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Imagine seeing this man every day for a month straight.  Because that’s what my roommate is about to do.

Powered on by the awful reality of unemployment, Pete has taken upon himself a challenge that few man have dared tried, and almost certainly none have completed.  He is going to watch a different Nicolas Cage movie every day for the entire month of May.

I don’t have the exact schedule with me because it’s upstairs and I’m too tired/lazy to go get it, but I know that it only has 11-12 movies that we either own, can borrow, or can stream on the XBox, so the rest of the month is an operations planning fiasco of mailing out Netflix DVDs and hoping for the best.  I expect the schedule to change or Blockbuster to be hit up at least 4 times during this challenge.

I can say with certainty that the first movie will be Knowing, Cage’s latest movie set for release tomorrow.

God speed Pete.

If I get another email from the career services department about internship opportunities in supply chain or operations positions I’m going to completely write them off for any potential help.  I don’t know how many times I have to talk to my advisor about how the reason I came back to school was to get out of that field, but she doesn’t seem to want to listen.

I understand that they’re nervous because 85% of the class has internships right now and I’m not one of them, but I’ve turned down interviews and job offers thus far because I know what I want to do and that isn’t anything close to it.  I settled for a job once, and it sucked the life out of me for 2 years.  I’m not doing it again.  Besides, Emory’s only at like 50% so who cares.

On a good note, I fly up to New York next week to interview with a company that I really want to work for.  They’re a startup with no internships posted, so I kinda just blind emailed them a resume with a cover letter explaining that I really liked what they were doing and would be interested in working with them this summer.  Hopefully it all goes well and I can land something awesome up there for the summer.

Wow, somehow in all of the studying and paper writing I forgot to congratulate fellow MBA classmate Darryl Richard on getting drafted by the New England Patriots on Sunday.

Some excerpts from nfl.com

Pick Analysis: Richard is a good leverage guy who can hold up against double teams. He can bull rush and is very smart. He fits well into the wave rush and can spell the Patriots’ defensive linemen as the game goes on. But really, how many DTs do the Pats need? That’s three so far in the draft.

Overview
A three-year starter who isn’t as flashy as the other Georgia Tech senior defensive linemen, but ACC coaches named him second-team all-conference with 10 tackles for loss and four sacks in 2008. Given the desperate need for linemen in the NFL, Richard’s size, strength and intelligence up front will be coveted. Redshirted his second season (2005) due to reconstructive surgery on his right knee after coming on strong as a true freshman starter.

Now it’ll be interesting to see if he gets included in the US News starting salary statistic for an MBA degree out of Georgia Tech next year.

Lots has been written recently on some of the sites I frequent about what’s going right and wrong in the education systems of today.  Some of the stuff has good explanations and recommendations, some of it is pretty bad.

Today I was linked to this post by Dave Pollard called An Unschooling Manifesto.  I’ll be fair in pointing out here that I’ve never heard about unschooling before today so please forgive me for any misinterpretations, but it appears on the surface to basically be the total lack of a structured educational program.  The child is free to go about learning whatever they want, whenever they want, however they want to.

I’m not sure how I feel about this on the whole, but I can see how it may be useful for a minority of students who are extremely smart and/or motivated, and who have some holdback from being able to get the most out of school.  For the author of that post, it’s probably a mixture of his “[finding] school increasingly traumatic” as a child and being of the mindset that “human civilization is in its last century.”  Now, I know as well as he must have when he linked the page with these statements in the beginning of his post that this would color the way I viewed his ideas, but I tried my best to take the piece for its intended purpose and learn what I could.

However, this part really turned me off:

Many people argue that unschooling will only work for the very brightest and most self-disciplined children. On the contrary, I think we are all perfectly suited to unschooling until the school system begins to beat the love of learning, the ability to self-manage, curiosity, imagination and critical thinking out of us. By the time we have reached the third grade it becomes much more difficult, and my success in unschooling in twelfth grade was, I will agree, due to my above-average intelligence and initiative — most of my intellectually-crippled peers just couldn’t manage by that time without the strictures they’d become accustomed to. They had long ago lost the desire to learn, and to think for themselves.

I disagree wholeheartedly with this.  Having seen so many people from all walks of life and education systems at all levels of my own schooling, the fact is that not everyone is interested in learning.  Especially since this would require extremely active parents, for all but the most dedicated learners out there, and parental apathy is the one thing that really holds back the children who need education reform the most.

I wish it wasn’t true, but this is no different than religious people who argue that the only reason everyone is not a member of their church is because they haven’t been able to hear “The Message” yet, or that they’ve been poisoned by the environment they grew up in.

However, there are some interesting ideas when you dive down into the heart of the post and I really do want to see education become more affordable and effective, so hopefully there is some way to integrate some kind of  reforms based around what Pollard argues for.

Notice there was no “again” in the title of this post.  I’ve never been good, but about 4-5 years ago I could play in the low-mid 90′s pretty consistently.  Even summer of 2005 I was putting up 92′s on my home course despite not playing much anymore.

Well, I’m pretty much just “bad” now thanks to a number of factors.  This surprises people who see me play because I have a good swing and you would think that would mean I could fight my way around a course.  Unfortunately for me golf is a mental sport, and I haven’t played anywhere near enough to have the trust in my game to confidently swing every time.  That leads to many a fat iron shot or duffed chip, two things that are pretty much the bane of my golfing existence.

However, I’ve played maybe a half dozen times in the last 2 months and I’m ready to give this whole golf thing another go.  I got some new shoes for the first time in 6 years and bought a driver that at least gets me in to the last decade technology-wise, so I’ve got money invested at this point.

We had a scramble tournament yesterday for the MBA program, and while my team came in last (way to put 3 30′s and a brand new player in one group together Brian) I was hitting the ball a lot better on the first 9 thanks to some work at the range earlier in the day.  Of course that also meant I started to get tired at about 13 and my swing just fell apart for the rest of the round.  Oh well, it was fun and I learned that I never want to play Bobby Jones again, so that’s gotta be worth something.

But yeah, the plan now is to find some course near me in Atlanta with a chipping/putting green so I can at least get that part of my game reasonably solid since it’s probably costing me 10-12 shots per round right now.  Then maybe I can get Pete to show me how to hit a shot correctly.

French women are Europe’s thinnest

The report by France’s National Institute of Demographic Studies compared body mass indexes in western Europe and found French women had the lowest average body mass index, at 23.2. British women had the highest average at 26.2, which was above the normal range considered healthy: 18.5 – 24.9.

And they include a photo of the gorgeous Audrey Tautou just to sell it fully

New US News rankings are out for 2009.  Guess who moved up 7 spots and is now tied with that $40k school down the street?  You know, the one who prides themselves on business education.

Indiana’s in the picture too as a not-so-subtle jab at the Hoosier state.  At least the basketball program is still strong!  Oh wait…

Since I didn’t put anything up last week, this set of links goes back a little further than just a week.  Also, they have a much more Atlanta flavor to them since there were more good Atlanta stories.

Arthur Blank in Atlanta, Estate of the Day (The Luxist)
Uncle Artie’s house over in Buckhead is up for sale for a surprisingly low cost of only $8.9 million.  I kinda figured that he may me balling out a little harder than that, but I guess when you actually own an NFL team you don’t feel the need to splash your money around on other stuff.  No one is wondering whether you’re THAT rich.

Behind the Scenes of U.S. vs T&T (The Offside Rules)
Highlight video from the US Soccer Federation for the game we all went up to Nashville for about 3 weeks ago.  Even if you don’t want to watch the whole thing, at least go to about 5:30 and give it a watch.

Hockey Players Take a Stand Against Their Awful Commercials (Deadspin)
Funny ad from the Atlanta Thrashers telling hockey players to stop making bad commercials.  Specifically calling out Alex Ovechkin and promoting a site www.ucantact.com, which redirects you to the Thrashers homepage.

Finally, two cool things from Gizmodo that I want.

Staircase/slide combo and a clock that doesn’t require you to reset it for daylight savings, just tip it over.

The last two nights have been a ton of fun.  Thursday night the MBA program had it’s annual Crawfish Boil and about 250 students and alumni showed up to eat some crawfish, some jambalaya, and drink some beer.  It was a really great time and I won a signed Danny Hall baseball at the raffle, so here’s hoping he doesn’t get fired anytime soon.

Last night was the spring banquet.  Much classier than eating crawfish, this involved renting out a section of Park Tavern, getting dressed up and then drinking just enough so that everyone feels like showing off their dance skills.

Thankfully today there’s nothing I need to do and plenty of sports on, so I can just lay around and try to recover.

Gizmodo writers have been doing a little series recently talking about their first albums.

What was Dan Nosowitz’s?  Let’s Face It.

Now, I’m not going to sit around here and try to justify my Bosstone fandom, but if you know me, you know that’s pretty much exactly how I roll.  So congratulations Dan, you win the awesome of the week award.

For the record, my first CD was Meatloaf – Bat Out of Hell II, given to me by my dad.  Not new mind you, just given to me after we were listening to it in his car one day.  I know I probably had a few tapes before then, but God only knows what those were.  As for the first CD I bought, that would probably either be Inner Circle – Bad Boys, or the single for Warren G – Regulate.

By the way, the wikipedia entry explaining the plot to Regulate may be one of the funniest (and whitest) things ever written.

The song tells a story in which Warren G., while looking for some “skirts” (women), is mugged in Long Beach, California. Nate Dogg is trying to find Warren G. at the same time, and when he finds that Warren G. is getting mugged, he kills the people mugging him. The two then look for women together, whom they eventually find.

So that’s my story.  Not nearly as good as Mike’s first CD which was either the Pulp Fiction soundtrack or The Fugees – The Score.