Never ending headaches
November 30th, 2005
So I got an email from the TA of the Managing Global Innovation class today saying I did not submit a paper and they may have to give me zero. This would be laughably funny if it wasn’t so serious. I told Gary Lau my life only gets worse.
The paper in question is the one based on my Baidu interview. Not only did I write the paper. I swear I submitted it early. Furthermore I made in addition to the mandatory PPT and MS Word versions an HTML version in the form of a blog posting. This posting has since been picked up by Business Week and Fortune magazine or at least blogs affiliated with them. Furthermore I wrote my professor and/or the TA telling them the class, the paper, and his research was also discussed online.
All of this would be easy to prove by looking in my outbox in Mailsmith, but my Mac’s hard drive has died.
It gets even worse. I had already invested hundreds of dollars in DiskWarrior, Retrospect, and external hard drives, not to mention my own time nursing the thing along. I had talked on the phone to Apple Support while back in Vancouver complaining about it. I had taken it in to the Apple Service Depot here in Beijing. They said it was fine. It’s not fine. It sounds sick. It can not search or read, it can’t even boot up anymore with reliability. I get all sorts of crashes and odd errors. Since they haven’t called me in the last few days maybe they have changed their tune.
The last time it was able to boot up, I immediately ran and bought both a USB key fob and some CDRWs. I tried to back up both my MBA degree, my website, my documents, my address book, my email etc. just in case. Hopefully that worked. Hopefully my paper and presentation are on one of those CDs. Of course it would be nice, if they found the email from me submitting my paper. Numerous people saw me give my presentation.
I’m literally down to the last few classes of my MBA degree. If I hadn’t gone on exchange I would be done by now. Of course if I hadn’t gone on exchange who knows what would have happened to me. Now I just update old blog posts and apply to jobs because experts continue to insist you can blog your way to a better career. If you have any advice you can leave it below.
This entry was originaly posted on , it was last edited on and is filed under: Technology and tagged: Hard Drive, MBA, PowerBook, Tsinghua.
I talked to Anders the other day. He informed me I got 99% in this class. This is unbelieveable if true, I went from 0 to 99 ie a failure to an A+ in the space of a few hours. Sadly this isn’t the first time this has happened to me.
The news didn’t make me happy, nothing makes me happy. I’ve given a lot of thought to when I was last happy for a sustained period. I’ve only come up with a few times in the last ten years. The last year has of course been the worst time of my life. A fact I don’t plan to allow to be forgotten. Perhaps the last happy night of my life… …even then I wasn’t all that happy and had several regrets which I had to dwell on.