Salocin

After wrestling for 2 hours with Freenet, I give up.

I went to play squash this morning. I got up at 7:30, pottered around as my body grew used to the fact that it wasn't getting a lie-in this morning (a break with recent tradition), and when I felt reasonably awake, I cycled to the squash courts, met my opponent, and promptly lost the match.

This was Ok, because I got all the benefit of feeling that I had gained several hours of wakefulness over my usual day. I was going to put these to good use, and I had many plans.

All of these plans were executed smoothly until I hit the item on my list that said, "Install Freenet on PC". Freenet is an anonymous peer-to-peer network of interesting design that requires that individuals set up nodes in order to function. I was ready to do my bit.

Downloading and installing works well, the system is much more slick that it was last time I saw it (which is not saying much at all, it's still crude and unfriendly, but before it used to be crude, unfriendly, resource-hogging, in-the-background, crash-prone and cryptic). But as soon as I try to download anything at all...

Network Error

Couldn't retrieve key: CHK@hdXaxkwZ9rA8-SidT0AN-bniQlgPAwI,XdCDmBuGsd-ulqbLnZ8v~w 

Hops To Live: 15

Error: Route not Found 




Attempts were made to contact 0 nodes.

0 were totally unreachable. 

0 restarted. 

0 cleanly rejected. 

The request couldn't even make it off of your node. Try

again, perhaps with the GPL to help your node learn about 

others. The publicly available seed nodes have been very 

busy lately. If possible try to get a friend to give you a 

reference to their node instead. 

Change Hops To Live   

And this message will not go away for love nor money - I tried everything I could think of, new seed nodes, restarting a hundred or so times, relaunching my connection to the internet, removing every interaction between Microsoft Windows and the internet connection - nothing.

So all the time I saved getting up so early was completely wasted trying to install innovative but frankly buggy software on my computer. So much for doing my part.

The Wharton School, that I am currently attending as a graduate, takes a tumble in the businessweek rankings (free registration required).

It's pretty damning on the face of it. A fall from number one to number five in the BusinessWeek Rankings. Not that the BusinessWeek Rankings are everything one should care about, but thanks to some excellent marketing on their part, Businessweek have managed to shove their MBA scoresheet firmly into the MBA applicant's field of vision. So why did Wharton fall from the number one spot, and how important is it that it should have dropped?

People's reactions are funny. When you're number one, the rankings are always perfectly accurate, but should you fall, questions immediately get asked regarding the integrity or objectivity of the scoring process. Of course, no-one wants to look like they care, so whilst they're questioning the ranking methodology in one breath, they're claiming the rankings never really mattered anyway in the next. It's a different song to the one that I heard during my application process.

From what I hear, we dropped mostly because of the feedback given by the students of 2002. We also fared slightly less well with employers last year. This was something that the administration knew about and were already fixing when we arrived in September. Changes are being made in the recruitment office that co-ordinates our career-search with employers wanting to recruit on campus. There's a new director, things look like they'll improve, and so there's an element of lag in the rankings.

But why the disappointed students? It's not as if the careers office was dreadful, it just went through a difficult transition, and possibly became a little complacent given how easy it was to get jobs for students in a booming worldwide economy - more recently, the downturn in the economy meant there were fewer jobs, and there's only so much a careers office can to compensate for that. Additional diversity in the range of employee relationships they cultivate will help, as Wharton has been quite Banking, Consulting and US-centered in the past.

According to the things I've been reading and hearing, there also seems to be a problem with expectations. The economic downturn did a few things to employment prospects (and the situation's not getting any better), and this forced a number of people who thought they'd get their dream job to settle for something other than their first choice employer.

I guess it's a hard moment to pass when you realise that Wharton isn't the magic bullet that allows you to completely bypass the effects of an economic downturn. Those of us in the 2004 class are perhaps a little more realistic since we saw the state of the economy and the job market when we were applying. Getting into one of the top schools is never a sure thing, it was important to have other options at the time. Whilst there were jobs out there, the picture wasn't the same as 12 months earlier.

Does the ranking matter? Personally, I don't think so. There's a lot of noise made about how the brand of your school is so important, but my theory is that once you're through the door and into your career, your personal performance and abilities are the only life-raft you have in a slow market, and with another 800+ Wharton students and plenty of other quality post-MBAs out there, you better make sure it floats. So get what you came for: learn the skills and build the network, its more important than ever.

UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME...... Computer failure in finals week. Typical.

So I turn on my computer one morning, the windows XP logo appears, the harddisk flickers schitzophrenically, and the BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) appears, with some unintelligible information and the words, "UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME" at the top.

Uh Oh.

Not to eulogise, but reading through the internet posts on this subject, it would seem that quite a few people have had this problem. The final solution I found was not clearly explained anywhere, and so in the name of charity, I am replicating it here.

Backround first. I have an IBM T30 Thinkpad, which comes with Windows XP pre-installed on the Hard Disk, and therefore no bootup CD from which to launch restore utilities. This is a drawback of the T30 that I hadn't thought of before, and I strongly suggest you download the 6 XP boot disks whilst you still have a computer to do it with.

The relevant microsoft knowledge base article (with the misleading words "during an upgrade" in the title) is number Q297185

Now the first thing to do is to calm down, this doesn't mean everything is broken, it either means that you've installed something that isn't compatible with windows XP, at which point you should uninstall it and try again, or it means that some vital sector of your harddisk is corrupt, and needs to be fixed. The Catch 22 here is that to fix it, you have to have access to the computer, and the OS can't load because the harddisk is broken, so you don't have access.

In a few easy steps, here's what to do.

• First, go to Microsoft KBA Q310994 to download your version of the XP bootup disks.
  
• Setup the bootup disks on a working computer, you'll need 6 blank, reliable diskettes.
  
• Boot up the XP computer from the diskettes, and when you get the option, hit the button (usually "R") to go to the recovery console (which looks just like DOS).
  
• On thinkpads, you need access to the partition that contains Windows. In my T30, this involved typing the word "LOGON" and nothing else because I have only one account, which is the administrator account, and which has no password.
  
• Now type CHKDSK /R and sit back and wait as the system does a complete check of your harddisk. This took over an hour on my system as it ran into the corrupted bits of the harddrive and fixed them.
  
• Now remove the diskettes and type EXIT, whilst of course hoping for the best.
  

At this point, my problems where over, but apparently, if you have a corrupted boot.ini file, your system may still not boot, at which point you should do boot up from your disks again, but use the command FIXBOOT instead of CHKDSK the second time.

A related point: you may not have access to the AUTOCHK.EXE file which CHKDSK requires in order to run. You'll know this is the case because CHKDSK will ask you where it should look to find this file - you can download it from here or here. I had to do this and put it on a diskette so that CHKDSK would run.

So that lasted until about 2am last night, and I can honestly say I am happy that's over. If you have had similar problems, let me know below. Pain shared is pain, erm, shared. So don't hesitate.

Just when I thought I had my schedule figured out - and that was hard enough - finals week has arrived, and the end of the first quarter comes crashing down like a bad hangover.

The coming two weeks promise hardship and pain. All of the courses I am currently taking come to an end, and all the final assignments are due. Then (or more precisely, at exactly the same time) the finals take place. In fact, there are less than 3 days between the last class and the final exam in one of my courses.

To summarise - I have...

• 3 case studies, two of them written and graded
  
• one written assignment
  
• one communications class presentation
  
• one finance homework
  
• one finance case study
  
• final examinations in all subjects
  

... to do by friday next week. And it is now 1am Wednesday morning.

But everyone's in the same boat, and the truth is it's not really as impossible as it seems. The real problem only kicks in when you consider the other list...

• Ongoing company presentations (with free food and drink incentive)
  
• Sports activities
  
• Organisation of Fall Break
  
• Party tomorrow
  
• 2 fiestas the day after tomorrow
  
• Lessons in extra-curricular sports/leisure activities etc over the weekend
  
• Additional parties, fiestas and dancing over the weekend
  

... all of which are, of course, an integral part of the Wharton MBA experience.

But if someone must sacrifice themselves, I guess it might as well be me :-)