Who is Farhan Lalji?

Fiddling around with WordPress – adding plug-ins, analytics, widgets etc - got me thinking about how much I’m enjoying having time to myself now. I’m rediscovering PHP, reading newspapers, magazines and books for fun and not for class.  I’m socialising and catching up with people all over again.

I was chatting with a couple of my fellow exec MBA’s last night at sundowners and discovered that I wasn’t the only one.  There’s something different about going to bed now, piece of mind is the only way I can really explain it.

I left work at the end of every day for 20 of the past 22 months and started immediately thinking about school.  I can’t explain how nice it is to leave work and think about absolutely nothing, to just take time and smell the roses.

Another side effect of the MBA is how much my TV watching has declined.  I used to watch an hour or two an evening and now I feel guilt just turning it on.  This has been to the wife’s delight.  She never was much of a TV person.

I’ll probably be even giddier next week, with our summer ball and congregation (not convocation, apparently we don’t get our degrees officially till August).  Then I’ll start looking for things to do with all the time I have now, I’ve got learning to play the guitar, learning Hindi, French and Spanish properly, taking golf lessons and going on holidays again on my to do list, but my own pace.

A friend of ours said the other day how much she like’s post MBA Farhan, and so do I, so do I.

My name is Farhan. I hit 30 last year, finished my MBA last month and joined Yahoo last week - okay it was 5 weeks ago, what can I say I’m a sucker for patterns.

I used to blog at vox, and while it was a useful blogging tool for someone who was working full time and studying full time - i.e. A chimp could have set it up - the time was right to make a move. So, after a bit of diligence I chose WordPress, picked a pattern, hacked it up a bit, added a couple of widgets and voila, welcome to the life of Farhan, a blog.

To be perfectly honest, my blogging over the past 20 months or so has been pretty weak. I blame it on the stress of doing an executive mba, switching jobs a couple of times and generally being too tired to write anything interesting. Now that I’m done with the mba, at a company I love and a role I’m enjoying things should be different… I hope.

So what am I going to talk about here you ask? Well life in general, life in technology, life in London and other stuff.

My adventures this past weekend are a perfect example of how diverse the topics will be. Friday we went and saw Nitin Sawhney and a bunch of unsigned independent artists put on a great show at the Royal Festival Hall. Rappers, singers, cellists and spoken word artists doing their thing together. Very cool.

Saturday was spent at Borough Market. We’ve recently put our flat on the market and one of the things I’ll miss is the fact that borough market is step counting distance away from us.

Sunday however was a highlight not only of the weekend but possibly the year to date, Yahoo and the beeb organised an open hack day. And as an employee I got the chance to help out. There were great hacks and great people but why go into details when others have done a far better job.

One of the highlights for me was sitting down and chatting with Salim Ismail, another newbie to yahoo. What Salim’s done over the past 10-15 years is pretty incredible, but it’s pretty consistent with the type of people I find myself working with here at Y!

So there you go, first post check. Hopefully you laughed, you cried and you can’t wait to come back. I promise I’ll try not to keep you waiting too long.

Some related stuff:

• more on hackday (plus the Flickr pics - over 4000 pics!)
• while I was writing this, Terry has resigned and Jerry Yang has stepped in as the CEO of the company he helped co-found, my opinion has pretty much been summed up by both Salim and Fred Wilson’s posts.