100% HUMIDITY

It has finally become hot here but now the humidity is ridiculous. I walk out of school at 11:00pm and am hit with a wall of dense sticky air. It's still only May so when summer really hits this place is going to be like a swamp. I think I'll need frequent trips up to the cottage to maintain my sanity.

I've been spending a lot of time at school lately. Here is a sample of what I'm writing these days "In the zeitgeist of the information age the remedy to antiquated budgeting systems is to go beyond budgeting".

Tomorrow we have classes until noon and then we're going on a canoe trip. I'm really enjoying the MBA so far. Tonight I walked by a classroom full of my classmates who were developing a strategy for Bell to enter the VOIP market and retain its existing customers. So I joined in on for an hour and gave my perspective on the future of information delivery in Canada.

CUSTOMER PROFITABILITY MATRIX

This post is in response to Rachels post about waiting times. When waiting in line you can think back to this chart and locate yourself on it.

create your own visited countries map

I hadn't updated this map since my last trip. I'm up to 17 countries, since that's only 7% I've still got plenty to go.

MONTREAL BY TRAIN

I took the train to Montreal this weekend. The weather was cool and rainy but that didn't stop Rachel and I from having a great time. The train station is right underneath the hotel we stayed at (Q. E., pictured below) so I hopped of the train and up to the lobby.














We decided to hit up the French bistros, first 'au petit extra' on Saturday and then we met Trev and Amy Sunday night at l'Express.


















































... and of course we hit up Schwarts for lunch where I ate way too much smoked meat on rye.




















Night out with Trev and Amy!

MOVIES

I saw two very different movies this weekend. Last night I saw just my luck and have to say that I racked my brain to find a worse movie but came up with nothing. I remember making a movie of lego men walking around by pressing stop/start on the camera and saying the script one word at a time and I think it would knock just my luck out of the park. It's not even funny bad either. It was kind of like watching a long episode of full house.

Tonight I saw Harvest Moon and it was really good. Nothing like a little Neil to remind me of what's real. Here's the posters and some reviews on each.

"'Heart of Gold' isn't quite like any other concert movie. There are no frantic edits, no showy montages, no swooping pans across a cheering audience. (In fact, the audience isn't even shown.) The picture was shot entirely with long-range lenses, which means there were no cameramen scurrying around the stage to distract the musicians. The performances move forward in long, serene takes, and the result is a film that focuses completely on the playing and singing. The musicians' empathic interaction is revelatory." - MTV.com

"In 'Neil Young: Heart of Gold,' the colors shift from ocher to shades of blue as the mood shifts from plaintive to rueful. Every so often a scrim slides awkwardly into place behind the musicians and a painted train cutting across a prairie is replaced with an interior scene of a skinny cat, a fat chair and a fireplace. The show's simplicity and homespun vibe serve Mr. Young's emotionally tremulous songs, both the new and the old, wonderfully well. At one point, during one of his occasional verbal rambles, he says half-jokingly, half-defensively that he's got some love songs left in him. This film, which is at once a valentine from one artist to another and a valentine from a musician to his audience, is surely proof that he does." - New York Times


"A romantic comedy even more idiotic than its embarrassing (and somewhat creepy) poster would indicate." - Miami Herald

"A romantic gimmick comedy that stands out as hackneyed even in this tired genre." - Philidelphia Daily News

"Every single scene is an abominable assemblage of mind-boggling stupidity, completely unmotivated behavior, and unfunny slapstick." - ericsnider.com

"Slight, pointless and convincingly witless. Lohan's cinematic Luck runs out instantaneously...[this] convoluted comical piece is as lucky as a mutilated 2-leaf clover" - Movie Eye

SUNDAY DINNER

I decided to cook a roast with potatoes for dinner today. I figured this would probably last me the rest of the week and I could make sandwiches out of it. I took unpacked the roast and lathered it in chopped garlic and put some potatoes around it like so.













I had already pre-heated the oven but to what temperature I was not to sure. This is the dial of my oven.














It goes without saying that the oven is old. I'm not sure what it takes to rub off the degree settings but someone must have scrubbed very hard. Another past tenant must have been just as annoyed at the lack of actual temperature data and tried to etch numbers into the metal of the dial. My camera is not sophisticated enough to pick up the tiny etchings but trust my they are there. So I set the oven for somewhere between 200 and 400 and hoped for the best.

After about an hour I checked on the roast and it appeared to be warming rather than cooking. I rotated the dial an eighth of turn and again hoped for the best. An hour and a half later I pulled the following pipping hot well done roast out of the oven.














I usually like roast rare but I was just happy to have not made it crispy by this time. That being said the potatoes were still not cooked all the way through. So I put them back in on a setting far too high for far too long. When they came out the insides were great but the outer quarter inch made that part difficult to access.

HOME IMPROVEMENTS

Grace is visiting here this weekend so today she helped me paint the kitachen and do some organizing. Here's some pictures of the ever improving apartment.

Night Off

For the first time since I started here a week ago I have a night off. So far the MBA classes ahave been exactly what I was hoping for. The team part of it all makes it pretty challenging but teams are a fact of life for most work environments so if I can do well in this one I should do well anywhere. That being said I've never been on a team of smarter people. I'm definitely dragging down the average GMAT score of the group.

Today was stats and organizational behaviour. Stats was brief and practical and organizational behaviour was for the most part a discussion about people’s worst job experiences.

My favourite was that one guy worked at a company where the employees stopped receiving their pay cheques. The company blamed it on a bank change. When it happened again the next week they pulled everyone into one room where the CEO was on the speaker phone. He went into a metaphor about how the company was in rough waters and that it had to lose some weight if it wanted to stay afloat. So the HR manager went around the room calling names and telling those people that they were fired. At the end of the list she read out her own name. The storyteller was spared but didn’t stick around long.

Tomorrow is the first meeting of the Environment Club and I’m anxious to see how many, if anyone, shows up. I’ve had some interest so hopefully it’s more than a one man club. I’ve also thrown my hat in for faculty liaison on the student executive. I was running uncontested until this morning when two others joined the race for the same position. I guess acclimation was too much to ask for.

I’ve joined the more traditional clubs of management consulting and marketing as these are career areas that, based on MBTI and other tests, I’m supposed to investigate. Who new that I was into “Creative Production”.

This picture is a computer generated forecast of what I might look like if I worked in management consulting for the next ten years.

THE HOUSE THAT LOVE BUILT

I finally have a day off today, at least until 7, so I decided to build some furniture. It's far more practical than stylish but I'm only here for a little while. This took an hour of shopping and 2.5 hours of building. I didn't build the chair but anything that looks like pine I built.

You can place an order in the comment section but I may not get to it for a long time.

MBA first couple days

It's day two of the MBA program and we're into some pretty intense team building sessions. Class gets going again in 10 minutes (9pm). I'm going to be seeing a lot of my team in the next 9 months so all this is pretty important to my mental well being and of course grades.

The latest exercise is a survival scenario in Labrador where we have to agree on what items we'd take with us. It took 45 minutes to agree on a rank of 15 items but we finally came to a list everyone could agree with. I made some assumptions during the debating, if I get proved wrong in the class I hope the group doesn't hang me. People think I'm outdoorsy so they gave me some leeway.

... the Otogar 

Rachel gets serious about scootering. 

The police form a barricade which the players and (most importantly) the referees walk under to leave the stadium. 

Turkish futbol game. 

Rock houses of Goreme. 

A road we scootered on along the Tuqoise coast. 

Apartment

I got this video of Rachels blog. Stephan Colbert does the White House Correspondents' dinner.

As well, this is the view from the back of my apartment.