the P.Pole

5 random quips:

• “(500) Days of Summer” and “I Love You Man” were great movies
• Modern Warfare 2 is quite an addictive game
• Grooveshark is awesome
• I hate spelling and grammar errors, but feel that they are necessary when being mushy with Amy
• Picking others’ brains is as important as picking your own

Today Eugene Roman (an executive at OpenText) came to have lunch with us co-op students. He spoke at length during and after lunch about some principles that he has adopted in his work and personal life that have gotten him where he is today. Pretty rad exec, if you ask me. I really liked when he answered the question “How do we find jobs in this market?” with “With hard work and cleverness.” I have already asked to have a sit-down with him next Thursday to find out what exactly makes a guy like him tick. Should be quite a learning experience, I say.

There’s some saying that I will, in a matter of a few words, begin butchering via paraphrase: “A humble student has innumerable masters.” There’s also the “A true student is always ready to learn.” Something along those lines is what I’m applying here. There are two kinds of successful people in my opinion, those who are lucky, and those who know what they are doing. Given that someone successful knows what they are doing, surely there is something to be gained from first knowing their road to success, understanding it, and eventually integrating the lessons learned into your own adventure. I am pretty excited.

Did you know that this place, the P.Pole, has been around since 2005? Did you also know that this year I, Carl K. Awesome H. Wong will be turning twenty years young? Yes, my friends, I will be at my quarter-life crisis in about three to four months from now.

Speaking of quarters, I have exactly one left over from paying for a bottle of Coke at work today. I thought I’d treat myself and drink to the Five-Year Anniversary (a “Fiversary” if you will, but you, like me, probably won’t) of the P.Pole. Effectively, I’ve been writing and posting for a quarter of my life with my lovely P.Pole.

I still remember the olden days when I first started out with her on Blogger which was, back then, a completely different beast and not the polished (and rather good-looking) face you’ll see today. I remember spending an entire day figuring out a great name for my own little slice of the Internet, and finally settled on the P.Pole (for some obvious and some clandestine reasons).

Somewhere along the line, I decided to try out Wordpress, as hosted on their servers (with limited functionality without payment). I tested an “Import from Blogger” feature and a month later, I had my own hosting and domain by Dreamhost, running a Wordpress install. I’ve since moved once more, to HostGator, and made a few tweaks to the P.Pole’s face (less than this woman though).

And here we are today, five years later, still posting and updating happily. Here’s to many more! *sips addictive caffeine enriched Coke*

Thank you, Amy. *smooches

Today I wrote my Statistics, Probability final exam. I feel very confident, and for someone doing very well in that class already, this should not be taken as a sign of arrogance (there are many others, take your pick).

According to my roommate Taylor, he has noticed that I seem to be quite moody today and, to a lesser extent, recently. He asked if it was my time of the month, and I asked whether he would like to settle the matter outside.

From past experience, I only get as described (that would be, dark, moody, etc…) over a very specific subset of things out of the larger set of Life. These would include (mainly):

• while seething over  some recent wronging
• during spells of feeling neglected
• when having trouble with girls

Now, let’s say that these three form a mean of sorts, an expected value, with variance being some expression in terms of my relationship status, proximity to other people, and how much duress I am experiencing at the moment of Great Upheavals. Possible values would thusly be varying reasons ranging from predominantly indignation-based (on our graph: left, for some arbitrary reason) to predominantly sadness-based (right).

Now, if each of these Great Upheaval events are distributed with identical underlying distribution models (I’d like to think of it in terms of some exponential distribution, where we consider only the wait time before the first event), then the Central Limit Theorem suggests that given enough observed Upheavals, the distribution of them all as a whole could be approximated by, you guessed it, the Normal Distribution.

This makes a lot of sense, since most everything in Nature tends towards some Normal Distribution model, be it the weight of individual penguins or termites per mound. Some say this is a quantifiable argument for God’s existence, but this more rationally explained by the underlying mathematics present. However, the elegance and perfection with which the underlying mathematics works out—now that is more like an argument for God’s designing hand in my somewhat educated opinion.

Also, the integral of e^(-x^2) from zero to infinity (mostly un-integrable by non-math nerds) works out to be the square root of Pi divided by 2 (i.e. √π/2) and this is where the Normal Distribution’s Probability Density Function is derived. Yeah, I know.  Calculus, meet Statistics.

I am also not feeling so great. Physically, very healthy. Otherwise, not in the best shape, as I came to realize today. I should probably seek medical attention wherever and as soon as possible.

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Take, if you want a slice,
If you want a piece,
If it feels alright.

Break, if you like the sound,
If it gets you up,
If it brings you down.

Share, if it makes you sleep,
If it sets you free,
If it helps you breathe.

Don’t come over here
And piss on my gate.
Save it—just keep it
Off my wave.

Cry, if you want to cry,
If it helps you see,
If it clears your eyes.

Hate, if you want to hate,
If it keeps you safe,
If it makes you brave.

Pray, if you want to pray,
If you like to kneel,
If you like to lay.

Keep it off my wave.
My wave.
- Soundgarden, My Wave

My mom has gone to Hong Kong. I am currently at home, in Toronto.

• just finished watching the Vera-Couture fight on Spike, horribly disappointed in the match judging once again
• went to wings tonight with family and friend(s) at All Stars, and God of Thunder was Deity of Death
• grabbing season five of The Office (US) while at home, abusing the nids here
• feeling happy about finding a second of Amy’s secret present yesterday, so that now we each have one to enjoy/pair up with
• going to bed now, after a tiring day of breakfast with dad, hair cut, dental appointment, 30+ levels of Hell’s Gate in Tactics Ogre, and NO STUDYING FOR ANY OF MY TWO TESTS (Organizational Behaviour, and Financial Accounting) AND ONE MIDTERM (Linear Algebra) THIS WEEK, MLIA

I eat them for breakfast.

Basically, I’m stuck at home (Toronto) this weekend due to what’s probably the H1N1 flu. Yep, I’m probably gonna be stuck half-crippled for awhile longer (before I either die from drowning in mucus or I get better somehow).

In my down and out state, so far the only thing to really bring some joy and colour back into my days has been working through taking second and third partial and full derivatives of abstract 4+ variable function compositions. I know, what the fuck is that anyway?

I don’t know if it’s the flu or the cabin fever talking, but I am actually enjoying this sort of stuff. Math really is the coolest thing ever for me. I am spending weekend at home creating and working through ridiculous math problems just because the professor said +80% of the class usually completely fail at this type of manipulation/derivation. This means I’ll need the extra practice to keep up.

The fact that I seem to be able to do this better now that I’m sick over healthy suggests that there’s probably a hidden gene somewhere in my DNA, giving me super mathematical insight when aching and coughing profusely. Like Batman, probably.

I’ve never seen anything nearly as complicated as some of these derivatives (single-variable Calculus compared with multi-variable Calculus is like putting on your pants one leg at a time compared with putting them on both legs at once, while playing tetris underwater during a cage match with a fire-breathing monitor lizard). And for someone who at one point failed every single quiz, test, and assignment in high school Calculus, I think I’m doing extra-fantastic. These are the wages of hard work and the reapings of sowings of the excellent Math professors at Waterloo, I believe. It’s cool, because I actually understand what the professor is talking about now, which helps in doing the actual compositions/operations/whatever so much more un-impossible.

Aside: You know what I still find ridiculous though? Teaching us the formal definition of a limit (which defines the derivative) after more than halfway through a term in which we have already been taking derivatives of entire sets of families of functions.

I am glad I chose Math at Waterloo. Business at WLU, on the other hand, well that’s a topic for a different kind of post.