What have I been doing? Watching the Chinese New Year lion dance at Bank of America Forum! (CAUTION: this video is very loud due to heavy drumming.)

I kid. The truth is I’ve been really busy with classes, projects, and recruiting. My IBD project takes up a significant portion of my week because the client wants our team to start putting together marketing plans immediately. At the same time, I’ve been interviewing for a number of positions at digital media and technology firms in the Bay Area.

My goal is to work in product marketing or business development. But thanks to my experience at Google, I’m pretty versatile and can work on pretty much any role that combines project management with analytics. Some of the roles I’m looking at include sales operations, business marketing, and product management. I am especially interested in gaming because that’s the industry I worked with at Google. Also, I’ve been playing games since I was 6.

Of course, classwork is tough as usual. This semester, I’m taking Operations Management and Macroeconomics. Both classes are fairly interesting for a ‘poet’ like me. However, the workload is very heavy.

In Macroeconomics, the professor insists that everyone in class read the Financial Times five times a week so that everyone can discuss current issues. He cold calls students and asks about countries. On one hand, the class is stress-inducing. On the other hand, I now know a lot about inflation in China, liquidity problems in Japan, and austerity in the EU. Also, the correct answer to every question in class is “Greece is doomed.”

Operations class is equally fascinating. I’ve always enjoyed process design and efficiency management. This class in particular is taught by an ex-consultant who lives and breathes operational efficiency. He introduces several frameworks and models which students can use to keep business operations flowing.

At the end of the course, students formed groups of 4 to run a factory simulation called Littlefield. We had to balance supply order decisions with machine purchasing and lead time monitoring. Think of it as Tamagotchi (or FarmVille) for MBAs. Teams were ranked at the end of the simulation by the amount of revenue they had generated. My team was 20 out of 60, which sounds bad but is actually very good. We different from team 1 by only a few thousand dollars. Some teams went bankrupt and had negative revenue. Overall, it was a good experience.

Aside from classes, I’ve been working with the Digital Media & Entertainment Club (DMEC) as their new VP of Social Media since January. In a nutshell, I manage DMEC’s Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and LinkedIn channels and outreach strategy. I also create and assemble weekly newsletters to distribute to the 200+ club members across the full time and evening/weekend MBA programs. I also redesigned the DMEC website. My next job is to design a shirt. I’ve posted an early design below. I plan to touch it up quite a bit.

The nice thing about DMEC is it connects me with classmates who are interested in technology. They use their ‘connections’ to set up company treks. In early February, I visited Zynga’s office in San Francisco and chatted with some Haas alumni. Considering I’m a pretty avid CityVille player, I was pretty excited.

I took this picture in the Zynga lobby. The little pillars you see are actually badge readers. If you try to walk through the pillars without a badge, crazy lights will start to flash to alert security and a man will show up with a club to escort you out. I felt it would be even cooler if a force field would materialize in the laser tunnel. Alas, real life is far less exciting than Star Wars.

Finally, I’ve been hard at work soliciting posts for the Haas Student Blog. I serve as one of two Editorial Directors and my job is to manage a team of bloggers that chronicle their business school activities in hopes of giving prospective students a behind the scenes look at Berkeley life. On a daily basis, I moderate comments, edit posts, check page analytics, and brainstorm new content. Sometimes, I wonder if I’ve over-committed myself and should cut back on activities. However, if I wanted my life to be easy, I would not have returned to school.

In the last post, I wrote about traveling in the back of a jeepney with my classmates. You might have wondered where we went taken. In fact, the jeepneys dropped us off at a community center near one of the villages at the outskirts of Manila. We spent the morning working with a non-profit group called Gawad Kalinga to paint houses and play with children.

Immediately upon walking into the community center, we were greeted by several wide-eyed children. They grabbed our hands and immediately tried to lead us to their playground.

I was impressed by their energy and aggressiveness. I feel like in America, kids are coddled and sheltered by their parents. As a result, many of them grow up afraid of the world and unwilling to take risks. The kids at the community center were basically living on the streets… and as a result had developed incredible street smarts. Most importantly, they weren’t afraid to ask for things aggressively. Piggy back rides. Shoulder tosses. Spinning in a circle. You name it, they asked for it.

You may have noticed that I’m wearing a Vindictus t-shirt in the above photo. Nexon, you’re welcome. I await your checks.

More after the jump.

As I mentioned earlier, our mission was to paint houses and entertain a bunch of kids. I was assigned to one of the houses at the end of a narrow alley. The owner wanted a pink house so I did my best to cover his house in pink. However, the paint was unnecessarily watery and as a result, I had to paint multiple layers.

Minnie told the homeowner that I was a great professional artist (not true…) and as a result, the guy gave me free reign to draw whatever the heck I wanted on his wall. My original plan was to draw red lanterns and yellow fireflies. However, I ran into two problems. First, I did not have a small paint brush. Second, I did not have any primary colors.

With such meager supplies, I wasn’t able to draw the fancy mural I had created in my mind. However, I left a small signature in the lower right corner in the form of blue and yellow flowers. I’m sure it will wear off in a few months.

Painting flowers with a big thick brush proved difficult. At one point, a kid handed me his toothbrush and I used it to detail the flowers. After half an hour, one of the locals finally figured out from my pantomime that I wanted a thin brush. He asked around and found one for me along with a slab of wood to use as a palette. There are only so many colors you can create with pink, cyan, and yellow, but I tried my best.

For lunch, we ate a traditional Filipino meal called chicken adobo. We ate with our hands, a concept that freaked me out considering I had suffered terrible stomach aches in Thailand just a few days earlier.

I washed my hands three times with soap and ventured forth. It was difficult to clump the rice with my hands. However, I noticed that the natives were very good at creating balls of rice and tossing them into their mouths. On the flipside, I kept getting food all over myself. Later, when I played the kids, they kept laughing at me and picking rice kernels from my shirt.

All in all, it was a productive and fun time for all. I truly envy these kids and their energy. I picked them up and threw them around as best I could. But in the end, old man Kevin needed to rest after only 20 minutes.

See the rest of the pictures here.

Anyway, I put together some new designs.

Home: I reverted to the shiny blue and gold colors seen in costumes circa 2005-2006. For the pants, I decided to incorporate a thick gold stripe with Yale blue outline to draw attention to the players’ legs and showcase their speed.

Away: I lightened the Yale blue from the current costume to make it pop and lengthened the shoulder stripe. I also replaced the gold pants with blue (and a thin white stripe). I considered making the white stripe thicker. But then, I thought about those terrible all-white uniforms from the recent 50-0 loss against USC and quickly changed my mind.

After Gold Cohort dominated the Golden Egg competition and crushed our fellow cohorts beneath the heel of our boot, I immediately went to work designing a shirt to celebrate. A grand plethora of ideas swirled in my brain. At one point I even considered making a tongue-in-cheek jersey that said “NCAA Golden Egg – National Champions!” Sadly, that idea fizzled.

Several failed concepts and wrinkled pages later, I settled on a simple idea. In “Problem Finding, Problem Solving” class, we learned that sometimes it’s best not to over-think things. My final design incorporates our victory chant: “Hey ho, go Gold!” and a subtle ‘golden egg’ inside the ‘O.’

I ordered the shirts from CustomInk. They’ll arrive in a few weeks. Sadly, by the time people actually receive the shirts, Gold Cohort will have disbanded.

The Fall semester is coming to an end! Gold Cohort is going to disband soon! I’ve grown quite attached to my friends and am a little sad that we’ll be taking different classes come spring. It doesn’t help that the spring cohorts are incredibly lame. They’re named Cohort 1, 2, 3, and 4.

The final event in the Golden Egg competition is called Walk Off. Named after a funny scene in Zoolander, the event requires the four Haas cohorts (Gold, Blue, Axe, and Oski) to put together creative skits with the theme ‘Hassily Ever After.’ My Cohort (Gold) decided to put together a parody of the Wizard of Oz.

What was my contribution? Since I can’t sing or act, I managed the background music and drew the wizard (seen above). He’s green and angry like in the movie.

Yes, Oski ended up beating us. To be fair, their skit was pretty creative and included a dance number. But despite the temporary setback, Oski could not overcome Gold Cohort’s massive lead in the much larger and much more important Golden Egg competition. At the end of the night, the judges tallied up all the scores from all of the events throughout the year (Cohort Olympics, No Shave November, etc.) and announced the winner: Gold!

What did we win? Nothing much. Only a party bus and eternal glory!

We wanted to tackle the taboo of sex in the Asian American and Pacific Islander community.

I had to create a cover that was both visually interesting and tasteful. This meant avoiding nudity or suggestions of pornography. It also had to be sensitive to Asian American issues. In other words, I couldn’t put a geisha girl behind a fan to suggest sex because that would be considered an exploitation of Asian women and contrary to our mission.

In one of my previous covers, I wrote “Asian American Studies Now” but with the T, U, and S blotted out. “Asian Americans Die Now.” It was based on a photo of a defaced sign from the Claremont Colleges. We had good readership that quarter.

After much brainstorming, I came across a famous Rolling Stone cover:

That’s Yoko Ono being ‘mauled’ by John Lennon. I refer to this position as ‘the koala.’

After discussing the idea with the rest of the staff, we agreed that recreating this iconic image with two Asian students would be a good way to draw attention to the issue. The guy would wear pants, of course.

We found two volunteers without having to kidnap or bribe any friends. The photo shoot was done in Kerckhoff Hall. For those of you who are wondering, I was not the male model. The entire campus would have gone blind if that had happened.

After the issue went live, I discovered that most people on campus didn’t understand the Rolling Stone reference and thought the magazine went “too overboard” with its sexual content. Some even called the cover pornographic. In retrospect, I should have put a tank top on the male model and placed a copy of the original Rolling Stone magazine at his feet.

We often distributed the magazine outside local businesses in Westwood. When we brought the magazine around, some of the business owners refused to carry it.

I learned a very valuable lesson from this experience. Pop culture references are double-edged swords. If your audience understands the reference, you seem like a genius. If they don’t understand, you seem like an idiot. We took a risk and it backfired.

You may be wondering why I’m writing about something that happened in 2005. Today, while cleaning out my Gmail inbox, I noticed that I had old Pacific Ties emails archived. When my hard drive crashed, I lost a lot of photos and art from my college years. I’m glad that I had emailed the images to myself (probably for printing) and unwittingly backed them up in the cloud.

Viva la cloud!

Future patches should to focus on optimizing game speed and improving diplomacy. While some people like unpredictability, I personally feel that it makes a game less tactical. The fun of playing a strategy game is figuring out patterns and improvising. If I want to play an unpredictable game, I’ll play a multiplayer game.

With lead designer Jon Schafer leaving Firaxis for Stardock, one wonders how the gameplay will evolve or regress. Schafer was responsible for the incredible Beyond The Sword expansion for Civ IV, which added brilliant gameplay features such as corporations and spies. Will his replacement continue to push the envelope or mold the game into a more conservative and familiar product?

Cities Are Difficult To Capture
I mentioned in an earlier post that the AI loves to attack your cities when there’s an opening. This can be frustrating if your strategy is to attempt a space or cultural victory. To solve this, cities now ‘heal’ at a faster rate. In the past, a few swordsmen and archers could take over an entire city in a matter of turns. Not anymore.

Of course, the opposite is true. Computer-controlled cities now require more damage to capture. Tanks and cavalry now have penalties when attacking cities. You’ll need to depend on siege engines more than ever.

Level Ups Occur The Following Turn
Adding to the city penalties, players can no longer heal a unit on the same turn that it attacks. Previously, you could throw fresh units against a city, take damage, and leverage a convenient ‘level up’ to heal to 100% HP. Now, the enemy will have an opportunity to pick off weakened units before they can level up.

Diplomacy Has Improved, A Little
The diplomacy system has been overhauled. The must maligned ‘pact of cooperation’ and ‘pact of secrecy’ options are gone. In the interest of added transparency, enemy civilizations will now tell you why they like or dislike you. You can play politics by publicly denouncing another civilization and convince your allies to do the same. The system is still far from perfect. It would be nice if there were more penalties for breaking long-standing non-aggression pacts.

Upgrade Structure Is Different
Cavalry can be upgraded into tanks. Ouch!

AI Fights Less, Schemes More
The enemy AI no longer throws ineffective units against your formations. If there’s a stalemate, the AI will pull back its forces and pursue a cultural victory. This puts the onus on you to keep an eye on your enemies. If they don’t attack you for a while, get suspicious!

Speed Boost
Is it just me or are turns faster now? Instead of waiting 60 seconds between turns on a large map, I wait about 45 now.

It seems no matter what I do in Civilization V, Gandhi is always the first to declare war on me. I don’t know if this is supposed to be an in-joke from the creators, but it took me by surprise.

I find this funny because Gandhi is supposed to be a great historical leader who mainstreamed the concept of non-violent resistance. This is true in previous Civ games where India tended to be the most peaceful nation.

In other news, Michael Soracoe, a well known Civ community member wrote a scathing analysis of the game that I mostly agree with. With Jon Schafer leaving Firaxis and getting picked up by Stardock, here’s hoping Civilization VI will be better.

Google Grants is an awesome program that enables non-profit organizations to get free AdWords advertising from Google. These organizations submit applications online and then are paired up with account managers, no strings attached. I worked with a small portfolio of non-profit organizations and built their campaigns.

I love that the climbers are chilling at base camp, playing chess, and generally unaware that their comrades are being terrorized by a yeti.

Everest, Annapurna, and Base Camp are three levels of awards given to Google Grants volunteers. I don’t remember what prize the volunteers received, but it wasn’t all fun and games. Google Grants is about helping others… and the prizes reflected that. I want to say that the top volunteer received a few days off work and a ticket to some foreign country to work on sustainability projects. However, don’t quote me on that. My memory is hazy.

The project: make a ladies’ handbag by hand. That’s right. No sewing machines. No rulers. No thimbles. Just a few needles, a spool of thread, and some denim.

Okay, that was bull.

The real story is that I was at Target with my lady friend. We saw a bag on sale and I decided I would make her one. So afterwards, we drove over to Jo-Ann in Cupertino to buy materials. I had thread and needles from working on the Scarecrow mask I made for Halloween. So it was really just the denim, which cost $2.50.

Six hours (and a calloused index finger) later, my friend now has a really cool handmade handbag. Go me.

Click to enlarge: