Riz’s Rotman Blog

Today was my 2nd last day of work. Today I exchanged goodbyes with the senior architect—someone who’ve I’ve worked very closely with for the last 10 months.

Everyday for the last week I’ve felt like I’ve deconstructing the life I’ve built in Kingston these last 6 years. Each evening I feel like a few more bricks of my life have been removed and nothing is being built to replace it. It is unbelievably saddening.

I’ve already said goodbye to many of my friends, now many of my coworkers, soon my entire life will disappear and all that will remain is a van full of furniture and my ambitions for the future.

There is no real point to this post. I just felt that it is important to note how difficult it is to tear down the life you’ve built in order to start something totally new. I know many other students have it worse—some are moving around the world, to a country where no one speaks their native language—but I imagine that the experience of departing is similar.

Saturday will be the last day that I call Kingston ‘home.’

I just “finished” the online finance course. I say “finished” because I fast-forwarded through most of it. Here are my impressions:

1. If you know nothing about markets, interest, math, or excel, there is value in taking the course.
2. The professor did a very good job of presenting the material.
3. The course has a lot of info about things that we are obviously going to learn in the core finance course and (I feel) should not have been tested material in the initial “tests” we were given to determine if we should take the finance pre-course.
4. I would have learned just as much and been a lot happier with a list of topics, a quick set of formulas, and a link to a free excel tutorial. Basically, for me, I just needed a refresher on some of the concepts I had forgotten since my undergrad math/stats course.
5. Thankfully this was an online course, I was able to fast-forward through most of the things I already knew.

I’ll have a better idea of the value of this course once I actually start the program. I’ll post my impressions then.

Right now I hope that the other two (non-online) pre-courses will provide me with more. Just to save you upper-years some time: I know, I know… you told me so.

P.S. I move to Toronto in a week!

Rotman is offering the Finance pre-course in an online format this year. I examined my calendar and realized that if I took the online version, I’d virtually have an extra week off–Done!

The one disappointing thing is that the cost of the online course is the same as the IRL (in real life) course. Using the Internet should result in the school incurring much lower costs than the IRL course. I know they are just trying to make $$ but why not look at how much $ you’re making off the IRL course and then calculate the finance course cost using a formula like 1.3*IRL profit + online cost. The school will still be making more money from the people taking the online course and encouraging people to take the online course since it’s probably cheaper.

Maybe I’m just looking at this the wrong way. That and I’m just looking to save some money.

I’ll let you know how it goes. I plan on taking the course on/around next weekend.

I haven’t posted in a while but not much has happened until now.

I’ve applied and been approved for the Scotiabank Interest-Subsidized loan. All I have to do (I’m told) is fill out some remaining paperwork. This should provide enough money for me to make it through my first year without any major issues.

The process was rather painless–fill out some online forms, get an e-mail saying you’ve been approved.

The pre-course registration is coming up very soon. The school has made some self-assessment tests available to help us decide if we need to take a pre-course. The tests are a little ridiculous. Does Rotman honestly expect more than 30% of the class to be able to answer the following questions:

1. What is the primary output of the financial accounting activities in an organization? Be specific.
2. Identify and discuss the reasons why net income will usually be different from net cash flow.
3. From the following information, prepare balance sheets for Demo Corp. as of December 31, 2004, and as of January 31, 2005, and a statement of income for the month ended January 31, 2005. Use either T-accounts or journal entries to show how the statements are compiled….

The questions above are all from the accounting test but the finance test was almost as bad. I found most of the quantitative test easy—only because my background is in science/math. I have the distinct feeling that this is just a big money grab (each pre-course costs $100). The questions they are asking are things I would hope to learn about while earning my MBA, not things I would expect people to know before they start their MBA.

Regardless, I’m not going to risk it—I’ll just shell out the $300 and take all three of the courses (some of the quantitative questions were getting a little tricky). If I find that this ends up being a big money grab (i.e. they re-teach all of this during the actual courses), I will complain (loudly) on this blog.

Stay tuned.

I probably would have gotten to go to JavaOne this year. I guess this is what I get for letting work know in advance that I’m leaving.

(using Java conventions, shouldn’t it be called javaOne? :))

This might be a little odd for me to post here but regardless:

The abrupt rise to hyper-respectability of managerial schools and their matching with large corporations led by technocrats has had the astonishing effect of confusing management with leadership. And if leadership is reduced to management, well then, problems are not to be solve. They are to be managed. In fact, the are no longer problems.

• John Ralston Saul, The Collapse of Globalism, 2005

Something to think about as I head off for my MBA.

Nothing has really happened on the Rotman front for quite a while. This post is more related to leaving work.

Most people at work now know that I’m going to be leaving to return to school. I’ve started to notice that I’m getting treated a little differently even though I wont be leaving for months. For one, there are these constant remarks about how I’m probably not worrying about the maintenance of my current project since I’m just going to leave.

It’s quite annoying. I’m not sure what’s causing people to make these remarks but I do take some offense to them. I pride myself on the work I’m producing. The problems I’m solving are unbelievably difficult and complex and it’s a great feeling to be tackling them piece-by-piece. My project plan has me finishing up all the features in June, leaving pleanty of time to find and fix bugs. I’m also trying to make sure that the project will be as easy to maintain as possible: external documentation, javadoc, “tech-tips,” and a wiki.

I’m sure that the people making these comments don’t intend to cause offense, they are all really nice people. Either way, it bothers me a bit.

I wonder if others leaving their current jobs are finding the same thing? It might just be an affliction of the software industry—once you put some code into the project, it’ll be there forever. You have to maintain it; If the person who developed it just hacked something together, you’re eventually going to pay for it… big time.

I just found out that Windows XP can run on Macs without any crazy hacks. Using a program released by Apple, you can repartition your Mac and burn a Windows XP disk that will let your Intel-based Mac boot up XP.

This is very good news for me. I’ve been a Mac user for the last 5-6 years and was dreading the switch back to Windows when I got to Rotman. Now that the Mac Book Pro can run Windows Natively, I doubt that Rotman can make any valid excuse for why I can’t use a Mac laptop instead of a clunky PC laptop.

Another good thing is the timing–hopefully by the start of August the new version of OS X will be out and all of the Mac Book issues will be sorted out.

Today looks like a good day.

I was given my R-World login information yesterday. I was really excited to check it out but was thoroughly disappointed.

The site looks like something from back in 1995. It’s very difficult to use and has blatantly huge security holes. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words:

The numbers on the graphic were added by me. The problem I would like to point out right off the bat are:

1. The link bar at the top. I didn’t even know it was a link bar until I re-read the e-mail telling me to click on the items.
2. The threading system. It is just a basic tree with no really easy way to traverse the posts. It doesn’t tell you which posts are new so as this keeps going I’m probably going to have to spend 10 minutes just trying to figure out what the new posts are. It has a very old school Unix hackers board feel but without the usual UI improvements that coders implement without being told they have to (this is a joke for all the geeks out there).
3. The body of messages. It appears they do not escape html entities or encode things like line breaks from the input into <br>. This means:

	a.	Everyone needs to understand html
	b.	You can’t use the & sign without possibly causing HUGE problems.
	c.	I can do whatever I want to the page–for example embed a random image or write my own CSS to change the site look for everyone.
	d.	It’s very easy to execute a cross-site scripting attack and steal people’s identities (I’m not saying more on this, if you know what a cross-site scripting attack is, it should be obvious how you can execute one). The only saving grace is that if someone does execute an attack it should be very easy to figure out who that person is because you could just see who posted the attack.

Not impress in the least. Perhaps if they didn’t try and hype it up so much–over the course of 6 weeks–I wouldn’t feel so let down.

Anyone out there from Rotman who has some sort of say, a little suggestion: It would be better to not have the portal than look like the school is totally behind the times, either shell out the cash for a decent implementation or just take it down. A simple mailing list would be nice and then geeks like me could quickly and easily take the initiative to make our own board that doesn’t make it look like the school just got their first dial-up connection.

I feel bad bashing the school I’m going to attend but I feel an obligation to point out things like this–especially if I expect this blog to be useful for others. At the same time, I’m not going to the school to learn the latest about the wizzy-bang-ajax-web 2.0-insert buzz word here-technology; I’m going to supplement my tech background with biz knowledge. As long as I don’t see things like a hammer and sickle, the school can probably still do what I need.

Update August 23, 2006: A related post can be found here which talks about the improved R-world.

This doesn’t bode well.

About 6 weeks ago I received an e-mail stating that I would be given access (and further information) about “R World,” the Rotman portal site. The e-mail also stated that I should expect to get everything related to R World within the next 3 weeks.

After about 4 weeks, I started to get a little worried that my spam filter may have eaten the e-mails so I replied to the original e-mail; the response? A MTA error–the user doesn’t exist. Ok, no big deal, I just e-mailed someone else directly. Their reply lead me to believe that I would get the information within a week. Two weeks later, nothing.

I might be a little demanding but this is starting to bother me… a lot.

P.S. I really don’t like the name “R world.” It’s very early 90s-.com-bubble bursting-wiz-bang-look at technology-terminolgy. Maybe they’ll teach me something in marketing that will change my mind.