I love technology. I buy MP3 players, wireless routers, PDAs, etc. before most of my friends. I'm sort of an early adopter, but I won't buy things that I am pretty sure will fall off the radar or that I thing are overpriced.

For example, a couple years ago somebody came out with a 802.11g hard-drive based music plater for your car. Theoretically, you could transfer all your music to your car if you left your car running and ran into your house to your computer, etc. But it cost about $700 so you might as well just plug your ipod into your car tuner instead. I like the hard drive based stereo units as well, but they cost too much as well at $500-$5000. Everything always comes back to the ipod. 20GB for $299 is my point of comparison.

So when the ipod nano came out, I was drooling. 20GB or more has always been way too much for me. I only have a couple GB of music, so a 4GB is plenty. But my ipod is only about 1 yr old so I can't justify the purchase. I think the killer app with these color ipods is going to be watching video & recording TV shows. I'm not sure if Apple is worried about copyright issues or just maintaining a steady flow of ipod upgrades to keep users buying and upgrading.

iSuppli has estimated that the 2GB nano provides 50% profit margins for Apple, before marketing and distribution costs. A big drivers for this profitability is the low cost, huge Samsung flash chip. Samsung gave Apple a 40% price break on flash memory as Apple contracted to buy 40% of Samsung's flash capacity. Not bad.

Gas prices are coming back up after hurricane Rita. There was a brief respite after the national average hit close to $3.00 around September 5th. Prices had recently dropped to $2.78 nationwide. There appears to already be a run on gas with people trying to fill up their tanks before prices rise again.

I am actually a fan of high gas prices. I hope that the high prices at the pump will drive people away from SUVs and minivans. It should also put pressure on manufacturers to put more emphasis on fuel consumption and less on engine performance requirements. Manufacturers just make what Americans demand. Even so, it will take a decade or more to have a large impact on fuel consumption as older cars are progressively replaced by newer, more efficient models.

Americans seem to have taken cheap gasoline as a right. They blame higher prices on price gouging and OPEC, not on simple rules of supply and demand. I wouldn't mind a stiff federal gasoline tax to keep prices high after the current crisis subsides. Transportation makes up 60% of American oil use and America uses the lions share of global oil production. As America comes under increasing pressure for foreign energy sources, we need to to compromise personal freedom to gas-guzzle for increased nation security of our energy supply. The first step towards this goal is more fuel efficient vehicles, while ultimately we will need alternative sources of energy to fulfill our immense demand for energy.

There was an article in BusinessWeek about MBA grade disclosure. Wharton, HBS, Stanford, and Chicago don't disclose grades to employers. At Wharton, there is sort of grade disclosure in that the top 10% of students can claim to employers that they are on the Director's List. Soon there will be a new bracket for the top 25%. This may ultimately lead to total disclosure because people who are identified as "bottom 75%" may want to show employers that they excelled in their areas of interest, i.e. tell Kraft that they DS'ed Marketing.

I think grades should be disclosed at Wharton for two reasons:

Wharton's competitive advantage is in its academic rigor and quantitative focus. Grade non-disclosure reduces the efforts that many students put forth. This is not to say that people are slacking in general--people at Wharton are competitive by nature and are driven to excel even if nobody knows their grades but them. But there is a portion of the population that sees an MBA as brief reprise from 80-hour work weeks.

Grade non-disclosure has actually put more focus on Director's List status by employers and focuses too much on past measures such as GMAT and undergraduate grades. By not disclosing current grades, but disclosing past grades, we are saying that employers can judge us by the past achievements but not by our current efforts, even though they are more applicable. Furthermore, analysis has shown that more Director's List recipients have been funneled to top consulting firms, investment banks, and PE shops since the non-disclosure policy came into effect. This is because a bank can no longer ask a student how they performed in Finance, so Director's List is the only measure they have available.

Below are some quotes from two of my favorite professors at Wharton, Dean Anjani Jain and Professor Ed George:

It's a debate that's flaring up on B-school campuses across the country. And nowhere is it more intense than at University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, where students, faculty, and administrators have locked horns over a school-initiated proposal that would effectively end a decade of grade secrecy at BusinessWeek's No. 3-ranked B-school. It wouldn't undo disclosure rules but would recognize the top 25% of each class -- in effect outing everyone else. It was motivated, says Vice-Dean Anjani Jain in a recent Wharton Journal article, by the "disincentivizing effects" of grade nondisclosure, which he says faculty blame for lackluster academic performance and student disengagement.

Just how contentious are things at Wharton? In cross-listed classes, Jain wrote, undergrads outperform MBAs, and the gap is widening. Annual student surveys, he wrote, show that the amount of time students spend on academics has fallen by 22% in just four years. Some of Wharton's best faculty have stopped teaching MBA classes altogether, he added. And those who continue now go to great lengths to keep students in check. Many prohibit late arrivals, talking, and cell phones. Others take attendance, as Harvard Business School does, or give weekly quizzes to make sure students show up for class. "Just like with traffic," says Edward I. George, a Wharton statistics professor. "You need traffic lights to function properly."

I recently found out that the guy who created the funny jibjab site is a Wharton MBA grad.

School has begun. I was able to get 2 of Wharton's top classes: Siggelkow for Strategic Planning and Control and Day for Marketing Strategy. I am also taking Advanced Corporate Finance, Competitive Strategy, Entrepreneurship, and Marketing Research.

I had some fun with the Wharton auction process. It is basically a market economy that allows students to buy an sell classes on the 'market.' I made about 4000 points in 'profit' that I can carry to the next semester. I will need them if I want to take the famous Diamond Negotiations class. I'd also like to take some finance, health care, and real estate classes.