November 14, 2008

  • frayed nerves time of semester

    I’m not sure what it is, but everyone at school (including me) just looks and feels incredibly tired. There’s so much more we have to get done by the end of the semester, and not really enough time to do it. And all our brains desperately need a break.

    Last Friday was ASA fall meeting – due to the above brain-deadness I usually manage to miss fall meeting, but I’m glad I finally made it to one. Part of the adventure was taking the school shuttle between campuses (I bet it wouldn’t take 45 minutes if we took the highway.) even though it turned out that it is possible to park at the other campus for free (since it’s not downtown like mine) We have a great statistics group – it’s fun seeing talks that get well into the problem, and then say “And this just didn’t freaking work. Ideas?”

    Had to send KK a “that super simple thing you told me to do? Yeah, can’t figure it out.” Haven’t heard back. Also got 4 more books that might help from the library, so I have something (hopefully) productive to do besides staring at my non-working code and freaking out.

    Making slow, steady progress on my econ paper. Maybe I won’t have so much trouble making it long as Dan expects.

    Recipe of the week: Super Rich Blueberry muffins. It halves and quarters fine (depends on how much sour cream I have on hand.) and frozen blueberries work just fine.

October 31, 2008

  • October = speed month

    Had a great talk with KK about where we want the research to go. So I should probably be doing something about that instead of talking to you. ;)

    I have to actually start writing my econ paper. On the plus side, there’s nothing like research to make paper writing not sound so bad.

    I do not recommend Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies. They’re not BAD, they’re just… weird. I managed to finish them by having them for breakfast when my tastebuds aren’t awake yet and the main food criterion is non-messy and no prep. Any ideas for what to do with the remaining 3/4 c of pumpkin left in the can?

    My pending schedule for next semester is looking thoroughly insane. Like “taking thesis hours would be a terrible idea workload-wise” insane. Oh well. It will be the first semester since last fall that I won’t try to sit in on a class as well as doing everything else.

October 24, 2008

  • kinda quiet

    Sometimes things are just kind of normal and repetitive.

    Beerfest was great – but more for the excitement and the people and the fun than for the beer. Turns out there’s a lot of beers I mostly like with food (IPAs, reds) and a lot of beers I like to slowly sip (Belgian Double anyone?) which is really not what Beerfest does well. (Though next time we go, we’ll know to make our own pretzel necklaces like the rest of the cool kids.) Also, I pretty much don’t like stouts or porters, which was a surprise. Everyone was very friendly and laid back, even when there were traffic jams of people. I did not keep track at all of what I tasted – one hand holding my glass and one hand hanging onto N. didn’t leave a hand to take notes with. Whenever my glass got empty, we’d just wade through the people towards the next beer that looked good. We walked past every single booth, so everyone had a chance. Even though I didn’t meet any new beers that impressed me, it was a ton of fun.

    School is rolling along – but right as I’m starting to have time to concentrate on research, people are getting talks together so I’m spending more time at school and seeing some cool new ideas. Two talks this week and I spent more time talking to people than I think I have since I started working from home.

October 10, 2008

  • Econ pres went really well. Glad it’s over. Now I need to start worrying about the second half of that class, where I’m supposed to find results. Maaaaaybe I will head to campus well before today’s econ talk and spend some quality time with STATA. I may also corner the new metrics teacher and see if she can help me explain why the model my coworker wants to use is making me so queasy.

    I have totally given up on doing the homeworks for Continuous Modeling, but I’m still reading the chapters and able to keep up with the in-class discussion.

    Wait, so that means I have tons of time to work on my research, right? cross your fingers for me.

    The “chocolate” icebox cookies turn out to be really blech. Halfway between chocolate graham crackers and stale oreos with extra crumbly. Had to stop my review recipes to make the Welcome Fall batch of Pumpkin Gingerbread muffins. (Recipe makes 24. Only had to bake for 20 minutes.)

    This weekend is Beerfest! I’m so excited. I’ve been meaning to go every year since we moved here. Last year we honestly tried, but couldn’t get a designated driver ticket ANYWHERE. This year I ordered tickets extremely early instead of driving to a variety of liquor stores.

October 3, 2008

  • I’ve lost count of the weeks. I think this is good.

    Still feeling oddly non-overwhelmed. I’ll take it while it lasts.

    The econ pres got moved back to next week.

    I went to a talk on morphing the Kalman filter to get better simulation results and more of it made sense than I expected, but still not enough to say I understand it. (Reasons Lynn is awesome: she says things like “You’re doing good if you understand the first 5 minutes of these talks” which make me feel lots better about my brain.)

    I actually made tangible progress on things at work (usually I make progress, but it’s on much more nebulous projects) – I wonder if that’s behind my good mood.

    I’ve made one and a half recipes out of Cookies Unlimited, and so far so good. The Sour Cream Cinnamon Drops are kind of bland, but easy to make and have an amazing texture, soft and cakey even days later. You only need about half the cinnamon-sugar. I made the dough for Dark Chocolate Sables (they’re in the icebox cookies section – a whole section on making your own refrigerated cookie dough) but I haven’t baked any yet. They came together very nicely since I remembered to take the butter out to soften. The dough tastes good, so I have high hopes for the cookies.

    I have two more recipes I want to try out of it – but they may have to wait until after pumpkin cupcakes.

September 27, 2008

  • It’s one of those “boring to talk about” points in time.

    I’ve got an econ presentation Tues. It would be nice if I attempted some Continuous homework this weekend, but totally unnecessary… There’s always plenty of stuff to do for comps and research, but for some reason, they don’t feel totally overwhelming right now.

    I totally bombed some cookies last week by trying to sub oil for butter (yes, I should totally know better. I’m sure there’s a Rose Levy Berenbaum book out there that tells the exact proportions to make it work.) So I’ve got Cookies Unlimited on hold at the library. I think cookies are more complicated than bread, and they’re pretty much the only thing I try to altitude adjust.

September 19, 2008

  • This is the my favorite thing I’ve seen about the current economic hoorah:

    “If unusually many airplanes crash during a given week, do you blame
    gravity? No. Greed, like gravity, is a constant. It can’t explain why
    the number of crashes is higher than usual.” – Lawrence H. White on Division of Labour

  • end week 5

    Maybe putting 2 yr plans on weekly updates isn’t the awesomest idea – but I’m getting a better grip on the stats language I’m using which makes everything much less frustrating.

    Semester long goals for research (end date – May 2010):
    1. Seriously, get all the standard estimation techniques (and our awesome side ideas) coded up
    2. Come up with a test suite of standard data (why is it called a suite? It makes it sound like it has a sofabed.)
    3. Evaluate techniques and come up with a reasonably easy to view way to report results.

    Semester long goals for comps (end date – March 2009):
    1. Finish first pass through MGB problems (there are many I can’t solve)
    2. Finish reading Applied Regression Analysis (see prev. entry)

    That gives me ~ 3 months to beg for help on the remaining MGB probs and review EDA.

    Actually related to this freaking week:
    1. Get most of econ slides together and run by teacher.
    2. Deliver my actual action items from our last research meeting.

    Random:
    glindagood – we’re doing population models in continuous modeling! I think of you whenever she’s up there groping for examples.

    I found this cookie recipe via someone who has an overlapping LibraryThing library (yes, I am super procrastinator – was that not obvious?) and it’s pretty awesome. If you like things a touch less spicy, drop the allspice.

September 13, 2008

  • Fail to Reject

    “[I]f we see a man who is poorly dressed we may hypothesize, H0: “This man is poor.” If the man walks to save bus fare or avoids lunch to save lunch money, we have no reason to reject this hypothesis. Further observations of this kind may make us feel H0 is true, but we cannot accept it unless we know all the true facts about the man. However, a single observation against H0, such as finding that the man owns a bank account containing $500,000 will be sufficient to reject the hypothesis.”

September 12, 2008

  • graduate school makes me crazy

    So… I feel terrible posting the same todo’s every week.  I guess that’s probably the whole point behind making it public, or at least having a record of it. :| If I was brave, I could look at these and see exactly how long I’ve been stuck on my research. So. This weekend, everything else goes on hold unless I get a major code breakthrough. No more doing everything-but-research and feeling ok because I got so much done. It’s more important to do the stuff that matters. Even if that’s the stuff that’s really scary to face up to the fact that I may need help on.