Twelve months later

It's been a strange sort of year, 2007.

I was at a crossroads last Dec 31, having realised I didn't want to be a solo marketer any longer but with the alternative (being an outsourced marketing department and recruiting a team) not looking any better.

A month in the desert the previous summer had reconnected me with the planet, but Q3/4 were horrendous as a result. A single full month away in five years had decimated a great roster. I spent Dec 31, 2006 wondering what I'd be in a year's time. Off adventuring for the last time? Working overseas again? Dead drunk on the London streets?

What I never thought, though, was that it'd involve becoming a University student.

But here I am: living on campus at Warwick University a few minutes from the gleaming white geometry of the business school. And just three months outside the madness of London has made everything clear again. I now know what I want to do next.

Here are my goals for 2008:

To rejoin a team. Being solo works when you have no commitments, but when you're selling your time it's hard to make year-on-year upticks to your bottom line, and I'm not getting any younger. So I want fresh resources to leverage: people, technology, capital, in order to make a bigger difference. And that only happens in organisations. So the lone wolf has to rejoin a pack.

To get international again. It's seven years since my work took me outside Europe; side trips to Asia and Africa and America have been just that: holidays. However pleasant having clients in Paris / London / Madrid may be, I miss the business travel that marked my calendar for my first working decade. So whatever I work on next, it'll have to be something that works across borders.

To reconnect with technology. Working with consultancies is great, but to really see how business and markets interact you've got to understand the technologies: why Ajax is exciting (hint: it enables Web 2.0) why UDWDM is a p-shift (hint: it steps up to mass broadband) and why the iPod has nothing to do with selling hardware (hint: it's about control of media distribution.) So I need to re-involve myself in TMT, which in the last year - without a single digital agency as a client - I've missed.

To play strategically. I'm sick of clients whining about my day rate; whatever I earn in my next role will be related to what I do for the business, not what I can squeeze out of their marketing budget. If I want six figures and an option on 1%, I'd better be able to demonstrate additional turnover attributable to my actions. And with the stuff I'm learning on the Warwick MBA, I'll be able to do it.

And of course, sluicing into all that is a more basic goal: to be a better person. To be less cynical. To network with people more, even useless ones. To tolerate fools more gladly. To gather points of view before taking one. To chase material success less. To listen and understand rather than dismiss and judge.

It'll be hard. But - with five new course folders on the shelf, with titles from Corporate Finance to Modelling & Analysis - I'm in the best place to start from.

Happy New Year!

It's going to get HOW cold?!!!

Minus 17? MINUS 17 DEGREES C? My word, it's going to get cold. Yes, that's the weather forecast: a New Year cold snap, with temperatures falling to seventeen degrees below zero. Dear me.

The Daily Madelaine

I'm not sure if I've ever seen a copy of The Daily Express without Madelaine McCann on the front page.

Of course, the Daily Express could be worthily trying to keep hope alive, by selflessly keeping her in the public consciousness.

Or - and far more likely - it's more more in common with Diana and the Daily Mail, or Keeley with the 'Sun', or ... Jade with 'Heat' magazine. Using boobs or celebrity to sell tabloids; well, that's okay. But a little girl? Worse, one who's almost certainly dead?

Sense of doubt

What if - having just decided you're finally going to take life seriously - you realised two seconds later that life actually is a joke?

Bhutto dies, and Pakistan with her

Damn. Benazir Bhutto's dead.

I liked Bhutto. A Kennedy for the subcontinent, and twice as tragic. The best-known, the most politically statesmanlike, certainly the hottest of South Asia's public servants (there was a time: Google for pics of her at 30.) Father, both brothers, and I believe several other family and friends murdered around her, yet even in exile she stood tall, bravely espousing democracy while retaining her values.

Yes, like any subcontinental politician, she was corrupt: it's the only way to get into any position where you can exert influence over there. The best thing you can hope for in south Asia is that your guy is less corrupt that the alternative. At least Benazir believed in something beyond her own prosperity.

The next month will decide far more than Pakistan's next leader: it'll decide whether or not Pakistan continues to exist as a nation. Musharref could fall, and the Taliban could make a move, chopping out half Pakistan's border at a stroke. Mush could continue cracking down, losing influence at home until he's just another dictator (rather than, as of now, a slightly different kind of dictator.) Either way, Pakistan's best shot at convincing the West it's different is finished. (And no, I don't think Mush was behind it; they may have been his supporters, but Mush is no Islamic Fundie. People who don't think elections are a good idea won't support your rigged elections!)

And the West losing an ally?! Must admit I've never understood the 'allies' thing. Our 'greatest allies' are Saudi Arabia and Pakistan? One country with an underclass of badly-educated young males who staffed the 911 attacks, the other ruled by a mad uncle intent on keeping his military stripes AND political posts? In both of them, the biggest debate in education is about whether Koranic studies should take up most of the curriculum or all of it.

Hey, Gordon (I long ago gave up on W) They're entitled to their independent views on the world, but remember: these people are not our friends! Respect them as such, and honour their deeply-felt nonviolent opinions, but they're not our friends. Stop treating them as such.

And Pakistan public - I know you're upset, but next time something like this happens, could you please handle the coffin a bit more carefully? It was tilting at 30 degrees with a loose lid while the massed crowds were shipping her body out, and there was a serious risk of a corpse resembling a discarded Saturday night kebab tipping out onto the dusty sidewalk. Remember, folks: dismembered is never a good look.

Hello Kitty discovers the male demographic

Hello Kitty is getting a rugged, macho look? That's slightly preferable to the orally challenged feline displaying her knickers, though I'm not sure how long the queues will be for masculine-themed Hello Kitty merchandise - even in Japan.

Six injured by exploding fondue set

Every so often, I see a news story that reflects how I think I'm going to check out. I mean, I'm perfectly suited to die a truly ridiculous death: if it's in a car crash it'll be taking a fairground dodgem onto the M25 or something, or if it's a hunting accident it'll happen to me the day I thought a hat with antlers was the right thing to wear. I live in mortal terror of one day being listed in 'The Darwin Awards'; my tombstone will read:

"Here lies Chris Worth. He Died as he Lived - in Utter Confusion."

But - an exploding fondue set? What the hell's that all about? Nobody in London's had a fondue since 1978. They got away with injuries, but they doubtless deserved to die, for disservices to cuisine. And there, but for a fit of retro pique, go I. Shiver.

I hate tissues

I've never seen the point of tissues.

I mean, okay, I can see what tissues are supposed to do: you blow your nose on them. But are the flimsy scraps of barely-there gossamer you find in boxes of Kleenex really 'fit for purpose'? They're so delicate! You'd think a minimum spec for a tissue would be that it survives one blow, but no: today's tissues fall apart at the slightest sneeze, leaving your hands to do most of the nasally-focussed mopping-up operations. Tissues suck.

Kitchen roll is where it's at. Stronger, designed for wiping up industrial-scale spills and scrubbing stains - THAT'S what you need to combat today's sniffles season. They don't break up in action, and you can even stuff them in a pocket and use them again if necessary. Kitchen roll is the perfect halfway house between the fragility of tissues and the toxic waste dump of a handkerchief.

I've got two boxes of tissues in my room, and I haven't opened either yet. Tissues just don't work for me.

(Reading this blog again: I MUST be bored to write crap like this. Time to start on my Corp Finance pre-reading, methinks.)

This is really boring

3.30pm and I'm ready for dinner. Dear me, living on a deserted university campus is worse than spooky; it's BORING.

I mean, I should be appreciating a few days of doing my own thing, catching up with consulting work (gotta pay those tuition fees somehow) in the peace and quiet. But somehow I can't settle properly. Normally I enjoy being alone, but 'alone' to a Londoner means the anonymity of the city, being alone in a crowd, not alone because there's nobody else about.

Let's see: I've had all the baths and showers one can usefully have in an afternoon, checked email more times than is healthy, and completed not one, but two tax returns (personal and business) but I'm still REALLY REALLY BORED. I think I'll have an early dinner.

Dead in the water

There must several hundred aquatic birds living at Warwick U, mostly of the breed in this pic, but plenty of shorter-necked ducks and a pair of swans too.

Which raises the question: how come I've never seen a dead one?

I mean, your average duck has a lifespan of a couple of years at most, which means a couple of ducks a week should make their last quacks. Yet I've never seen so much as a wobbly one wandering about at Lakeside.

Do ducks bury their dead or something? Where are the dead ones?

I am alone, totally alone

I am alone in the flat.

Sixteen rooms along the corridor and I seem to be the only one here. The joint's deserted. There's a howling wind outside, and the windchill factor's pushing the mercury well below zero in the darkening gloom.

It's at times like this my comic-booky imagination takes over, and the particular situation that comes to mind is Infocom's Lurking Horror game from the 1980s.

I loved Infocom's games. Text adventures, the old 'GO NORTH', 'TAKE LANTERN', 'YOU HAVE DIED ANOTHER GAME Y/N?' The best were as immersive as any great novel. It's something today's youth - with their turbocharged graphics, billion-triangle rendering engines and Hollywood-standard photorealism - would never understand, the same way the Facebook Generation will never comprehend how thrilling Usenet was.

It started with Zork, a Dungeons'n'Dragons fantasy born on the earliest mainframes. But I preferred the later games. There was one set in an Eastern Bloc country, another set in a circus, so real you could smell the urine-stained concrete and the greasepaint-flecked sawdust. There was one set in a hi-tech city where you never played a character, just took viewpoints from what your antagonists typed into terminals or passed in front of CCTV cameras; another sent you on a Kafkaesque journey to get a single form signed-off through a maze of bureacracy. Frustration, fear, and bewilderment laced those games. That's what was so great about them.

Lurking Horror was set in a University, during a blizzard. You had to get across campus using hidden tunnels under the school, but the sense of foreboding it created was as dark as HP Lovecraft; I shiver thinking about it, even now. Because when you're at a computer screen, your back's always turned to anything creeeping up behind you...

And tonight, seemingly alone in a building designed for 600, I feel the same icy finger on my spine. Exquisite.

Because one room's just too damn small

The beauty of an iPod is that if you fill it with random stuff and leave it running you'll sometimes find things with a strangely attractive resonance. For example, I've never liked Bowie's 'Heathen', yet 'Cactus' and 'Slip Away' have now wormed their way into my consciousness and I'm quite enjoying the experience.

The vastness of a campus just beyond my third floor window. Yet without the people it's just geography. I'm sick of living in a 3 x 4m room, even if the air's cleaner here than it ever was in London. Need some space around me that isn't a vacuum.

I am quite pleased with the way my Economics Assignment is progressing

OK, enough of the Onion-style headlines already. But it's true: it's been a really good day on the EBE assessment. My disparate grab-bag of data has yielded a real story of how one company beat strategic hell by erecting barriers to entry over a decade of global expansion, reporting and working with global GDP and macroeconomic trends while they were at it.

12 pages of pure genius, needing only the text polished and figures turned into graphs and barcharts tomorrow. Whoever thought 'Marketing services companies suffer from high x-inefficiency' would make such a good headline?

Damn, I'm good.

An apology to Deepak

After neglecting to mention him in this farewell to Mannheimers blog, I'd like to make it clear that Dee Pathak (aka 'Deep Attack') is sodding off back to Mannheim too, despite not coming from there in the first place. In addition, the Mannheimers, of which Deepak is now one although he's never been there and wasn't one before, are leaving Warwick to go to not Mannheim, but somewhere in France or Canada. Meaning that one Mannheimer who isn't from Mannheim will not receive a single lecture at Mannheim Business School until the first half of his MBA's over, while ten Mannheimers who ARE from Mannheim will spend a term at Warwick and a term somewhere equally non-Mannheim before returning to Mannheim. (Confused yet? I am.)

I am strangely attracted to GU chocolate desserts

GU chocolate puds are all well and good: rich, organic, and all that. It's just a pity I'm addicted to the 240g couple puds rather than the small ones in glass 'ramekins', whatever a ramekin is.

The 'couple' puds are designed for two consumers in the ABC1 social group. However, there's something missing from my relationship right now (OH YEAH, IT'S A GIRLFRIEND) so I'm forced to consume an entire pud alone.

I've worked out the calorific content of these muthas is approximately equivalent to 60 lengths of the pool, which I did today, so I can 'afford' one. Better keep a watch on this though. I mean, some people might just laugh at me.

Gaping void again

After a few years of stumbling into Gaping Void once a year or so, I've finally linked to it. Today's cartoon is as fresh as ever: "Dreams die quickly... or kill you slowly". I'm in the death-by-a-thousand-cuts camp.

I am a bad person: a blog of self-loathing

I'm having a road-to-Damascus moment. (A bit odd, given that today one of my MBA colleagues really is on the road back to Damascus. But that's irrelevant.) I woke up at 1pm with a fading hangover, and I'm blogging this while it's fresh.

In the shower yesterday, just before heading to the end-of-term party, a crushing realisation - one of those experiences so real you just know it's true - hit me.

I am a bad person.

I'm a bad person because I've never needed to be good.

First in the advertising business, then the money-obsessed rat race of London, I've spent my life surrounded by assholes. Maybe the only times I haven't are the times I've travelled: teenage backpacking across the USA, journeys of self-discovery across Asia and Australia, the deserts of north Africa under a searing sky. And those times I travelled mostly alone.

When you're surrounded by assholes, you never notice you're an asshole yourself.

But for three months now I've lived and worked with an eighty-strong new crowd, my MBA cohort. And they're good people. Even the worst of them is better than me (well, there's one worse). People who've made huge sacrifices to better themselves and improve their lives. People with energy and talent, and the fundamentally positive nature that'll let them use it to make the world better: building businesses, improving organisations, developing individuals. Good people.

And I realise now that I'm a bad person. Arrogant, impatient, irritable, dismissive and contemptuous, and those are my better traits.

I spend party night quiet and contemplative, downing glass after glass after glass of white for a solid six hours.

I think I possibly mentioned the fact I'm a bad person to one or two people. I must have bored them shitless. (It's a good job I didn't corner any of them for lengthy conversations or anything.)

Last night was also our last night with the Mannheimers: MBA exchange participants from a German school, and they were the coolest clique in the cohort. Bye friend Fernando, may your scooter never stop. Bye Maina, kooky and beautiful. Bye Katsu, from whom a single sentence could have the cohort collapsing in laughter. Bye the other Fernando; I never knew you well. Bye Tuan, you bicultural brainbox. Bye Sasha, bye Olivia, bye Irina and Tatjana. Bye Allen. It was good to know you all.

I'm a bad person.

But in 2008 I'm going to try really, really hard to be good.

SCHOOOOOOL'S OUT!!!

Exams over! Just a few days completing an assignment, and 2007 is done. A third of my MBA (excluding the project term) is now over bar the partying. And looking back, I can honestly say I wouldn't have changed a thing.

The first-term modules - Accounting & Finance, Economics of Business, Operations Management, Market Analysis, and Organisational Behaviour - were, with the exception of OB, instantly relevant and practical. And even OB demonstrated its value in later lectures: when people behave in a certain way, it's sometimes possible to see why, based on fundamental human traits like motivation, leadership, power, culture, pay/performance, teams, and identity. After the first OB lecture I came home and exploded to my flatmates, "What the FUCK was that all about?!" but overall I'm glad it was a core module; it provided a human aspect to all the numbers and strategy stuff elsewhere. And you can't forget the people.

We've also had some outstanding lecturers. Ben Knight seems everyone's favourite - a brilliant performer and deeply knowledgeable, with a knack for putting economic concepts into everyday experience - but the passion of Stuart Chambers turned humdrum operational management into a warm and rewarding exercise in problem solving, whereas Nigel Piercy's sarcasm-laced Market Analysis lectures were cerebrally stimulating. Accounting was the low point, but low here is still above the merely ok, and let's face it, do you really want a passionate accountant?

And what about POM, 'Practice of Management', the personal and professional development module Warwick's famous for? To be fair, it's been patchy. The least joined-up of the modules - more a grab-bag of seminars than a Great Conversation. Obviously the three-year-old module's still bedding in. But its heart is in the right place, and in another decade it'll be a world-beating USP for Warwick's programme. (It takes a LOT of time to tune a course to goosebump-inducing perfection. And such positive resonance, well taught, is the difference between the world's top 50 business schools and the 5,000 also-rans beneath them.)

I've just picked up my module folders for the Spring, and they form a pleasing sequence along my bookshelf: core modules of Modelling & Analysis and Strategic Advantage, following on from Term 1's strategic environment learnings (Economics) and preceding the Summer Term's putting it into use (Strategy & Practice). A nice thread running through the courses, branching off into a custom programme of electives, half quant and half strategic.

I wouldn't change a thing about this MBA. But I do want it to change me.

Three down, one to go

Market Analysis exam over. Just Operations Management tomorrow, then it's a clear run to the end of Term 1's work with an Economics assignment. What fun.

Next term's working out okay, too, even though I'm doing an ill-advised third elective (increases workload, but it was the only way to get the mix of modules I wanted, half hard quant and half softer strategic stuff.) I must be the only person deliberately doing the stuff I'm no good at - my two big weaknesses in business are finance and strategy; I've always been a seat-of-the-pants creative type whose financial projections tend to be back-of-envelope, best-guess stuff. (Actually, I think that's how professional financiers work as well; it's just that they don't admit it.)

The good thing is, next term all my lectures are in the mornings - four days a week, I have nothing scheduled after 12.30, except for Tuesdays when lectures go on into the evening (doing a language is compulsory on the Warwick MBA, so Tuesday evenings will be filled with the sounds of France.) Three elective modules, two core modules, the POM personal development module, and a language: it may be only seven scheduled sessions a week, but each is of three and a half hours, and with teamwork and projects outside the lecture hall I've a feeling it'll be no less busy than this term.

But at least with lectures over with by 12.30 most days, I have the whole afternoon to use. (With free mornings, it's all too easy to use them to catch up on sleep.) If I race to the pool at 12.30, I can grab a hot lunch at 1.30 before University House cafe closes, then have a straight run from 2pm to late. And with Corporate Finance and Management Accounting on my list, I'm going to need it...

Let's do lunch sometime

Lunch at University House was awesome today.

I realise that's not a blog title that'll set the world ablaze, but I was really impressed. Now I'm back in the pool a lot, I get hungry, so I've been having a hot lunch most days at the cafe in University House opposite my favourite spot, the Learning Grid. Usually there's a choice of three or four hot meals, none of that microwaved-from-frozen stuff so common in university cafeterias; this stuff always feels homemade. Today it was Christmas Lunch. And it was amazing!

Roast turkey carved on the spot, and no Asda Special Turkey either: it tasted free-range, mix of dark and white meat, generous servings expertly carved. Add to that fluffy roast potatoes, stuffing, gravy - the equal of anything I've had in London - and extras like brussels, carrots, parsnips, and chipolatas with bacon, and for £5 or so it was breathtaking. (Doing parsnips and potatoes properly takes care: you've got to start with real heat and watch carefully. Doing it on an industrial scale takes serious skill.) How did they do that? Forget lunch; I'd be fine with that for dinner.

Of course, after the exam this morning (OB today) and 60 lengths I was hungry anyway; any kind of protein would've done. But discovering that a low-cost cafe - a university canteen, what's more - can cook a brilliant Christmas lunch for a fiver is awesome. If I were 18, a canteen like this would be enough reason to come to Warwick in itself.

Extreme accounting

Wow! That was INTENSE!!! Is ANYTHING on earth more exhilarating than investment ratio analysis?

OK. That was a joke. I'm definitely not turning into some kind of sad financial bastard, oh dear me no.

But still - the Accounting & Finance exam was pretty extreme. 2 questions in 2 hours, and on each one I (along with everybody else) was writing right up to the wire. I chose a question on cashflow forecasting and another on the RONA pyramid, and learned in CostGouger (where the entire cohort seemed to go shopping afterwards) that I'd missed one really, really important point about the 1000 SKUs the T shirt seller had purchased before starting up in business. Which meant his bank balance didn't dip into overdraft as it was supposed to, making my advice to the business owner (go for it and forget about your bank manager) completely nonsensical, although self-consistent (which is the basis the exam is marked on.) So overall I think I did okay - about 65% I'd guess, definitely a pass even in the worst case. No chance of a Distinction though - T-Shirt-Tony, I curse you.

And I'm fired up! I NEEDED something like this to get me interested/involved in financial matters, and now I feel almost - almost - ready to chat on equal terms with my clients and contacts about jobs next year, after putting Management Accounting and Corporate Finance under my belt too.

A few hard lengths

Hmmm, 72 lengths, not bad. I try to do sets of 12 lengths rather than 10 at the pool these days; incremental improvement, and if I can do 5 minutes a set I'm hitting my target time. (Yeah, I KNOW Ian Thorpe does 1500m in under 15mins; I said MY target time, not the Thorpedo's...)

I'm now back in the water often enough to get tired, which does wonders for my technique; I seem to thrash around for 20+ lengths unable to co-ordinate properly, and then when I start getting tired, my body sort of realises it's got to apply some methods if it's to complete another 40 lengths within half an hour. It's always about 30 lengths before I settle down properly and start stroking in a manner that doesn't make passersby snort with laughter. Got to get a grip on that.

It's symptomatic of a real problem I have in life: I can't just Be Here Now. Life should be about the journey, not the destination. But my trouble is, I only ever think about where I'm going, not where I am. Just wish I could relax enough to enjoy the journey.

Man has sex with bicycle

Hmm, don't worry fella, some of us will understand. I once saw a titanium Merlin that I immediately wanted to get a room with.

Well, does it? DOES IT?!!

I've been trying for hours. The Box Office staff can't help. it seems NOBODY can answer that all-important question: does the Arts Centre's showing of 'The Darjeeling' include the short companion film beforehand where Natalie gets her kit off?

I mean, it may be 'brief and tasteful' (damn) but let's face it, a naked Natalie Portman is a huge plus point for going to see a film. I have a heavy revision schedule this weekend and two hours is too long to spend on anything that DOESN'T include Natalie naked.

11.22pm: IT DOES!!! Yes, the UK release of the film indeed includes 'Hotel Chevalier', which contains important riffs and motifs relating to the main feature. I've no idea why 'The Darjeeling' was released in the US without it.

Although I must admit, the way I jumped up in the cinema shouting 'YEESSSSS!!!' when the announcement appeared for the short film was a bit embarassing...

Tesco bag tumbleweed

The chill wind whistles aimlessly around the deserted campus, drowning out even the giant sucking sound of the village emptying of students.

It's eerily quiet. The ghostly presence left by a generation of departed students pervades the damp December air. And along deathy pathways roll tumbleweeds of stray plastic bags.

Us postgrads of course are around another week or two, and it's nice to have the place to ourselves. Even if it's just a week of exams and then a week finishing a project I haven't started yet.

I think I'll take a stroll to the Arts Centre and check for signs of life, taking my Accounting revision with me.

Shaky-kneed, blurred, vision, stumbling off the rollercoaster

Term 1 done!

The first quarter of my MBA has been a wild ride, and now the lecture season's over - just a few days of revision, then exams next week - I'm strangely nonplussed. Just as I've settled into my new life, I get reminded that it'll all be over before I know it.

(I only have 3 taught weeks in Term 3 and Term 4 is project/dissertation on site with my client, so effectively I'll be back at work by April.)

It's been a good term though, busy to the point of arrestable violence and hard enough to feel worthwhile.

A Marketing Professor for whom there's been an odd correlation between the professional marketers in the cohort and low assessed scores. (Does this mean academics in marketing are talking crap?) An Economics lecturer who balances hardass macroeconomical graphs with expressions like, 'And we refer to this technically as 'the shit hitting the fan'.' An Operations tutor with so much passion for his subject he can make production lines and decimal minutes interesting. And even the abtruse sociology of Organisational Behaviour has been brought to life by a three-metre tall lecturer.

My personal life isn't where I want it to be, but my new professional direction is all working, and I'm starting to worry less about the next ten years. And that's all I want in life, really: for the endless inner frustration to stop.

I hate revision

You know those days when you leap out of bed at 7 ready to put in a full day of revision for a subject you're weak on and then you start procrastinating like answering a bunch of emails and taking your time over coffee and then making a few phone calls and writing up notes on lectures and attacking bits of odd paperwork that aren't due for weeks and I don't like the way that zoom lens looks on my camera so I think I'll swap it with the prime to make it look smarter on my shelf and rearranging textbooks in a neat line because it feels like you're doing something and then feeling a bit hungry so you wander over to the Arts Centre for lunch and then do a bit of Christmas Card shopping and then trundle back wondering if you've got any more email to answer and oh crap it's already past 1pm...?

Well I'm having one.

Beneath a darkening sky

Sometimes, nightfall in Warwickshire can be just... breathtaking.

These photos were taken about five minutes apart, between 5pm and 5.15. The first's of Warwick Business School, taken from Lakeside student village. No, the school isn't really an ultralong building that goes all the way across behind those trees; there are two buildings of similar architectural heritage on opposite sides of the road, but they're several minutes' walk apart and not connected physically or culturally.

The second pic's taken from the winding path leading from Heronbank to central campus, alongside the freshly-ploughed field where non-performing WBS lecturers end up minus identifying dentition. (Sssshh.)

The third was snapped at central campus, looking across the 'plaza' at Rootes Social Building, where I've never done any socialising (like the Student Union, it's principally an undergrad scene.)

It's amazing how in the right light, a mob of budget-constrained, functional modern boxes - hallmarks of any modern British university - can look arresting, even gorgeous. But of course they can't beat that sky.

Why I like it here

I'm running a client project in tandem with my MBA, and it involves a database design I'll soon need implementing. Trouble is, I'm a few months clear of London now, and my contacts list is starting to go stale.

So I'm walking along, hands in pockets, and wondering where I'm going to find a couple of enthusiastic database programmers who'll work to a budget and are close enough to see the whites of their eyes...

Then I walk past a building labelled 'DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE'.

It's great living on campus.

"You're my best friend" she said softly, as my heart shattered

It's happened again. I'm her fucking best friend!!!

What, precisely, am I doing wrong here? All the fucking time?

Against all odds - possessed of a mean temper, a persona that sways between joyous-for-the-hella-vit and Lovecraft-dark, and prone to fits of pique that'd shame a 4-year old - I'm somehow a fairly good bloke, and there are a surprising number of women in this world who actually seem to like me.

And that's about it. Like me. Nothing more.

I've got an improbable number of ABSOLUTELY BEAUTIFUL women in my Outlook Contacts, intelligent and charming and about 10 lightyears out of Mr Average's league. I have coffee with any one of these women, and guys on the street outside are pressing their noses up against the window, slackjawed and drooling, in pure wonderment at what they're doing hanging out with a guy like me. If only they knew...

... that not ONE of them is currently cognoscent of the fact I'm a red-blooded male. I get about four emails a day from female friends agonising over their latest husband/ boyfriend/ conquest /don't-know, and the logical next step for them seems to be 'Let's call Chris.' Yeah, just CALL. That's it.

I've had the 'you're my best male pal' conversation about 60 times in the last two years, and I'm fucking SICK of it. I'd call it emotionally draining, except I don't have any emotions to drain.

The latest one lives nearby, smart as Versace with a billion-watt smile. We chat in the corridors a lot and Facebook daily. I'd almost have called it dating. She didn't quite say 'Let's be friends' in our latest exchange, but that's what she meant.

I'm SICK of these either/or relationships. I appreciate I'm a handful, but in a village of 5,000 single females shouldn't there be a FEW who don't recoil in horror at the thought of having an actual relationship that involves both talking and intimacy?

I'm going back to dating undergrads. At least they put out, even if the conversation's not up to much.

Nicholas Bate, if you're reading, there's TEN GRAND in it for you if you can solve this conundrum.

Discounting the discounted

OK, revision time for finals week. Net Present Value. Discounted Cash Flow. Gordon's Dividend Growth Model for pricing shares.

Fuck Gordon.

Discounted Cash Flow is a common method of valuing an investment. You take a look at what profit that investment will produce in years to come, 'discount' it accordingly back to the present day (the further out it is, the riskier it is) and you get a Net Present Value. If the NPV is positive, it's a project worth investing in, dependent on a number of other factors like inflation, interest rates, and normal returns. This method is used almost universally by large investment firms as a means of legitimising their investments and making them look good to their clients.

And you know what? It's a complete con job.

The impressive-looking spreadsheets DCF and NPV produce disguise the fact that both models - two basic and interrelated concepts of corporate finance used daily in billion-dollar takeovers - are a fistful of COMPLETE GUESSWORK. In fact, it's worse than guesswork: both ideas generally use the one assumption you can't make, namely that things are going to be the same next year.

That's what the world financial system is based on: a pack of guesses given legitimacy by bigass spreadsheets, the same way supernatural imaginings were given legitimacy by impressive buildings and Latin language in medieaval Europe. The bigger the snow job, the more concrete the result looks.

Hey, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. I've got an exam on this stuff in ten days, and then I'm going to start using it.

I am Really Quite Annoyed at Skype's Tongue-Out Smiley

Sorry, Skype, but does that smiley REALLY look like someone sticking his tongue out?

Look, the point of the :P smiley is that you're being a bit rude to someone. The animated Skype one sticks its tongue out okay, but is smiling at the same time - which reduces the impact. And of course you can't switch the little bugger off. Yet another cheap and cheerful Internet concept gets dumbed down by people who didn't quite 'get it'.

It proves Marshall McLuhan right yet again, obviously - defining the 'cool' as being something that is understood by a connected minority, and coolness disintegrates as the concepts (like smileys) are delivered to mainstream culture. (Smileys aren't cool today of course.)

But does today's software really have to convert such things into animated graphics without asking? I mean, the whole reason SMS succeeded and MMS has been a dismal failure is that the former is cheap and cheerful and appeals on its simplicity, as do smileys. There's no need to load up simple concepts with cycle-munching baggage.