Articles from: 2011

I had been living in a rented room in a condo for the past four plus years or so and decided it was time to move. I have been shopping for a house but was motivated by a friend and my brother who both suggested I try to find a place to rent that’s better. One of the perks of moving is being able to go through all your stuff and discarding things that you don’t need or want anymore. Interestingly enough, the old tenant hasn’t moved out yet so I haven’t quite fully moved in yet so my stuff is still in boxes, almost begging a second look as to whether I still need them or not. Anyway, I did manage to set up my desk and it is rather nice to have a somewhat clean, minimalistic workspace. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep this that way. To be honest, though, the space underneath the desk is a mess of usb, power, audio, and antenna cords and it’s quite unsightly.  But the previous tenant left his Rolling Stones covers calendar, so I have Taylor Lautner in a wet t-shirt to accent the space. Having a clean desk is nice.  Usually I balk at the thought of doing some studying at home (it was never that conducive to work at my old place I thought) but I’ve actually managed to get through some parts of the modules I have to complete, taking guitar breaks along the way.  Anyway, it’s slightly a strange setup not being able to move in for an indeterminate amount of time (the previous tenant has been on honeymoon for the past few weeks or so) but I imagine it being some sermon illustration on being sojourners in this world, or developing patience, or something of that nature.  Anyway, I finished learning another song on the guitar, and got started on another.  My fingertips are pretty dented in from the strings.

Lesson learned: if you’re dying to get strange looks from people, just set up your camera in the middle of a hallway and stand by it.

And it only took … a year.

As strange as it sounds, one thing that spurred me to get a camera was the light coming through the office windows at the end of the day.  I really love this light.  It makes everything look nostalgic. So when everyone was gone yesterday, I set up my tripod, camera, and intervalometer and started taking photos until . . . I came back and discovered I ran out of batteries.  Doh!  Ah well.  Below was all I got.

Not very exciting but hopefully I can make something more interesting and involved.  I kinda want to set up my camera in the main hallway when everyone is coming into the building but I’m torn between artistry and not looking like a dork.  Anyway, I managed to encode this in H.264 for all you brilliant people with flash deficient iPhones.

Well I finished the last practice exam of my study manual (I have plenty more outside the manual) yesterday and my scores are as follows:

Exam	Score
1	29/35
2	27/35
3	18/35
4	28/35
5	26/35
6	27/35
7	30/35
8	23/35
9	25/35
10	18/35

I think the pass mark may be in the area of 21-23 out of 35 so on the whole fairly decent scores considering some of the exams are known to be on the harder side and considering I didn’t guess which may or may not have bumped up some of these scores by one or two points.  But even knowing that I felt a bit defeated yesterday after an 18 and was hoping to finish strong. I’ve been noticing that there are some days I actually choose to forgo studying and leave work a bit early.  I think in my overly introspective ways I tend to project my life outward from where it is now to try to predict where it might end up (similar to Bayesian credibility, Chapter 42 , I guess) and the thought of long ending streams (cf Parametric Distributions, Chapter 2.3) of nights alone in an office studying makes me feel (cf Biased Estimators, Chapter 19.1.1) a bit, well, scared.  I guess this is only a temporary phase in my life (cf Kernel Smoothing of Empirical Data, Chapter 25), but to be honest, I don’t want my life to be about … studying for tests (cf Hypothesis Tests, Chapter 33).  I think I would have never have given this a second thought when I was younger (cf Kaplan-Meier estimators of single decrements, Chapter 22) but maybe age just makes time feel a bit weightier (cf Hypothesis Tests: Chi-Square, Chapter 36.  This hypothesis tests places more weight on intervals of low fitted probability). In other news I got a camera.  (Um, letsee, Chapter 13 – Exposure Modiciations?  That might be a stretch)

  [Edit: hmm, upon further examination of my answers, I’ve discovered I worked out an answer to be 10/11ths, which was correct, and somehow I circled 11/10ths.  Note to self:  must remember what numbers look like]

I just finished a practice exam.  It was out of this world CUHRAYZEE hard.  So crazy!  So hard!  What really irks me is that I remember doing some of these problems six months ago, and thought I knew how to do it, but after spending a while working through all the calculations, I look down at the answer choices and don’t see my answer!  On the plus side, I’m definitely doing a lot better than six months ago, and people who have gotten comparable scores on these exams seem to be passing.  It’s been a pretty long road. So I spent most of memorial day at home at my desk and went out to get some sushi near this place near Cal State Northridge.  On the drive back home I had this thought about looking back on life when you’re old and all of a sudden everything seemed a lot less cuhrayzee.

I took my first practice exam and scored a 29 out of 35!  (I think around 21 is passing)  Granted it was one of the easier ones and I think I made good educated guesses on problems that I didn’t know how to do but it was somewhat relieving knowing that I’ve come a ways since six months ago.  I started thinking of everything that has happened since I started studying for this exam almost a year ago and I was impressed at how much can happen in a year.  And then depressed at how quickly time flies.  And then repressed at how much I wanted to write about but never did.  And then … forest?  Mae West?  Undressed?  Hmm, must think of more rhymes… On a random note, I decided to sleep the opposite way on my bed.  I wouldn’t necessarily classify this change up as “fun” but it does make me look forward to sleeping somewhat.  When I was younger I would always like to sleep at my friend’s place or in these sofa cushion forts and seeing as how I don’t have a sofa, I’m finding it a tad satisfying to my inner child to sleep differently.

So my netbook (a poor man’s iPad) died and I was trying to figure out whether to get an iPad (I guess it’s a rich man’s netbook) when I got tired and started lying in bed.  It dawned on me how out of control my feelings can get at times and I’m trying to figure out the heart of the matter because I think on the surface most people tend to think I’m this quiet polite guy.  I think for a lot of things I’m pretty low key (like if I suddenly won a trip to Hawaii I might yawn a little) but there are some things I go complete bonkers about.  I think it has a lot to do with expectations vs. reality and the disparity between the two can be quite jarring.  I think at times we can all have wild imaginations on what might take place, what our life might be liked if everything panned out as planned, and start living toward those unrealistic expectations.  I never thought imagination was a bad thing, but I suppose what’s the real killer is not understanding that it’s just imagination. I ended up getting another netbook, which I think has slightly better video playback than my old one which I’m going to have to sadly retire.  I’m going to miss the little guy as I’ve been using it practically everyday.  I have 29 study days left until my exam, so it’s time to put my nose to the grindstone.

I finished my study manual for exam C!  I was thinking of putting up even more progress bars of the different sample problems/practice exams I have yet to do before my exam on June 20th (I have quite a lot to keep me busy until then) but I can’t seem to think of anything more boring to watch.  Letsee I can see how long it takes to eat 300 waffles.  Or go through 2000 yards of dental floss.  Or ingest 50,000,000 milligrams of sodium.  That last one might be hard to keep track. Progress bars have been my answer to everything lately.  Need to lose weight?  Progress bars!  Put more money in savings?  Progress bars!  Change a tire?  Progress bars!  Find a spouse?  Progress bars!  Letsee, I’m currently at 0 for 1 in the spouse department.  Only, uh… one more to go!  Almost there!

Well on a whim I decided to throw up a push up progress bar.  I’m not sure how close I’ll be able to get to 10,000 pushups; that’s probably more than I’ve done in my lifetime.  I figure I’m pretty far ahead of where I should be study wise so I thought I’d throw in something to distract me in the meantime.  Although I’m not sure how my new lifestyle will change with my bulging biceps.  I’ll probably have to adjust myself when I shake people’s hands so I don’t crush them with my unleashed power.  Maybe I’ll have to sit differently during my exam sitting so I don’t break the keyboards with my massive arms.  I’ll have to restrain myself when opening doors for people that I don’t totally blow them off their hinges.  Think of all the doors I’d have to replace, and the embarrassment caused to myself, my friends, and my family.  Wow, this is becoming more problematic than I thought.