Do Not Disturb

Ok, so I'm now back in Oxford and back to the grind - for the last time on this course I hope. We're doing our writeup of our Summer Consulting Project which is due on Friday so it's heads down and hands chained to the keyboard. :(

I'll come up for air on Friday then it's party time!!

A week in pictures

plus some others that I didn't get a chance to upload before...

Mall, California style...


You never know what you will find around the corner


Salsa fiesta


Look who we met!


Groovy baby


Take three MBA's...


Watch out!!


Serious Business


King of the Barrel


Relaxing after a hard day...


The way home

Playing with the band

No I haven't decided to abandon the world of business and start a new life as a rocker! Though it would be fun :) No, last night I went to hear a gig by Great Teacher, some friends of my flatmate who have a band. It was in a laundromat slash cafe slash bar called Brainwash. A bit random, but pretty cool. The band was awesome, and the number that I sang with them caused quite a ruckus in the cafe! (only kidding). Here's me and the band...

A week too early

It appears that I was a week too early in my complaint about the lack of promised free wireless internet at the Mountain View Caltrain station. Google has today launched its free service to the public.

Guess what I'll be checking out tomorrow...

The halfway point...

... of my SCP came and went without any fanfare, or even a whimper. I can't believe that we've got less than two weeks to finish our research, make our recommendations, do lots of presentations then fly back to Oxford to do our writeup and hand it in. Phew! The time has flown by!

Celebrations
I have had news that I've passed all my Trinity exams, yeah! I only have my SCP to hand in and a final exam to pass and it will be all over, I will have completed my Oxford MBA. Living proof that there is a God :)

I shall miss it all!

Picture Search?

I found an interesting little company which allows you to search the web for pictures. I put my name in the search box and guess what? It returned pictures of me! Go on, see if you're on the internet...

Perhaps pictures are the way forward? or is it specialised search?

Free wireless?

So, after all the hype from Google about the free wireless internet access that they are going to provide to the citizens of Mountain View, I'm here, sitting in the Mountain View Caltrain station and... nothing. My Yahoo! laptop is equiped with state-of-the-art wireless network communication devices and although it picks up a number of wireless networks in the area, they are all secured, i.e. ordinary plebs cannot use them without an access key.

So much for the first step towards the world of ubiquitous computing! Or is it? How many of you have a laptop that connects to the internet? - all I imagine. How about a phone that can access the web? - quite a few. Next, what about surfing the net through your TV? - maybe not all but I bet everyone could imagine it. Now wouldn't it be nice if your laptop spoke to your TV and your phone and PDA were automatically kept in sync with each other? What if you had one address book that you kept regardless of device that was always in sync? Bliss! Welcome to the world of persistent or ubiquitous computing where all your devices are connected to each other in a seemless way in a giant, global network that isn't controlled by anyone.

Interesting? It could be the future...

Week two

Well, my second week in sunny California started with a trip to the annual Yahoo! summer picnic held this year at Blackberry Farm. It was fun, the food was good, the weather was fantastic, however the abundance of kids did make you feel that the focus was on them and not you.

Home sweet home
My next adventure was to move to my new home in Menlo Park where I'll be spending the rest of my time here. It's a lovely 3 bedroom house shared with two fabulous girls, one of whom immediately invited me out for dinner with some of her friends.


We are planning a house meal next wednesday, they both love to cook - I'm so lucky! I've offered to contribute a nice bottle of wine and my prowess at packing the dishwasher :)


Giants
So, in appreciation of the hard work that the interns in the group I'm working with have done (all of one week for me), we were invited to be entertained in the "Diamond Suite" at the home stadium of the San Francisco Giants. Not having any prior knowledge of baseball apart from playing it a few times in high school, I said sure.


We were fortunate to have the best seats in the house, well according to Dan, the guy in the picture who was kindly explaining the game to me. Yahoo! must like us :)

Work, work and more work
There was plenty of that going on, mostly in meeting rooms named after Vegas nightclubs and some of it was in our cubes, where we're identified by our Yahoo! star.


Swag
The week ended with an Intern product fair where representatives from all the different 'properties' within Yahoo! came to demo their stuff, give the interns freebies and try to nab them for jobs. I've now got a Yahoo! baseball cap, laptop light, deck of cards, swiss army knife, keyrings, sports bottle plus numerous t-shirts, pens and stickers and a copy of "Bridget Jones' Diary" (why?). It will be hard to forget my time here.