bkdunn

In case anyone still checks this blog and cares, this is where I'm probably applying to (alphabetical):

1. CMU


2. Michigan


3. Oklahoma


4. Pittsburgh


5. Purdue


6. UC-Irvine


7. Utah

I might still do Maryland and Washington also -- there are some factors to consider still with those two.

Adios.

bkd

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But I'm posting a lot over at the other blog: 48stateroadtrip.com. Check me out there or on Facebook, I guess, where I brilliantly re-direct people back to the blog.

bkd

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At least, not according to the Graduate Management Admissions Council. Although, to analyze my own assertion, I should note the following unsupported assumptions:

• The GMAT in 2009 does not necessarily test in the same manner as it did in 1995.


• The scores may be scaled differently today.


• The test may not be a good measure of intelligence as such.


• It may be that in 2009 I compensated for having become stupider by preparing better for the examination.

But whatever: I did well enough on it that I don't have to do it again and I beat my old score (barely).

bkd

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Mostly Windows- and Outlook-related. XP even, not Vista.

• "Restore active desktop" button appearing on my desktop, behind my icons, for no clear reason.


• Recurrent "valkyrie.dll" issues.


• Normal.dot preventing me from shutting down.


• 20 minutes from turning the computer on until being able to do something with it.


• Daily emails telling me my "mailbox is full" (not exactly helping the problem, are they?).


• Receiving auto-generated emails telling me I should go look at the emails in my spam mailbox (?!).


• Not being able to reserve rooms for recurring meetings due to one over lap during the next millennium.


• "The data file 'Mailbox - Dunn, Brian' was not closed properly" and then waiting 5-10 minutes for Outlook to decide what to do about it.


• Launching an application, getting bored waiting for it, switching to a second application, getting in the middle of doing something (an Excel formula), and then having the first application take over again after deciding it wants to run after all.


• My (local) printer not working after un-docking "too many" times.


• Spotty wireless connectivity inside the building.


• Frequent hanging.


• Outlook taking 60 seconds to display the text of an email because (?) there's a large file attached to it.


• The mailbox full dialog box offering to help delete emails in ways that don't actually help. And then continuing to pop up after you've taken care of the issue.


• Having to attempt to launch Internet Explorer two or three times before it actually launches.


• Pulling an email back from the archive and having Outlook ask me whether I want to have the email retrieved "now" or "later".


• Having Excel warn me Every Time I tried to open an Excel 07 document in Excel 03. Such clever marketers in Redmond!


• Attempting to close excel, answering the "do you want to save?" question for three of the four spreadsheets I had opened, then realizing that I needed to keep the fourth one open, clicking cancel, and having the first three spreadsheets reappear as open.


• Having emails sent from gmail addresses intermittently labeled "spam".


• The "safeboot" security thing that increases boot time by five minutes for the sake of keeping someone from stealing the information on my laptop during all the travel I did in the last year.


• Emails disappearing into the either after six months of storage.

Wow -- I'm getting mad just having to recall this stuff. Time heals all wounds. Time heals all wounds...

bkd

Originally published at bkdunn.com. » Click here « to leave any comments.

The *truly* impressive thing is that I finished it.

Good:

• Steinbeck writes very cleanly.


• Probably a useful depiction of a slice of life during the Great Depression (although... well, see below).


• Makes me glad I wasn't a destitute farmer in (fictionalized) California during the 30s.

Bad:

• I swear there were blocking problems everywhere in this book. Was never sure who was in the scene or where in the scene they were -- and this often mattered.


• Probably about twice as long as it should have been.


• It lacks event -- essentially, this is a 400-page vignette. Very little in the way of plot or tension.


• There are certainly character arcs (Ma has the strongest, Casy obviously, Tom sure, Al sort of, Pa sort of, John should have but didn't), but they're just arcs. There are no epiphanies. Ma probably transcended herself, but she wasn't the focus of the novel for the most part. No one else seemed inclined toward overcoming anything. And Ma's development felt pretty arbitrary.


• While it might be a useful depiction of real life during the Depression, Steinbeck hammers his themes home with such ferocity that I'm inclined to worry that what was depicted may have been skewed to fit his needs.


• Man, but the PoV wandered. Wonder if that woman who taught that extension class at UCI knows about this...


• The interstitial chapters, the ones that talked in generalities but then didn't, felt cloying, like they were trying too hard to be something.


• The climax was teased hard and obviously from Page One on, but no part of it started resolving until 80% of the way through. And then it was very, very sudden.

Meh. I liked Of Mice and Men a lot better. For one thing, it was the right length.

Disappointed,

bkd

Originally published at bkdunn.com. » Click here « to leave any comments.

Spent all day today doing superficial research of Business PhD programs, the result of which is that I'm now still considering only 38 37 of them (I somehow failed to look into UNC-Greensboro the first time around to eliminate it). Final 38 37 hurrah! Yeah. I didn't weed out as many as I originally thought I might. My criteria for passing this cut was to (a) have a "strategic management" (or similar) concentration on offer, (b) be located somewhere that I might want to live (this was a broad net, unlike yesterday's post about places I want to live), and (c) can't have run up the score against BYU in a bowl game.

Here's who's left (in alphabetical order by what people call their football team):

1. Arizona State


2. Arkansas


3. Auburn


4. Cincinnati


5. Colorado


6. Duke


7. Georgia Tech


8. Illinois


9. Indiana


10. Iowa


11. Kentucky


12. Michigan


13. Michigan State


14. Minnesota


15. Missouri


16. Nebraska


17. North Carolina


18. North Texas


19. Northwestern


20. Ohio State


21. Oklahoma State


22. Old Dominion


23. Oregon


24. Penn State


25. Pitt


26. Purdue


27. Texas


28. Texas Tech


29. Tulane


30. UC-Irvine


31. UNC-Greensboro


32. UT-Arlington


33. UT-San Antonio


34. Utah


35. Virginia Tech


36. Washington


37. Washington State


38. Washington University (St. Louis)

Ostensibly, then, I'll be attending one of the above from 2010 through 2014 or '15.

Tired of navigating sometimes confusing websites,

bkd

Originally published at bkdunn.com. » Click here « to leave any comments.

I have no idea where I'm going to be living after the road trip (speaking of which, several updates on the other blog since last time I mentioned it). A couple months to decide, o' course, but figure it'd at least be worthwhile to have some criteria set up:

• Rents < $1,000 for a place with a 2-car garage and something like a yard.


• Close enough to the mountains that getting a season's pass for skiing makes sense.


• Close to good hiking.


• Close to a real karting track.


• In the vicinity of an adult baseball league I can join.


• Close to current friends/family.


• Not crushingly urban (e.g., New York).


• Not crushingly rural (e.g., Twin Falls).


• Not crushingly suburban (e.g., Mission Viejo).


• Not crushingly pretentious (e.g., Laguna Beach).


• Predominately sunny (not necessarily warm, just sunny).


• Smart, reasonably compatible prevailing personality.


• Should be non-imaginary.

It might be tough to find a place that meets all those criteria. Here are the places that could be considered front-runners, along with the areas where they may not measure up (listed alphabetically):

• Kauai: Not much skiing, karting, or baseball; can't get a place with a garage for under $1,000 (but it's still a cheaper rental market than SoCal); might get really sick of it after three weeks.


• Reno: No family and only one friend (whom I haven't talked to for a few years); could be too redneckish; possibly imaginary.


• San Diego: Couldn't possibly get a 2BR w/ garage for less than $1K without living somewhere where I'd get shot daily (although it's really not much more expensive than Seattle-Tacoma); no skiing and karting is tricky; not as sunny as non-Cals think; could be pretentious or trashy, depending on the neighborhood.


• Seattle-Tacoma Area: Not very sunny; don't really have any friends that live there (that I've talked to in the last 20 years at least); would have to get deep into the sticks in order to find a 2BR place with a garage under $1,000/month.


• Tahoe: No friends or family; could be too pretentious or too rural -- really; not close to karting or baseball; no idea on personalities.


• Some Random Place: I got at least a couple months to figure it out.

Or if some municipality wanted to pay me cash considerations in exchange for positive blog mentions, I'd be up for that probably.

bkd

Originally published at bkdunn.com. » Click here « to leave any comments.

Over the past 10 days I've gotten hooked on two different multi-player Internet simulation games:

• AirwaySim -- It's an airline simulator. I have two airlines going. Just recently, SwampAir became the airline transporting the most passengers through its home base of Orlando and now has a daily nonstop to Manchester, UK. Dog Food Airlines, on the other hand, transports half of all traffic going in and out of Cincinnati/CVG and recently made its first acquisition of an aircraft (everything previous was leased). I have dreamed of this game since I was six. The only thing that would make it better would be if it came with one of those departure boards like they have in all the European airports, the ones that make the clattering noise as the board updates by flipping through all the letters of the alphabet for each space in the city name column. But otherwise, a dream come true.


• BATracer -- It's a car racing simulator. I haven't dreamed of it since I was six, but so far it's kind of fun, especially as it coincides with my recent interest in auto racing. I have a couple of cars running: a BMW-Sauber in a 2009 Formula One recreation and a Force Warthog Peugeot in a British Touring Car Championship series. I qualified last in the first F1 race and 13th of 16 in the BTCC. Nowhere to go but up.

Toward a more-simulated future,

bkd

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Saw this sign at the Long Beach airport on my way up to Seattle over the weekend:

First off, I'm glad that the TSA is finally getting around to their most important assignment: self-preservation through public relations. Otherwise known as scaring people into thinking that they're still relevant.

I love these accomplishments, though. System wide, an entire week of travel, and *these* are the Great Results that the TSA has wrought. They found TWO "artfully concealed" prohibited items? I'm guessing someone figured out how to turn a laptop into a water bottle. Arrests for "suspicious behavior"? I'm guessing bloggin about how stupid the TSA is would be considered "suspicious" by the TSA, no? 32 incidents that involved a checkpoint closure -- and they're trying to make out like that's a good thing.

Seriously. Hire a new PR agency, one that's willing to go the full monty and give you something worth reporting on by trying to smuggle timed explosives through. None of the things on the list above necessarily had anything to do with a terrorist activity. It's very possible to have a gun in your possession without trying to take over an airplane (I'm not necessarily advocating allowing people to bring guns on planes, but if someone were to get away with it -- that's not in itself dangerous.)

How about putting another line item on there for productivity minutes lost nationwide as a result of the "enhanced screening process"? Maybe that's what they were getting at with the closure count.

Remember that Simpsons episode with the bear patrol? Lisa tells Homer that the rock she has in her hand is keeping bears away because, well, she's holding it and neither of them see any bears around.

Homer buys the rock.

bkd

In case you somehow missed the news, as of today you're no longer allowed to leave the United States without a passport. Previously, other countries might have required a passport in order to enter them, but as of now (well, this morning), your government decides whether you're allowed to leave its jurisdiction.

More here.

Y'know, the Soviet Union started with good intentions. For that matter, so did the German Democratic Republic. I mean, sure, their politicians wanted all the power for themselves, but so long as they kept their populace safe, secure, and somewhat fed, who could mind?

Please wake up.

bkd

Here 'is:

• Get my truck serviced.


• Move the rest of my non-trip stuff into storage.


• Move my trip stuff out of storage.


• Buy a JetBoil.


• Make reservations for Boundary Waters and other parts of the trip that need reservations.


• Get signed up on health insurance.


• Get my interim mailing address squared away.


• Study for the GMAT.


• Take the GMAT.


• Figure out which schools I should be applying to.


• Get my transcripts and other academic documents put together.


• Secure all my would-be recommendation-writers.


• Write drafts of at least a couple of the application essays.


• Plan and book the family reunion.


• Go to the beach once.

bkd

(Thanks to Miq for the blog post-as-self guilt trip idea!)

Originally published at bkdunn.com. » Click here « to leave any comments.

Originally published at bkdunn.com. » Click here « to leave any comments.

Haven't talked about this much, but I'm getting ready to apply to Business PhD programs for admission in Fall of 2010. To that end, I have to take the GMAT again (turns out schools don't accept 14-year-old scores) and since I figured I was going to have a hard time getting myself to study for it, I enrolled in a course with "Veritas Prep", which sounds like an aptly branded high school for nouveau riche children.

It's not. It's just another test prep company like Kaplan and Princeton Review. I've gone for two weeks now and...

Good:

• For the money, they give you a lot of class time (14 sessions vs. 8 or so with the other companies).


• The workbooks they use are pretty well written and lend themselves to self-teaching.


• On the second night of class one person who was re-taking the class said that last time everything moved too fast for her, to which the instructor responded that it moves as fast as it moves and they expect students to have some reasonable understanding of the subject matter beforehand so deal with it. I'm paraphrasing.


• Most of the answer keys are correct.

Bad:

• The teachers are more like TAs than professors. Basically, they just read through the manual and answer questions if they come up. I'm guessing this is the Veritas method, but it seems a little half-hearted.


• More class sessions means it's kind of a pain having to spend three hours twice a week to attend.


• The hotel where the classes are held appears to have no food-vending machines.


• The other students in the class -- well, yeah. I guess they're about what I expected. But since most of the students in the class are going to be happy scoring 600 and the instruction is focused mostly on them -- well...

All in all -- it's probably the right thing for me to be doing to prepare for the test. I get next to nothing out of the in-class instruction, but it gives me six relatively quiet hours a week during which I can work through the workbooks and practice problems, which is a lot more time than I'd spend preparing otherwise.

bkd

Went to the Planes of Fame Air Show in Chino on Saturday. This was the best photo I got:

[caption id="attachment_413" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="A B-24 Liberator comes in for a low pass while some guys work on an F6F Hellcat that claims to have shot down 29 Japanese planes despite being part of something called the "Commemorative Air Force"."][/caption]

Took 300 photos, most of which were awful. I blame the haze. And the number of people that were there. And my unwillingness to go stand in front of all the people for an unobstructed view. Plus, really, what kind of composition actually works for planes flying alone against a hazy-blue sky? Nosuch.

Air Show was at the Chino Airport, which is also the home to the "Planes of Fame Museum" I visited a while back. Was hot out there -- 90 maybe. Got good and burned on my neck, most importantly.

The show was mostly old planes, mostly from World War II, although there was a brief Korea showcase with an F-86 and a MiG 15 chasing each other around. Also had an A-10 Thunderbolt, which is usually pretty fun to watch (IMHO, slow flying trumps everything at an air show), and a C-17, which isn't necessarily fun to watch. And the tri-tip barbecue sandwich was way better than I expected I'd find at an air show.

Here's a photo of F8F Bearcats flying in formation, in case you care:

[caption id="attachment_414" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="Three aerobatic F8F Bearcats fly in formation, shaming one of their less well-heeled bretheren into folding up its wings."][/caption]

So I really didn't rock it on the photography. Many life-lessons were learned, however. And the old planes looked and sounded cool.

bkd

Originally published at bkdunn.com. » Click here « to leave any comments.

My second weekend of living in Laguna Beach. Here's what I saw on my walk into town today (ca. 1.3 mi. each way):

Ferarris: 4 (2 NB PCH, 1 SB PCH, 1 Parked PCH)
Maseratis: 2 (1 NB PCH, 1 SB PCH)
Lamborghinis: 1 (NB PCH)
Bentleys: 1 (EB Bluebird Cyn)

Bonus: 3 Dodge Vipers in a row.

To qualify: No cars with MSRP under $100K in manufacturer's current US-available lineup (thus: no BMW, Lotus, Mercedes, Porsche, et al); mysterious or one-off vehicles that probably retail at over $100K (e.g., Oscar Meyer Wienermobile) may be included at the blog author's discretion.

As if I'm actually going to do this every week (?!).

Observationally,

bkd

Originally published at bkdunn.com. » Click here « to leave any comments.

Don't know how long I should keep doing this, but I put up a couple of new posts on 48stateroadtrip.com.

• New Road Trip Itinerary (version 9!)


• Recurring Trip Themes (version 1)

So maybe check those out. If you want.

bkd

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They're not really scenes, I guess. Just photos. With a bunch of stuff in them because I haven't really unpacked yet -- still debating whether it makes sense to unpack, for one thing.

The new living room. The place comes furnished, btw. It's nice, eclectic stuff.

The view out the front door.

The boardwalk at Main Beach in Laguna. This photo is about a mile down from where I'm living -- but there's another beach that's just three blocks and across PCH away from me (5 minutes walk).

Chief Idiosyncracies (of the Apartment and Area):

• It's really small. Most of my stuff is in storage already, but not enough of it apparently.


• No garbage disposal or dishwasher.


• The recycling bin is bigger than the main trash can.


• Backing out of the driveway is tricky (it slopes down toward the house and it's kind of a blind back-out situation as a result).


• Town is crowded on the weekends.


• More per capita Ferarris than any other city on Earth.

Everyone warned me about the traffic before moving here. But "everyone" hasn't lived here -- they've just experienced traffic trying to get here on a weekend, which I'm sure was brutal. But when you're starting with your car already in Laguna Beach, it's not quite so awful. Driving to work is 25 minutes now, but not that much traffic on the way and it's pretty free-flowing.

We'll see how it goes.

bkd

Originally published at bkdunn.com. » Click here « to leave any comments.

Still not leaving for another (let's count 'em!) 67 days, but I launched a new cross-country road trip website (the URL: www.48stateroadtrip.com) to accommodate its chronicling. There's a new version of the itinerary there, for instance. Actually, that's all that's there. But anyway -- I'll probably post more stuff there, maybe update your bookmarks accordingly.

I also keep having people tell me I need to take up Twitter, at least for the duration of the road trip and now that I figured out how to get it onto my Blackberry (it was very difficult -- involved downloading and installing an app!) I suppose that could happen (my Twitter account is bdunn02 if you'd like to watch that particular apocalypse).

That's all I have to say about that. And now I can start loading the truck up for my new vacation lifestyle in Laguna Beach.

bkd

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Or at least that's my current operating theory. It was interesting to see how various people at work reacted to the news. Some surprised, some not so much. Me? Not surprised...

Jadedly,

bkd

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