Brief break: News@Sloan about bloggers
I'll take a brief break from my thesis writing to post this. It's not
quite feverish, but results are coming together nicely, so I think I
can afford the time for write some non-research-grade musings.
This week's News@Sloan is now available, and the cover/main story is
about MIT bloggers. They mispelled my last name (it's not Shapiro,
it's Shapira: the former is the more common spelling outside Israel,
the latter is the more common spelling in Israel, where I was born and
raised), but it's a cool story otherwise. It has pictures of Robbie,
Ilana, Alli and myself, and a couple of other bloggers as well.
Classes have been a breeze, thankfully. Our presentation about
open-source business models at last week's Software Business course
was awesome: a bunch of people in the class have expressed their
thanks in private for including a lot of non-trivial and recent
developments in the field, and asked for a copy of the presentation
for their private records. It's always a nice compliment when
classmates like your stuff: in some ways it's even better than the
professor liking it (although Cusumano did).
Project Management has been OK: a cool guest speaker or two, nice TAs.
In one of my homeworks, I commented that I don't think the particular
approach we were using (DSM in that instance) was all that effective
or efficient: a TA circled that part and said "Is your thesis trying
to disprove DSM?" (Of course, disproving DSM is unnecessary, as most
of the real world has already voted with its feet, by running quickly
away...)
System Architecture is not worth wasting any more time or space than
this sentence. Software Engineering Concepts has been OK: last week's
coverage of testing theory issues was actually cool. TechEnv has been
OK as well, but I haven't been attending: it's a good thing I didn't
take it for credit.
The open-source business conference (OSBC) was interesting: a little
underwhelming, but then again due to the thesis writing constraints, I
was only able to attend the first half day of the conference. I'll
have a lot more to blog about that shortly. Matt Asay's writings have
been interesting. The best part about that conference was the nice
dinners: at Stefano's, with Geir, Sanjiva, Murugan, and Susie, and at
Le Soir with Mark.
Alli's brother Shaun has been in town with his girlfriend Whitney.
They're both awesome, and I wish I had the time to go clubbing with
them every night ;)
But mostly, it's been thesis writing. I'm in the home stretch now.
More frequent and detailed class ranting and raving will resume in a
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