LA trip

San Luis Obispo and Pismo beach were awesome...especially the Monarch butterflies.
Venice beach and Sant Monica pretty much sucked because it was cloudy and dull all day long..not quite the sunny California vacation i had in mind.
And of course, the drive back from LA on I-5 was horrible..as expected.

We stayed at The Apple farm Inn @ SLO and the Ayres Manhattan beach near LA. The location of the Inn was pretty good..about 6 blocks from downtown. But the room had a bit of a musty smell and the wall paper was crazy.

The hotel @ Manhattan beach was very, very nice. Pretty close to the beaches and not
very far from Santa Monica. good choice, if I may say so myself.


Butterfly cluster

Monarch butterflies @ Pismo beach

Sunset on a beach 30 mi south of Santa Barbara

Holiday travel

Quite a bit of travel over the next couple of weeks for me. I am off to San Luis Obispo and LA for the Christmas break. And then a trip to Portland, Oregon for the New Year's break. Of course, this means GMAT prep is totally off the radar.

I have been following the BW forums on and off this past week and it was quite exciting to read about all the admits and dings. It looks like LBS has a nice way of giving out admit decisions just before Christmas, making it a special one for all those who get the nod.

Its quite around here...

at work. Today was the in-house Holiday Party aka company-sponsored lunch. And almost all my colleagues are in the auditorioum playing a game called Steal-a-thon.

I have had to psotpone my GMAT. I initially signed up to take it on Dec 22. But looking at my scores on sample tests, I decided to take some more time to prepare.

I seem to consistently get about 8-9 questions wrong in both sections. My DS questions are the ones I am struggling with. In the Verbal section, my problem is with the SC and RC questions. I space out reading the RC paragraph and just try and guess the answer.
So, now the plan is to take the test mid-January. Which means I will have to take the test adminstered by Person VUE..apparently they do not give you scratch paper to work out the Quant section, but give two erasable noteboards. But all other aspects of the test remain unchaged.

It's been a while...

..since I last updated this blog.

I have started work on my new project, and it looks to be a bigger mess than the previous one. why can't we learn from our mistakes, make intelligent choices, work smart? In the software field, most engineers thinks its best to use the latest technology, do the coolest things. Or the other extreme is to do things one way simply because they have been doing it that way in the past? Can we not innovate, work smart?
That is why I am a big fan of the Agile methodology for software development..only implement the exact requirement specified by the customer, nothing more, nothing less.
On a positive note, my manager has acknowldged my desire to start managing projects and delegates a lot more of the planning tasks to me now.

This is the last week of my Contract Management class..the second in a 6-part series to get my Certificate in project Management.

In the past week I also got a call from a recruiter at one of the hottest tech companies in the Valley..the one whose stock is hovering in the $400 range. She was trying to get me to apply for a job that I was not really interested in. When I emailed her the job description I was really interested in, she cooled off. What's up with that?

I have my GMAT on the 22nd. I still have to work on my essay writing and do full tests going forward. And AVOID silly mistakes.