MSN Conversations

July 27th, 2007 Uncategorized

V: I put the kueh on the cupboard by your door.
Me: Thanks! Now the prisoner/pet is fed, the exercise wheel is needed.
V: If the gap btwn the door to ur rm were big enough…
Me: you could stick ciggies through and we can talk about how we got in here and whether or not we were innocent. And one day, one of us would find a spoon…
V: Harlow…earth calling…come back…

Me:i thought i made a really funny joke but only the crickets chirped.
V: hehe….happen often ah….kakakaka!!!
Me: O [my boss] is to have a meet and greet with some Vietnamese. she commented that they were late. So i said, they are coming by boat.
V: hahahaha!!! ok….on funny scale…i give it a ….five
Me: oh you’re biased. i’m sure you would be rolling on the floor like a kitten if the boyfriend said it.
V: You could be right….hahahahaha!!!!! For that….an eight!!

Out of the blue…

V: david
Me: Goliath
Me: we playing a game?
V:hahahaha!!!!!11
V:11 points!!!
V:hahahah!!
Me:EXCELLENT
V: I was looking for david’s number and wassn’t looking and typed into the msn!!

Times like these, I think it’s quite alright working with my friends in the same office.

I haven’t a clue

July 25th, 2007 Uncategorized

I’ve taken whatever I can get off the newsgroups for I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue. Greedy for more, I decided to see if they have any video recordings of their recordings. I found one on you tube and for the first time saw how old they were. (They don’t sound old.) I mean, I wanted to marry Tim Brooke-Taylor. Ok, I still want to marry Taylor. Now I’m worried that Humphrey Lyttelton will kneel over. I don’t want that to happen.

King Lear

July 23rd, 2007 theatre

This was the event of the year for me – quite possibly this decade. Whatever I couldn’t figure out about the character’s motivation, the entire ensemble on stage filled it in with masterful interpretation and acting. They showed me something I have never before seen: commanding stage presence. They also showed me pacing and what it like when it was done right. They showed me how wonderful the show was when everyone good at their job pulled their weight. I love it! (I can’t believe I didn’t buy The Seagull!) I thought before it should be good, I didn’t expect it to be superb.

(The audience on Saturday night was lively and excited: they whooped when the lights went off there was a little problem before the show.)

Is this a coupe, a hat-trick pulled off by the art council? Or the abysmal wake up trumpet calling for the doom of the local theatre? The discovery of one’s depravity is the mark of the enlightened. I know not how theatre audiences can return to the loose gravy stools that is local theatre

Insurance

July 18th, 2007 Uncategorized

Women have complicated feelings for their friends and the emotional reliance is unlike the depth of emotional reliance on a man. When a single woman begins to date, the friend suffer an emotional shock – even if the friend is dating herself. Continued emotional support allows the friendship to survive the shock. Because women rely on close circle of friends for support when things go wrong, many women continue to provide the same level of emotional support. Some fail and the sense of loss is strongly felt because it is almost a rejection by an entire community.

Three months ago I bought second hand laptop that was going cheap. I don’t dislike it but I feel no love for it. The keyboard is a little wonky – you had to stab hard to get the keys to work properly. The spacebar doesn’t register when you punch it with yoyr left hand even if you were using a hammer. The touchpad buttons also require a bit of hard tapping. Once in a while, I call rude names and make empty threats about junking it but the mood passes. One developes affection even for a thing that does not work – after a while one comes to think of the occasional glitch as quirks as though the thing has grown a human nature. Can one develop an affection for a person with quirks? Does affection have a chance when dislike, like weeds, flourish easily and unaided?

If a woman fails to live up to the promise of emotional support, is it a personality quirk? Can she be accepted and loved like a troublesome laptop? Does affection have a chance when she is a genuinely nice person?

You Are Not The Beginning Or The End

July 15th, 2007 theatre

The rest of the story need not be shown in action, and indeed,
would hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so
enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the ready-makes and
reach-me-downs of the ragshop in which Romance keeps its stock of
“happy endings” to misfit all stories. Now, the history of Eliza
Doolittle, though called a romance because of the transfiguration
it records seems exceedingly improbable, is common enough. Such
transfigurations have been achieved by hundreds of resolutely
ambitious young women since Nell Gwynne set them the example by
playing queens and fascinating kings in the theatre in which she
began by selling oranges. Nevertheless, people in all directions
have assumed, for no other reason than that she became the
heroine of a romance, that she must have married the hero of it.
This is unbearable, not only because her little drama, if acted
on such a thoughtless assumption, must be spoiled, but because
the true sequel is patent to anyone with a sense of human nature
in general, and of feminine instinct in particular.

From The Footnote of Pygmalion

Stuff off BBC Radio 4 and 7

July 14th, 2007 radio

Peeling the Onion is Book of the week!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/book_week.shtml

ISIHAC – I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue.
My mind is firmly entrenched in the gutter after listening to a good number of episodes (actually from years 2007 to 1995). Words such as nuts and Neapolitan are no longer innocent when placed together.

I also picked up a few series of Rigor Mortis (quite alright), Think The Unthinkable (rather excellent), In The Chair(best bits are only about Kenny the PM) and a few episodes of In The End (frustrating because the episodes were 2-4 and contained more cliff hangers). I hope to get Hut 33 and His Master’s Voice some time in the future.

=======================

This exchange on usenet reminds me of the time I dubbed music to exchange with friends.

Applied Econometrics

July 14th, 2007 atschool

“When we use non-stationary data in a regression equation, the estimated equation will result in suprious regression leading us to believe (from Fstat and R-squared) that a relationship exist when it doesn

Miss school?

July 11th, 2007 atschool

Start with a base of library laced with a generous helping of pencil and a small dash of fan. Garnish with typewriter. Find the most uncomfortable wooden chair and fall asleep drooling onto yellow lecture pads. Don’t forget to hold a pen onto your sweater to get that nice spreading ink blot when you get up.

Fooled by Randomness

July 5th, 2007 books

While reading up on work – in particular Value at Risk – I came across this an article by Nassim Taleb. New Yorker made him calmer and his lifestyle romantic – the kind of romance one associates with Woody Allen films/writing. The line “In a bar, Taleb would pick a fight” is almost like the piece from Woody Allen called “The 20s.”

On a recent spring morning, the staff of Empirica were concerned with solving a thorny problem, having to do with the square root of n, where n is a given number of random set of observations, and what relation n might have to a speculator’s confidence in his estimations. Taleb was up at a whiteboard by the door, his marker squeaking furiously as he scribbled possible solutions. Spitznagel and Pallop looked on intently. Spitznagel is blond and from the Midwest and does yoga: in contrast to Taleb, he exudes a certain laconic levelheadedness. In a bar, Taleb would pick a fight. Spitznagel would break it up. Pallop is of Thai extraction and is doing a Ph.D. in financial mathematics at Princeton. He has longish black hair, and a slightly quizzical air. “Pallop is very lazy,” Taleb will remark, to no one in particular, several times over the course of the day, although this is said with such affection that it suggests that “laziness,” in the Talebian nomenclature, is a synonym for genius. Pallop’s computer was untouched and he often turned his chair around, so that he faced completely away from his desk. He was reading a book by the cognitive psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, whose arguments, he said a bit disappointedly, were “not really quantifiable.” The three argued back and forth about the solution. It appeared that Taleb might be wrong, but before the matter could be resolved the markets opened. Taleb returned to his desk and began to bicker with Spitznagel about what exactly would be put on the company boom box. Spitznagel plays the piano and the French horn and has appointed himself the Empirica d.j. He wanted to play Mahler, and Taleb does not like Mahler. “Mahler is not good for volatility,” Taleb complained. “Bach is good. St. Matthew’s Passion!” Taleb gestured toward Spitznagel, who was wearing a gray woollen turtleneck. “Look at him. He wants to be like von Karajan, like someone who wants to live in a castle. Technically superior to the rest of us. No chitchatting. Top skier. That’s Mark!” As Spitznagel rolled his eyes, a man whom Taleb refers to, somewhat mysteriously, as Dr. Wu wandered in. Dr. Wu works for another hedge fund, down the hall, and is said to be brilliant. He is thin and squints through black-rimmed glasses. He was asked his opinion on the square root of n but declined to answer. “Dr. Wu comes here for intellectual kicks and to borrow books and to talk music with Mark,” Taleb explained after their visitor had drifted away. He added darkly, “Dr. Wu is a Mahlerian.”

At Empirica, then, there are no Wall Street Journals to be found. There is very little active trading, because the options that the fund owns are selected by computer. Most of those options will be useful only if the market does something dramatic, and, of course, on most days the market doesn’t. So the job of Taleb and his team is to wait and to think. They analyze the company’s trading policies, back-test various strategies, and construct ever-more sophisticated computer models of options pricing. Danny, in the corner, occasionally types things into the computer. Pallop looks dreamily off into the distance. Spitznagel takes calls from traders, and toggles back and forth between screens on his computer. Taleb answers e-mails and calls one of the firm’s brokers in Chicago, affecting, as he does, the kind of Brooklyn accent that people from Brooklyn would have if they were actually from northern Lebanon: “Howyoudoin?” It is closer to a classroom than to a trading floor.

“Pallop, did you introspect?” Taleb calls out as he wanders back in from lunch. Pallop is asked what his Ph.D. is about. “Pretty much this,” he says, waving a languid hand around the room.

“It looks like we will have to write it for him,” Taleb chimes in, “because Pollop is very lazy.”

“As the day came to an end, Taleb and his team turned their attention once again to the problem of the square root of n. Taleb was back at the whiteboard. Spitznagel was looking on. Pallop was idly peeling a banana. Outside, the sun was beginning to settle behind the trees. “You do a conversion to p1 and p2,” Taleb said. His marker was once again squeaking across the whiteboard. “We say we have a Gaussian distribution, and you have the market switching from a low-volume regime to a high-volume. P21. P22. You have your igon value.” He frowned and stared at his handiwork. The markets were now closed. Empirica had lost money, which meant that somewhere off in the woods of Connecticut Niederhoffer had no doubt made money. That hurt, but if you steeled yourself, and thought about the problem at hand, and kept in mind that someday the market would do something utterly unexpected because in the world we live in something utterly unexpected always happens, then the hurt was not so bad. Taleb eyed his equations on the whiteboard, and arched an eyebrow. It was a very difficult problem. “Where is Dr. Wu? Should we call in Dr. Wu?”

His Master’s Voice

July 4th, 2007 radio

I love Mark Tavener! He has something new! First episode starts today! It’s absolutely delicious!