Earlier this week, I sat on a panel at American University titled "Starting your own Business: Trials and Tribulations". While all of the panelists work in startups, have managed in startups, and have often founded startups, I found myself as the sole technologist in the bunch... speaking to a bunch of MBA grads and budding entrepreneurs.

Update on 27 Apr: I forgot to link to the great pictures taken by the Jobmatchbox team.

Disclaimer: With all due respect, what I describe can easily happen someone without an MBA, I've seen but I'm talking patterns here. ;)

One of the things that often - not always! - drives someone to business school is the desire to start their own company. The flexibility, the power, the excitement, the big idea that they have. No, seriously the *big* idea. Somewhere along the way, the get all the pieces that go into making it happen... they learn about the marketing, the strategy, the presentations, the research, and all the other little bits and pieces.

... just isn't worth it.

I have - on occasion - said something interesting, insightful, and even a bit provocative in this space. I had a post all lined up to go today.. and then I realized the date. I realized that at least two of my four readers don't know what I'm talking about most of the time, so I'm mostly writing for an audience of two... and since it's April Fools' Day at least one of those people wouldn't believe me anyway.

For example, when Gmail was announced on 01 April 2004, I didn't believe it. It was just so far out there and didn't make sense. Six weeks later, I was clamouring for an invite and managed to snag one through a friend of a friend of a friend who took mercy on my pitiful self.

So anyway, I - like my horribly unquotable friend Jimmy Gardner - am just waiting for 02 April to get here. Enjoy your jokes for today... some of them have been entertaining, but I'll wait to catch the news and read up until tomorrow.

This past week, an interesting article hit my radar from Wired magazine, titled simply "Top 5 Reasons It Sucks to Be an Engineering Student". As a former engineering student myself*, I thought I'd share some perspective on this one...

First, yes, most of the textbooks are awful. Some of them are beyond awful.. some of the worst ones are written by your own profs.

I remember getting chewed out by my Department Head and having to apologize to another Department Head when I publicly criticized the choice in a text book change and would not allow usage of the old book. Yes, because apparently thermo tables changed somewhere in the last year... oh wait, it was that Department Head's book. ;) That said, the single best "book" I had was a 90 page super cliff-notes guide to circuit analysis written by another prof. I still keep that one on hand.

A few weeks ago, I came across something interesting in my inbox from the Go Big Network. If you're not familiar with it, it's a place where startups, investors, and people looking to join investors can connect up, recruit one another, and generally get a bit of exposure.

They also have a regular newsletter that goes out covering different issues and that's where this post kicks off.

Normal disclaimers apply: I try not to make this a political space. I'm not an economist, but I've studied it both in academia and in real life.

Fundamentally, I believe that a basic understanding of it is required to have any significant success... well, for the common man. If you happen to be one of the elite - or otherwise be unconnected with real life - it's not quite as necessary. As demonstrated here by Senator Clinton about Alan Greenspan

"Not only that, but the Fed didn't act while he was there. But he has a calming influence still to this day on Wall Street -- don't ask me why because I never understand what he's saying -- but nevertheless people respond to that Delphic oracle approach. I think it would be wise to include him. And recently he's come out and vert smartly so [sic] that we have to deal with housing and maybe we need to have some kind of buyout mechanism for mortgages. So he's moved on his understanding and depth of the problem -- but you know you could pick three others.

... is the worst possible thing you can be.

One of the aspects of the work that I do is system analysis. I'm contacted regularly by individuals who are working on a new application or have an application that's about to go into production that they want me to look at. Generally, the focus is performance or scalability, but there's almost always a "is it secure?" comment in there.

I generally try to stay out of politics in this space, but the rhetoric and discussion in the past few weeks have really ticked me off. For the record, I don't support any candidate on either side at the moment. I am opposed to a couple of them - one actively - but have otherwise not been involved... the thing that concerns me now is the latest anti-profit kick from a couple of the current leaders in the US Presidential race.

I've come to expect this to expect this from Senator Clinton. For as long as I can remember, she's ranted talked about the "windfall profits" of Big Oil/Pharmaceutical/Insurance/everyone else. More than anything, it seems to come from the assumption that everyone who has been successful has lied, cheated, and stolen to make it to where they are. Yes, a few have (Enron, MCI, etc), but I believe their names/companies come to mind because there are so few.