04.27.06 100% & stupid brothers

Should I be jazzed about getting 100% on my first stats test? It's just community college, and MBA-land will be 1,000,000,000 times harder. Like +22 standard deviations if community college stats BUS210 = μ. I am, however, going to make of point of showing off to Jeff Miller that I finally know what a Poisson Distribution is. :)

1 month to go before we take off to see the feria in Madrid and find the apartment in Oxford, and I can hardly wait. Reba and I took Thursday (today) and Friday off this week, it has been FABULOUS to not be at work. I think that I will be into this life change if for no other reason, because it will get me out of the toxic atmosphere of my current job. That's probably a bit dramatic. I will miss my boys, but I sure won't miss the 800 things I could list that uber-suck about that place. Ethan and Eban came over for lunch today, it's funny because Ethan is studying the same stuff (binomial distributions) that I am studying now. Of course his studies are focused on how stats actually apply to business, and what I'm doing can only help me figure out my odds if I play the lottery or decide to guess my way through a multiple choice test (like you really need stats to tell you not to play the lottery or guess through a mult choice test), but it's still the same basic math. It's a lot of fun to learn how these things actually work, I really dig being able to say, "OHHHHH, so THAT'S how that works" about some basic everyday thing that I always just breezed over before in life. The accounting class was like that, so is this one. Maybe I should be a professional student, it turns out that I actually like learning. Who would have guessed that back at WSU in 1987? I'll tell you who: no one. I will definitely miss Ethan, Eban, and our Thursday "baby brother lunch" days. Those are really great fun, and it's nice to be somewhat close with my family. I suppose those lunches will have to be a bit fewer and farther in between when Reba and I are over there. All the more reason to convince my stupid brothers to fly out to visit!

04.21.06 A Mertonian is Born

Dear Ean

We have heard from Merton that they have given you membership - horrahh!

They will be sending you a letter shortly, congratulations

Kind regards

Sally

...this showed up in my inbox today. I had called Sally Webb at SBS a few weeks ago to see how the college auditioning process was going, and it turned out that Balliol (1st choice) had rejected me, and the application was now off to Merton. Sally let me know that since Balliol had rejected me, I was likely to be rejected by Merton and any of the other "top" or "picky" schools, including Christ Church and a couple of others whos' names escape me just now. So, she suggested a slighlty less difficult list to pick from, and I chose Brasenose, Exeter and Hertford. But apparently, Merton was into it after all, and now I will forever be a Mertonian. What that will really mean is to be determined. Given that I won't be using up a room there, probably won't spend a huge amount of time there (between the SBS and home, I won't have a lot to spare), not even taking classes there, and I'm shelling out £3000 to become a member, I would think that I would seem like a pretty good deal to just about any Oxford college. But then again, I'm a fairly ignorant "yank" about this whole Oxford business, so my views on this matter probably aren't worth much. Plus, with an endowment of £104million, they probably don't care too much about my measley £3000.
Some stuff about Merton:

• founded in 1264 by Walter de Merton
• 1 of the 3 oldest colleges at Oxford
• JRR Tolkien taught at Merton
• TS Elliot, Admiral Robert Blake and Randolph Churchill (Winston's dad) graduated from Merton
• apparently you have to wear robes at dinner sometimes
• has a square called the "mob quad" which is from the 1280s... that name makes me laugh for some reason

I have no idea how belonging to this college will effect my life downstream, if at all. I think that a lot of undergrads and graduates students spend 2 or more years here, so I will probably be a bit transient in the eyes of the other Mertonians. Above all, I really hope that the folks there like me: it would be really cool to make friends and cool connections from a set outside of the SBS MBA folks I will mostly run with while at school. Here is a pretty cool drawing of the college, and here are some pictures of my new clubhouse...

the fancy view!

the Mob Quad: a little more spevyhousesque...

04.18.06 St(ats) Helier

Stats: not blowing me away yet

My Business Stats 201 class is going slowly. I'm typing this out in class while I listen to the instructor go over basic probability stuff. This is about 35 times easier than the stuff we covered in the princeton review. Of course, that was a nightmare cram session, so maybe I should just be cool about this… it could be like last summer. Whatev, I still don't know how this is going to be after the class really gets started, so I should probably just shut up and appreciate the currently low level of difficulty.


St Helier

I wired off the first deposit of cash to my offshore account today… I hope that goes through. This money will be what we will use to secure an apartment when we go over in May. One more step into the next phase. Sending this money was a minor ordeal… you have to know a bunch of stuff about the transfer mechanism (Swift T100 or T103), routing and sorting numbers, and even the physical destination. Needless to say, St Helier isn't exactly in the standard set of known places buzzing around the head of your average wamu assistant branch manager, so I had to come back twice. I didn't mind this or having to sit there for a half hour each time though: the assistant manager who helped me was totally smokin' hot! :) In any event, we got the wire kicked off, whether it really makes it to the Esplanade HSBC in the little town of St Helier on the tiny island of Jersey is another matter entirely.

04.12.06 Math Notes

My next preparatory course has begun: Business Statistics 210. This isn't offered in the evening at Seattle Central Community College, so I'm taking it at South Seattle Community College. This is a bit of a drive from where I work, but it's really not too bad for just a couple of months. It beats the HELL out of the hunter safety course that Reba and I took down in the Maple Valley last year. That was a 1.5 hour drive each way for a 4 hour class! This class is only 2.5 hours, and the instructor seems committed to only running 2 hours, which is fine by me. The first week was a bit rocky, but I think I've since caught up...


Class 1, Tuesday April 4th

I was home sick this day, and got myself off the couch, showered, and drove down just for the class. Of course I got lost, and took forever finding the place. I made it just in time to find an official looking paper taped to the door of the classroom saying that the class would not begin until the following Thursday. Fuckers!!!! I drove all the way down here for a cancelled class? But, fine, I could wait another two days, especially since I was sick.


Class 2, Thursday April 6th

I was still sick on this day, but went to work anyway. :( After work, I drove down to SSCC again, didn't get nearly as lost, and then made it to the classroom, which had been moved. I found the new classroom, walked in, introduced myself to the instructor, and sat down. After "nice to meet you", the first thing he said was, "were you here on Tuesday?" ...I replied, "no, there was a note saying that class was cancelled until Thursday". To which he replied, "I heard about that, that note was incorrect, we had class in this room on Tuesday."

Fabulous.

I quickly found out that I had missed class 1, was already 1 homework assignment behind, 1 reading assignment behind, and that not only were there no more textbooks, but that they were going to be out of stock until Monday, with class 3 work, reading etc., all due on Tuesday. A favorite quote comes to mind...

"Suck days ahead." - Jim Shultz, circa 1989

Oh well, I'm sure that the difficult situations I'll find myself dropped into at Oxford will make these seem like sweet sweet salad days. For whatever fortuitous reason, a woman (Allison) in my class approached me after class, wanting to trade emails and phone numbers in case one ofus missed class. I ended up writing her that night, and asking if she wouldn't mind me photocopying her book. She was cool with that, and so I ran about 100 pages at work Friday and had the weekend to do my homework. Other than this rather sucky start, the class is going fine, and the instructor is fairly ok.

One of the problems with taking a math class is how to take notes. Taking text based notes is really easy with Microsoft Onenote, which totally kicks ass. You can type away, it outlines really easily, it auto saves for you (the save function is actually disabled), it searches notes very quickly (beats thumbing through notebooks), and has a really cool flagging system to collate questions, important points, todos, etc. There are a ton of other features I won't go into here. You can even save them to a (microsoft proprietary) web page format, mht. The problem arises when you want to write non-text stuff like equations or graphs, etc. The intention behind Onenote is that you use it with a tablet computer, and it has lots of support for writing recognition, different pens for drawing, etc. However, I needed an "all in one" laptop... home recording, software dev, basic home computing, itunes, etc., and the IBM tablets aren't quite burly enough for these reqs just yet. So, I didn't get a tablet, and thus can't use a pen to draw graphs and equations. And, using a mouse for this kind of sucks. I can make these things in excel and import, but that is a slow process. What to do??? I decided to see what math students out there are using to take notes.


Taking Math Notes on a Computer

It turns out that there really isn't a great way to do this yet. There are a couple of approaches:

1. Use a tablet, draw out your equations with the pen. (not going to work, as previously stated)

2. Use an equation editor. There are a bunch of these out there, and they all work the same basic way. The editor lets you click buttons for math signs (σ, Σ, μ, √, etc.), other buttons for layout (exponent, fractions, etc.). The amount and variety of different math symbols really depends on the editor. Usually you can copy/paste to certain types of app, or save to a format that can be more universally pasted. Onenote doesn't really handle the breadth of embedded object types that word does, so the latter approach usually works better. The problem is that none of these are very fast to work with, so taking notes in class is a bit rough.

A few examples:

• Microsoft Equation Editor - comes with Office for free, outputs to wmf, kind of sucky.
• MathType - $99 from http://www.dessci.com/ , has lots more symbols etc., outputs to eps, gif, wmf. 30 day trial available.
• MathWriter - $49 from http://www.jpowered.com/ , didn't get this one, seems a lot like MathType.

3. Scientific Writing Aides. These are set up to help scientists and mathematicians write papers. So, they have a lot of formatting, graph importing, etc. These are usually complex and buggy. I tried using these as note taking vehicles (maybe skipping onenote entirely for math notes), but either had useability problems or bugginess sufficient to turn me off.

• WinEdt - freeware from http://www.winedt.com , this runs on a math markup system called TeX (http://www.tug.org) which is pretty cool from a conceptual stance, but WHAT A CLUSTER TO RUN! Apparently there's a bunch of server software to install, multiple packages to locate from different users' group sites, and difficult to find info on syntax. This must be great for Physics PhDs, but BLOWS for me.
• SciWriter - $49 from http://www.soft4science.com/ , 30 day trial available, saves data in something called MathML, which is a Math specific version of XML. This makes pretty readable web pages, but the text editing is pretty buggy and inconsistent. Tried using this for note taking, and spent way too much time screwing around with basic functions like bulleted lists and text selection that didn't work. No dice.

4. In line equations and cheesy substitutions. A lot of people do this, and at least you can write it out fast. For a basic stats equation like standard deviation....

...you can write it out in text like this:

s = sqrt(Σ[x-xbar]^2/n-1)

Symbols like Σ, μ, and σ are in the standard character set that Onenote recognizes, although you have to copy/paste them or look them up in the symbol tool if you want to use them. This method is pretty cheesy, and is a bit hard to read, and of course, a lot of the symbols have to get fudged with weak assed stuff like "xbar" instead of the proper:

...but that's what I'm doing for now, because the other options really aren't panning out.

5. Use a Pen Mouse. There are a couple of these out there, but for whatever reason they're not too popular. The way these works is: you have an optical mouse that is shaped like a big fat pen...

... they usually have a couple of buttons and may even have a scroll wheel. You hold it like a pen, and it does the job of a mouse. You can even use it to draw, somewhat crappily it seems, but probably good enough for my purposes. They come in wired usb, wireless rf (with wired rf receiver) and bluetooth models, although everyone who's selling them is "going to have bluetooth models in stock soon". The companies that make these are pretty sketchy... weird foreign websites with lots of broken links and unitelligible english, discontinued statuses on most internet resellers, PC Mag reviews that are several years out of date, etc. Here are a couple I have found:

http://store.yahoo.com/saveateaglestore/ez5.html ...weird "generic" manufacturer design, seems too big, sketchy.

http://www.wowpenusa.com/ ...no visible way to buy, huge size, sketchy.

http://www.ipen4you.com/ ...probably will buy one of these, seems to be what I want, and is no sketchier than the competition. [update: ordered the RF version tonight, we'll see if it's worth a crap]

...That's probably more than enough about my recent "adventures". Time to do some homework!

04.03.06 Balliol says no!

I've been waiting to find out what college I got into. I wrote a bit about these in an earlier post. The good news is that as a grad student, at least one college HAS to take me. :) For undergrads, it's a whole different story: they get accepted to colleges, and thereby the University. So, if there isn't a college that likes them, tough na-nas, you don't get into Oxford. There is a big ancient complicated hierarchy to the relative statuses of Oxford colleges, as with most things in the UK (apparently). I really don't know the whole story, but do know that people who go to Christ Church tend to be wealthy, aristocratic, and bound for the higher levels of UK government. Apparently, Balliol, Merton, Magdalen College, New College, and St John College all fall into the same bucket. I had applied to Balliol, and Merton (you only get two choices on the online application), basically because they were two of the oldest colleges. It's honestly pretty hard to figure out which college I would prefer more, and in some ways, since I won't be studying in the college, won't be living there, and will only be at Oxford for 1 year, it's really not as big a deal as it would be if I was an undergrad. Balliol did sound pretty cool, if for no other reason, because they have a drum set in the school music room. I may be a lousy drummer, but I like playing them... so I listed them as choice #1.

In any case, I got rejected from Balliol... apparently there is only room for one MBA student at Balliol, and I am not going to be it. I found this out when I called the school to see what was up with the college application process. Bear in mind, this has nothing to do with getting into Oxford (for me) because as a grad student, I get in via the business school, not through a college. The woman I spoke to at the school said that if I got rejected from Balliol, I was likely to get rejected by Merton, Magdalen College, New College, and St John College too. Basically, they figure if I'm not good enough for Balliol, I'm not good enough for them either. Since Merton was choice #2, I'll probably get dissed by them too. :( Oh well.

So, she recommended choices in less popular schools, including Brasenose, Exeter, Hertford, Jesus, Queens, St Hughs and Worcester. St Hughs and Worcester are fairly new colleges, so I figured they're not for me, since I want to belong to a college that's got a lot of history. Being an atheist, as well as a Northwest sweaterpunk/whateverrocker I just feel weird going to "Jesus" college. Just not me. That's probably dumb, but there it is. Queens is out for similar reasons. :) Brasenose apparently has a nose shaped door knocker for a mascot, and that's pretty cool, so I picked them as my new #1, and put Exeter and Hertford as 2 and 3.

I'm sure that someone will like me! Maybe the nose people. Apparently, at one point, Brasenose dudes wore nose shaped tie pins. That's funny! I guess it doesn't matter a HUGE amount, but nobody likes to get rejected, even me. Oh well, just getting into Oxford is a pretty huge thing in the first place, I never even expected to be accepted, so a little rejection at this point is probably good for me.

Oh yeah, and it looks like my offshore bank account stuff is finally wrapped up: we got the debit cards today. So, we've finally got that part done. Phew.