07.30.06 Hangover

There is no clearer way to state it than this.

 

Tracy = 11;  Ean = 9 + 3 (handicap) = 12

07.24.06 Final Touches

The last week at Wamu is here.  We had a launch this weekend, which will also be my last.  I’ve been helping out with a few items here and there, but everyone is so busy, they really don’t have time to give me anything to do.  Funny.  At this point, I’m mostly shoring up the business contacts, resume items, old emails, etc. 

 

Would You Like to Join My Totally Fake Seeming Business Contact Network?

Today, I got my Linkedin changes updated, and sent invites off to about 90 colleagues, business contacts, friends, and etc.  Of course, if you’re reading this and I forgot YOU, please forgive me, and add me to your Linkedin contacts, my email is eanhernandez@eanh.net now, as the wamu.net address will be shut off at the end of this week.  I also got all my contacts off of my work laptop and got them nicely backed up.  If you don;t know what Linkedin is, basically it’s an easier way to maintain contact with your business network, and also lets you network with people at your company or school, or in your industry, etc., but does a reasonably good job of isolating your from out and out spam.  You can read all about it here.

 

False Advertising or Good Marketing?

While I was updating my Linkedin profile, I found out that I could enter in my school, if I’m in school.   I’ve actually been wondering for quite a while what…

2006 – MBA, University of Oxford, UK

…would look like on my resume, but have been kind of freaked out that I would jinx things if I gave it too much thought.  I certainly never would have posted my resume with Oxford listed on it, I felt like I have to earn that right before trumpeting even the fact that I’m attending.  But then all of a sudden, after putting “attending Oxford” on my Linkedin profile, I was staring at a very resume-like web page that clearly indicated that I’m going to Oxford.  So, I was a bit weirded out.  Thinking about it a bit more, I reasoned that:

 

a. Having a 1 year gap on Linkedin or my resume probably looks worse than having the name of a school that I haven’t graduated from yet… what am I going to put?  “Chillin”?

b. Linkedin provides a facility for showing that you are currently at a school, so I can’t be doing something all that uncommon.

c. You don’t wait until you leave a job to list the fact that you were employed at it.

d. I actually AM going to Oxford for school this fall, so what’s the harm in noting it?

 

It still seems a bit like cheating to have Oxford on there before I’ve even moved to the UK, let alone graduated.  I still need to think about this.  You can see the profile here: http://www.linkedin.com/in/eanhernandez …tell me what YOU think.

  

 

Super Totally Hardcore Kickass No-Way-Can-Fail Data Storage

Sounds pretty dorky, right?  Here’s the thing: if you have a shit-ton of data, and to make it sound less totally lame, let’s not call it “data”, let’s call it “pictures your wife took” (and will lose her mind over if they get erased), “your whole frigging music collection” (because dragging 800+ CDs to the UK seemed like a really bad idea), instead of “data”, “all the software” (you ever bought), (your grandiose)“financial plans” and “all the emails” (you got over the course of the last 4 years).  So, as I was saying, if you have a shit-ton of “data”, and want it to be around after your laptop dies, you back it up to somewhere.  But what if your obsessive music collecting and photographic tendencies leave you with too much “data” to keep on one paltry laptop hard drive?  I don’t know what normal people do, but what I did was buy a 250 gigabyte network hard drive from Ximeta.  Network storage is a big big deal in the IT world, but I think that it’s a really good idea for small time users too, on a much smaller scale, of course.  There appear to be two main ways of handling network storage for the small time chump:

 

1. Hard drive with a network card. 

This approach is the one I went with: basically, it’s a hard drive with a network card, and is not smart enough to do anything further, including actually be accessed by a computer using standard networking protocols on a network.  So, you have to have some kind of special custom made networking software that runs on your computer which handles the networking bit.  This isn’t a BIG deal, it’s just a minor pain, especially since the networking software doesn’t handle wireless as well as it could, tends to be finicky about having multiple computers attaching to the network drive, requires patching, isn’t as mature/robust as standard networking protocols, etc. etc. etc.  The upside is that you don’t have to deal with the issues presented by option #2.

 

2. Really simple computer which is mostly just a hard drive and network card.

This approach is the approach I think I should have gone with.  The way this works is: you have a butt-simple computer with a network card and a big hard drive, and connect to it from any computer on the network (just like with any other computer).  The upside here is that you don’t have to monkey around with special networking software.  The downside is that since you are dealing with a computer, you have all the joy of maintaining and administering an operating system.  Oh how very nice for you.  This blows, because you’re going to need to either deal with learning to administer a standard, simple operating system like Linux, which I’m really not interested in if I can avoid it; or deal with a standard, really complex operating system like Windows XP, which just SUCKS, because you’re going to be dealing with automatic updates, reboots, virii, etc. etc.  The other possibility is dealing with some kind of stripped down special custom made operating system software, which sort of gets you back into the reliability issues associated with option number 1 above.  I’ve even heard of people building these network storage drives from some old shitty PC, and running some small footprint version of Linux to maintain the system.  That sounds like a science project to me, and the only science projects I’m interested in are made in Belgium with 8% or more alcohol by volume.

In the end, option 1 seemed less shitty at the time of purchase, so I went with that.  And, Frank had one of these that he liked, so I figured it couldn’t be all bad.  In retrospect, I’ve had enough trouble with the networking software at this point that I’d be willing to give option 2 a try if I were doing it all over again.  However, I’ve already spent the dough ($180), so I’m committed.  I had all of my music, photos, downloads, files, old emails, etc. safely backed up onto this drive when I had a scary thought: “what happens if the network drive dies?”  This actually happened to Frank after about 4 years, so I know it can happen.  I’d be in the soup if this drive died, because not only would I lose my stuff, I wouldn’t even be able to start moving stuff to somewhere else (like my or Reba’s laptop) when things got sketchy, because there’s so much data on the network drive. 

 

Solution: Just Buy One More!

It probably sounds dumb, but I decided that the only way to be really safe with all this precious data would be to buy a second network drive.  There is a technology called “RAID” which basically takes anything you put onto one drive and then automatically copies it to an identical drive, without you ever having to worry about it.  This is pretty neat, and if something should happen to my main network drive, I’ll have another backup of it.  The backup came today, and I am getting ready to RAID it up with my existing drive.  This is a little more complicated that it would seem, because I actually have to re-format the existing drive in order to RAID enable it with the new one. 

This requires moving the 62 gigabytes of backed up data from the main drive to a temporary location, which of course required finding a temporary location with 62 gigabytes free, which of course required that I take the old desktop computer out of the storage unit, plug it back in at the house, and clean some space off of it. This represents a step backwards with regard to the general “moving out” plan, but that’s a separate issue entirely.

 

I bet NO ONE actually read the whole thing this time.

 

e

 

 

 

07.20.06 Sell sell sell

Endgame

We are now in the final phase of our US tenure... we both quit our jobs next week, the big going away luau is next Saturday, the house has been sold (still sorting some closing details), the cars go up for sale shortly, the financial plans have been laid, and the 1 way plane ticket has been bought!

It's sad leaving this house. It's such a great place, and we have taken so much time and consideration to make it into a home that really feels like we belong to. Summer days here are just so very pleasant and breezy, and the garden looks so beautiful with it's lavender and dahlias. With the UK having record heatwaves, I'm sure that I'm in for a bit of a shock my first few weeks in the new flat. Sigh.

 

 

Bubble?

 Luckily, the house sold for the asking price, and we have made a reasonable rate of return on our money, although not the extravagant proceeds housing boom-ists would have you dreaming of. The figuring exercise was kind of fun: assuming that I treated the money I put into my house as an investment that I could have put into a stock or mutual fund or whatever, I tried to figure out what interest rate I got on the house investment. Making an apples to apples comparison was a bit difficult, but I think I'm close...

 
1. I assembled the following values:
 
 
* down payment
* improvements (paid in cash out of pocket, not including HELOC)
* extra monthly payment (mortgage payment + interest only HELOC payment - rent payment I would have had if I stayed at my old rental)
* income tax saved (due to income tax deductions)
* final takeaway (cash left after selling house, paying HELOC, closing costs, realtor costs, etc.)
 
2. I figured out my "investment" as: investment = down payment + improvements + extra monthly payment - income tax saved
 
3. I figured out what yearly compound interest rate would result in my investment growing to my final takeaway over 3.75 years...
 
4. the rate worked out to ~9.8% each year for almost 4 years straight, which is 2.3% better than my stock broker did for me just last year. Not quite the "double your money" type of return that people in Seattle seem to think they are going to get on a house, but still, nothing to sniff at! obviously I didn't take sweat equity into consideration, and I don't have to buy a lawnmower to keep my stock portfolio saleable, so there are probably more hidden costs to be exposed. But then again, you can't throw a cool cocktail party on the deck at your wachovia securities statement either. :)
 
 

 

 

Updated Schedule 
 
 The current plan is as follows:
 
July 28 - quit jobs
July 29 - BIG luau at Tasha's
August 1 to 30 chillllll
August 30 - vacate house, fly ONE WAY to the UK
September 4 - meet mom at Heathrow
September 15 - Reba comes out
September 19 - Reba goes to Greece with Leah, Austen, Marshall, and others
October 2 - EAN STARTS GRAD SCHOOL
October 8 - Reba comes back to Oxford Mom Trip
 
The regular reader might notice the Sept 4 entry in the list above... YES, my mom can come on the trip! This is an absolutely awesome turn of events. I was worried that her health issues would prevent her from coming out, but the trip is totally set. We're going to do all sorts of great UK and Ireland stuff: Oxford museums, British Museum, Tea at Fortnam's, Stonehenge, Parliament Square, visit Swinford (ancestral home of the O'Donnells, my mom's family), Aran Islands, and to top it all off, we'll stay a few days at a fancy old country house come hotel on the west coast of Ireland. This is the trip that mom has wanted to do forever, and it's going to be a real honor to be able to be the one who took her on it.
 
 

Luau Rising 
 
Tasha is famous for ragingly good Luaus. She really goes nuts for them too... decorating the yard in tiki stuff and bamboo; Hawaiian shirts, pulled pork, enough rum to choke an alcoholic Titanosaur; she even flies flowers in from Hawaii (actually cheaper than local wholesale prices, for whatever reason). The Primate 5 (http://www.myspace.com/theprimatefive) are playing, as is my band, Tales From the Birdbath (http://www.neatshows.com). Today we bought something like 4 gallons of rum. This will be in addition to the 3 kegs of beer and whatever else folks bring. This should be a whopper, and in all likelihood should get totally shut down by the authorities. Yahoo! Evite claims there are 96 confirmed attendees, 22 maybes, and 178 undecideds, adding a touch of apprehension to the air. This should be a blast!

 

05.30.06 Whirlwind!

Finding a new home...

Last week we left Seattle for Spain, and spent a kickass week hanging out with Angel and Marta at their place in Pozuelo, which is a suburb of Madrid. The kickass-osity also kicked my ass, and now I have a cold. Whatev, at least it’s not camphelobacter jejueni.

The plan was to spend this week finding a flat in Oxford. Following a 2 hour flight, a 70 minute bus ride and a 10 minute cab ride, we spent an evening walking around Oxford, and ate at the Eagle and Child which is a neat pub where a writing group called “The Inklings” used to meet, apparently JRR Tolkein and CS Lewis were members. Cool!

Today, we looked at two places, and found one that we liked! Our new home will be on the southern shore of the Thames river (for some reason also called the Isis when it goes through Oxford) at the southwest corner of the Folly Bridge, which was built in 1827, 24 years before the first settlers even arrived in Seattle. I found a website that claims there was a bridge at the site of Folly Bridge before 1085. Heavy.

Map of central Oxford. The red X shows our flat, the blue X shows my college (Merton) and the green X shows the Business School.

The arrow shows our balcony.

The neighbors across the street (river).

Another shot of the flat and the bridge.

Reba at the front door. Cute!

The place is a little rickety, the bridge traffic is a bit loud, and living there will be nowhere near as cushy as in our Ballard house, but it should keep us comfy enough for a year in Oxford. It has an extra bedroom for visiting friends, a decent living/dining room, a deck for Reba to do a little bit of gardening on, and a neat communal garden area and dock by the river’s edge for general lounging. And YES dad, it has running water, flush toilets, heating, washer/dryer, stove, etc.

We paid the deposit today, and will sign the papers Friday. We are one step closer to being gone gone gone.

SCARY!!!

05.03.06 Scary Days Ahead

And now, a bit on the darker side of moving overseas...

My mom has had a pretty major health problem all of her adult life: an Arterio-Venous Malformation or AVM in her brain. Some people get these in their leg, arm, whatever, but not mom. She had to get one in the brain. Brain AVMs present a nice little array of issues, including a risk of bleeding (fatal) and Epilepsy. Over the years, I've watched my mother have epileptic seizures ranging in severity from a momentary dizzy spell to a full-on, fall down, jaw chomping Grand Mall. A year ago, she had life threatening brain surgery to remove the AVM, which went quite well. For years, she experienced seizures of varying intensity, and after the surgery, had zero seizures for 6 months. Beginning 6 months ago, they returned at a rate of about 1 very mild seizure per month... not great, but totally liveable. This all changed yesterday when she had 3 fairly large seizures in a row. She works in a hospital, so the doctors started checking her out right away, and detected ~2CCs of blood near where the AVM had once been. This is BAD BAD BAD. She is now stable, has stopped bleeding, is conscious and has been seizure-free for >24 hours, so the immediate prospects look ok.

So, mom's in the hospital again and will get out in a few days, but I'm worried that she's going to get sicker or even die. This is morbid thinking, but it's certainly running through my brain. I feel bummed out and guilty that I may not be around her (since I'm moving to the UK for a number of years) for what could be the last years of her life, but then again, I have no way of knowing how this will turn out: she could be fine, or not, or have just about any outcome in between.

She and I have a great trip to Ireland and the UK planned for this summer, and she's never been there before even though it's where her family is from and she's always wanted to go. It's going to just be the two of us, will be totally awesome, and will be a great way for me to spend some serious quality time with my mom before I leave the country for a few years. Based on recent developments, I have no idea as to whether we'll actually be able to share this really cool experience or not.

I generally feel guilty about leaving my family and friends behind, but especially guilty regarding my mom, since the amount of time I have left with her seems to be getting smaller and smaller. All I can do is spend time with her now and hope that things get better, hope that we can do our trip, and hope that we can stay in touch and visit often when I move. My family has a fairly creepy/goofy way of dealing with this kind of stress, so we do odd things like take funny pictures when one of us is hurt. For example, when I got the CRAP beat out of me in college, and had a really bad shiner, she took a picture of the two of us and framed it for me. It's a BIG print. So, in kind, but also in an attempt to keep things lighthearted, my brothers and dad and I keep posing for pictures with her when she's lying in the hospital bed. I suppose that in some respect, we are implying through joking around that we think she's going to be fine and get out of the hospital for us to later hold the pictures over her head and make fun of her.

Yes, my family is weird.

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.

03.17.06 Offshore Bank Account

"you will need a UK bank account to rent a flat in the UK"

"you will need 3 months of utility bills from your UK address to open a UK bank account"

...those two statements didn't raise any logical issues for the two britons who made them. I'm beginning to detect a pattern. It turns out that setting up a bank account from overseas is a real pain. Firstly, there are no international banks (at least that I could find) who provide the ability to open a bank account in your own country, and just be accessible in another country. Cash machines are no problem, you can use them from anywhere. The same goes for visa/mastercard. However, these don't cut it as far as renting a flat, which is a requirement for me, since my sweet wife refuses to live in either a residence hall or school provided married student housing. The normal way of opening a UK bank account is 1) live in the UK at an address for 3 months, 2) bring proof of #1, and 3) open a local HSBC, Barclays, etc. account. This obviously won't fly for us. The next option is to open a special account set up for the "international customer". Some examples of this are:

• HSBC "Passport" - http://www.hsbc.co.uk/1/2/personal/current-accounts/passport

...this is set up for people like me, but requires at least two separate trips to London 1 week apart, which blows. Reba and I are going to Oxford for 2 weeks this spring to rent a place, and can't be waiting around for paperwork and meetings in London

• HSBC "Premier" - http://www.hsbc.co.uk/1/2/personal/current-accounts/premier-home

...another no-dicer. This wants you to have a mortgage of £200,000 or more with HSBC Bank, or savings or investments of at least £50,000 with HSBC Bank, or annual income of £75,000 or over and a mortgage of £100,000 or over with HSBC Bank; none of which I have or will have.

There are also a bunch of "student" type accounts out there, but that just screams "don't rent to me", from my perspective.

Finally, after scratching my head on this for a while I found this:

• HSBC "Offshore Bank Account" - http://www.offshore.hsbc.com/1/2/international/current-accounts/offshore-bank-account

...this is about as good as I'm going to get. This is an account that lives on one of the channel islands (little islands off the coast of France that are owned by the UK) and takes advantage of funny business rules that allow for this sort of application process. It allows me to do regular checking at any HSBC in the UK, open entirely from the US, and fund from the US. Basically, this will give me a UK account that is ready to rock with a debit card and checks before I show up in June. The downside is that I have to keep a £5000 ($8800) minimum balance, which is crazy, but apparently they're trying to prevent people from racking up a bunch of debt and then splitting. Although since I'm living on savings, I suppose it doesn't matter. I'll probably move to a regular account as soon as I've been there 3 months anyway.

03.04.06 "Flat" hunting

We have to rent a "flat" to live in while I'm at school. This, like many other aspects of our move, seems to be more difficult than it ought to be. Normally, students live in a college when attending Oxford. These are sort of like a Harry Potter Frat House / Dormitory, but there's quite a bit more to it than that, check out the deets here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colleges_of_the_University_of_Oxford

Obviously, my wife wasn't too excited about the prospect of living in a residential hall setting, so that got vetoed quickly. It turns out that most of the colleges have special married student accommodations away from the main college, but that really didn't fit for us either. Apparently you don't get to see what they're like before you move in ("because the current residents are still in them" ...classic Oxford reasoning), and we would have no idea if we could get a place with an extra bedroom for visiting friends and family. So, it has to be an apartment. This would be fine, except it is not at all clear when I should go apartment hunting. I have been told all of the following, by different people, regarding the subject of "flats" in Oxford:

• "it's not possible to say when the best time to go flat hunting is until they come up free"
• "there are some flats across the street from the SBS, I'll look into them for you" (never heard back on this one)
• "we released 150 apartments for the 2006/2007 school year in December, and there are two left (this was in February)
• "other SBS students haven't even begun to look into rentals at this point"
• etc.

So, with lots of conflicting info, and nothing firm, I am taking the spam approach, and writing to any letting agency we can find, asking about good times to come and look for a rental.

In no particular order...

http://www.rentaflat.co.uk/

http://www.collegeandcounty.biz/index.html

http://www.qbman.co.uk/

http://www.hamptons.co.uk/

http://www.nops.co.uk/

http://www.medicsonthemove.co.uk/index.html

http://www.manorhouseproperties.co.uk/home.mhtml?count-num=127332

http://www.elwood.co.uk/

http://www.thomasmerrifield.co.uk/

http://www.spaceagency.co.uk/index.php

http://www.letting-agents-uk.org.uk/agent.asp?id=8403

http://www.lucyproperties.co.uk/

http://www.email4property.co.uk/oxford/form_letting.htm

...hopefully something will pan out.

02.24.06 Visa visa visa, part deux

Visa Debate is OVER

After much fret and worry, the decision has been made: student visas are the way to go. I will get a student visa, and my wife will get a student dependent visa. When I get to the end of my studies, I will apply for an HSMP, which I should get even without the extra 50 points an SBS (Said Business School, the MBA school at Oxford) diploma gets you. This introduces the potential issue that I may have to return to the US briefly after school ends while my HSMP visa gets approved, but whatever. It's better than trying to explain to the immigration dudes why I am getting an HSMP now if I'm going to school, or why I'm a student who's a dependent on my wife's HSMP, or why I have one type of visa and my wife has another, etc. Check out all the wacky stuff they want me to send in to get a visa:

• completed application form VAF1
• your current passport
• your old passport or a copy of it
• Immigration status (Original not copy):e.g. Permanent residence card, Valid I-94 H1-B - L-1 - B-1 I-20 (Signed on reverse side) IAP-66
• Employment authorisation card with advance parole document
• evidence of funds available to you, for example recent bank statements covering at least the last three months
• either a letter confirming your period of leave from your employer together with salary slips for the last three months; or a certificate confirming you have continuing studies; or if you are self employed
• evidence of your business
• a letter of enrolment from a recognised UK University, College or School giving details about the proposed course. This should including the length of the course and the number of hours of study each week.
• An estimation of the costs your also be provided
• your educational qualifications or copies of them
• evidence of Government sponsorship (if applicable)
• One recent passport photograph (not more than six months old)

...quite a bit of stuff just to prove who I am! I've got it all now, though, with the exception of the financial records of funds available. I'm consolidating money from various places (stocks, options, whatever) into the tender clutches of my stockbroker via the single account that he manages on my behalf. Once this dough is all in the same place, I can get a single, compact statement that shows the immigration dudes that I have enough money to come and live in the UK. It turns out that I also have to prove to SBS that I have enough scratch to afford school and living in Oxford, etc., so I'll get this info off to them at the same time as well.


Living in the UK... is it expensive?

All of this money talk has got me thinking about the cost of living in Britain, the value of US dollars in Britain today, etc. Everybody says that living in the UK is expensive, you don't make as much money there as you do here, the exchange rate is bad just now, etc. etc. etc. So, I did a little internet searching, and found that the International Salary Calculator at homefair.com thinks I will need to make ~30% more money to enjoy the same lifestyle in the UK that I currently do here, yikes! To get a feel for just how bad the current exchange rate is, I did a little looking, and found data to chart the following:




...pretty interesting. Today's exchange rate is $1.75 US = 1.00 UK. This really isn't a ton of change relative to the rate over the last 20 years. Historically speaking, that makes the current value of the US dollar relative to the UK pound...

• 4% higher than the average over the last 2 years
• 6% lower than the average over the last 5 years
• 7% lower than the average over the last 10 years
• 7% lower than the average over the last 20 years
• 18% higher than the average over the last 50 years
• 54% higher than the average over the last 75 years
• 83% higher than the average over the last 100 years
• 123% higher than the average over the last 150 years
• 134% higher than the average over the last 200 years
• 136% higher than the average since 1791

There were all time exchange rate lows of $1.30 in 1985 and $1.50 in 2002, as well as an all time high of $9.97 in 1864 (during the civil war), but we are still at a near historically low value of UK Pound relative to US Dollar... there's more interesting data regarding historical exchange rates, "real" currency values, etc. available here: http://www.eh.net/hmit/


The Best Thing About Today

This has absolutely nothing to do with moving to the UK, but I got the following in my email today, and am officially TOTALLY HAPPY NOW.

02.22.06 Sallie Mae? or Mae not?

"SLM Corporation (Student Loan Marketing Association, NYSE: SLM), commonly known as Sallie Mae, is the United state's largest paying-for-college company, managing more than $107 billion in student loans for more than 7 million borrowers. Sallie Mae was originally created in 1972 as a government sponsored enterprise (GSE) and terminated all ties to the federal government in 2004. The company remains the country's largest originator of federally insured student loans."

...another example for my "why the US is secretly a socialist country" file. Sallie Mae is where I am getting my MBA loan from, they are one of the few US institutions willing to lend me money to go to school overseas. Apparently, they hold 1/3 of all US education loans! They gave us a pretty great rate, and now, after a bunch of rigmarole, I finally have the dough. Practically speaking.



The rig(amarole), a short story by Ean Hernandez


Online Forms, Easy-Pleasey

To apply for and get approved for an MBA loan, all I had to do was fill out an online form, and have my wife fill out a similar online cosigner form. That took about 20 minutes, and worked great.


Online Forms Only Work if You're Online

Next, I had to get Oxford to fill out a couple of fields on the form. Since they haven't set up with Sallie Mae to do this online, I had to mail this to Oxford. Nothing gets to Oxford fast. Even pricey overnight stuff gets to just outside of Oxford quickly, and then seems to slow way down as it enters town. Then, paperwork likes to sit around in in-boxes, get shuffled from department to department, and finally, get the pre-longweekend brushoff. After a month of this, my form made it's way to the equally efficient offices of Sallie Mae, who seemed to take a damn long time goofing around with it as well. During this time, I got semi-weekly robot phone calls from Sallie Mae letting me know that my loan still hadn't been fulfilled. However, after about two months the paperwork had made it's way into the Sallie Mae computer systems, and I was good to go with my loan. Almost.


The Credit Check / Disbursement Issue

Try this conundrum on for size: as a well compensated software development manager with a decent credit history, I got a good rate with Sallie Mae: Prime+0%. Throw in my well compensated biotech researcher wife will equally good credit, and we got Prime -.5%! Not too shabby. However, a credit check is only good for 6 months, so you have to either take the money soon, or risk getting a worse rate when they rerun the credit check at some future date. Enter the "disbursement date" issue. I can have SM send Oxford the $$$ now, be all paid up, and not worry about getting my loan any more, BUT, if I do that, I start accruing interest now, a at rate of prime - .5%, or 7.5% - .5%, or $292 per month. I don't have to pay Oxford the full amount until Sept 1st 2006, so I could always wait to have SM send them the cash and not start accruing interest until the last possible minute... the risk there is that I won't have much wiggle room if some kind of SM problem crops up. Worse yet, if they have to rerun my credit in Sept, I will no longer be a well compensated software development manager, I will be an out of work student (aka bum) and might get a crappier rate or even have problems getting the loan at all! So, waiting until Sept is bad too. The plan: I had Oxford tell SM to do the disbursement in May, that way I get a couple of months to clean up any last minute issues that might arise. This required several calls to both Oxford and SM, but now my loan was ready to go. Almost.


Adjusting the Length of Course

As it turns out, the full time MBA program at Oxford lasts 12 - 15 months, depending on the length of your internship, 12 is typical. However, I don't know what is going to happen when I go over, so I wanted to specify 15 months, just in case. Of course, the folks at Oxford put 12 months on the form, so I was somewhat worried that I might end up being done with school from SM's point of view, but still have another 3 months to go in my internship! SM loan payments start 6 months after the graduation date listed on the application, which could be 3 months after my actual graduation. If I'm still looking for work, or on some sort of long vacation or whatever at that time, I don't want to have to cough up an extra $292 a month. So, this took some more phone calling, but the length of the program was extended to 15 months on the SM form, and now, everything should be in order. Almost.


epilogue

I actually have a letter from SM saying they are going to give me the money, it will be disbursed in May, etc. Of course, Oxford doesn't have the cash yet, but I really have no reason to assume there will be any problem at this point ...right?

02.08.06 Visa, Visa, Visa

I need a Visa. Figuring out exactly how to get one, what to put on the application, etc., plays directly into my long term UK aspirations. The machinations are pretty endless...

Student Visa

Since I'm paying OUT THE ASS to go to school in the UK, I can get a student visa no problem, and then Reba can get a student dependent one for sure as well. These will let me study, as well as work up to 20 hours/week, and Reba can work full time. However, these visas expire literally the day after I graduate! So, travelling outside of the UK (my plan after graduation) would potentially end up in a situation where I was refused reentry to the UK! This will really screw up my long term UK living plans.

HSMP Visa

After graduation, it's a different story. If I want to stay in the UK, I have to get a different visa. The most logical is the Highly Skilled Migrant (worker) Program Visa. Yes, I, Ean Hernandez, will move overseas at great expense and effort to become a migrant worker! Of course, unlike many other Hernandi, I will not be picking, shucking, digging up, baling or otherwise harvesting anything. HSMP works on a points system... you get a certain number of points for making so much money, a certain amount for have a certain type of job in a certain field, and even a certain amount for being under 28 (no idea why on that one). You have to have 65 points to qualify, and in a fairly obvious attempt to get MBAs into the country, the UK gave graduates from 50 top international business schools 50 free points. Of course, they have to pander to the UK business schools, so regardless of whether or not they are really in the top 50 schools worldwide, there's about 10 UK schools listed there, one of which is Oxford. The upshot is that it is pretty easy for you to get a 1 year HSMP after graduating from Oxford. After is the key idea there, because you have to have graduated to get the 50 points, and my student visa runs out the day I graduate! That could be a sketchy couple of weeks while the HSMP paperwork processes. After the 1st year, I can apply for a 4 or maybe 5 year HSMP extension. Apparently, you don't even have to have a job while on the HSMP, it basically just lets you live there. I think they're figuring that the HSMP "type" is going to get a job though, I certainly am. Reba can work as a dependent on my HSMP, so as long as I have one, she can work in the UK too. I'm not really sure that she'll qualify for one on her own, but as long as I've got one, we're cool.

UK Passport

Here's a wacky option: Reba's dad was born in the UK (granny was a war bride), and lived there for about 1 year while grandpa did some gnarly clean-up duty in some German concentration camps. When gramps finished up, the whole family went back to the states. So, while my father in law is about as English as English Bob... (that's funny, because his name IS Bob) for some goofy reason Reba is entitled to a UK passport, which gives her dual citizenship, I think. This basically lets her work and live in the UK all she wants. Exactly what this imparts to me is more mysterious, but I'm working on it. The US state dept web site is a little bit crabby on this subject, making vague references to how dual citizenship could screw up your US citizenship...

"...a person who acquires a foreign citizenship by applying for it may lose U.S. citizenship. In order to lose U.S. citizenship, the law requires that the person must apply for the foreign citizenship voluntarily, by free choice, and with the intention to give up U.S. citizenship."

What a bunch of dicks! I'm not too surprised, really. They probably all voted for W. The scuttlebutt out on the internet is a little less sinister:


(from http://www.americanexpats.co.uk/dual.htm)


In order to lose U.S. citizenship, the law requires that the person must apply for the foreign citizenship voluntarily, by free choice, and with the intention to give up U.S. citizenship. NOTE from American Expats In The UK: This means that unless you denounce your U.S. citizenship..you will keep it while having dual citizenship U.S. and U.K.


(from http://www.easyexpat.com/en/faq/departure/q21.htm)

Will I lose US citizenship if I naturalize as a UK citizen?

Many wonder if becoming natualized as a British citizen means losing US citizenship. This is NOT the case as shown below.

U.S. law does not require a person entitled to more than one nationality to give up his/her other nationality. Travel on a foreign passport does not affect U.S. citizenship. However, please note that all U.S. citizens, even dual nationals, must enter and depart the United States on U.S. passports.
http://www.usembassy.org.uk/

In order to lose U.S. citizenship, the law requires that the person must apply for the foreign citizenship voluntarily, by free choice, and with the intention to give up U.S. citizenship.
http://travel.state.gov/travel/

Countries usually do not like to tell you that you are entitled to dual citizenship. As a US citizen, you are perfectly entitle to acquire another nationality and keep your US citizenship. [31-01-05]





(from http://www.richw.org/dualcit/faq.html#noway)



But I thought US law didn't permit one to be a dual citizen -- that if you were (by birth or otherwise), you either had to give up the other citizenship when you came of age, or else you'd lose your US status. And that if you became a citizen of another country, you'd automatically lose your US citizenship. So what's all this talk about dual citizenship?

It indeed used to be the case in the US that you couldn't hold dual citizenship (except in certain cases if you had dual citizenship from birth or childhood, in which case some Supreme Court rulings -- Perkins v. Elg (1939), Mandoli v. Acheson (1952), and Kawakita v. U.S. (1952) -- permitted you to keep both).

However, most of the laws forbidding dual citizenship were struck down in 1967 by the US Supreme Court. The court's decision in this case, Afroyim v. Rusk, as well as a second case in 1980, Vance v. Terrazas, eventually made its way explicitly into the statute books in 1986; up till that time, the old laws were still on the books, but the State Department was effectively under court order to ignore them.

Rules against dual citizenship still apply to some extent to people who wish to become US citizens via naturalization. The Supreme Court chose to leave in place the requirement that new citizens must renounce their old citizenship during US naturalization. However, in practice, the State Department is no longer doing anything in the vast majority of situations where a new citizen's "old country" refuses to recognize the US renunciation.

The official US State Department policy on dual citizenship today is that the United States does not favor it as a matter of policy because of various problems they feel it may cause, but the existence of dual citizenship is recognized in individual cases. That is, if you ask them if you ought to become a dual citizen, they will recommend against doing it; but if you tell them you are a dual citizen, they'll usually say it's OK.

...so, I think it will be cool if Reba gets a UK passport. That will be pretty cool to actually be married to a brit! I always thought they had really sexy voices. :)

Work Visa

The final option I know of is a regular old work visa. I haven't really looked into this, but I think it's really a function of who wants to hire you and if they're willing to hook you up with a visa. I figure that between the post-graduation recruiting events and the internship I work up, I should have a shot at one of these, but I really have no idea. There's enough other options that I will probably back-burner this for now.


ttfn

e

02.03.06 91%

This is the score I got on my first accounting test, which is OK, but not as good as I would have liked. The stuff I got wrong was mostly a product of not understanding the way my instructor thinks about accounting, instead of not understanding accounting itself, which is good. However, I want a 100%! I keep reminding myself that the point of this exercise is to become familiar with the basics of a subject with which I will be expected to become familiar on an unreasonably short timeline. So, this is groundwork. Ethan (my brother) says that this stuff will help me with 1/4 to 1/2 of my first financial accounting course, but after that it's all big picture stuff that this "beancounting" course won't help with. I figure, at the minimum, it will get my brain working and in the habit of studying again. While the French classes were awesome I have to admit that they were pretty conversational and non scholastic toward the end. Of course, I had fun with that. :)

01.24.06 third eye gone!

In an attempt to shore up all of my medical needs while I'm still on US insurance, I am getting some dentistry done and a lypoma removed from my forehead. A lypoma is a little lump of fat that builds itself up in one place or another, I don't know why in particular. This one was on my forehead, and I called it my "3rd eye", even though it was quite small. I still thought it was ugly, and didn't want to get into the situation that my father in law had: his got as big as an acorn, and moved down his forehead so that it hung over his eye! Today I went in to see Dr. Lawler to have mine removed. First, they injected lytocane (sp?) which made it swell up, so that it really looked like a 3rd eye.

Then, they cut the thing out. Reba watched, an I could kind of see what they were doing via the reflection in her glasses. Yuck! After a lot of cutting, ominous scraping, and blood wiping, they had the little guy out. It was the size of a cherry pit, sort of globby and yellow/bloody. Here is a picture of it in the biopsy container.

And finally, they stitched me up, and put a bandage on my head, which is pretty goofy looking:

...so I'm staying home the rest of the day. Plus, this will give me a chance to finish up my accounting homework.

01.23.06 work, life, school, ducks

This weekend was my last duck hunting expedition before the big move. It was really sad to watch Robby and Sarin standing on the shore waving goodbye, and to watch the duck blinds and favorite hunting spot disappear around the corner as we were ferried up the Winchester Wasteway and back to the launch. The hunt really wasn't very good, Saturday was mostly spent picking at small groups of divers, and Sunday was so bad that only two (long) shots were fired all day. Happily, I got 2 Goldeneye Drakes and a Shovelnose Hen on Saturday, one of which I nailed with a classic pass shot... I was really happy about that one. The other two were acquired more in the sluicing method, and while it's irresistible in the moment, I frankly don't feel too satisfied after the fact.

Regarding the low number of potential shots, I suspect that more is at work than Hernandez luck. The guides say that Moses Lake hunts have been hit and miss all year, and from what I can remember, they've been hit and miss for the last few. I don't think that duck populations are down in general, I just think that the farming practices in the Moses Lake area are not supporting the volume of ducks we once had. I do know this: since I got back into hunting about 4 years ago, I have not seen a set of more than 1 dozen ducks come in to a blind I was hunting, and even groups numbering a dozen have presented themselves less than a handful of times. Generally, I have shot at small sets of 2 to 5 ducks, and this last weekend's level of shooting has been more common than not. I'm beginning to wonder if Moses Lake is just played out? I hope not, but I am considering that my next trip will be to somewhere like Mexico or Canada. It's sad, because I remember shooting at groups of 30 or 40 ducks regularly as a kid... much of that was in the Skagit, but Eastern Washington had similar productivity when I was out there. We'll see. Maybe I'll give old Moses Lake another go this next year, if I'm back in town for the Xmas holiday.

Of course, the upshot of this weekend's activities is that I now have to cram in a bunch of Accounting homework tonight and tomorrow, hence the title of this post. Balancing the fun stuff I like to do with the work I want to accomplish is going to be different in an academic setting than in the work setting I am so used to.

I have to get some minor surgery in the AM tomorrow, but I'm hoping to feel OK to finish up the assignment before class that night, even if I just email it in. My hobbies are going to have to really slow down in order to support the level of studying I want to do... weekend-long getaways are not going to be possible over the next few months, and even less possible when I start at Oxford. I just need to get into that rhythm of studying all weekend, which I actually enjoy to a certain degree. The other issue is that my focus is weak right now, and I need to get it up into good fighting shape: I can't be half spaced out and hope to grind through a ton of study work at the same time!

01.08.06 change in owner equity

This accounting stuff isn't killing me yet, but there are a few concepts that are not going into my head nicely and quietly, so I'm really glad I'm taking this class now! I'd hate to be struggling through these concepts next year while my academic overlords try to kill me with sheer volume of work. I'm actually finding accounting to be aesthetically pleasing in the same way programming is: when everything works out, i.e. the accounts balance, the program compiles, whatever... I feel this soothing sense of order (and a smug sense of superiority). That's a lot of S's. I'd probably get marks off for that in a paper. In any case, when things don't work out, and I'm beating my head against some idea... then it's not quite as satisfying. Although, I suppose that satisfaction in a completed task goes up some amount for every beat of the head against the [insert metaphor]. Tomorrow is the first day of asp .net class at the UW. I hope that doesn't kill me either. Since I set the whole thing up, I kind of get to call the shots with the instructor. I was on a conference call with him Friday, when he actually asked me how much work I wanted assigned outside of class! MY GOD!!!! For the first time in history, I actually got to decide how much homework the teacher would assign! For 2 seconds, I thought that I would tell him to go easy, because it would make things easy on me. Of course, I felt guilty about that and told him that this class needs to be challenging, and my people need to work for it... I also told him that each one gave me a personal commitment to do the reading and homework, and really work their asses off. So, I chumped out and basically told him to give us lots of homework. :) Oh well, we'll all be the better for it.

01.06.06 skypeage

After just a few posts to this thing, I'm noticing a clear desire on my part to post more, even if there's nothing to report. I find myself wanting to tap out the trivia of my day and most recent concerns, even though they are not the point of this blog. Therefore, I will resolve to only post items relevant to my overseas journey, and hopefully let off a little trivia pressure whenever I get enough appropriate material to warrant a post. The tension created between wanting to jabber and not finding noteworthy subjects should make for interesting something or other. We shall see.

On to it: Frank turned me on to this thing called Skype, which is a voice over ip service that runs on your PC, and has the following features:

• totally free calls to anyone using Skype
• 2 cents/minute from Skype to land lines (in the 1st world)
• 25 cents/minute from Skype to cell phones
• local phone numbers wherever you like that forward to your computer wherever you are for $30/year
• forward to a land line or cell at the same rate as calling a land line or cell

...best of all, this all works the same and costs the same, wherever you are in the world.

So, theoretically, I can give my mom a Seattle (206) number to call us at, it will go to my Skype account on my PC, and will cost only 2 cents a minute. This beats the hell out of the 1 POUND a minute I was paying on my crappy "pay as you go" phone that I took on my last few trips to the UK. If I have it forward to my UK cell, it will only cost 25 cents a minute, still about 1/7th the cost I was paying last time. If I can teach her how to use a Skype phone on her computer, it's entirely free!

No matter which way we go, this makes for a dirt cheap way of doing long distance, EXCEPT for the forwarding to cell phone case, which probably wouldn't be super useful anyway, as I don't want to get calls from mom in the middle of class.

I'm going to check it out tonight, Frank even lent me a usb voip phone to try. Maybe this will keep me from going broke via long distance phone when I go over.

Update: the phone works fine, the service works fine (sometimes fades in and out), and the Skype site and online store are kind of crappy. The experience is a bit cooler when you use the microphone and speakers of the computer, except then you have issues with echoes. I'm going to keep working on this, I'd like to not have to spend so damn much money on phones the next time I go over.

L8tr

e

01.04.06 ACC210

The loan info and wire transfer have been sent. Now, I'm stuck going to Oxford, unless I give up my deposit. I only wish I didn't have to wait 8 more months!!!

Had the first session of ACC210 last night. Several other people and I were standing outside the class waiting for the instructor to arrive, and as class time got closer, no one in apparent authority showed up. One guy was worrying somewhat vocally about whether we had the wrong room or not, and another guy wearing a purple shirt mentioned that he had heard the instructor was a "real jackass". Fabulous. Then, just at class time, a security guy came and opened the door, saying hello to purple shirt guy, which seemed odd. Then, purple shirt guy came clean and admitted that he was actually the instructor, which was pretty damn funny, and scored points with me. The class was OK, he talked about some very basic accounting stuff, which seemed appropriate for the crowd he's speaking to: bookkeepers, 4-year transfer hopefuls, high school kids getting occupational education credits, people who own small businesses and need to be better at the books, etc. etc. And then, there's me. I know absolutely FUCK ALL about accounting, so even the most basic data is useful. The age range in there is probably from 16 to 50, I suppose that's typical of community college courses. I hope that I will be able to handle taking this class as well as the asp.net programming stuff coming up, but if last night is any indication, I should be OK.

01.03.06 money

Got the paperwork to do the US to UK wire transfer from my stock broker today, Reba has to sign it tonight, and then SBS gets their down payment sent tomorrow. Also have the student loan docs done, which also require my fine wife's signature before sending off. This down payment is non refundable, so if announcing to my colleagues that I'm quitting wasn't final enough, sending off the wire tomorrow will make this life-move pretty damn irreversible. Of course, at this point, I've told everybody I know, and if I forgot someone, the rumor mill spreads the story for me. It's funny how a fancy name like Oxford makes everyone chatty... the congratulations and back slapping and "isn't that a neat adventure" stuff is of course great, but I imagine it would come regardless of what school I attended. There's something about this school in particular, or more probably, the American conception of this school in particular, that makes people talk it up. While this is all fun for me now, I'm starting to feel the pressure already... there is no freaking way I can afford to fail at this. I don't think I'd want to come back to Seattle if that happened... just facing everyone would be unbearable. So, I will just have to succeed!

Tonight is the first night of Accounting 210 at SCCC, my attempt at doing some pre-game warm up for Oxford. Next quarter will be business statistics, which should be interesting, at least. We'll see what accounting is like, honestly I'm not looking forward to it. I am, however, looking forward to being on a tighter schedule, with all the holiday free time I'm getting antsy again: I only need a few hours of sleep at night, gain weight, etc. So, this will keep me focused and tired, which always takes a load off of my mind.

01.02.06 getting started

11:33 pm January 2nd 2006.

The idea of having a blog is so my friends and family can keep up with what I'm doing over in the UK when I go to school. Since this is post #1, I suppose some background is in order.

At the age of 36, I decided to go back to school to get an MBA, somewhat because I think that will help me move forward in my career, and somewhat because I'm ready to try something new. When I told Reba (wife) about this idea, she said "sure, but there is one requirement: you are NOT allowed to work and go to school at the same time, you are not capable of focusing on that many things at once." She was probably right. From there, I thought, "well if I'm not going to keep my job during this, I should go somewhere cool for school." Since I've always wanted to live in Europe, I figured this was as good a chance as any. Initially I was thinking about a 2year English language program at the IESE in Barcelona, where they even teach you Spanish at the same time as the MBA stuff and have really good food AND weather, but Reba was not down with this: she wanted to keep working, and therefore wanted to be somewhere where people speak English at work. Ok, so I started looking at the UK. To make a long story short: the university of Oxford sounded like a damn cool place to spend one year overseas, and after a lot of GMAT studying, test taking, essay writing, and to-the-UK-flying, I got accepted to the Saïd Business School at Oxford. Here's the business school's website: http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/ Also, some funny background info on Mr. Saïd and the arms dealing controversy can be found here: http://www.oxfordstudent.com/tt2002wk1/news/what_was_saïd

Campus liberals up in arms aside, I'm going. The timeline works out like this:

• (may '06) sell house, move into sub let in seattle, visit Oxford briefly to pick an apartment
• (aug '06) move to Oxford
• (sep '06) screw around in the UK, France, whatever
• (oct '06) start school, get ass kicked by reading assignments, etc.
• (jul, aug '07) consulting project somewhere cool in the UK or Europe
• (oct '07) work for at least 1 year in the UK... the UK govt gives a 1 year work visa to Oxford grads
• (oct '08) stay? return? unknown!

Since I got the OK from SBS in October, there hasn't been a ton to do in terms of prepping for school. That all changed last week, when I got the official offer package and a demand for an ~£4000 downpayment and proof of having the cash to cover the whole £29,000 tuition within 15 days. This appears to be pretty typical of Oxford... £29,000 is about $50,000, so most people would take out a loan. BUT, you can't get a loan unless you have an offer of a place in the program. SBS doesn't care, they want their down payment and proof NOW. So, I'm scrambling a bit, but should be OK.

The other imminent step toward business schooliness is the Financial Accounting class I'm going to take two nights a week starting tomorrow. The idea is that if I have some inkling of how that works before I get to SBS, I won't have to learn all the basic basics while I'm getting slammed with a ton of other material in Oxford's somewhat legendarily intensive terms. While business school in general interests me, I don't seem to be super drawn to accounting, so I suppose it will be an exercise in "can you handle doing something you don't like doing", which is pretty much what I do for a living currently, so it shouldn't be too difficult.

Ok, that's about it for now, I plan to update this as stuff develops, but mostly not until I move, which is the point at which things will probably get interesting.

L8tr

e