Time flies....

when you're busy! Work has been HECTIC. We've been undergoing some personnel transitions in the financial analysis team, and my forecasting colleague is out on vacation, so I'm holding down the fort this week and I'm the sole person to handle ad hoc requests from da boss. Meanwhile, we're getting into the thick of our quarterly forecasting cycle and the Q3 version is always a hoot because of the emphasis placed on next year and finding a way to meet corporate guidelines while growing our line of business. I'm looking forward to many revisions and lots of negotiating. It builds character, that's for sure, and provides some good stories for b-school application essays. I'm pretty pleased right now because we put together a big quarterly report, kind of a state of the union address and prelude to 2005 forecasting, and our presentation was very well received by senior management. We're off to a good start and da boss is happy.

I hope this means I will sleep better tonight because the past few nights have been rough. I don't have problems falling asleep, but I've been waking up around 2 or 3, then my mind will get going and I have a hard time shutting it down again. By the time I'm ready to fall back to sleep, I've got neighbor noise. The doctor upstairs has his alarm set for 4 am, and the girls next door like to run their blender around 6 am. If I do fall asleep, I'm out cold, which makes it that much harder to get up when my alarm goes off at 7. So it goes.

I have mixed feelings about the whole RSS/public/private debate. On the one hand, the reason I started a blog in the first place was to share my experience with others and to bounce my ideas off people. These are "public" objectives. While I'm not crazy about some of the more personal things in my blog getting syndicated and perhaps being taken out of context, I feel that they are a necessary part of my blogging experience if this blog is going to be about the real, complete ME. Much like an MBA application, it needs both professional and personal introspection, plus a bit of personality, to be meaningful and portray an honest account of who I am, what makes me tick, and why I've chosen this path. That's the only way it will be useful to me, and it's the only way it will be useful to others. Am I concerned that my thoughts, opinions, preferences, etc. in my blog will find their way to an adcom member and perhaps change their opinion of my application? Sure, but the truth is my applications *should* be consistent with my blog. Otherwise, what's the point? If they are consistent, I have nothing to worry about. Plus, I think adcoms are probably too busy to read every applicant blog and connect the dots back to specific applications. They have plenty of other, more important things to worry about.

That said, it's time for a disclaimer. This blog is not quite written as a stream of consciousness, but I want to keep it pretty informal and I certainly don't care to spend time correcting every typo, misspelling, or grammatical error. So please forgive me for not sweating the small stuff. Also, if you're reading my blog and you know me personally or think you might, please do me a favor and send me an email to let me know you are reading. Thanks!