dubious.biz(ness)

Today is absolutely perfect. I don’t usually write about my day here but today is so very perfect that I must. It’s December 17th and it is 73F (22C). Far out of character for Lexington weather but I am certainly not going to complain. I was out last night until about 5am, meaning that today didn’t start until a bit late, but when it did the house was warm and calm like a spring day. I don’t really think about it much since I hardly lived here a few months before I left but my parents’ house can be idylic. It is the sort of place where you feel like very little will happen if you don’t want it to. Perhaps I should refer to it as my country retreat.

My dad has a strange thing about christmas music being played throughout the entire damned holiday, and half the house is tuned to a radio station which plays the same 3 hour playlist over and over again. He took the stereo from the patio up into his bedroom and sleeps to christmas music from Sirius (for a change?) as well. But today he’s not here so the house is quiet and I stole the receiver from their bedroom and brought it back down so I could sit by the pool and listen. I’m pretending it’s summer. It is paradise.

Unfortunately it’s also the sort of day where I don’t actually want to do anything useful. I had big plans to do all sorts of work but thus far the most productive thing I can do is blog how fantastically lazy I am being. I have so much to do in fact that it’s a bit overwhelming, and I’m working some serious hours in addition. I’m working with elink and Chase, a guy who’s grown up a lot since I last had much to do with him. It’s impressive in fact, and he reminds me of the excitement and passion I had for work then. Maybe that’s why I don’t mind doing 10 hour days, but the 10 hour days combined with a one hour commute to work are cutting into my free time, which was intended to be used for the numerous things I need to do: summer jobs, June Event, study, Boat Club…

The kitchen is in an interesting state. Kitchens apparently don’t happen very quickly and this one doubly so. Partly because of my dad’s particular taste in kitchenry and partly because of the general stupidity of contractors and home improvement salespeople, the kitchen will not likely be finished while I am here. There is also a narrow hole all the way through my bathroom so that an exhaust pipe could be run from the range. It is next to the avacado toilet. Pictures forthcoming.

Essentially at the moment the cabinets have mostly been set but some must be reordered to fit the space, the granite countertops cannot be ordered until the counters are finished, and the none of the main appliances (gas range, oven, microwave) have been connected although the range is in place and looks amazing. Dad alternately says he is going to chill out and wait for all the mistakes to be corrected professionally and then freaks and starts to connect things. Odds are 3 to 2 that he will connect the range early, though we’ll see.

I always know that I am too pragmatic and pessimistic because when wonderful days like these come around, I always think about the fact that this is the edge of a front and that means that tomorrow will be cold, rainy, and shitty. But tomorrow will also be another big first for me, my first pro football game. We’re going to see the Cincinnati Bengals at Indianapolis thanks to a very kind gift from my uncle, two tickets to Monday Night Football, tenth row in the end zone. So maybe tomorrow will be shitty and maybe it won’t but at the moment, I feel fantastic so I am happy to let the world pass by.

It’s strange to leave a country where you have lived for nearly a year straight and essentially made a home for yourself to go “home” for nearly a month. Home is the place where you say you’re from. To be honest I’m one of the stable students in my college. My peers often are dual passport holders with parents who did stints in Africa, Europe, the States, etc. Others of course are plain vanilla UK students who are from Birmingham or Leeds or York and haven’t really had the experience of living abroad, but I certainly feel like I’m the guy who has a home.

“Whereabouts are you from (in the States)?” I have heard it thousands of times.

“Kentucky”. Always with a really weird accent and a smile, the way that absolutely no one from Kentucky says “Kentucky.” Already I try to distance myself from it, pronouncing clearly every syllable: KEN-TUC-KEE. Most people don’t know much about the US other than California, Texas, and New York, and anything not there is the big empty middle, so usually this is met with blank stares. “…Fried Chicken” I then remind them. Thank god we thought of something useful to export, this usually gets a smile back and they then realize I don’t expect them to know anything about Kentucky. More rarely they actually do, usually the Derby or Bourbon. Sometimes basketball.

To be honest Kentucky is quite notable abroad. We export perhaps the only distinctly American spirit, we have an internationally recognized horse breeding and racing industry, we are home to a car factory, a baseball bat manufacturer, and the headquarters of several well-known restaurants. As a state we are about as distinctive as you can be without having a big city.

If I were from Tennessee people wouldn’t recognize it much better: Elvis, Jack Daniels, country music, hydropower? Tennessee is not exactly a mecca. Nor Ohio, though by virtue of being so physically large and containing so many cities might make it a bit more of a conversation starter. And being a contested state in the last presidential election, which amongst Cambridge circles is perhaps most notable.

But the question of home is now muddy. Everyone has to have one and I have mine, and I am proud of it. But I have never felt strong connections with home, yet place seems to be focal to everything I do. And in the small things, like the terrain, the quality of light and clear sunsets, the sprawling main arteries so full of entrances and exits that they require a permanent turning lane. The generic chain restaurants and the authentic ethnic food.

But without the people there, a lot of substitutes would be suitable for my home. Indeed I actively look for it. I look out across the Vet School’s small field in front of my lab, where three bay horses are kept year round and imagine home. And if I go north into the Pennines or west to the Cotswolds I can almost get the feel of rolling hills. And these places are all different too, unique in their own right but remind me of home.

More so, my family stretches even as we speak. My mom now commutes to Indianapolis every week for work, living with my uncle. My friends have always been few and thick, it is a curse which I carry and do not understand, but there are now enough that have left over the years and spread across the country to make perhaps anyway in the states a suitable place to be. The few that are there are perhaps the thickest though, and seeing them in a big part of going home, they and my parents will make this holiday. So I tell myself.

A year away though, and the prospect of at least another and a half means that this is a strange trip home. This is the home in which I do not live. The home that I visit. The home which gave birth to me and kept me for 23 years and which I am now free of, but no one is free of home. Everyone must have a place called home, it is the place you say when you are asked “Whereabouts are you from?”

Ed note: this post was pre-dated to match the date of authorship, it was posted 17/12/2006

So wow I’m a loser. I really have let the blog fall by the wayside. If it makes you feel any better (it won’t) I’ve taken to writing a lot of stuff in my diary which is a really beautiful moleskine notebook. If you like nice things I strongly recommend you looking at getting moleskine notebooks, they are the best made and most useful notebooks ever. Combined with a tiny Ikea pencil they make for the best companion you’ll ever have.

So I’ll make the rest of this like a newsletter to try to keep things up to date. In ascending order by time consumption (originally it was descending but the blog posts things by descending date so anyway…):

Well my RAG adventure started off interestingly, I’ve raised thus far £80 or so for our college, and nearly met our yearly totals. It’s honestly not as much as I had hoped and I have been a bit disappointed by the turn outs to each of the events but I think that my social reach into the freshers is well entrenched now, so perhaps next term will be more profitable.

What is RAG you ask? That’s what everyone asks. RAG is Raise and Give, it’s basically a fundraising organization for a lot of different charities, which organizes some fun events and some serious events for Cambridge students and around the UK. I’m the RAG rep for Wolfson, and though I haven’t done a massive amount owing to my slight over-commitment to the boat club, in next term RAG really heats up and Wolfson should ride the wave.

I did organize a fairly interesting if not terribly profitable pub crawl, and a fairly profitable pub quiz. I plan on a poker tourney next term along with another pub quiz, and of course the university-wide RAG events, and I still hope to raise £1000 by the end of the year. I can hope anyway.

I somehow got roped into coxing and ended up coxing two boats (like I ended up rowing in two boats last year, I guess). I coxed the “first men” which are better known as the boat club’s hope chest, where we put all the men we’d like to see rowing in bumps in the next few terms. I think I did ok, it’s always hard to see how the boat will turn out, I really ended up being good friends with all of them, and to put it mildly these guys know how to have a good time. I don’t think that fares well for their rowing career but they’re good lads to have a laugh with. After three sessions per week with them we ended up coming in 17th in the major novice race of the term (Fairbairns). This is fairly respectable considering that we are only 17th in bumps positions and that several of bigger and more boaty colleges had two boats above us.

I also coxed the second men, a bit of a let down as the other cox dropped out and the third didn’t end up getting her boat into Fairbairns (as they missed too many outings) so we’re still deathly short on coxes. The second men were quite good as well, not as much emphasis on fitness as the first boat crew but certainly several of them have great potential.

Finally I rowed in the senior boat. It was frustrating for a lot of reasons. We didn’t end up getting organized until the final few weeks of term and missed out on one of the biggest races of the term, the Four’s Head on the Thames (the entries filled up). There were some serious cox-less-ness problems along with organizational problems. The second and first men were sharing a cox and the first women were using a cox from out of college, and the first men and women were sharing a coach. With the resource allocation problems as such, we were lucky to get in the training we did, but after all the difficulties it felt like training was half-hearted and we never really got the work in that would have been necessary to get a respectable crew together.

So when it came to the showdown, we rowed in Fairbairns for the seniors which is the longest race on the Cam at 4.6km (basically it’s bounded by the two locks on the Cam). We rowed well for the first half, but Downing I began breathing down on us by the half way mark and passed us around 3/4 of the way through. It’s quite embarassing to get passed by another crew in a head race, as crews are sent off at 30 second intervals, but what was worse was that the row itself felt like shit, no one was prepared for the distance and no one kept it together. People were flailing all over the place and blades were slapping up and down in the air. Every stroke felt like it was through concrete because no one was pushing together.

This is unfortunately one of the downsides to becoming a more experienced rower, that you know what to expect and you expect more from the boat. I did expect more from the boat and from myself, after the race I realized that as much as everyone else, I didn’t train properly and didn’t focus properly. To my credit I had a lot of crews to worry about, and I had spent a lot of my time after getting cut from lightweights on the novice crew (since there were 4 weeks where I didn’t row).

But I think this has really put the resolve into me and hopefully some of the other crew so that we pull together a formidable crew for Lents. Amongst some other fallout, I ended up being Kit Officer in addition to my role as Secretary (aka Webmaster) of the boat club. I don’t particularly want to be kit officer but there was somewhat difficult reorganization due to the lack of resources and I felt like I would make myself used where useful and hope that the club soldiers on.

So now I’m home and I’m going to start a strict regimen of 4 ergs a week at some serious distances, weights, and cross training and hopefully make myself a good 1st boat candidate. We’ll see.

So I went to a lot of careers fairs and they were all mildly interesting. The only one that I missed, ironically, was the internship fair. It conflicted with my schedule a bit too much. But I ended up going to a lot of cutesy events and I’ve derived a lot of conclusions.

First, I don’t think I actually want to have anything to do with investment banks, at least not in the long term. I think I may still try to get in to one because I am interested in seeing what it’s like on the inside, but knowing one person who’s working at one and has essentially let it consume her entire life, along with talking to several of them I’ve concluded that they’re all a bunch of snot nosed assholes who know very little except how to play the system. I have been rarely impressed by anything other than their monochromatic dress. The one bright spot have been two companies that I have had the pleasure to meet: first, Macquarie Bank, and second the Strategy Group at Goldman Sachs. Macquarie because they actually seemed to take pride in being the bad boy of ibanks, and seemed to actually have a grasp that their strategy was going to be something unique. I predict good things for them in only one line of business, those in which they can own hardware (means of transport or production) as well as trading in those commodities. Other than that the big banks have already figured out their game at currently they’ve only got one play in their playbook. The Global Strat guys at Goldmans I respected because they were quite literally the opposite of every other ibanker I’ve met. They aren’t arrogant and self appreciating bastards who think they hung the moon, they’re actually the people making the money for Goldmans by outsmarting (outpricing and outrisking) the competition. And in my assessment if you could unplug those guys from the wall the machine that is GS would die instantaneously.

So after my short flirt with the high fashion and high dollar side of Cambridge recruiting I found myself back at my roots: techies. And I also found myself at the footsteps of a few other institutions. Firstly back at the a few hedgies, which I like because they’re friendly, competitive, but slightly less soulless. Sort of like i-bank lite. But better yet I found my way back to old favorites: tech companies. I’m going to put some serious work into trying to get a job at either Google or Bloomberg and I have some secret strategies for each. Playing in my favor are my skills at the rubik’s cube (something I’ll tell you another time ;-)) and the fact that Google has based its mobile app development out of London. Yay! So we’ll see.

At this point I’ve aspired to be everything from race car driver to astronaut so I don’t think it counts for much… but, when I left high school my idea was to program software for mobile devices. If I had actually followed through with it I’d be in an enviable position right now. I chose to follow another puck but I think I still am on track to get in front of this puck as well.

As far as bloomberg, suffice to say they have nice rubik’s cubes and I can solve them in about 2 minutes now.

Class is pretty hard core this year. I’m really happy to be in 100% computer science. I have to admit that a lot of it is heavy theory and I’m not sure if it’s my style. I’m not exactly sure what my style is yet but I think it’s not in academics, at least not of the sort they’re drilling into us. The things we’re learning this year so far as: Logic and Proof (basically a bunch of tools for proving theorems), Semantics of Programming Languages (a thinly veiled proofs course aimed at proving the correctness of programming languages), Prolog (a particular sort of logic system). All these things are basically the same only different, a lot of rather symbol heavy mathematics that invest heavily in the idea that the tools we use on computers have some sort of definite and determined meaning. This reflects the Computer Lab’s hertiage as a child of the math department and the general abstract and mathematical approach that the Cambridge has to computer science.

Then we have computer design and ECAD, both of which are ultra low-level electronics projects, which most computer science courses do not delve into this level of detail, nor do electrical engineering courses. There’s an in between degree usually called computer engineering which does but it’s not that common. Anyway, I built a clock that synchronizes with the atomic clock in the UK and a CPU. Low level hardware probably stems from Cambridge’s position as an original designer of computers, something most of the US got out of in the 1960’s but Cambridge kept on with through the 1980’s and beyond due to Acorn, the BBC Micro, and ARM.

Finally there is Concurrent Systems and Applications, a massive catch-all that would be better known as “Java II” or better still “how to actually program”. It spans the whole term and covers more advanced topics in java, most important of which are threading and concurrency, but with 1005 things thrown in as well. And the lecturer wore a “Perth Australia” shirt every day. And said “Sucks like a hoover.”

Oh I forgot, also there were four lectures each in Floating Point and Software Engineering. The former was interesting as it touched on a rather unrespected issue that only hard core mathmos and scientists should care about, the effect of floating point error on precision calculation. The latter was, as should be expected, completely stupid and full of crap that no human being will ever use in a real job.

So essentially I learned a bunch of ridiculous logic, ridiculous low-level hardware, and an hour every other day of how to program. With some salt and pepper thrown on.

That is not to say that I don’t like all this stuff, but it certainly isn’t going to help me impress my employers and get a job.

Speaking of which…