European MBA Diary

Saturday, January 28, 2006

Next!


I've been tagged! Here it goes! (sorry for the black humour photo.... :-) )

Four jobs I've had in my life:
- bar/restaurant piano player
- host of an industrial music radio show
- math tutor
- telecomms sales manager


Four movies I can watch over and over:
- Blade Runner
- Dune
- Lord of the Rings
- The Thin Red Line


Four places I have lived:
- Porto, Portugal (hometown!)
- Cascais, Portugal
- London (Hammersmith), UK
- London (St. Johns Wood), UK


Four TV shows I love to watch:
- Seinfeld
- X-files
- Black Adder
- Southpark


Four places I have been on vacation:
- Rome, Italy
- Mykonos, Greece
- Paris, France
- Isla Marguerita, Venezuela


Four Websites I visit daily:

- O Jogo (obviously ;-) )
- Google blog
- London Business School portal
- Pitchfork media


Four of my favourite dishes:
- Francesinha!! (visit Porto and find it out yourself)
- Prego no prato (steak, chips, fried egg)
- Bacalhau com natas (cod with cream)
- Seafood (any)

Four places I would rather be right now:
- Santorini
- New York
- Florence
- anywhere with my girlfriend

Four books I loved reading:
- iCon: Steve Jobs (Young & Simon)
- The Search (John Battelle)
- The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R.Tolkien)
- Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card)

Four bloggers I am tagging (this one is tough, probably everyone has been tagged already...):
- RusGirl
- Futureguru
- Karibu
- John Battelle (hey! maybe he reads my blog! :-)) )


Sunday, January 22, 2006

News cloud.... cool!

I first read about it at John Battelle's blog. How cool is that?? A news cloud made of the most popular news tags! The bigger the tag, the more popular the story. Now this is a nice website to use as home page. It's an easy and quick way to have an idea about what's happening out there, every morning.

By the way, for those interested on Google and trying to prepare for their coming presentation & summer internship applications, I really recommend Battelle's book "The Search". I'm still reading it but it's so addictive!


Wednesday, January 11, 2006

And here we are again

The holidays are over. No more 12-hours of sleep per day. Forget the Christmas presents and New Year's eve celebrations. Nice portuguese spas (I owe this one to my fantastic girlfriend... thanks!!), relaxing in jacuzzis, doing nothing, forgeting about b-school.... all belong to the past. Now is time to wake up again. Return to the chaos and hectic life of the past 3 months.

Xmas break did not start well though. I lost my flight to Porto because of a 30+ min delay on the ridiculous Stansted Express. I had to buy another flight ticket for the following day and man, was that expensive! The return to London was also not peaceful. The flight was delayed and instead of arriving home at 1am this sunday, I got there at 3am. That's Ryan Air... And I still had to write my Finance assignment to hand-it in before 10.30am on Monday!! I miss my holidays already...

Milkround is here. Lots of companies are making fancy presentations to lure this high-potential (eheh) crowd. Yesterday it started with Citigroup. I went there although I'm not interested in finance. I was just checking its corporate strategy division. Boring. Lunch was for free, though, and we got a free umbrella! :-) That's also a nice thing about the milkround: free food, free drinks, free goodies.

Today BCG is coming to town. Tomorrow will be McKinsey. Although all those big consulting and IB names are coming here, none has got me as anxious as the one who's coming next month: Google. Now that seems interesting!!

Tomorrow is the application deadline for Bain. I got my cover letter ready, as well as my CV. Let's see how it goes.

Classes have also started, of course. New core courses (Operations and Technology Management, Marketing and Decision & Risk Analysis) as well as an old one (Finance), now with a (ahem, I'm proud of this one) Portuguese professor, Joao Cocco. And he is great! According to the overall opinion (mine including) he is better than our previous italian professor. And he has a niiiice sense of humour :-)

Well, time to go back to my Marketing class.