I haven’t thought much about Microsoft’s Support for Linux Guest on Virtual Server 2005 yet, but it’s definitely noteworthy.  Tristan Louis wrote a long, thoughtful post on it that’s worth reading if you care about this stuff.

This morning, I noticed on Will Herman’s blog that on Wednesday of this week, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06 (at least in the US).  I plan to be awake to see it.  After three people sent me the same fact today (thanks!) I decided my obsession with numbers is starting to infect the universe (or maybe it’s the other way around.)

Adam Rubenstein – who writes a blog called Colorado Life Science Deal Flow – has started a guest blogger series to encourage some of his friends and collegues to dip their toes into the blogpond.  His first guest is Harry Ross – a partner at Aweida Venture Partners which is just up the road from my office.  Harry – c’mon in – the water is usually pretty warm (although it’s occassionally a little too hot.)

As I settle in for an hour wait before my plane at the San Jose Airport (the United Terminal really needs a paint job and a good vacuuming), I’ve been pondering the complete lack of electrical outlets.  I can open up my laptop and immediately connect to the Internet (via my Verizon EVDO card – bypassing the nonsense of dealing with airport paid-WiFi).  However, I’ve got to scrounge around find an electrical outlet.

Of course, I could just run off my batteries, but since I’m on a two hour flight to Denver, I’d rather make sure I have a full charge.  Am I the only person that thinks it’s odd to be sitting in an airport full of an incredible amount of infrastructure, yet not be able to get electric juice?

I did find one – I’m the guy hunched over in the very corner next to the wall near the door at Gate C3B.

NewsGator and VNU announced today localized versions of NewsGator Online and NewsGator Inbox for Germany, Holland, Italy, Belgium, and Spain.  These countries join the previously localized versions for the UK and France.

Ah – the joy of a platform.

As a follow up to my MBA post from yesterday, I noticed an article in BusinessWeek titled “Can a Personal MBA Match the Real McCoy?”  Interesting and provocative content, along with a few interesting links for those of you thinking about an MBA.

I got a fun question in my inbox recently from a long time reader of this blog.  This answer is aimed at those of you who have ever thought about going to business school.

I’m an entrepreneur, software developer, and occasional angel investor, who is thinking about going to business school. I’m looking for something new to do, either in VC or in finance more generally, and want to use business school as a way to change career direction. Since I live in the Bay area, I talked to the Stanford GSB admissions office, which recommended that I apply for their Sloan Fellows program. I did so and was recently accepted, but upon further investigation I’m a little worried because, as you may know, the Sloan program is a one-year program which results in a MS in Management rather than an MBA.  My question to you is if you think that the fact you have an MS rather than an MBA has ever closed any doors to you? If so, which ones?

Before I answer the question, I want to straighten up some facts.  I don’t have an “MS in Management.”  I actually have an SM in Management Science” (I try to clear up resume fraud wherever I go.)  When I went to MIT in the mid-1980’s, they didn’t have an MBA program.  For some reason that I can’t remember (presumably to be more true to the original latin – Scientiae Baccalaureus), MIT reverses the letters on the BS and MS degrees (so they are actually SB and SM degrees.)  In addition – MIT didn’t want to be known for giving out BA degrees, so the undergraduate degree that I have is an SB in Management Science (yeah – a bachelor of science degree.)

Now that that is cleared up, let’s go on to the question.  Five years ago, I was approached by a bright young man (ok – I was young – but he was younger) looking for advice on which business school to go to.  He had a bachelors and masters degree from Stanford.  He’d recently been accepted to both Stanford GSB and Harvard Business School.  He had been working for four or five years – first as a management consultant and then as an early employee (ultimately the director of corporate development) at a recently public company.  My answer to him was “how about neither – why don’t you come work for me instead.”  Chris did, and I don’t think he’s ever looked back.

Business school certainly has value and serves a useful purpose in this world.  However, the essence of the question points at one of the fundamental problems (and possibly misconceptions) about business school.  I’m 40.  I don’t believe that the degree I have has ever had any material impact on my “career” during the last 20 years.  I can’t think of a single situation where it came up in a conversation about anything that I was considering doing.  For a while, I obsessively corrected the “MBA” and “MS” listings that would show up on web sites and in public filings – I finally gave up because I decided it simply wasn’t relevant.  While many people wear their degrees as badges of honor on their chests, I prefer to let actions speak for themselves (and – rather than look at the badges people have, I look for the actions.)

If you want a two year break from life, go to business school.  If you want to meet a bunch of new, generally smart, and always interesting people, go to business school.  If you are a techie but like the business side of things, want to get an intellectual (and functional grounding) in business stuff, want a two year break from life, and want to meet interesting people, go to business school. But please – don’t worry about whether you are getting an SM or an MS or an MBA – that’s not what you are going for.

Recognize this will cost you $100k plus two years of opportunity cost, so make sure it’s worth it to you.  There are many careers where you generally (but not always) need the MBA badge to advance to the next level.  If you are an investment banker or a management consultant, it’ll help.  If you are looking to be a VC, it might help, but it probably won’t, as the population of people being recruited into the VC business continues to be very small.  Don’t be misguided by the idea that doors will now fly open to you since you are a newly minted MBA (or MS, or SM.)

Yesterday I said I was going to make April “Microsoft Month” for my computers.  After installing IE7b2, a bunch of Live.com stuff, migrating my bookmarks from Firefox to IE7, and then trying to use IE7 as my primary browser, I’ve given up after 24 hours.  It occurred to me that this wasn’t going to work out the third time I had to restart my computer because something goofy was going on. 

I was determined to use Live.com and IE7 for feadreading – after watching Live.com choke on importing my OPML file (it didn’t seem to be able to handle 707 feeds that were formatted into folders), I downloaded the Live.com toolbar to install Onfolio (plus – I needed it to synchronize my bookmarks – er – I mean favorites – since IE requires the entire toolbar to do this on multiple machines.)  By this point, I had icons and buttons all over the place in IE7 and was constantly having to drop down menus for things that were one button in Firefox.  I chalked this up to my inexperience with IE7 and kept driving.

Onfolio handled my OPML file fine, but was excruciating slow refreshing all my feeds.  I managed to crash it trying to mark all feeds as read (it turns out there’s an easy way, but I hadn’t figured it out yet and had to reboot again when I hung IE7 and then had spurious issues with Outlook after shutting it down in the Task Manager.)

I woke up this morning ready to try again.  I was getting my mind around the idea that maybe I’d only run all Microsoft on my machine at home and I’d leave my laptop and work machine as is so I didn’t totally destroy their configs.  When I started getting a “The Operation Failed” message when I tried to “Send Page by E-mail” from IE7, I started realizing that basic things simply weren’t working anymore (of course, this is beta software – I know.)  I installed my del.icio.us buttons – they didn’t work (I got an IE “Internet Explorer cannot download …eURIComponent … Unspecified error” – clearly the buttons that worked with IE 6 don’t work with IE 7.

I tried a few more things with my morning routine and finally decided that I was going to modify my experiment.  Rather than view the browser as a part of the Microsoft / Yahoo / Google diet, I’m going to limit myself to web-based apps.  I’m going back to Firefox, but will continue to try to wean myself off of my.yahoo, Google’s search, and the other Yahoo / Google things I use.

In my ultimate quest for periodic pain, I’ve decided to take a page from Chris Pirillo’s Googlefasting playbook and segment my use over the next three months.  Rather than using a mix of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft I’m going to spend April with Microsoft only, May with Yahoo, and June with Google. 

I’m starting the process today.  I figure the first few days will be a transition from what I’m currently using to only Microsoft stuff.  I haven’t yet decided how I’m going to approach the edge cases (e.g. does that mean I dump iTunes, what about all the tagging I do with del.icio.us, and I suppose I’ll have to see if I can get into the Microsoft AdCenter beta to replace my Google and Yahoo ads on my blog) – I’ll figure this out as I go.

I always learn a lot when I do something like this.  For example, about a year ago I used a different aggregator each week (e.g. Bloglines one week, then FeedDemon (before NewsGator bought FeedDemon), then Rojo, then NetNewsWire on my Mac (before NewsGator bought NetNewsWire) – deep immersion with other products in my use case is very instructive to me and I always encourage the executives at my companies to actively use competitive products (Andy – that was intended for your ears.)

After spending a day at Microsoft earlier this week digging into some interesting stuff, I decided to really push each of the Microsoft / Yahoo / Google platforms and see where they took me.  I imagine there will be some limitations (e.g. I doubt I’ll switch from Outlook, good luck prying my Sidekick out of my hands, and no – I’m not going to switch my feld.com blogging infrastructure from MovableType), but I’ll see how far I can take it.

Look for periodic reports from the front line.  Thanks Chris for the inspiration.  The IE 7 Beta 2 just finished installing on my machine at home and is telling me to reboot, so that’s all for now.