USACFC Office

I thought I had some running mates all lined up to run with me, and this weekend they’ve backed out. Everyone else I’ve talked to doesn’t want near the office (understandably so). I have no problem with running alone and losing, that’s what a vote is there for. I have no problem running and winning either. What I’m afraid of is running, winning, and not doing a good job because I can’t work well with the other officers and I’m unable to accomplish the things I want to accomplish.

I just want someone to tell me that if I win, I’ll be successful, and that any personal anguish I go through will be well spent. That the members will be satisfied, because that would make it worthwhile. There’s only one person right now who can tell me that, and that’s me. And right now I’m not so sure I believe it.

Statistical Approach to Relationships

I’ve now got a list of roughly 20 women I’ve dated or wanted to date; enough to start looking for patterns. I’ve listed the following attributes for each woman: Name, Occupation/Major, Relative Age to me (older, younger, same), If I pursued her, if she pursued me, my assessment of the Quality  [potential] relationship (good, fair, poor), and the Duration of the relationship in months.

What’s crazy is that I find myself applying Data Mining techniques (with my brain instead of a computer) to the data set.

So far, the results I’ve found that are true 100% of the time are

• when I DO NOT PURSUE a woman the relationship is NOT GOOD (meaning it is either poor, or fair) – 5 cases
• when I DO PURSUE a woman AND she PURSUES ME, the relationship is GOOD – 2 cases
• when her RELATIVE AGE is the SAME, the QUALITY is NOT POOR – 10 cases

Conclusion: For the best relationship on this next go-around I should seek a woman who is also seeking me and is the same age as me.

Possible Revisions: Generalize Occupation/Major to “Liberal Arts” and “Math/Science” to allow better grouping. Also, include information pertaining to location, maybe both relative and absolute location.

EDIT: I’ve updated the sheet (but not my findings) and put it on Google Docs. The names have not been published to protect the innocent/guilty.

A Loan

I’ve signed up for a loan through Prosper, which is a peer to peer loan service (ie. no bank). You can also be the lender, and collect interest from people, like me, looking to borrow. The loan is to consolidate my credit card debt ($15,000) at a lower interest rate than I’m currently paying. Yes, I’m kind of embarassed to say I have a sizeable debt, but sitting on it and doing nothing about it is detrimental to my fiscal health. The link to my loan “auction” is below if you’re interested in funding it. Otherwise head over to http://www.prosper.com/ and check out the service for yourself.

Back on my feet (Loan listing #113322) – Prosper

http://www.prosper.com/public/…

Bids are displayed in ranked order from lowest to highest bids by interest rate. For winning bids, the lender’s actual bid rate may not be displayed. Learn how bidding works.

Back from Chicago

In reverse order: I sucked it up at the fencing tournament this morning. Sleep shortage might have contributed, but I wasn’t “social” enough at the bar the night before for alcohol consumption to be a factor really. I was just dub. I did the same thing over and over, that worked ten times, meanwhile my opponent was making that one thing he did better and better.

But I did manage to link up with Dickerson and his pals (namely Adam and Amanda, along with the Lady Hizzle). I’ve got to write Adam a thank you for taking me in (especially after I bailed on the group towards the end of the night).  We went to some bar, and Irish one I think, and it was over packed. You had to push and shove to move anywhere, sometimes just to stand somewhere you had to defend your turf.

On Saturday morning I managed to make it out to the St. Patrick’s Day parade where it snowed a little bit. I’ve got a picture of the green dino float they had, but right now I’m too  [fill in most any adjective here] from the weekend. But now I’ve had my fill of parades for a while so I won’t be needing to go to one again any time soon. The greening of the river was just as awesome as I remember it though.

This is where I’m going

Go Irish! Go Green!

Originally uploaded by Flipped Out.

When I say green river in Chicago, I’m not f***ing around. Are you wearing green?

Beard

I’m growing a full beard. On my face. It is a week old at this point. I think it’ll make it this time where other beards have failed.

Last Night

Last night I came home, and I was excited to blog about work. I put in five hours Saturday, twelve on Sunday, and fourteen on Monday. We were wrapping up a project with the presentation of our work being this morning at 10 AM. Sunday was a ton of fun, even though it was at work, but just working in an informal environment, cracking jokes, pair programming, and getting stuff done. Monday wasn’t much different, but I ended up having to get a sub at River City Fencing (Josh you rock!).

When we checked done on every test around 10:15pm last night, it felt good, and we went out for a celebratory beer at Hunter’s Pub (not Down Under).  It felt good to be done. It felt good to celebrate with other programmers. Hard work paid off and it felt good.

This morning.
This morning we were scheduled to present our work internally at 10am before presenting to customers this afternoon. It would be my first project review. My team mate and I busted ass to make sure we could present the changes that were only made last night. At 10:06am, as we were walking to the conference room, we were told our presentation was canceled.

What I learned about myself this morning, is that I dislike having meetings that I’m invited to canceled or moved around on me. What gets under my skin even more is when my presentation meeting is cancelled. To me, it says that I am not worth the effort it takes to makes sure a schedule stays clear for the block of time I’ve been allotted. So I had a bummer morning. Fortunately the sun was out and I’ve got a kick ass team mate who was willing to have lunch with me at Sgt. Preston’s which did a decent job of cheering me up.

March 17th

I’ve decided I’m going to Chicago for some fencing, and St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. There’s a tournament at the Chicago Athletic Association Fencing Club and Chicago will be dying the river green along with parade at noon.

I’m kind of hoping I can talk someone into going with me. Better still would be to make a blind date out of it. Green beer + Fencing + Chicago = WIN! I hopefully will get to link up with my old roomies, Jacqui and Clint, or perhaps the Great Dickersonian. So if anyone is free/has plans I can tag along for, let me know!

EDIT: Crap! My event is 9AM Sunday, not Saturday as I had thought. It works out better for driving if I’m already in Chicago, but less better for drinking the day before instead of the afternoon/evening after.

Work Update

I’ve grumbled about my job to some people over the last few days admittedly, but today was a pretty good day, so I wanted to write about work while I was feeling up. The biggest problem has been the change in my personal schedule. To go from 12 hours of sleep to 4-6 some nights makes it tough to love anything. Some of that has gone away, or at least felt less stressful this week because RCF started the new schedule meaning I have more personal time, or at least time to eat dinner.

The other contributing factor is that my current project at work has turned out kind of ugly. You can point the finger any number of places, including at myself, mainly for being new and for taking too much time tending to details. But a lot of the process fell apart so now in the middle of the project run, we’re getting information that normally would have been given to us at the beginning. My team mate has also been absent for a handful of days, and that’s a separate issue I hope to facilitate a resolution for when I go in to work tomorrow.

But the result of the messy project is that my boss and the lead developer have jumped in to help me out. By doing so, I’ve gotten to know their strengths a lot better than if the project had run according to plan. I particularly enjoy my conversations with the dev lead, because he and I have very similar thoughts on how coding should be done, what practices are important. He’s stronger than I am in regards to code, but I seem to know a little more about database structure and programming, so occasionally I get to repay the knowledge he gives to me. My boss seems to be good at user interface design, so between the three of us we chewed through an amazing amount of work in the last 36 hours.

So all told, I like my job and what I do. I like the people I work with, all of them. I’m happy to be employed. Life is pretty good.

Girlfriend Weather

Today, partly sunny with a chance of romance. Highs in mid to late evening.

At least that’s what the weather man could have said today. It was really warm out for March, 60’s I’m told. It’s this kind of weather that people in general are outside doing things: running, walking, eating, or enjoying ice cream. People seem happier too when they’re outside and not freezing their butts off.

I think it’s just easier to meet people in the Fall/Spring seasons. Who knows, maybe one of my coworkers knows someone who is single and could introduce me, or maybe this is the month that some 25 year old co-ed decides to take up fencing at RCF. Anything could happen.