Events

I learned a valuable lesson yesterday: when you lock your computer to your hotel room desk, and you put the cable-lock key in your pocket, you have to remove the key from your pocket before sending the slacks down to the laundry. This realization crept up on me over a very quiet 90-second period that started when I looked in my room safe for the key and didn't find it there. I won't keep you in suspense: housekeeping found and returned the key this morning. This is good, because I had no idea how I was...

Really cool slide show of alternative mass-transit maps via the Economist's Gulliver blog. One, for example shows North American systems to scale. I know I should be studying financial accounting, but this stuff is distracting.

The U.S. Postal Service finally plans to sell the Old Post Office building in Chicago, which they abandoned more than 10 years ago: One of the biggest real estate auctions in the city’s history is slated for Thursday, when the U.S. Postal Service is to sell the Old Main Post Office. And even though the postal service is planning an "absolute auction" — meaning the building is to be sold regardless of price, with a suggested opening bid of just $300,000 — the question remains who will step up for the...

Will someone please tell me what this means, and whether the pelican survived? More photos from London to follow later this week.

We got our official team MBTI profile back this morning. It turns out, I was wrong on one person's Sensing-iNtuitive axis; we're really ESTJ ESTJ ESTJ ESTP ENTP INTP. The balance of Ps and Js is good; the unanimity of Ts is not; and we're acutely aware of the issues surrounding the 5:1 E:I ratio. But that's all for tonight, when we work out our "team charter," the list of expectations and guidelines for how we'll work together from now until April, when Duke recomposes all the teams. Now, half of the...

We go in and out of classrooms all day, every day, and along the way have watched the Thames' noticable tides. We're just a couple days past the New Moon, meaning it's spring tide. Today the BBC weather centre predicted a 7-meter (22-foot) spread at London Bridge, just upriver from our hotel. Here's low tide, around 10 this morning, from the hotel: Now high tide, about 4 this afternoon: Here are side-by-side comparisons of Butler's Wharf: This happens because this far downriver the Thames is actually an...

I walked across the Thames for dinner tonight—my first time out of the hotel in almost two days—and had a lovely risotto al fresco. On the way back I snapped a photo of the hotel where we've been imprisoned stayed for the past week: For good measure I also took another gratuitous photo of Tower Bridge: Because, really, you can't have too many photos of something that cool, right?

As sleep deprivation and other physical assaults continue here in London, and as we begin a five-day sprint through all of Financial Accounting, I pause to note one of the bigger news stories from back home in Chicago. No, not the Cubs sale to the Ricketts family or United's and American's shared panic; I mean the alligator in the Chicago river: A 3-foot-long alligator was caught in the Chicago River last night and is en route to a more suitable home, according to a spokesman for the Chicago Commission...

It's 1:10 am London time, meaning I will enjoy no more than six hours of sleep tonight (including thirty minutes drooling on the breakfast table). Because I'm running on fumes, and therefore no longer playing with a full deck on the top floor, I have decided to post the assignment that kept me up so late. (The essay that follows refers to the InterCultural Edge, an experimental tool for evaluating cross-cultural interactions out of Duke's business school. Otherwise I hope it stands on its own. Also...

They put this out for us every single day: And this is what happens when it's 29°C in Trafalgar Square: And, finally, my temporary Summer Office, the Dickens Inn at St. Katharine's Wharf: All right. Back to work.