iStudiez Pro – I can’t say enough about iStudiez Pro for iOS. I’ve tried every calendar management tool and todo application under the sun, and this is far and away the best of them. Aimed at students, it excels in three ways. First, it’s got a great system for scheduling classes and assignments. Second, it syncs brilliantly and invisibly across devices. And third, its absolutely gorgeous. A lot of time and energy went into this app, and it shows.

The Wall Street Journal – Yep, the newspaper. WSJ is the language of business students and business professionals. MBAs are expected to read it every day and have an opinion on every article. The WSJ iPad app makes it much easier for me to keep up, and eliminates the hassle of searching for a paper copy. While a subscription is necessary, the payoff is huge.

Saver – I’m a grad student. Therefore, I am poor. Saver is a simple little app that helps me manage my spending through a classic motivational tool: guilt. Yes, by punching in every transaction I make, I can see graphically exactly how much more I am spending than I should. It’s easy-to-use and helpful as a grim reminder of the necessity of fiscal responsibility can be!

There are also a couple of great “analog” pieces that have become indispensable elements of my daily business school routine.

Solo Vintage Backpack – The thing is absolutely gorgeous. Dark brown Columbian leather punctuated by antique brass makes for a clean, professional appearance. To me, the discerning consumer and MBA student, this is not insignificant. I’m going to lectures, meeting guest speakers, and will soon be introducing myself to recruiters from some of the largest corporations in the world. And I ask myself, does a $20 North Face backpack really convey the image I want to put forward? If I’m cleaning my suits, shining my shoes, and learning the difference between Half Windsor, Full Windsor, and Pratt Knots, I don’t want to handicap myself with a bag better suited to hiking in Vermont than sealing deals in New York. The Solo Vintage looks like the bag of a stylish young professional, and that matters. But looks aren’t everything, of course. A backpack has to be able to hold and organize the things you need to carry without destroying your spine in the process. The Solo Vintage must be built with Time Lord technology – it’s bigger on the inside.

BookBook Case for MacBook Pro – The MacBook Pro is mighty stylish machine, but it needs protection if you’re taking it with you everywhere. I’ve been using a simple neoprene sleeve for half a decade, but recently decided to upgrade to BookBook. It’s a brilliant leather case, handmade and designed to resemble a dusty tome from deep within the bowels of some academic library. In addition to providing protection and style, it’s also a great conversation starter.

TikTok – And speaking of conversation starters, no item I’ve ever owned has ever caught people’s attention like my TikTok. This product – the result of the most successful Kickstarter project in history – transforms your 6th generation iPod nano into a beautiful wristwatch. It’s just awesome. The only caveat: the upcoming LunaTik Lynk from the same company looks even better.

National Review made the bold decision to embrace Apple’s subscription service and offer its product in on a new media platform. It’s not a completely independent edition of the venerable publication – in fact, it’s simply a high-quality PDF of the printed version – but it is in no way dependent on outdated models of publishing. Unlike The New York Times, let’s say, which has built its cost structure to incentivize users to subscribe to its print edition ($8.75 a week for unlimited digital subscribers vs. $7.40 a week for home delivered print AND unlimited digital) , National Review has embraced the benefits of digital publishing and distribution, and is giving its readers every reason to do the same. A one-year digital subscription costs $19.99, as opposed to a $29.50 print subscription, or nearly $120 for twenty-four individually purchased issues. (For comparison, NYT digital costs $1.25 per digital edition, while NR costs 83¢. NYT with print costs $1.05 per issue. Not trying to compare NYT and NR by content, but rather the ways they are using pricing to incentivize digital subscriber behavior.)  Even better, by using Apple’s subscription service, National Review allowed me to opt out of sharing my personal data. That means that I won’t be sold as a product to any cause that wants to send me their mail (or more accurately, send my trashcan their mail). That’s something that would be worth paying more for – and I’m paying less for it.

This is my first experience with Apple’s subscription system. It took less than a minute to do. I don’t know if National Review is going to make enough through this process to justify shifting more of its resources to digital, but if there are more users like me out there to whom the ease of the process and the lowered price makes a difference, then the publisher has a good chance of making up in volume what it gave up in price. And that’s a very good thing for National Review, for Apple, for the future of publishing, and for users like me.

It’s a ridiculous thought, of course. Were it not for Middlebury, I wouldn’t have been offered a spot at the Johnson School. I’m following in a long tradition of undergrads pursuing advanced degrees at other institutions. Many of my friends have already done so in their respective fields. But the first time I pull on a Cornell sweatshirt or cheer for Big Red at a hockey game or, God forbid, go on the air with the Cornell Radio Theater of Thrills & Suspense (Cr|Tots doesn’t sound right), it’s going to feel uncomfortable.

This will change over time. I will one day be able to accept that I am a part of two different academic communities, and will be able to love both in equal measure. But Middlebury will always be my first love and will always have my loyalty. Middlebury will always be home.

I’ve been away for a while, I know. The truth is that the last several months have been difficult. I was engaged in a relentless job search that was starting to eat away at me. I was tired. I was sick of everything I was doing and ready for a change. And most of all, my writing had ground to a halt.

But fortunately, this story has a happy ending, and a seed I planted more than half a year ago has finally born fruit. After submitting my application in October 2010 and spending four months on the waiting list, I’ve been accepted to the S.C. Johnson School of Management at Cornell University. This August, I’ll matriculate to Ithaca, New York, where I’ll begin the two-year process of earning my MBA. I feel honored to have the opportunity to join the program at such a young age, and although I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me over the next two years, I’m eager to get started.

I worked very hard to position myself for this. I took the GMAT twice, applied once beforein 2009, earned strong grades at college and performed substantial work in DC. Now I get the enjoy the payoff.

Over the next couple months, I’ll have some time to reflect as I prepare to matriculate, and one of the things I’ll be considering is what to do with this blog. I’ll update once I’ve figured that out, but suffice to say, I’m getting to the point in my life where I’m thinking a lot more about what I’m putting out for public consumption. Shocking as it may seem, I’ve learned some measure of restraint.

I’ll be updating in the future as I prepare to depart DC. Stay tuned for more.

The tragedy is that after months of diligent work, I have finally cracked this story. I know what needs to happen and how the characters need to relate to one another. Extraneous plot threads have been eliminated, the story has become more focused, and the themes have come into sharp focus. But despite the fact that I know how it’s all supposed to unfold, I just haven’t been able to sit down and write the two hundred pages I need to write.

There are two issues, I think, and they’re both about me. The first is that I’m very unsure of the tone that I’ve been using to tell this story. It’s very grim, which fits the story, but it doesn’t come naturally to me. I’m trying to conform my style to the story I’m trying to tell, rather than telling that story in my style, which is a challenge primarily because both the story and the style are mine. So I’ve created a story that I actually do enjoy that feels like it would be best told by someone else.

The second issue is that the setting of the story is one that I actually don’t know anything about. My knowledge of it is cobbled together from bits and pieces of popular culture, and it shows. With every draft, the setting itself has receded into the background, but it’s still there and my ignorance is painfully obvious. They say “write what you know,” but if I wrote what I knew, I’d be writing stories about well-educated conservative young professionals in love with video games, comic books, and progressive rock, and that’s a damn narrow target audience. And frankly, I don’t want to tell stories about my life. I want to tell the kind of stories that I would like to read. Blood and Thunder is one such story, but unfortunately, I don’t know if I’m the person to write it.

None of this blog post makes sense to anyone who hasn’t tried their hand at writing something. I don’t mean the occasional short story or angst-ridden poem. I mean a real, substantial, sustained piece of creative writing. And maybe the solution is, as with all things, to just write through it. To just pound out this next draft of the story, get it in someone else’s hands, say “READ!” and get feedback. That might be the thing to do. That might be what I end up doing. But right now, I don’t know.

Damn, this creating stuff is hard.

My schedule has been horribly thrown off these last few weeks following the GMAT. I’m getting it back together – my writing, at least, seems to be back on track – but certain things like blogging have been neglected. I’ll get back to it regularly after the holiday.

Additionally, I am curious about what you readers think about the current look/feel of the site. Do you like the minimalism, or do the people demand their sidebars?

Coming soon: review of “Absolutely Free,” review of Stranger in a Strange Land, commentary on trends in computing and consumption, and possibly a piece on politics. (Yes, n00bs, this was once a fiercely political blog – that is, before I started working in politics.) Stay tuned.

In retrospect, I feel foolish for not reaching this twist earlier. It was the obvious one, but I neglected it due to my desire to keep certain plot elements a secret until late in the story. By executing the twist and pushing a major revelation forward in the story, I am allowing myself to develop a different type of dramatic tension, while also strengthening my protagonist’s arc. But sometimes I guess you need to realize what’s not working and why before you can accept an alternative approach.

So now the story continues, albeit slowly. My pace has slipped. I devoted a lot of time in recent weeks to the GMAT (with spectacular results), but couldn’t spend much time writing as a result. Now, with a bit more time on my hands, I’ll hopefully get rolling again.

More than any other show, Lost has taken viewers on a substantive literary journey, from the opening frame to the cusp of the finale. Has it always been perfect? No. But it has always been interesting, and I have confidence that tonight’s episode will be, if nothing else, memorable.

I plan on rewatching the whole series some time soon. As I do, I’ll be blogging with my thoughts on each episode. But for tonight, I’ll be content to sit back and enjoy as it all comes to an end. Hope you all enjoy it too.

Update: It was perfect.

Having finished draft one of my novel, I thought I could go back and cruise to a second draft by making edits and adding to/subtracting from the whole. This has, after all, been my primary mode of writing to date. It is very rare for me to simply start over again, and I assumed that my old habits would carry me through this new adventure. Not so, it appears. As I have made my way through this second draft, it has become increasingly apparent that simple tweaks aren’t going to do the trick.

Think of it like an old code base: you can change bits of it, add to it, subtract from it, etc., but eventually you reach a point where if you want to move on, you have to simply take all the lessons you’ve learned and start from scratch, with a new code. And it’s hard to accept that, because you’ve put so much work into the first version, but if you want to get where you want to go, then you have to suck it up and do what the job demands, and that’s what I’m doing.

That’s not to say I’m abandoning what I’ve done. In fact, I’ve made tremendous progress on the story, the characters, the setting – really, every aspect of it – and I fully intend to finish telling this story. But to get it where I want it to be, I need to start from word one all over again. I know the story, I’ve got extensive notes, and I have my original manuscript to reference. Now it’s time to sit down with what I now know and write it again.

What I’m trying to say is that after trying to carve a second draft from a first, I have now decided to write a second draft. This is going to take time and it’s going to take energy, but having examined the options available to me, I feel it’s the best one left. My goal has always been to have something that I am personally happy with by December 31st, 2010. I think that this is the best way for me to achieve that goal.

So, here goes!