Riz’s Rotman Blog

I got this e-mail from Rotman’s IT Help Desk:

Please be advised that some European websites are unreachable from the UofT network due to a dispute between internet providers Cogent and TeliaSonera.  

Cogent is the internet provider for the University and one of the largest in North America. TeliaSonera is a major provider in Nordic and Baltic countries.  Until this dispute is resolved the following geo-locations may not be accessible from either network. Traffic that has originated on either of these networks has been blocked regardless of other network paths (3rd parties) that may be available to each company.  We will keep you up to-date as we receive new information.

For anyone who want’s more information (like me) you can check out this blog. Excerpt:

In the past, when Cogent got into a peering fight, it fought with other tier 1 providers who felt that Cogent shouldn’t belong to the exclusive club. Tier 1 providers have “settlement-free” peering between each other, meaning nobody pays anyone else for network access.

As you can imagine, this can save a lot of money.

Cogent is the company that other Tier 1 providers love to hate because it has the lowest prices, 100 Mbps for $1,000 per month (yes, that’s $10 per Mbps).

Now, GigaOM is reporting that Cogent is no longer linking with Swedish backbone provider Telia because Cogent wants payment from Telia for peering.

It seems important that these guys figure out some sort of agreement. This type of silly fighting just gives customers a reason to go pay a slightly higher price for their internet access. Eh UofT? *wink* *wink*

HA! Check it out if you want to understand the whole subprime crash.

Just an FYI, back to school and in the Venture Capital Strategy intensive course. Next semester’s schedule results in me having class only on Thursday and Friday. Yay me. Picture of me hard at work (and two others of me being silly 1 2):

I think I’ll start to read The Opposable Mind like Idris did in Denver:  

People often complain that creative types are difficult to manage if they can be managed at all and most of high maintenance in nature. There is some truth here but I don’t necessarily buy all that. My favorite types of creative people are what I called the “Da Vincis”. They are people who can use both sides of the brain. May be this is what Roger Marin refers to as “Integrative Thinker”. I picked up his book The Opposite Mind (while I was stucked in Denver airport for a connecting flight back from Palm Spring where we had a planning session) and I was reading it during this holiday. I buy 10 books a month and I read only one of them. Here is a good one.

Facebook is a great product but I’ve blogged before about how I think the valuation is a little wonky. Fred Wilson, an investor in my favorite video podcast, has said the following which gives me some confidence that there are still rational people in the VC world:

 If I had to buy Facebook right now, I think $5 billion to $7 billion would be the right price. 

I have to admit, that’s a lot more than my $2 billion to $4.5 billion back of the envelope calculation but given how quickly I calculated the number, and that it was calculated in the summer, I can see how his valuation could be more accurate. At least it’s not $15 billion!

Now for something Rotman related.

Exams finished on Thursday and there was a little party. I’ve just been blowing off steam since. Picture from Thursday:

I’m feeling quite euphoric about how close I am to the end of school. This next week should also be a lot of fun since some close old friends are coming into Toronto to visit.

This blog won’t see a lot of activity until January 7th but I hope to post about a few things eventually:

• My overall thoughts on classes from 1st semester
• Any thoughts on the Venture Capital intensive course
• My experiences with Integrative Thinking at Rotman (I got an e-mail request to post about this).

Happy new year everyone. I’m off to play some video games.

Came across this post where the comments are just gold. Some managers don’t even think. I love this one:

I used to work at a factory and our “perk” one year was that we got a free bag. It was a very nice bag…..which we had to make. Yeah, we had a “rush order” for an item and worked like mad to finish it in time then were given the exact item. Classy, I know.

(Source)

I always find my webserver stats kind of interesting: How do people get to my site? What’s the most popular post? Things like that. Here are the stats for search terms that have brought people to my site this month (so far):

Things to note:

• Some first years are obviously been brought to my domain while doing some research on exams (evidence: financial accounting 2006 exam rotman, and rotman 2007 strategy exam).
• The main search terms bringing people to my domain are rotman related
• My name is being used in some of the search terms. This leads me to believe that a few people know of this blog but just don’t remember the URL/domain. Well, tunerds.com is an old buy of mine and I don’t think I plan on changing. It has become a sort of online identity.

Something else interesting is that hits to the Rotman blog are WAYYYYYY up so far this month, so much so that it looks like this will (probably) be the first month that hits to the Rotman blog will out number hits to any other part of the site (excluding my tumble blog but that’s not really getting much traction from what I can tell). It kind of makes sense for hits to be up though, it’s MBA application season.

So I guess, hi to all of you applying to MBA program. :) 

There’s a picture of me in the Rotman brochure! I’m a hansom devil.  

I posted it to my tumble blog and figure the blurry picture might be of interest to some of you Rotman Blog readers.

I’m surprised by how much more efficient I’ve become (either that or my quality of work has slipped). Here’s an update on my big projects:

So this means I have no motivation again and have this strong urge to buy an Xbox 360 with my signing bonus from RIM (did I mention I took a job with RIM? :)) and play lots of Call of Duty 4. It’s always fun to save the world.

Maybe instead of that I should get back into my work-out schedule. I’ve been sick for the last few weeks and have reverted to do the bare minimum at the gym.

Rotman just started a photography club which I’m joining. I’m not an expert in any way but I think it would be cool to hang out with some photo-geeks. 

Finally, I’ve decided to change up some of my courses. The add-drops are still in flux so I’ll post an update once everything is figured out.

Exams in 2 weeks!