Moving to tarindel.com

Can you believe it? I'm updating my blog! For all zero of you that read it, I wanted to let you know that I now have a new website: tarindel.com, which is going to be my new personal website going forward.

That's all. Thanks for stopping by.

My Blog is Dying & WP Carey Class 3

I just realized I haven't posted to it for like two months -- and not because I have nothing to say either. Things have just been busy, crazy, crazy, busy.

So here's the recap of the major events of the last two months:

Went to New York and Boston
Got engaged
Squeaked through my 3rd WP Carey MBA class
Redid the drip irrigation in my garden
Had my parents meet Tracy's parents for the first time

The 3rd MBA class was a lot more difficult for me than the previous two -- I've always been fairly good with numbers and math so statistics wasn't that bad. I aced all the econ classes in college so the managerial econ class didn't phase me too much. But finance. Ohhhhh man. I have almost no finance/accounting background, and this class certainly didn't make me want to get one. The class was basically learning how to read company's financial statements -- yes, those 108 page documents. The thing that makes it really difficult is that company's are allowed a HUGE amount of flexibility in how they present those things, so while the overall structure remains the same from company to company, the details can change drastically. Companies use different vocabulary for the same thing, account for things like inventory in different ways, and hide non-recurring line items in one of about a thousand different places. I have to say, I learned a lot, but it wasn't fun, and it was really difficult.

Fortunately, it is now summer break, and I have 7 weeks off from school. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean no studying -- I am working on learning new technologies to improve my resume and hopefully make myself more employable. I am currently reading about web services (which I started with because it's light, and my brain is already full). Next is C++ .Net and C#. Then it's on to project management stuff.

Hopefully it won't be a couple of months until my next update.

WP Carey, Course 2 Result

So this is finals week for my second WP Carey MBA course (Managerial Econ), and because I'm leaving on vacation, I had to finish my final early. Although I haven't gotten my grade, I'm going to post a little bit about the course for the three of you that read my blog.

The course started with a very micro-economic bent to it -- we're talking supply and demand curves and lots of elasticity calculations. There was a ton of material to get through and I'm really glad I took econ in college. Week two covered different types of competitive markets, such as monopolies, oligopolies, etc... Not as bad as the first week but still pretty intense. The first half of week 3 covered costs of productivity issues (eg. how much labor you want to hire, etc...).

At this point, the course kind of shifted gears from a traditional college econ draw-lots-of-graphics-and-calculate-marginal-something mode to more of a higher level, more abstract conceptual mode. The second half of week 3 involved designing "incentive contracts", which is a fancy way of saying "worker compensation", which is a fancy way of saying "salary". This part was actually kind of cool and new to me. And fairly easy.

Week 4 involved pricing issues. This included topics such as price discrimination (no, this is does not involve the police and price profiling), which is the various methods companies use to try and extract more money from consumers. For example, we got into the theory of why stores release coupons, why bundling products (eg. a burger, fries, and shake together) is good business, and why low price guarantees are actually anti-competitive (which I knew anyway because I'm a nerd).

Week 5 was "game theory", which is pretty much what it sounds like when you're talking about strategy games. This involved issues like covering the prisoners dilemma, where two prisoners have to decide independently whether to rat each other out or not. We covered Nash equilibria (this has nothing to do with Steve Nash, it's the other Nash guy, the one who was in the movie A Beautiful Mind). Basically, it's identifying strategies that lead to results where no player can unilaterally improve their position. We also covered collusion and cartels. This stuff was pretty easy for me because I am an avid gamer and I eat strategy for lunch.

So overall, first 2.5 weeks were pretty boring, dry, and hard. The last 2.5 weeks were way more interesting. As for the reading material, it was a big letdown compared to the stats class last quarter. There was a lot of redundant information (which is merely wasteful of time). But more to the point, the reading material often used terms without defining them first, so you could only kind of get an idea what certain things meant by the context they were used in. This is really bad practice. Also, the reading material was seriously short on examples and graphs, so when I got to the homework, most of the time I was like "okay, I understand the theory, now how do I translate this into practical results?".

The final consisted of half multiple choice and half short answer. The multiple choice was pretty straightforward, except for two questions I'm almost positive we never covered in the reading material. The short answer was anything but short -- There were only 4 questions, but each question had about a quintillion subparts. Furthermore, it took longer to do because I had to check my work more carefully to make sure I didn't make a stupid mistake. Stupid mistakes on the multiple choice section are usually easier to spot because you know you screwed up when none of the given answers match the answer you got (unless answer D is, in fact, "none of the above" in which case you're just screwed). But the thing that got me was that one of the questions was on something we never covered. The question pretty much said "we haven't covered this, but we've given you all of the tools you need to figure it out". Okay. Fine. Be little bitches. The problem is, they DIDN'T give us all of the tools to figure it out. I spent two hours on the internet trying to figure out how to do it. And then the problem ended up being WAY more mathy than anything else we'd done in the class.

So overall, I thought the last half of the class was valuable, but my overall satisfaction with this class is a lot lower than with the stat class.

Next class is financial accounting. More to come when I get there.

Going on Vacation

Tomorrow Tracy and I are leaving on vacation -- 3 nights in Manhattan, and 2 nights in Boston. Never been to either, so thought I'd go see em before I get crushed by a random piano falling out of a 3rd floor window somewhere.

Because, you know, that always happens to people.

Details when I get back.

Ate Too Much

Sick. Full. Full. Full. Sick. Sick. Full. Sick.

Damn you delicious food.

Left Hand, Meet Right Hand (aka. Iraq and Iran)

From the excellent Georgia10 at Daily Kos:

Then:

George W. Bush, November 12, 2002:

We don't know how close he is today, but a Saddam Hussein with a nuclear weapon is a grave, grave threat to America and our friends and allies. link

Donald Rumsfeld, September 19, 2002:

There are a number of terrorist states pursuing weapons of mass destruction -- Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria, just to name a few -- but no terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. link

Hans Blix, January 9, 2003:

"We have now been there for some two months and been covering [Iraq] in ever wider sweeps and we haven't found any smoking guns." link

---

Today:

George W. Bush, January 16, 2006:

"Iran armed with a nuclear weapon poses a grave threat to the security of the world." link

George W. Bush, March 16, 2006:

"We may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran. link

Hans Blix, April 3, 2006:

(AP) Former U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix said Monday that Iran is a least five years away from developing a nuclear bomb, leaving time to peacefully negotiate a settlement. [...] "We have time on our side in this case. Iran can't have a bomb ready in the next five years," Blix was quoted as saying. link

---

Condoleeza Rice, March 31, 2006:

"If you're impervious to the lessons you've just come out of you're brain-dead.'' link

This is damn interesting!

Freak 1980 Accident; Lake Loses 3.5 Billion Gallons of Water in 3 Hours

I thought this was really cool

This article is about a company that uses an internal stock market to filter out which ideas are good ideas and bad ideas. Since it's from the NY times, registration is probably required, but you should have an account there anyway, or just use bugmenot.

Yes, I Am Still Alive

I know, I haven't written much to my blog lately. I've been pretty busy trying to pull together a vacation to New York and Boston in mid-April, working on my Econ class for my MBA program, and not sleeping. The not sleeping thing is the worst part. I don't know why, but over the past week I've been having a really hard time getting good sleep. Perhaps it's stress, or maybe just a temporarily insomniatic period, I don't know. But I do know I don't function well on not much sleep. I turn into Zombie Alex (tm). I've also been looking for a new job, with some craziness on that front.

The MBA program is going well. I am now about half-way through my second class, which is called managerial economics but is really micro-econ in disguise. A lot of it is a repeat from econ I took in college, but it's still not easy. Unlike statistics, which was organized excellently, this course is somewhat of a mess. The reading material is not organized as well -- there is lots of duplicate information, the concepts are not described as clearly, and sometimes terms are used without being defined at all! I hate that. It's also been a lot more reading -- in statistics, I took on average about 4 pages of notes a week. In this course, I am averaging about 12 pages of notes a week.

On the job front, I am still looking for a new job. I interviewed with a company called Intel that some of you may have heard of. I went for a half-day interview and talked with a bunch of different people about all sorts of stuff. Almost all of the people I talked to seemed really enthusiastic about me, and I did well on the techincal portions of the interview. Consequently, I was almost positive they'd offer me a position. Only, reality got in the way and they decided not to. I was not given a reason why (in fact, I was not given anything at all), but these things happen. Maybe there was a better candidate, and it probably didn't help that the guy who I seemed to "connect with" least was the guy who would have been my manager.

I also interviewed with a company called Pianodisc, who writes software for player pianos. The cool thing is that they do a lot of work with Linux and Midi, and as some of you know, I am an aspiring wannabe musician (as in, I suck, but I wish I didn't -- oh, if only wishes were reality). Although they seemed really interested in me, they made me an offer that was simply not competitive, and I couldn't take it. From what I hear, they've had a resignation in the software department, and that might lead to an opportunity. I expect to find out more today.

Most of the other jobs I applied to I have heard nothing back, or received an email saying the position has been cancelled. So onward I search.

I am still playing WoW. Keltarin the Druid hit level 42 over the weekend, so I am climbing the levelling treadmill as it gets ever steeper. Strangely, there seems to be a marked glut of gear on the auction house at this level. I think largely because people who make twinks often don't get them out of their 30s, and most characters who get to their 40s go all the way to 60. Consequently, there's just not much supply. The cool thing was that I got a blue world drop the other day an (assault band. Unfortunately, it was only a small improvement from the green ring I was wearing, so I decided to auction house it instead. Here's hoping someone who likes to PVP buys it for what I listed it at. If I sell it, I think that would push me above 200 gold. I bought my level 40 mount, and although it's a lot faster than walking (60% faster), it seems only marginally faster than cat form with the 30% speed boost druids can get as a talent. Kind of disappointing, especially given the cost.

That's all for now! More when I've got more news.

Vista to Eat My Computer

According to this article by the Inquirer, Windows Vista can eat over 800 megs WHILE IDLING and requires up to SEVEN GIGS of hard drive space.

Seriously, for those kinds of requirements, this operating system better clean my room, make my lunch, and give me a full-body massage with a happy ending.

WoW

While talking to my friend Christina a few weeks back, I asked her if she was still playing any MMORPGs. She said she was still playing WoW, which was a great game for her because she could log on for short intervals and still get something done. I'd heard that WoW was pretty good for casual players -- my main concern with the game was that everyone would hit level 60 and there would be nothing to do. Players would get bored, leave the game, and that would be that. But all of my friends who hit 60 seemed to be having as much fun as ever, and the game got a huge population boost over XMas. Since I had a week off between classes, I figured I'd give it a whirl.

Just one problem: character creation on the server my friends were playing on was deactivated because the servers are having so many performance issues. Well, so much for that idea. I mean, I could have played on another server, but I'd rather play with my friends or not at all.

Strangely enough, about 3 days later, they opened character creation, and I jumped on the opportunity. The game took about 3 hours to install -- between the 5 CDs (which took forever to read for some reason) and multiple patches, I thought I'd never get to play. But eventually it finished, and I was able to create a character.

And thus, Keltarin the Druid was reborn again (he was my first main character in EQ1). I've been playing him regularily on the Silver Hand RP server, and he is now level 28 or so. I have joined a guild called the "Templars of Dawn", where everyone is nice, and it's great because I know 4 people in the guild in real life.

So far, I've mostly been soloing, although I've grouped up a few times here and there (mostly duoing). Tonight I will take my first experience with a full group and plunge into the deadmines. It should be a blast. I heard there's an underground pirate ship in there, which reminds me of The Goonies, and I can't wait to see it!

So yes, I'm back to playing MMORPGs again. God, I missed them.

WP Carey, Course 1 Result

The week before last was finals week for my first WP Carey course (Managerial Decision Analysis (aka. Statistics)). The final was given to us on Tuesday and we had until Sunday to finish it, which was more than enough time. The final was HARD and some of the questions were a bit tricky, but it was pretty much all right out of the material we studied. And, of course, it was open book/computer since there's no way to enforce a closed book test over the internet. I finished it up without too much hassle and turned it in, and then proceeded to wait for my grade.

There are 200 possible points in the class, and 180 is needed for an A-. Before the final, I had missed 4 points total, which meant I had 16 points to squander on the final (which was worth 100 points). Although I felt very confident about my final, when I got it back today I was slightly dissapointed because I didn't do as well as I'd expected. The median score on the final was an 86, and that's exactly what I got. The good news is that means I only missed 14 points total, giving me a total of 182 points out of 200. That's 91% in the class, or pretty much the lowest A possible. :) So I eeked it out.

The course was very useful -- we learned all about samples, confidence intervals, regression testing, forecasting, and six sigma processes. The best part was that all of the calculation work was done using Excel, which is a program I always have a lot of fun with.

Our next course, which starts Monday, is Managerial Economics (aka. Microeconomics). I took a lower division and upper division econ course in college (where we had to do derivitives), so I should be good to go for this one, assuming I haven't forgotten everything over the last 8 years.

My Nose Spray Addiction (Part 2)

As I blogged previously, I have been addicted to nose spray, largely due to chronic enlarged turbinates making it hard for me to breathe otherwise. I realize this is an unhealthy thing, but so is not getting any sleep. The thing that sucks is that they really don't know what causes enlarged turbinates, and once they become enlarged, there isn't a whole lot they can do, outside of a turbinectomy. Given that your turbinates serve the useful purpose of warming air and filtering out particles like dust and pollen, removing them completely sounds like a procedure not without consequence. And besides, I've already been under the knife once to have my septum straightened and turbinates worked on -- so I didn't really want to do it again.

A couple months ago, after consulting with my Otolaryngologist (aka. my nose doc), he informed me that I would probably be a good candidate for a minimally invasive procedure called a Turbinoplasty, which is a specialized version of Somnoplasty. The basic idea is that they shove a tube up your nose and use high frequency radio waves to superheat your turbinate tissue, effectively burning it. After being burnt, it scabs, and your body starts working on repairing it by removing the destroyed tissue and replacing it with new tissue. The end result is supposed to be that when your body is finished healing, the turbinates will be smaller than they were before, allowing more air thought. Apparently they have had pretty good results with this procedure in the past, but unfortunately since it's really up to your body to do all the useful work, the effectiveness of the procedure is ultimately determined by your genetics, not so much by your doctor. The downside is that means there's a chance it might not help much at all.

After thinking about it for a while, I decided to give it a go. My appointment was yesterday. I went into the doctors office, and he sat me down in a chair. He took some lidocaine gel (local anasthetic) and used a cotton swab to poke it deep into my nasal cavity. This is like someone jamming their pinky completely up your nose and is fairly uncomfortable, except a cotton swab isn't as girthy (I love that word) as a pinky so it's marginally better in that regard. After that, he took two thin cotton sheets, folded them up, soaked them in a lidocaine solution, and stuck them in my nostrils. Since they were absolutely dripping with lidocaine, a lot of it went down the back of my throat. I have to say, it's pretty much the most bitter thing I've ever tasted! Yuck!

After about 45 minutes, he came back and asked me if I was numb. I told him I couldn't tell, so he poked me with another cotton swab, and I couldn't feel it. He said I was ready for my injection. He asked me if I had a tendency to faint when I gave blood, and I told him no. So he took a huge needle filled with some kind of more powerful anasthetic, and stuck that in my left turbinate. Although I expected it to be quite painful, it was more of a pinching and not all that bad. And then I started getting lightheaded and REALLY hot. The nurse had to put a wet towel on my forehead so I didn't pass out.

He then took the somnoplasty widget and went to work. At first it wasn't that bad, but I calculated that the widget heated up to 157 degrees farenheit. So even though I was numb, I could still feel it, and it was quite painful. Not enough to tell him to stop, but pretty close. After a few minutes, he said he was done, and went to do the other one. Strangely enough, even though my right nostril had been soaking in the lidocaine for longer, when he gave me the injection it REALLY hurt. But at least no more lightheadedness. Then he went to work with the somnoplasty widget and did the same thing as before. Fortunately, it wasn't as painful as the left side.

After he was done, he stuck some cotton in my nose and let me rest for about 30 minutes. Then they took the cotton out, and I was free to go!

My nose dripped blood and gunk for the rest of the evening, both out of the front, and down my throat. And the worst part was that it all tasted like burnt flesh. YUCK!

I expected the first night to be hell (with my nose scabbed and swollen on the inside), but surprisingly one of my nostrils opened up and I was able to breathe through it, even though it felt kind of burning. But whatever, a little burning isn't going to keep me from sleeping! So I slept through the night, woke up this morning, and it feels MUCH better. The inside of nose is all crusty and gunky and scabby, and the worst part is that I'm not allowed to blow it hard. I just have to live with it and let my body do it's job. Over the next week, I'm supposed to be swollen and scabby, and then in about 3-5 weeks I'm supposed to start seeing the benefit.

I hope it works, because if I went through all of that for no benefit, I will be pretty damn unhappy. :)

Almost Too Sad To Be Believed

These two diaries from DailyKos detail some of the reasons why Africa is having such a hard time becoming "civilized". And it comes down to: because we want it that way.

What's the Matter With Africa?
Darwin's Nightmare

This is a great read if you're interested in "Guns, Germs, and Steel" kind of stuff.

Elevator Into Space, Going Up...

According to this article, the LiftPort Group wants to create a space elevator by 2018. They recently tested a cable a mile long, although the robot climbers didn't make it very far.

The idea behind a space elevator is simple in theory and complex in practice. Basically, you anchor a cable to the ground on one end, put a heavy weight on the other end, and fling the end with the weight into space. If the cable is the right length, the weight will be sitting right at the correct height to be in geosynchronous orbit, meaning that even though the Earth spins on it's axis, the weighted end of the rope will stay stationary relative to the spot on the ground it's anchored to. However, the centripugal (sp?) force of the Earths spinning will keep the rope pulled tight, as it's constantly trying to fly off into space. From there, you can build robot climbers to climb from the ground up into space to deliver payloads.

The hard part is building a cable strong enough to support it's own weight. To do this, it needs to be extremely thin, and we don't have the technology to do that yet (although there are some promising starts). The second challenge is to build the climbers, but I think that's probably the easier of the two main challenges.

In any case, the ultimate goal is to lower the cost and risk of delivering goods into space. Rockets can (and do) explode and they're expensive since they're not reusable.

2018 seems a bit optimistic to me, though. I'm still waiting for my flying cars!

This is Awesome

From Anandtech, a look inside the warehouse of Newegg.com. Like many computer techies, I buy almost all of my computer stuff from Newegg because they have great prices, a great selection, and get it to me FAST. This articles goes into the HOW part of the operation -- how they manage to put your order together and get it shipped out of the warehouse so quickly. Not surprisingly, there is a lot of automation, and even a packing-peanut gun! Definitely worth a read, and has lots of pics to boot.

Hey, F U Buddy!

According to this Wired article, people correctly interpreted the tone of an email only 50% of the time. In other words, no better than guessing.

That falls right in line with my assertion that email is a completely toneless medium, and as such, one has to be extremely careful when employing sarcasm. It also helps explain the huge proliferation of emoticons -- I love em, and use em like pepper. :)

My Co-workers are Incompetant, (aka. HAHAHAHAHA!!!)

Last Thursday and Friday, we had a training class here at work, in the computer area near the bathrooms. We have a bunch of computers set up there, along with a projector, so an instructor can teach people how to use our software. We do this about once every other month, bringing a batch of 10-12 people in to learn the program.

We have a big fridge in the employee breakroom (which is also doubling as the filing cabinet room, the server rack room, and the spare junk room). However, this fridge is kind of inconvenient to get to (see aforementioned note about spare junk room), and besides, the big fridge smells like old mold. Gross! Someone really needs to give it a serious baking soda bath. Or throw it out. But that's beside the point.

In any case, since the main fridge is inconvenient, they decide to purchase a mini-fridge they could keep sitting on the counter in the kitchenette, and stock it with soda for the people doing the training program. I was curious about it (it just appearing one day with no note or email), so I opened the fridge door, saw it PACKED full of soda, and knowing that my workplace is WAY too cheap to ever buy canned soda for it's employees outside of the occasional 2 liter to go along with a cheap pizza lunch to celebrate a coworkers birthday, I figured it was for the people undergoing training.

That was last week. I came in to work this morning, walking right past it, and it didn't catch my eye. Small. Fridge. Boring. Ignore. I. Am. A. Zombie. Today one of my coworkers who I get along with well comes into my cube and says "have you seen the new fridge?". I was like "yeah, how could I have missed it?". I figured it was an obvious lead in to something else. He says "have you seen it today though?". I said not really. He said "go look". So I went down the hallway, into the kitchenette, and didn't see anything special about it.

Looked the same as last week, as far as I could tell. So I figured maybe it was something to do with the inside?

I grabbed the handle, pulled slowly, and opened the door... and it was like a multicolored, frozen wonderland inside. There was frozen soda mush EVERYWHERE. On the inside of the door. On the bottom. On the walls. On the ceiling. On the shelves. Everywhere. It was a complete and utter mess!

Apparently whomever put the sodas in set the thermostat just a little too cold. As soon as training ended (Friday) and people stopped opened the fridge door on a regular basis over the weekend, every single can of soda in the fridge FROZE, and subsequently exploded, spawing half-frozen liquid all over the inside of the fridge.

Hahaha!

I am so glad I'm not the one who's going to have to clean that up...

Paging Dr. Frued

Hehehe

According to this article, a prankster added "dog shit" as one of the ingredients on a packet of ham over in the UK.

And a bad Ron Artest joke:

Q:Why did Ron Artest leave before the game was over?

A: He wanted to beat the crowd.

For the Gamers

Calabasis

becomes one of the first cities in the nation to ban smoking outdoors when other people are present. I definitely applaud this decision. I am not allowed to pour toxic substances on other people's skin, so why am I allowed to put toxic smoke directly into their lungs?

The Rest of Last Week

Most of the weekdays of last week was spent either studying or watching Kings games.

The Kings had a 3 game winning steak going, before they lost a game they should have won in Orlando, and then lost again to Miami (which was expected). They play the 76ers tonight, and the line has the Kings losing by 5. Not good. Peja says he wants to stay in Sac for the rest of his career -- I've always been a Peja fan, but this year he has looked horrible and he hasn't been playing with any heart. He says he's had multiple injuries, including a back injury, which have been slowing him down. It'll be interesting to see if he gets traded, or whether he accepts less than max money to stay with the Kings. Brad Miller says after his contract with the Kings expires in 2010 that he wants to go back to Indiana to finish his career with the Pacers, even if he has to take the minimum amount to do so.

Worst name for a food product EVER:



I mean, seriously. WTF?

Saturday was game day with Jer, Matt, Matt's lil'sis Taylor, and Tracy's work friend Leslie. We played a game of Puerto Rico -- everybody was sure that Leslie was going to win even though she was a newbie, but it turns out that because it was such a shipping-poor game, Leslie (who had tons of money) ended up with almost no victory points. Matt had a horrible game, sitting just downstream of me, because I ended up playing the same strategy as him (by necessity, not out of spite). We also played Cities and Knights, which was a bizarre game as well. There were a ton of 2's, 3's, 9's, and 10's at the beginning of the game. Half the players lost their first city, which rarely happens. There were a ton of blue progress cards being delt to players too, so there was a lot of military action going on, which is also rare for us. Of course, I ended up drawing the intrigue card twice (it's the most useless card in the deck). I am going to make it a house rule that we don't play with that card, because in all the games I've ever played, I've never seen a use for that card even once because it's so situational.

Jer and I played Tetris Attack (Pokemon version) late into the night, and he beat me again -- he's a better player than I am, but not by much. I love that game. I wish they're release the Gamecube version -- sadly enough, they already have it finished (it was released in Japan), but Nintendo won't release it because they don't think it'll sell well here in the states. Bah on that!

QBA 502 -- Managerial Decision Analysis (post-week-2)

Wow, you blink and suddenly a week has gone by and you haven't posted anything on your blog.

Been doing LOTS of studying. As you may or may not know, the online classes at WP Carey are only 6 week long -- that's 5 weeks of studying, and 1 week for finals. Each week, we have a module to read, and a supplimentary textbook (which I've found useful for looking up specific concepts that weren't clear to me, but unnecessary to read in full so far). The modules are dense with material to learn, and then we have homework exercises to complete and a quiz to take at the end of every week to show that we've learned it.

The class I am taking right now is QBA 502, which is managerial decision analysis, aka statistics. I have been working hard to get ahead in case I run into a time crunch, and to make sure I have time to review my quizzes before I submit them. In order to get an A in the class, I need to score at least 180 points out of 200. Each missed quiz question is -1 points, so it's definitely important to do well on the quizzes.

Week 1 was pretty simple -- it covered basic stuff about data: how to create graphs in Excel, what a population and a sample is, what standard deviation is, etc... No sweat. Week 2, which I just completed last night, was significantly more difficult: normal populations, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing, and p-values. The material was a lot more dense and there was a lot more of it, the quiz questions were significantly tougher, and there were 22 of them. So far, between weeks 1 and 2, I've missed 2 quiz questions, meaning I have 18 more to blow between the next 3 weeks and the final (which is 50% of our grade).

Now I'm just getting started on week 3, which is regression testing. I haven't really delved into it yet, but it's supposed to be the toughest week, and I believe it. So far, I've covered least squares lines (a linear best-fit line for data on a scatterplot). That's easy, but I expect it to ramp up in toughness significantly now that I'm out of the introductory section.

So far, the workload has been entirely managable, and I am impressed with the overall quality of the modules and my fellow students.