Little about courses

Its been a while so thought of jotting something down. I'll start by saying that till now its been pretty manageable - the job, family and MIT lectures/assignments and readings. I hope I don't jinx myself..:-)
So coming back to lectures - I'm continuing Product Design and Development, the Concept selection is done, we are now designing our product. This course hits both arenas on one hand it takes you to the engineering domain of concept selection, designing and actually building a product (we are given $800 budget) and on the other side of it we were involved in market selection, user group finding, and will work on business plan shortly. Guest lectures have been great , one specially I liked was lecture on "Sustainable Development" by Nicholas Ashford. He talked about how growth needs to be tied closely will energy, politics, business and people.

Another course in 2nd half of Spring semester is "System Optimization". I like it, its cut short but to the point, I do not know where I'll be using it in real life but it gives insight in to how companies makes decision on choosing a path in their business, let me supply chain, investing, product development. The lectures are example based with couple of case studies and individual and group assignments, it has some maths but nothing too cryptic...I'm sure I'll not be able to optimize a real world system after this course but surely will be able to understand it better.

I also was trying to get little more organized in recent days and so have been visiting lot of GTDs and mind mapping sites....I've started using "freemind" open source mind mapping software and is going good so far. I'm still experimenting though and so will be some time before I trust one system and get use to it...

Well that's it for April '08.

Ashok.