WTFMJ

Micheal Jackson left us today. He has given a lot to us.

I first learned about this 6-7 hours ago, on Tracy's Facebook status... that's really not paying respect to MJ learning this over Facebook...

Anyways, I'll have to tell my future kids that before they were born, there were a place called Neverland, a place where nobody grew old.

I finally decided to write something on this blog again. Not having this event would be an insult to MJ.

Back to my life now...

Since two weeks or so, my job became much more interesting. Here's how it happenned.

As a Junior Economist at Industry Canada, you don't typically do much. You make some charts out of data, and... hmm... I don't even have a second task to make a list. It gets so boring that I started to take daily naps around 10:30 am. I also spend a lot of time solving www.hacker.org challenges. More on that maybe another time. On Thursdays, I do my DE course homework.

I'm glad to be a mathie. I believe it was Friday the 12th this month.

I was walking to my cubicle, a few minutes late of 9:00am, as usual. It's not like I have anything urgent to be completed. In the governement, not many things are urgent. At least not as I have seen. Except maybe for making PowerPoints for incredibly high ranked people (The PCO Clerk, yeah I made charts for Kevin G. Lynch). I sat down and typed my password under the username MAD. The everyday morning ritual started, and I opened Outlook, checked for e-mails, opened Google Chrome, ebuddy, and that time I was swifting through the Wikipedia page of Himmler, a German SS during WW2. I was looking through his childhood to see how he was a loser and how that affected his becoming.

Then suddenly, my boss' boss, the "Director", knocked on the metallic edge of my cubicle where a door usually would stand in an office. I don't think he has ever talked or noticed my presence beforehand, in contrast to me sitting right next to his office door, and hearing everything he says with other people. He asked me: "You're a math student right?" I had a freaking page of Himmler on my screen. "Ya" I said, slightly scrolling down to a part with no pictures. Changing the page would have been too obvious. Not doing anything would be weird. "I have a problem, are you interested? [...] A fresh pair of eyes may help." Wow... this is one heck of an opportunity he gave me.

He explains to me the situation on "Productivity Gains Decompostions" and shows me a paper by Griliches & Regev. The problem he had was with a doubtful equality. At first sight, it really seemed more like a sloppy economist approximation written with an equal sign instead of the wiggly equal. In fact, even I was supporting his doubts on the paper at first, saying the paper was wrong. (He showed other papers too, which actually contained errors and sloppiness. Internally published papers are not comparable to peer-reviewed stuff.) I took the paper back to my desk, and after ten-fifteen minutes, I had luckily realized the funky algebra trick G&R employed to get this equality. I quickly told Marc. Impressed, he had apparently spent over an hour the day before, trying. He then gives me some papers for me to read around, and play with in the meantime.

By the end of the day, with two introductory economics class knowledge in my bag, stating that my understanding of those papers was fuzzy would be an overstatement of my accomplishments. I then made a choice, walked into his office to discuss more on this topic of Productivity Gains Decomposition. As he taught me stuff, I like to believe now that I also brought insights to him as well with the exchanges, I understood more about the subject myself, and came up with the "path-dependency" of that decomposition. I think that's the part I contributed. Pleased, he wanted me to write up the still unripe fruit of the discussion. He had just offered me the possibility to publish a paper. I now know that confidence in yourself, and contradicting your superiors when you feel so (even if you might be wrong) is a productive activity. At that time, it was almost six o'clock. We usually leave before five. But during that small interval of time, I learned more than the whole time I was at Industry Canada.

The next week, I had coffee with Marc, he lectured me a bit more and gave me green light to start.

So these past few days, I have been working, writing, learning, discovering stuff would be a long-shot, and hitting my computer (quickly picking up LaTeX). Still napping a little, but much less.

I hope I can post the paper I will have collaborated on in the near (a few months) future.

Keep reading.

$45.58

Nice cleavage

This Friday, my boss bought me beer. I don't know about Montreal, or Waterloo, Toronto, or wherever one might be, but Friday was a sunny but not a soleil de plomb, blue-sky, and hair-in-a-slight-soothing-breeze day. A few of my coworkers (I shouldn't say coworker because they are all permanent and higher ranked workers...) decided to go out to have a nice cold beer at a nearby pub. My boss asked if I wanted to join them. At first I was somewhat hesitant at the thought of having to mingle with "older folks", and sieving my words as I had to talk to them in a professional manner. But then again, the best opportunities in life usually only come unexpectedly with "networking".

I don't like the word "networking", because it usually doesn't really work that way. Yes you get contact information from various people at "networking" events. But how often do you follow up? And actually how well do you know those people to think they will give you an opportunity before they give it to their real friends? I went to some of these networking events. They usually consist of people awkwardly exchanging e-mails on little pieces of paper that would serve better as emergency toilet paper.

Real "networking" takes time and effort. And it sucks if you don't actually like the person. So, I don't try to cast a huge net. It's a "WOMBAT". I just befriend people just because they seem chill or fun to be with. Trying to use them as future potential stepping stones is a futile attempt. They won't care about you anyways if you don't care about them.

So I accepted. In went the beer, and out went a bit of office gossip. It was a nice experience, especially when your boss pays your beer.

Also, earlier that day, my boss had a Second Cup banana nut muffin, and gave me half. It was THE best muffin of my life. Crisp but not quite crunchy exterior, soft and warm but not mushy interior, a generous amount of roasted walnuts, sweet scent of a banana, it was quite the muffin. It's definitely going to be my breakfast sometimes. I guess you have to buy it fresh in the morning as well.

National Art Gallery in less than 9 hours.

$43.86

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