There was no flippin way I was going to get all of my stuff into my relatively tiny Maxima so I had to pack up a lot of crap into boxes last week, to get them shipped off. In total, I packed up 4 boxes and my printer. Boxes mostly included old textbooks, which I have a lot of, winter clothes, and other clutter/junk. You know what I’m talking about - when everything’s tucked away in drawers and shelves you don’t notice, but once you have to start packing, you realize how much clutter you actually have. Slight hitch with the pickup, but the boxes were picked up on Saturday and I hope they’ve been shipped out by now. I have to call them up tomorrow to confirm.

Even with all those boxes, I still had a big suitcase, a small suitcase, several bags of miscellaneous stuff, my computer, and my chair. I barely crammed all of this stuff into my car while keeping enough space for my mom in the back. I almost had to ditch my leather chair because I couldn’t get the bottom detached, but I eventually did. Let’s just say packing and moving is always a big pain - one of my least favorite things to do.

Graduation - Cornell Class of 2006

I’ve always considered myself more Class of 2005 than 2006 because all my friends are 05 and we kind of “came up” together since freshman year. But 06 will do. I completely skipped Convocation. We had Martin Luther King Jr’s son (I think he’s Martin Luther King III) as the speaker. Cornell does Convocation separately, a day before Commencement, if you’re wondering. Didn’t have any interest. I was part of the “Jon Stewart for Convocation 06″ group on Facebook. Hunter Rawling’s speech during Commencement was pretty damn boring. He mostly talked about famous Cornell professors, writers, and what not - I kind of phased out.

And wow, was it a hot day or what. It was a blazing 85 degrees and I forgot sunscreen so I tanned my face and neck like crazy. It took me a year to recover from all the tanning in Miami during Spring Break last year and now my face is so tan again. Nuts and cabbages!

THE MOST ASKED QUESTION: “So what are you doing after graduation?”

But yea, so now I’m out of college. I’m an alum now. In the real world. Roughin it. Everyone’s question is always what are you doing after college? Do you have a job? No, I don’t have a job. I started my own business. Almost everyone I’ve told this to had the reaction of like “oh, wow” “good for you” or some similar thing. It’s not that glamorous. Considering I’m trying to build a new business from scratch and have no real revenue (yet), it’s not that dissimilar from being unemployed. There are the detractors that say I’ve graduated and have nothing to show for it. What I say and what will actually happen are too different, that I’m detached from reality.

My Response: Okay. If you don’t know by now, criticism is my fuel. The very fact you’re telling me I can’t do something motivates me so much to find a way to prove you wrong. Even if I fail now, it’s still a learning experience and I’ll still find a way to one-up you. I have a lot innate determination and competitiveness. What drives this is simple: I have to be better than you or else I’ll have to work at it until I actually am better than you. Like in basketball. Sometimes I’m on the losing team and I can get pretty ticked off when teammates aren’t putting in the effort. It’s recreational, but I always play to win. Losing is well, for losers.

The other day I was in my human resources class and I was completely spaced out. The professor was talking and I was just in my little own daydream. Actually I wasn’t even really thinking about anything. I was literally just sitting there in a daze pretending to pay attention. So we often have these discussion questions in class where we work with the person we’re sitting next to. After that the professor usually calls on people. Apparently, he called on my group (my friend and I). I had no idea because I was so spaced out. I didn’t even work on the discussion question. I was just kind of looking around and was wondering why the professor was staring right at me. Luckily after a few awkward moments, my friend spoke up. She told me the prof had called on us and she thought I was going to answer. Haha, oh well.

Lately I’ve been getting into the (bad) habit of staying up later than usual and have missed a few sessions of the same class I described above. What sucks is that if anyone else is absent the professor might not even notice it. BUT when I’m absent it’s noticeable, because I’m the ONLY Asian guy in the class. Now that sucks.

Besides school assignments, I have about 4 different web projects in the pipeline. Obviously first and foremost is my web design and development business. I’m a bit frustrated with that at the moment because I am waiting on merchant account approval, resulting in unexpected delays. Although the site is up, I hope to really “go live” in 2 weeks maximum. At the moment, I’m also developing a pretty targeted direct mail campaign.

I’m also redeveloping my Stuffbox website. It’s been sitting idly for about a year, although traffic has increased steadily. The current version in development is a vast improvement over the previous version and my goal is to generate ad revenue. The new site takes advantage of a lot of “Web 2.0″ features. The Stuffbox can attract a lot of eyeballs if done right and this means lucrative ad dollars especially since it has a fairly targeted visitor demographic.

Other than that, I have two more projects still in basic concept development/research stages. So when I’m not at class, doing assignments, or at the gym, I’m working on these projects. Of course I still make time for leisure and entertainment but much less so, now that I’m about to graduate. I mean, my goal is to be comfortably self employed, not unemployed after graduation.

It should be an easy semester. Again I set it up so that I don’t have classes on Friday. I mean once you’ve had Friday off, you can’t go back!

P.S. I just wanted to mention to those people that I know: most of the time I won’t pick up calls from numbers I don’t recognize. Calls that have the number blocked will guarantee I won’t pick up. So let me know if you have a new number. And also, DO NOT send me text messages. Without a Verizon Wireless text message plan, those little bastards cost 10 cents per message!

Over Winter Break, I’m going to basically relax, move my venture closer towards a full launch, and I’m also going to work on my other website (The StuffBox). Basically I’m redeveloping that site to build more traffic and start generating ad revenue. I’ll also be doing some reading, I’m ordering a couple of books - lately I’ve been getting into those business educational/motivational/self-help type of books. They’re pretty interesting to read and provide insightful yet practical information.

I decided that I should set a launch date. The website will launch on February 7, 2006!

My attitude is just that as long as I know I’ve gained knowledge I don’t care about grades. My experience is that I am horrible at college test-taking. Really. And I can’t apply myself when I don’t feel motivated to. I only do well in classes that I’ve actually applied myself in or had some sort of deeper interest. I was great at test-taking in high school because everything is hand-fed to you and I was able to simply memorize everything with ease. In college I’ve become kind of jaded because I feel there are fundamental flaws in the way material is taught and tested. For example, for my personal finance class, the professor is actually making us memorize a bunch of formulas for the exam. In real life, reference material is readily available - who the hell memorizes that crap? So why shouldn’t we get a formula sheet? The purpose should be to learn when/how to apply the formulas, not to make sure we have them memorized. It really is ridiculous.

So right now I’m basically reading a LOT of material that I am going to remember for a day and will forget. In short, I’m studying but in the end, I don’t really care whether I do well as long as I pass the course. I would very much prefer each class had a series of short papers than exams. Because then you’re actively seeking out information and thinking critically about it which I think is the intrinsic motivation required for meaningful learning.

EDIT: I’m pulling an all-nighter to study for this final and just spent the last hour reading celebrity gossip. I can’t help but laugh at that. And I have no problem pulling this all-nighter because my internal clock is all messed up, but that’s another story.

I’m going to try and describe everything so specific details are not identifiable. So I’m taking this class, it’s not business related, I’m only taking it for fun. But basically we have this final group project. The groups are very large so we’ve subdivided into smaller groups to work on each section of the report. Naturally, I’m in the marketing group. Well there’s this other guy, I’ll call him Bob, he’s also an AEM major. So a few weeks ago when the group was brainstorming ideas, he kept suggesting these utterly ridiculous and sometimes offensive ideas. I don’t know if he thought he was funny or what but all I was thinking was “this guy’s a douchebag.”

Then when our mini-group has to start coming up with ideas and write the marketing section, Bob sends an email saying - “Hey I’m an AEM major, I don’t mind doing some made-up analysis stuff, like fake graphs type stuff.” Keep in mind I’m not paraphrasing or summarizing in any way, I’m quoting verbatim.

I’m just thinking.. WTF??? What do you mean by fake analysis stuff? Fake graphs? You had to precede this by indicating you’re an AEM major? As if being an AEM major has given you expertise in doing this kind of thing? I mean wow, way to go for representing AEM! Dumbass!

But it seems like a lot of the teams my team is competing against are making irrational decisions. I’d like to see how they’re going to justify their decisions in their memos. It seems like their only response is to price lower and lower. Some are pricing very close to marginal cost even though capacity costs are extremely high. It makes no sense because they’re never going to recoup their costs and we have made no indication that we want a price war. They think by pricing low, they can force us out. But we’re in markets with relatively low capacity costs! We’re not going to just pick up and leave once we’ve put up the entry costs!

But it sort of works out because a lot of these firms are building way too much capacity and pricing way too low. That means they’re all in the red and paying out interest on their debt every period. Even if my firm earns relatively low profits on top of our starting cash ($1,000,000) we’d probably earn more than most of the teams.

AEM 419 - Strategic Thinking
Although some of the material can get quite boring at times, other topics are really interesting in their applications in real world situations. Plus, the professor is a pretty good teacher - I didn’t even buy the textbook and I understand the material. All you really need to do is attend lectures and read the handouts.

AEM 424 - Management Strategy
I can only characterize the substance of this class as “thin.” It’s a capstone class required of seniors but it just goes over topics that we’ve learned in other classes in a very light manner. I don’t feel like we’ve gone over that much material up till now. And the problem sets involve math that the professor doesn’t really go over in class. His answer is “see the TA at office hours if you don’t understand.” Uhm.. OK, why am I even taking the class then?!

EAS 109 - Dinosaurs
One of the biggest disappointments ever. I expected this to be a fun survey course on dinosaurs but instead it has been INCREDIBLY boring and thus far, it has not really covered dinosaurs but instead evolution of fish, sediments, fossils, and other related crap. Fellow Cornellians, do NOT take this course unless you need a 1 credit class to finish off your physical science requirements (like I do).

FOOD 101 - Introduction to Food Science
This class is fairly interesting. You learn a lot of information about food research, production, etc. That’s about all I have to say about it - it’s a decent course barring the fact that it’s located at a rather far building on campus.

HD 220 - The Human Brain
This class is VERY BORING. It puts me to sleep every time without fail. I could’ve had a good night’s sleep. I can conciously resist dozing off. I can check out the abundant amount of girls in the class. Doesn’t matter - I ALWAYS fall asleep. Additionally, the lecture material is taken almost entirely from the textbook, eliminating the need to even attend lecture. I’ve only attended the first 2 weeks of this class.

HADM 120 - Personal Financial Management
For some reason, this course has also turned out to be incredibly boring, perhaps due to the way the instructor presents the material (she’s actually an accountant, not a professor). Most of it is pretty common sense stuff but once in a while I do learn things I didn’t know. But for the most part, the lectures are very boring, so I’ve resorted to simply picking up the handouts and reading the textbook.

CONCLUSION? This semester isn’t really that great besides the fact that I have a pretty light course load and have a lot of free time to devote to other endeavors.

I’m interested in marketing, competitive strategy, branding, technology, and the Internet. Consulting? Maybe. Finance, crunching numbers? No. Definitely no. Wearing a suit everyday? NO. I like improving things, making things work better. If only I were ingenious enough to just look at the world around me and come up with some brilliant idea to fill some need. If only.

So I have one more semester before I graduate. People say time flies and before you know it, you’re graduating but I feel like I’ve been in college for my whole life or something. For my peers who are still wondering why I’m still in school, it’s not because I’m retarded. I took a semester off and then I transferred from Computer Science to Business.

I’m just sleepy and babbling for no reason. Good night.

And just because I feel like it, here’s a huge spoiler for the movie Saw: the killer is the supposedly dead guy in the middle of the room. He gets up at the end. Suckers. Saw 2 is coming!