If you have been always suspicious of chirstmas* or your cultural tradition has never celebrated it, here is something to celebrate: Yesterday was the shortest day of the year (in the northern hemisphere). From today on, daylight hours will progressively increase until the summer solstice. Happy solstice!
For me, a Mediterranean (latitude 41º) in London (latitude 51º), this fact is key, because daylight hours have been few and precious lately. I am truly looking forward longer days, I miss them!

Longer daylight hours! That is quite something to celebrate.

Happy solstice to all my readers!

If you have it, Enjoy your break!

——

* When you watch the 5 Retarded Online Christmas Videos at 10 Zen Monkeys you realize that, undeniably, there is something amiss in the way western countries celebrate chirstmas.

Public thank you to karlitos for showing me the way to Hannover Sq, a block away from Oxford Circus. The square is the Japanese epicenter of London. There is a couple of delightful japanese restaurant that pass the international quality test (most of the patrons are actually japanese).

But the best attraction is the japanese food store. I do not know my way around japanese cuisine enough, and most of items are labelled in japanese, but I can find the must-have azuki beans cakes and icecream, green tea icecream and high-quality japanese ramen noodles!

It might be cold in London, but noodle soup helps to go through the winter months.

Just in time to have a peaceful break: I am extremely pleased with my performance in the test. The result will provide the extra gram of motivation I need to do my finance homework before flying off for the break.

Again, I am still amazed at what sustained work can achieve at the end of the day. My final results are proof that it is better to do a little bit of work everyday than just a crazy sprint at the end.

It is not my intention to sound obvious, or maybe patronizing. I am just reflecting on my different approach on the MBA, compared to my approach when I was a university student. Now I am, not only more mature, but specially much more motivated and willing to do a continuous effort.

Excellent positive reinforcement for a much more healthy approach to exams, test and life than the one used ten years ago.

Thanks to life that I am not a teenager anymore!

Wow! I cannot believe a whole year has gone by. Yet it is true! A year ago I got the big news (admitted!) and my life perspective changed forever. If feels like a fastforwarding year!

Although the whole idea of MBA class of 2009 makes me feel uncomfortable (I am schocked because the 1st quarter is already gone), I want to congratulate all the admits on the first round. Great job!

Special congratulations to RusGirl (”too happy to think”). Persistence does pay off!

For those rejected and waitlisted, I am sorry, I really feel your pain! But please keep the perspective: most MBAers have been rejected somewhere along the process and that rejection is an inherent part of trying, and that if you are trying, you are still on the game. Keep striving!

Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all. — Dale Carnegie

PS: I am completely disconected of other applicant’s blog. Please leave a link if you are one.

They look very interesting, some unexpected and some very reasonable. You can download a podcast about the predictions. Here is the quick list:
Gartner issues predictions for 2007 and beyond - Business - News - ZDNet Asia

1. Through 2009, market share for the top 10 IT outsourcers will decline to 40 percent (from 43.5 percent now), equalling a revenue shift of US$5.4 billion.
2. Only one Asia/Pacific-based service provider will make the global top 20 through 2010.
3. Blogging and community contributors will peak in the first half of 2007.
4. By 2009, corporate social responsibility (CSR) will be a higher board- and executive-level priority than regulatory compliance. Regulation has become a key issue for government and the corporate world, with the aim of ensuring more-responsible behaviour.
5. By the end of 2007, 75 percent of enterprises will be infected with undetected, financially motivated, targeted malware that evaded their traditional perimeter and host defences.
6. Vista will be the last major release of Microsoft Windows. The next generation of operating environments will be more modular and will be updated incrementally.
7. By 2010, the average total cost of ownership (TCO) of new PCs will fall by 50 percent.
8. By 2010, 60 percent of the worldwide cellular population will be “trackable” via an emerging “follow-me internet”.
9. Through 2011, enterprises will waste US$100 billion buying the wrong networking technologies and services.
10. By 2008, nearly 50 percent of data centres worldwide will lack the necessary power and cooling capacity to support high-density equipment.

The interesting thing is… what will actually happen in a year? Will I drop my blogging collaboration (see #3)? Will really CSR become such a hot topic in the IT world? Is really Windows Vista going to be the last big Windows?

Comments are welcome!

PS: The card shown belongs to the traditional spanish cards used for playing in Spain (from Mus to Butifarra). More info at Wikipedia and at the manufacturer Heraclio Fournier (surprising broad range of    products!).

I have a full next 48h, because today at 5pm I will submit the Strategy exam and tomorrow at 2pm I have the Accounting final exam. Very cool stuff!

As cool as Accounting can sound, I still have plenty of social obligations to fulfill. It is my immense pleasure to give you a funny recount about my blogospheric social life!

First word of advice, forget about the blog and meet the people in person! That is how you can get to know the real person behind the blog! (Implicit assumption: People are way more than what they reflect in their blog. This assumption oftentimes holds true)

Then you can enjoy 4 bloggers in real life in 48h.

To start with, and this might come as a surprise, I have been sitting all this quarter with Karlitos by my right. In London Business School (as in most schools) we have fixed seating every quarter. This helps teachers (and students) to learn persons name. Yesterday we took economics seating together, he is a very smart and funny person, with very good and interesting insights in and off classes.

Later in the afternoon, I had coffee with Genie, which I met for the first time. I had a great conversation with her, I enjoyed myself a lot. She is as smart and perceptive as her blog suggests. Great conversations, is there anything better in life than that?

In the evening, I moved on to celebrate St. Nikolaus, a relevant x-mas day in most of Europe. Regarding St. Nicholas, I couldn’t stop laughing when, over lunch break, my dutch friend L. explained me how Sinterklaas arrives by steamboat from Spain (which is odd as he lives in a palace in Madrid - a city without a port!). But the best/worst part is how politically incorrect is the fact that his group of assistans are all black servants, or should I say slaves? And they are the ones that punish bad children. The whole setup is so racially incorrect!

In Spain we have figured it out better, we have three wise men, coming on Jan 6th, with plenty of gifts. Out of the three, there is one which is black, and he is, by far, the most loved one by children.

I was talking about St. Nikolaus celebration, which we enjoyed at angel angie’s penthouse apartment. We were planning to stay for only 30min or so, given the workload ahead. But the party was great, amazing, divine. In a word, awesome. Here is a representation of the event:

It was great to see so many nice people around, I got to meet with plenty of interesting friends, and at the end stayed until 10pm. I tried to leave early, but I kept bumping into irresistibly interestingly nice people. That is the best part of doing the MBA. The people and how to enjoy them. So I kept having interesting conversations. At the end, my beautiful companion made me realize that it was 10pm. Wow! Time had flown by like an arrow. Instead of 30min, we had stayed 3h. It was time to, regretfully, take off and go to sleep.

My 4th social blogger in 48h is going to be Tropical Tom Tvu. He is visiting the school, I have never met him in person, and after the serious tour and interviews, he is also going to attend Sundowners. I am looking forward to get his impression on the school. Sigh! Oh those stressful days of MBA applications! How cool they are long gone!

But before meeting with him, I’d better stop writing the blog, and I’d better start doing some Strategy.

The images one can find in Wikipedia

Moblog: Moblog is a blend of the words mobile and weblog. A mobile weblog, or moblog, consists of content posted to the Internet from a mobile or portable device, such as a cellular phone or PDA. Moblogs generally involve technology which allows publishing from a mobile device.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moblog

As you can see, I am working at installing the plugin for publishing pictures in a Wordpress blog directly from the cellphone (postie) . If I succeed, I will be posting more often pictures I take with my cellphone. Like the economist ad with Superman typography, and many other ones.

London and the MBA are full of surprises, I hope I can share a few of those with you through the cellphone.

In the meantime, this blog might experience minor technical difficulties (like blank posts, broken links to images, etc…). It will take me a couple of weeks of tweaking around.