Month: August 2008

85.779%

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

We finished our last day in the classroom today, assuming everything goes well in my exam tomorrow. It started to feel long, but the fourth day always does. Wrapped up around 5, grabbed some dinner at the Economy Shoe Shop and came back here to do some work. Not studying really, but case analysis. It’ll be an odd exam.

I ordered a class ring today too. Not exactly sure why, since I can’t imagine ever wearing it. I asked if I could donate the money instead but that seemed to confuse things, so I just picked the smallest, plainest one I could in white gold (Dan doesn’t do yellow gold) and pulled the trigger.

OK, gotta go meet up with the group to review our brilliant insights.

[tags]mba, dalhousie, economy shoe shoe[/tags]

61.567%

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

A pretty easy day. Executive speech in the morning, grad photos at lunch, a full afternoon session and dinner at the Red Stag at day’s end. Only problem was the surplus of heavy food & beer, and now I’m far too sleepy to do any work.

Tomorrow’s my last day of class (and therefore my last night of studying) evah. I can’t say I’m not a little excited about that.

[tags]mba, dalhousie, halifax, red stag[/tags]

37.775%

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

Just got back from a cruise around Halifax Harbour. People seemed to enjoy it; most of them haven’t seen Halifax from that vantage point. It was pretty gray and on the verge of raining, but the water was calm and wind not too cold. We ate on board the tall ship and the food was really pretty good. Nice time. A few of us stopped for a beer on the way home, but I was way too full to even finish it, and it started to rain anyway, so we walked home.

Half done the classroom portion of the week now…believe it or not, I almost wish we had more class time. There’s so much going on this week it feels like we haven’t had much time to really dig into this course, but I’m not going to complain at this point if they want to take it easy on us.

[tags]mba, halifax, tall ship silva[/tags]

13.478%

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

Day one is over. Pretty easy so far. The new business building is sooooo much nicer than the old one where I did my undergrad. Some people from the university gave the group a campus tour at lunchtime, which was nice…could see what’s changed. And it turns out one of the guys giving the tour grew up 15 minutes away from me and went to high school with some of our close family friends.

Anyway, tonight was a quiet one, maybe the only quiet one. We finished a case around 6:00 and had a bite to eat down at the Rogue’s Roost. I’ll enjoy my relaxation time when I can get it.

[tags]mba, dalhousie[/tags]

Love my bed SO HARD

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

Sorry, there hasn’t been much time to post. It’s been a whirlwind since landing in Halifax…lot of catching up and celebrating and so on.

It’s amazing to be back in Halifax. Seeing old familiar places (like Pizza Corner) and new ones (like Rogue’s Roost), with so many good friends, many of whom have never been here before, has been fantastic. I’m really looking forward to the rest of the week — even the classroom time — and they’re keeping us busy in the evenings. Feels weird to be here without Nellie though.

I have to get up early, and I’m damned exhausted, so that’s it for tonight. I’ll have more later in the week. If you desire more updates and want to follow along with the minutiae of my daily life, you can follow me on twitter.

[tags]mba, halifax[/tags]

"It's the ciiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiircle of liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiife!"

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

In three days I’ll fly to Halifax (again…I was just there less than two weeks ago) to attend the final intensive week of my MBA and write my final exam. I’m excited about this, for reasons beyond the obvious…the obvious being that I really, really, pretty-please-with-a-cherry-on-top want to be done this fucker.

Ahem…like I said: beyond that. Even though I’ve lived in Toronto for eleven years now, I still very much think of Halifax as another home. A different kind of home than the family farm, which is two hours northwest of Halifax, but home nonetheless. I spent four years at university there, where I met my wife. I visited Halifax with my family several times as a kid and have visited many times since I moved away. I was married in Halifax. I have good friends there. Some of my favourite places are there: the Public Gardens, the Daily Grind, the bottom of a glass of Granite Brewery Special Best Bitter. If there’s such a thing as a spiritual home, I think Halifax is probably it. If I love the farm for feeling familiar and comfortable, I love Halifax equally for being liberating. Not liberating from the farm or my family, but liberating from the nearby town where I went to high school and the life I was afraid I’d slip into there.

I’m glad I’ll get to enjoy next week with new friends, good friends. It’ll be fun to be one of the two people who’ve lived there and show the tourists around and explain what a donair is. It’ll be fun being on campus, even if it’ll be quiet during the summer. I think it’ll feel like closing a circle too, righting a small wrong. I’ve never felt like I wasted my university education; in fact I think I’ve done fairly well by it. However, I look back (as most people probably do) and shudder at the weakness my work ethic in those years, and regret the sloppiness of my first two most especially. I’ve been lucky enough to learn some of the stuff I, quite frankly, probably should have learned (or remembered) from my first go-round at business school. Not many people get a second crack at that.

How lucky, then, that I get to wrap it all up in the city where it started. Where everything started.

[tags]halifax, dalhousie, public gardens, daily grind, granite brewery[/tags]

"I'm not a monster…I'm just ahead of the curve."

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

Deary me, I somehow managed to forget to blog about seeing The Dark Knight (imdb | rotten tomatoes). Nellie reminded me tonight while we were having a drink and some food at C’est What. That was tasty, by the way, even if they didn’t have half the beer I wanted.

Anyway…TDK. I liked it lots and lots. I liked that they finally introduced Bruce Wayne’s internal conflict into the series, the fact that he doesn’t want to be Batman, but maybe secretly he needs to be. I liked that Christopher Nolan doesn’t film fight scenes by just jump-cutting together dozens of quarter-second snippets. I liked that Maggie Gyllenhaal was in it instead of Katie Holmes. I liked that the batvehicles, as bizarre as they looked, moved like real vehicles. I liked how dark (mood, not lighting) it was…Batman’s supposed to be dark. Most of all, I liked that for all the hype I’d heard about how good Heath Ledger was as The Joker, I was still blown away. He was very good, and very scary. Nicholson was very good, but never scary.

I didn’t like that Christian Bale sounds like Tom Waits when he does the Batman voice and I didn’t like that they took Aaron Eckhart’s* storyline too far. Those are minor complaints, though; it was an excellent film.

* did anyone else keep thinking about the crooked cop from the Batman every time he was on the screen? “Eckhart…think about the future!” [blam!]

[tags]c’est what, the dark knight, batman[/tags]

"It makes me aerodynamic, for fighting."

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

We saw Pineapple Express (imdb | rotten tomatoes) yesterday. I guess I liked it…I wouldn’t say it’s a great movie by any means, but it was very funny at times. I probably would’ve been confused by the movie’s style had I not known David Gordon Green was the director. He injected some of his style into an otherwise typically Rogen/Goldberg script, which worked for some scenes and made others feel odd. It gave the movie a pretty uneven feel, but the funny moments were good enough to make up for it. Some surprisingly prolonged fight scenes too.

After that we met up with CBGBLB and some of CB’s family for dinner at beerbistro. Much tastiness ensued…for the second straight night. I watched a little Olympic action and then slept like the dead, fortunately nowhere near all the explosions. Check out the pictures and video of that at Photojunkie.

[tags]pineapple express, beerbistro, toronto propane explosions[/tags]