No. 31

Hey everyone,

It’s been a while since I’ve updated so I’ll write a new post summarizing what’s been happening over the past few months. First of all, my Facebook account has been disabled since they’ve accused me of using a fake name. Of course, I have done no such thing and am upset and frustrated since I have a lot of pictures on there that I would have liked to keep for myself. Due to the enormous size of Facebook I’ll probably never see what I had on my page again and I don’t know if I would want to use a service that cannot accurately distinguish real accounts from fake ones. On the bright side, now that my account’s gone I’ll probably have more time to do something productive since Facebook is hardly the place to do that. I also wrote a lengthy blog entry detailing my experience at the Memorial Park Criterium, but after uploading my photos, WordPress crashed on me and all my drafts were lost. So remember folks, save your data often or else you will regret it!

Anyway, over the last few months I’ve been traveling all across Texas looking for work and racing bicycles. Fortunately, I had some success as I placed well in my remaining races (3rd at Chappell Hill, 7th at State Championships), but more on that later in other blog posts. I also landed a job so now that I’ve become employed I’ve had to rearrange my priorities and projects to suit my career. And some more good news – I achieved a perfect score on my second actuarial exam, FM/2! I had studied very hard the month before I took the test, but not so hard the month before that. I’m just glad that I probably got every single question right on that exam. I was pretty cautious during the test and took my time, using the entire three hours I was allotted for that exam. I didn’t feel entirely prepared but in retrospect I probably studied more than most people do for that test, since I read the entire textbook in the syllabus and did every single problem in the book – twice. Unfortunately my main goal was to read the text twice, but I felt so lazy for only reading it once, go figure! Perhaps I’m too cautious – given that there are an infinite number of possible questions – you can never be fully prepared!

I had to put Python aside and I probably won’t be able to go back to it until maybe the summer of 2011.  Fortunately, I’m learning two other programming languages in its place, C++, and VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), so the time I spent on python has definitely not gone to waste. C++ is harder, and I would have liked to learn Python first but I’ll have to make do since that’s what we use at work. I also finished a computer science textbook, a textbook on Microsoft Excel, and another introductory textbook on C++, as well as a couple of legal documents regarding my work. I’m currently reading my second textbook on C++,  and a textbook on VBA as well. Check out the projects page for more details.