The Bay Area doesn't care about Redmond

(Robbie Bach and J Allard pulled a Nicholas Cage / John Travolta from Face Off)

On a day that we saw Apple take over MS in market cap, the San Jose Mercury rubbed an extra handful of salt in an article on the MS Entertainment and Devices division shake up.

Microsoft is sometimes Redmond-centric, the Merc just plain too busy to check the MS press kits.

The Cube is back!

(Franken-cube, Apple G4 Cube with newer keyboard and Dell monitor)

I'm back in CA for one of my high school friend's wedding and it turns out one of my parents' Dell desktop from a couple of years ago gave up the ghost. Since I had a Apple G4 Cube around from before I went off to grad school, that's now their desktop. A 10 year computer running upgraded OS 10.4 Tiger is a little poky but doing its job web surfing, playing music and organizing pictures. The Cube is maxed out at 1.5GB RAM and has an upgraded HD, hate to imagine how much it would have been back then. I upgraded all of that later when it was much cheaper.

After all this time it still looks like it can be exhibited at MOMA and do cameos in Ab Fab, About a Boy and Royal Tenenbaums. Ahhh, the year 2000.

I'll let YouTube take us on a trip down memory lane...

Ivory Tower vs Microsoft, the revisit and rethink

A while back, by a while back, I mean in 2006. I had a choice to make, to continue in education academia get a PhD or go work for Microsoft on an online collaboration service. 4 Years into it, I am looking at the choice once again.

(The Sign In App on the right was my feature)

At Microsoft, I have been the Program Manager for Microsoft Business Online Services since its inception. We built a group from nothing to a service that's now regularly uses by millions of customers world wide. In my spare time, I have been able to teach CS on the side, take education classes at UW, and most recently start up the TEALS pilot program.

(notice the book talk on the Computer Club House)

In my recent visit to NYC, I think I might have briefly fell in love with the idea of a PhD program and the atmosphere of graduate school again. NYC has this amazing energy and vibe that just does not exist anywhere else. Columbia itself is sort of an oasis in the city. Best of both worlds maybe. I visited Teachers College and it did remind me of what I liked about graduate school.

It's always been a struggle for me between on the ground impact I can make vs bigger picture theory. So very very torn... Then reality hit me, beer in NYC is $8.

Why relevance in STEM education matters

This cartoon simplifies the issues a little bit, and somewhat stereotypes, but you get the idea...

It's not about the theory, but the application right?

$125,000 teacher salaries

Looks like the founder of the Manhattan GMAT Prep Services founded a school where they pay middle school teacher as if they were b school grads. $125,000 a year, plus $25,000 bonus. The hiring process looks at the teacher's GRE/GMAT scores!

Adjusting for cost of living, $150,000 in NYC is about $120,000 in Seattle. That is two and half times the salary of a new teacher.

The high salary would be able to keep stellar teachers who would otherwise leave teaching for financial reasons, especially if they scored above 90% on the GRE/LSAT/GMAT.