never read — and also to encourage me to post encouragements to the more "obscure" blogs that I follow, so as to encourage them to keep posting.

But, really, it’s just cool.

Richbook?

Rich people don’t do things the way normal peons like you or me do. They buy yachts and play golf and date supermodels and go to the opera. That’s apparently why they need their own social networking sites, such as SPiRE, DiamondLounge, and aSmallWorld.

I don’t know much about the individual sites, as I apparently lack the wherewithal to make the cut. Or, as aSmallWorld puts it more delicately: “We have imposed certain criteria in order to keep the network exclusive.”

Ouch.

Rich or not, these social networks can still appear tacky – just take a look at DiamondLounge’s site with its horrible layout and obnoxious rotating diamond centerpiece:

So, who exactly are the people who use these sites? Well, according to coverage by VentureBeat, the lowest income category that you can list is “under $100K” (I guess that’s where I’m at!), and the youngest age category is apparently “under 35” (also apparently where I’m at).

The big question I have – what makes these sites think that they can beat Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn at their game? Because I don’t think I’m seeing it…

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