Supply Chain Logistics and some other things

As far as classes go, I have finished my first class and am now halfway into my second. The first class was Modern Chinese and Japanese History. Now I am onto the IE classes, starting with Supply Chain Economics. The material is sort of interesting, but after about an hour of it, it gets very boring. Then I realize I still have three more hours and that makes me want to cry. As you would expect, we are learning all of the aspects of managing a supply chain. That means we are looking at transportation routes, inventory management, etc.

Our first test was yesterday. It was probably the longest non-final I have ever taken. It was ten pages of multiple choice, true/false, short answer and math problems. It took me 1.75 hours and I was the first or second person done. None of the problems were too difficult, though I will always hate linear programming problems.

One of the problems on the test was also a routing problem. I think I have now done routing/shorting distance problems in at least five different classes (Supply Chain Logistics, Combinatorics, Linear and Discrete, Optimization, and Stochastics). I'm pretty sure i'm now qualified to work for MapQuest or GoogleMaps.

As part of the class, we took a tour of the local IBM manufacturer. My biggest takeaway from the tour was that IBM is working very very hard to get away from the image of being a dull, gray company. We repeatedly heard that one of their processors now comes in color instead of just gray. Additionally, a few months ago, they broke into teams within the company and each team was assigned a conference room to decorate. They had a $100 budget and had to work outside of normal office hours. They were incredibly proud of these conference rooms. We even got to see a power point presentation about the contest.

I'm being reminded of the blog name lately. I'm very very sick of Asian food of all types. I can't remember the last time I went this long without pizza and I really miss it. Plus I don't think more than 2 meals have actually filled me up. We went out to a burger place on Saturday. They put bread on our table and we ravenously scarfed it down. I did finally go to Little India last night for some Indian food. The Indian restraunt in Columbia is honestly better and it was a bit pricey, but still nice to have something different.

I stayed in town this past weekend but am leaving for Hong Kong tomorrow. A guy on our trip lived there for a few months so he has lots planned for us, starting with Macau and some gambling on Thursday.