www.BPODigest.com i-Vortal

First Day @ Harvard Extension School

Yesterday, I was so excited to go to my first class at HES, I planned to go early, relax a little bit, get to know the people and savor the experience. The class was scheduled at 7:35 PM in the evening. I reached Harvard Square around 7:00 PM and I could not locate my parking garage and every parking sport around the square is occupied. I went round and round and round the square roads in search of parking for about 30 minutes and by the time I reached the class, the class has almost started. The first class was simple with team forming exercise, a movie viewing and take home exercises. Its sure going to be extremely busy fall season. The class has around 30 students and I am sure it’s going to be exciting working with all of them.

Courses That I am taking at HES

After researching the courses offerred at HES and thinking a lot, I finally decided to take two courses that will help me to evolve in my career from an Information Technology Consultant to an Information Technology Consulting Manager, with a little touch of Entrepreneurship.

The courses are:
Management of Technology: People and Organizations and
e-Commerce Strategies for Managers and Entrepreneurs

Can’t believe I am doing this for real starting from next week. I believe that these courses will to help me a lot in boosting my career in short term.

Harvard Extension School - Master of Liberal Arts in Management

Now that I consult in Boston, I explored the possibility of taking some management courses at Harvard University. I found out that Harvard has a continuing education school called Harvard Extension School (HES – My Abbreviation). This HES offers hundreds of courses in various disciplines, which are taught by Harvard professors and other eminent Professors/Consultants from Other reputed Universities and Working World. You can browse the list of subjects offered by HES @ this link. HES programs gives freedom to an individual to choose to take degrees, certifications, citations or just courses.

I am mostly interested in management studies at this point of time, so I attended one of the HES information sessions. HES offers Certificate in Management (CM) and Master of Liberal Arts in Management(ALMM) programs. HES has more than 25 years of history with CM offering. However, ALMM is initiated just this year (2006). I just feel that, its the way Harvard chose to welcome me into its academic experience, heheheee. I am totally looking forward to savor the Harvard experience starting this Fall.

Christophe Coenraets published a 30 Minutes Flex Test-Drive for Java Developers. Flex is one of those cool Web2.0 RIA (Rich Internet Application) technology. I can't comment much on technology, but one thing for sure is that, there are good billing rates in the market if you know flex. Have fun playing with flex.

Open source competitor for flex is Laszlo, which is pretty cool as well. I dabbled with it a while ago and really loved it, however there were many features that were missing in it when I tried, I am sure they must have improvised it a lot more.

Free Algorithm Boom

S. Dasgupta, C.H. Papadimitriou, and U.V. Vazirani published an algorithm book and it is available onlilne for free. Find it out at http://www.cse.ucsd.edu/users/dasgupta/mcgrawhill/