All booked

I spent the better part of today booking several airplane tickets.  Here are the flights that I’m going to be getting on:

April 15th – SFO to Madrid

May 17th – Santiago (Spain) to Barcelona

June 6th – Madrid to SFO

That’s a lot of flying.  It almost seems like too much time to be away but if it is, then at least I know I won’t want to keep traveling some more when I get back   I’m getting the itch to start working again, more than anything to just be around people.  I’m learning that being by myself the entire day is not the most exciting thing and I don’t think I could have a job where I worked from home full time.  So while I’m unemployed I’m meeting people for lunch every day to give me some of that human interaction.

And today, I had lunch with my friend Emily at the Grove in Pac Heights.  She started an after school tutoring / educational program for children living in public housing back in February.  She’s got some crazy stories but she still loves what she’s doing and that’s great.  I’m trying to get her to help me find some volunteering opps here in the city as she is tied in to that whole network.  But, not till after I get back.

Ok, off to go look at bus schedules to take me from the Madrid airport to Pamplona to Roncesvalles to St Jean Port de Pied…yeah try seeing how well Expedia helps you out with that one.

Wow, it’s been a while

I stopped writing everyday when I got to Philadelphia as my friend Will didn’t have wifi in his apartment and the thought of sitting at his desk and blogging was revolting.  Ok it wasn’t that bad but I wasn’t feeling it, if you know what I mean. That all seems like a long time ago.  Fast forward almost three weeks to today.  I guess time flies even if you’re not working.  I’ve been keeping busy with looking into business schools and starting to prepare for the GMAT and talking to lots of people about their business school experience.  What I’ve learned is this: getting an MBA is not a ticket to a great job; you need to know what you want to do with the MBA before you get to business school, and probably before you write your business school essays.  What got me thinking about business school was a conversation I was having with my friend Joel in New York.  He is studying for the CFA exam and was showing me some of the questions that you get asked, such as ‘company A wants to buy a $500,000 heavy duty saw that will depreciate over 10 years and blah blah blah…is it a good investment?’  This is interesting stuff to me!  Sounds crazy probably but I have no idea how you would do that, how you put business decisions into scientific terms and formulas. In my last position at Xythos I was basically a general manager of a new business we started.  Then is when I could have really used an MBA.  I wrote a business plan, did revenue forecasting, worked on a marketing plan…all of this sort of done sans much experience and a little guidance from others.  It was interesting and I would do something like that again but only after I felt more confident in my abilities to make it successful. Another thing that has changed since I last posted is…are you ready for this…my browser!  That’s right.  I’m now on Safari 3.0.  I have completely abandoned Firefox as it not only made my computer slower than was even bearable (I would click a tab, and literally 5 seconds later, the selected tab would appear), but the increased cpu cycles was making my computer a portable microwave.  I’m pretty sure I could have set it on a package of Lean Cuisine and it would have been ready to eat in 3 minutes.  I bet Firefox doesn’t do a lot of testing with G4 processors (why would they?  they’re old) but Apple obviously would be more incented to do so.  Or would they?  Maybe if Safari didn’t work well either I would have had to go and buy a Macbook.  Shhhhhh….