the P.Pole

I have been mulling the thought over in my head the past few days, and so far I’m still leaning towards my realization that I am not fit to be a student. I am not good at it. This does not mean I don’t do well for myself as one (I do decently and this is not false humility), I just don’t find it particularly engaging. I also don’t share the same sense of motivation as my peers for doing exceptionally well either.

To explain the image, I like building things. I very much enjoy designing badass stuff. I love the process of taking a bunch of raw materials, and infusing myself into them through work and application such that they take on form and function worth more than the sum of the parts. Contrast this affection with my falling out with “school” and all it stands for and you have a perfectly good reason to post a shot of my dear Phoebe’s nude body.

Back in high school (and even before), I played the role of a student rather readily and even enthusiastically. I enjoyed all my subjects and had great rapport with my teachers barring Olsheski the Unfit and to a much lesser extent, Quejada the Exiguous). I picked up  new information and facts, relationships and theories easily enough, and applied them as well as I could be expected to. And this was all fine and dandy, if not for the subject matter itself, then for the thrill of competition. Continue reading

5 things I taught myself to do within MS Excel’s macro modules:

• automatically find and “commit” existing data (by saving values and removing all formulas) in non-empty cells
• referencing + manipulating cell contents for VB programming
• automatically add to, remove from, and sort lists within ranges of cells
• create (and abuse) snarky user interaction windows/prompts
• establish a data connection with an online table + refresh the table

These things are pretty basic for advanced Excel developers, but for me, one who is in between the unwashed masses and the mildly initiated, well, I feel pretty damn good about figuring this stuff out mostly on my own (Google, Macro Recording, a coworker, and Herman were great helps along the way).

It has been said that necessity is the mother of all invention, but I think my inventions are bastardized in nature, as laziness is fact the real mother of these inventions! Like one of those secret plots, where the king’s child is actually born of a concubine (in this case, a very seductive and clever, albeit lazy concubine), but the public is kept from this knowledge, to protect the good name of the royal family. But even more secretly, the queen is fuming, but also satisfied because the child takes care of her needs… too? I am not sure this translates.

In any case, I was being a sneaky cleverist, and made a whole bunch of macros/functions/buttons for deciding how an expense tracking workbook would work. This was for the project managers here at Open Text, IT. I believe myself and any that follow would not enjoy the laborious task of manually maintaining the sheet’s infrastructure and editing the VB code to accommodate for the slightest changes, so I wrote it in a very hands-free fashion, and it will work flawlessly so long as no one decides to delete random columns/rows… Which no one ever does, right? RIGHT?! Well, i can leave documentation, and that’s about it really… Here’s to hoping no random user decides to “clean” my sheets.

Work work!

5 great changes of late:

• at work: I’ve begun work on my term project at Open Text, automating the entire process of my job—”The Idea” (more on this below, post-list)
• at home: Eric, the new guy who is replacing Taylor for this term, has unclogged our shower drain with a pair of tweezers and much Liquid Plumbr (SIC), and now we do not shower in pools of soapy water
• at school: none—no schooling to be done while on coop as it is strictly forbidden
• at OS-level: I was forced to reinstall OS X Snow Leopard when I decided to fix my BSOD problem on Win7 by repartitioning/Boot Camping/installing everything, and now I’ve got a fresh OS X, retaining all my data, and a clean Win7 install, with Team Fortress 2 and CoD4: Modern Warfare 2
• at heart: I feel pretty happy and satisfied what with my deepening friendships, and doing decently well at work, which I had been worrying over before

So! My big Idea. Basically, there are parts of my job that are rather straightforward and could/should very well be done by an automated process. As we are not OS X, I cannot just write up/record an Automator workflow to do these tasks, and am forced to tackle them manually.

One of my term projects (I’ve got about three so far, and they’re all doosies) involves me finding/contemplating/inventing a way to automate most of the process of adding change/project requests, initiating and closing the same, etc…

The Problem: if we are to hook into the system that is in place, I would have to design this all in SQL, a programming language I am not familiar (at all) with.

Continue reading

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

Okay so long story short, today I came home from the Actuarial Science test and reviewed a little bit for my Algebra midterm. From past experience, Math midterms have been around 7 pm at night, and I assumed the same.

I started playing some Left 4 Dead and about half an hour into it, I suddenly got compelled (I am convinced it was divine intervention!) to check my time and room for the exam. To my horror, I found that my midterm started at 4:20 pm. For some reason (probably out of panic), when I looked at my clock, it read 5:50 pm, so I thought to myself “Oh shit. I’ve got like 40 minutes to write a 2 hour exam.” So, like a bat out of linear Hell, I tore out of my house, making a mad dash for the Math building where my midterm was hosted. Continue reading

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.