It’s unprecedented
February 26, 2001
that this webpage goes without an update for 10 days. Ok ok, there was an unofficial update via Sinned’s Realm – many thankyou’s to Sinned for that. As you might have gathered from the update there, I was visiting porn sites on the pay terminals in Banff (you’re a loser Dennis). The 4 degrees or something in Vancouver feels like Mexico compared to the ski runs. I guess overall the trip was fun. I met and got to know a tonne of people who are crazy. I improved my skiing a little, but still stuck to the green runs although I’m quite sure I could have managed the blues. I went drinking everyday which was crazy but so freaking fun. And of course I didn’t manage much sleep those 4 days but it’s quite alright, I’ll make it up in class.
I’ve drawn up a design for my domain which will be used until the ultimate master plan can be made. This one, titled “The Pre-dawn of JVision” will be up maybe by this weekend or the next – so basically really soon.
I have a copy of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon or Stupid Lion Eating Dragon or whatever it’s called in cantonese so that’s my after dinner treat. That and studying.
And that’s all I’m going to say for now.
Woohoo
February 16, 2001
I’m done. I’ve finished all my pre-reading break midterms! Wooohooo! I then played basketball today, I’ve been going every friday this year (almost). It’s great. I feel great. I feel tired, but great! I’m going shwoop shwoop shwooping tomorrow (that’s skiing for you non-Friends watchers). At least I hope I am. I faxed in credit card information on wednesday for 27 tickets but haven’t gotten any confirmation from cypress. The person I contacted never picked up the phone today. I hope it’s all ok.
Then I’m working everyday except this sunday from now until school again. Woohoo! I love not being lazy. I hope to squeeze in time to move this site over to the other site. I hope.
Oh yes, US/British planes attacked some Iraqi targets today. Woohoo! War is great!
This update is brought to you in part by Sarcastovision – subdivision of Jvision.
“Cuz 2 out of 3 ain’t bad”
February 15, 2001
I’m sneaking in an update before starting to study for tomorrow’s 3 and final midterm before the break. Yippee! It’s an elective course so I’m basically at the border of “I don’t give a damn” and “I’ll study because it’s more productive than waiting for snow”.
I’m going skiing this saturday for work. Sweet. I’m going to Banff next Thursday for 4 days. Sweet^2. Banff means more skiing. Free skiing. Sweet^3.
We succeeded: Eri and I have finished the 2000 piece puzzle. It sits on the carpet right now, waiting for some way to be put up on the wall. It was so glorious. I took a picture of it, but I’ll put it up later.
I don’t update much now (but more often than all you other webpagers) because of school – studying all week, and work – worked about 25 hours this week. I haven’t gone out in about 2 weeks. So, after tomorrow, I’m going to paint the town red and then paint the town’s dog red.
But for now… books. Bye.
Another midnight update that’s too long to read, but irresistable
February 12, 2001
because you just know what a darn great writer I tend to be when I update about nothing. And so here’s the latest episode in “What Jerry Did” episode 152 volume 4002. I’m working too much. I’m studying too much. I’m not doing the things I like to do enough. That was my week. The end.
My group assignment week went by rather easily in that 1 group project I voluntarily wrote the entire thing (but the info was thought up by all of us) , all 10 pages or so. The other group thing turned out to be ridiculously short and easy. The last one, well, we were accused of cheating (re: 02/07/01). So it wasn’t as bad as I made it out to be. What was bad though was that those assignments took up too much time leaving me not very much to study for midterms this week – 3 midterms, 2 homework assignments, and 1 case write up in the same week. I call it the 3-2-1 combo. It’s the greatest knockout move ever.
Justin: I’m glad you consider me part of your elite. But what can I say? There’s only 1 way to solve a problem – act on it. But you’re smart. You’ll figure a way to deal with your stuff.
I haven’t done anything in terms of my new webpage, but I have an idea that seems like a fun and ambitious plan. I don’t know when this fun and ambitious webpage will be done. I don’t even know when I’ll start… well, maybe on Sunday. I’m going skiing next sat after my 3-2-1! Yay.
Fuck. I had so much to say about stuff that I read/experienced/saw over this week but it’s all gone now. Fuck it all.
Piped where pipes shouldn’t go
February 07, 2001
unless you’re the kind of guy who likes that kind of stuff, but that’s for you to know and me to never find out. My story. Remember that webpage I made for work? As amateurish and unprofessional as it was, I still made it. The important thing is, I spent time working on it and even worked on it on my own time because I enjoyed it. The quality of the work for this story is irrelevant – had I made the perfect, flawless, most beautiful webpage or something ultra ugly, the outcome would have been the same.
I have been shafted.
Big time.
I think I told about it a bit… about 2 or 3 weeks ago, my supervisor went to some webpage meeting and I assume one of the ‘issues’ they discussed was the new design (of which I thought was a lot better than the old one). He talked a little bit about the meeting. At that point, I thought that my design would be scrapped because UBC has about 2000 miles of red tape and about 1 mile of it belonged to webpage policies.
I was right.
But my supervisor then mentions last week that I should go to another meeting held today and sit in and whatever. Ok, I go there, I find the room after some difficulty, and I listen.
Result: the page that I made is effectively to be stripped, raped, beat, and have its throat slit. It was rather uncomfortable sitting there listening to them speak of what they will do to “improve” the page. Firstly, every page will have a graphic that I estimate to be about 800pixels wide by 200 pixels high. Then, they’ll have a side navigation menu about 150 or so wide. Then their brilliant idea was to use both side navigation AND the icons that I made. That was the most retarded thing I have ever heard – 2 navigational interfaces on the same page. I’d rather they use something they design totally on their own instead of trying to almagamate my fun, cutesy webpage and their professional, clean, cutting edge webpage.
Imagine Pikachu and Alan Greenspan merged into one. Pikaspan it would be. If they said, “Yeah, dude, we’re gonna just delete your page. Sorry about that”. I would have been, “sure… that’s fine.” But the fact that they’re going to take it and modify it to suit the stupid ass UBC policies is like taking a piss on someone after beating them up.
I think I left the impression on my supervisor that I was kind of unhappy about it… well, I actually said to him, “well, I’m unhappy about what they’re going to do…”. It’s totally not his fault. It’s not the fault of those 3 webpage people there too because they’re just doing their job. Who’s fault?
Well actually, those 3 webpage people get some blame because it would have been nice if they fucking told me about the guidelines of webpages for Continuing Studies instead of telling me AFTER I fucking make the thing. Then the blame is with UBC for all the red tape they wrap around the red tape they impose on everyone. Then I just want to say fuck the system because it fucks people like me over.
Anyway, they’re going to do the revisions all on their own, without any input by me. Again I feel bad for my supervisor because he wanted me to go to the meeting so that I can have some input. I pretty much sat quietly listening to them kill it. Goodbye…
So… shafted… oh yeah, my group in an accounting class was accused of copying (we didn’t, obviously)! 2 things – 1 of them, it was partially my fault; another guy was printing out my part and he accidentally picked up sheets from another group’s. 2 – the idiot girl in the group sent her file to her fucking idiot friend and that idiot friend copied her work. I hate group work.
I am bitter.
Hi Gene
February 06, 2001
As a b-schooler, here is my take. What you say is, in a way, correct, but fundamental analysis relies on the theory of efficient securities market (semi-strong form) to hold true. I’ll assume you know what this is, but for the less financially minded, the ESM theory basically means that the prices of stocks reflect all pubicly known information about a company.
So, if people are buying stocks because others are buying because of released information, this price change wasn’t the result of the information. That was unclear. Clarify. X Co – releases info. Drives their stock price from 100 – 125. 125 would be the stable price based on all publicly known information. Then, tech analysts would see this increase in price/volume and buy. This drives the price to, say, 135. The extra 10 increase was not based on publicly information – it was ‘artifically’ increased.
Assuming that the ESM theory holds true, the stock price would return to its ‘real’ value of 125 – certainly, some of the tech analysts would lose on that. Then there are market movers who basically do this on a large scale.
What I personally feel is that price changes in a stock are due to the information known about the company, market noise, and basically, some randomness. If someone is just looking at the charts, they’re taking some risk in that the price changes may not reflect the actual state of the company. Well, I don’t know if this is true, this is just what I’m guessing.
Financial institutions and accounting firms do all that analysis (25 hours in a day – sounds about right… really!) to find the present value of cash flows. It’s all that matters in finance. From what it seems, tech analysts buy a stock because of its prospect of a capital gain – buy it lower, the price raises, they sell high, keep the difference. Inversely, they can short when the prices look to drop. Etc. Etc. So what the actual company does doesn’t matter. They could all be selling rocks and this method still works.
Hmm… I don’t seem to be coming to any point in this ‘argument’. In many ways, I agree with Gene that b-schoolers are doing all the work for nothing since there’s so much theory involved. But there seems to be something intrinsically wrong in investing based on how the price moves.
Ah yes, my first and only finance course – any opportunities to make money when selling (termed arbitrage), are so quickly snapped up by the market that it’s pretty hard to get those profits. Eg. if a price of a stock is underpriced based on its current state, you can be sure that the price will truly reflect its state in less than 5 minutes. That is, assuming that ESM is true. Similarly, if a price is overpriced, it will come down to reflect its true value.
I think that is what happened to NASDAQ. What was it, it was at 5000 not too long ago? Now it’s at around 2600? I think everyone knew it was way over its real value and was DUE for a drop. Based on charts, everyone would have bought something in it, or maybe an index when it was 4500, 4600, whatever. Now its 2600… many lost big $$$.
Fundamental Analysis may be boring, but I feel it gets down the nitty gritty find the real value and not some artificially inflated value.
But that’s just what I feel and since I have 0.00 experience in actual trading, I will shutup now.
Ahh, a fresh new page for me to ruin
February 01, 2001
I gotta do something about my date system – it’s too confusing. Dennis has updated! I think he updated twice, or maybe he forgot to upload the 2nd update because i never saw it until tonight. Even though I’m not a computer guy, I think he’s right about c++, i hear c++ everywhere. As for the new things like java, and all that – they seem like buzzwords to me because of the hype of e-commerce (which is as overhyped as last year’s NASDAQ mind you). Although it wasn’t for me, I still had some fun learning about variables and if/else functions.
Anyway, my view about e-commerce is – it won’t work for many many products. I think I might have said this before, but I like repeating myself myself. Humans in their nature are inquisitive. When someone buys something that’s not a durable or a perishable (see your econ100 textbook for definitions), they want to be able to touch, feel, test, taste, drop, poke, slap the product. On the net, you see a few pictures, hear some testimonials from customers, and read all the tech mumble jumble.
So, things like Amazon.com – they’re prey for the 21st century’s biggest crumbler. They sell books. That’s their forte. Yes I know of their expansion into other retail sources. In fact, at Amazon, you can buy pretty much anything now. Result? What’s their EPS? (Earnings per share) – not good. They buy and buy and buy up business but they don’t have a backbone to support them.
When Amazon first came out several years ago, I had high hopes about them – they sold books. They sold it online. It was new, it was cool, it was at the time a great idea. But now? Sure they’ve built up a name for themselves (good marketing team) but they’re like everyone else… online buying.
Anyway what I’m getting at is… uh I don’t really know. I haven’t really formed a good enough argument in this update to sell any point.
My prediction: Amazon will shock the world when it announces its debt structure has been messed up and it turns out they were much worse off then they claimed they were. As a result, it will send one of the internet’s biggest commerce names into the drain. Prove me wrong Jeff Whoever.
Now time for some bitching
I have 3 group assignments due next week. I’m working fri, sat, sun, mon, tues, wed. Time is my constraint. The optimal use would be to do the work constantly with no breaks. Qualitatively, it’s impossible. I don’t like these times.
And I feel like I’m stuck in a big rut. Everyone (well, you guys anyway) have their coop jobs that seem to prep you for your careers and whatnot and here i am stuck in this big hole. I don’t have any plan. I have vague notions of what I want to do but notions don’t get you anywhere. My notion consists of graduating, attaining the CA or CMA designation, enhancing my japanese, and begin my career in japan. There’s so many jobs in japan that pay exhorbantly high. That and Eri lives there. But it doesn’t feel right… something is wrong.
It seems like all this stupid commerce stuff feels secondary somehow. I just can’t figure out what’s the main big concern that drives me. I know one thing, it’s driving me crazy – it’s like a rock in your shoe while you’re driving. You squirm around trying to get the rock to shift to the edge, but it just won’t move from under the ball of your foot. It feels like it’s poking right through your foot. I can’t stop the car and take off my shoe to remove it too.
Oh yes, to top off this update – it appears that my work on the Cultural Assistant page may be for naught (nought?) The meeting was today and I’m just waiting for my boss to tell me that it has to conform with the ELI page – meaning big ugly English Language Institute bar on the top. I’m not in a good mood.
I think I’ll just ramble some more because I’m stressed and this writing nonstop helps me somehow. Did you know that it takes 2 calories per minute when you’re typing? Bet you didn’t.
Our 2000 piece puzzle is about 70% done. Yay. My new design is non-existent and will continue to be so until the reading break at which I want to go to Banff for work. That means it may be delayed some more. I’m going skiing in 3 weeks which is just too exciting and unbearable for waiting. Uh… I’m going to toronto for 4 days in about 2 months. Uh… I’m going to Japan in just under one year… and uh… I’m going to sleep soon.
Greets to Dennis on his Visor!
Dennis has just informed me of his 13 hr workday tomorrow and that he will read this update on his visor. So hello to Dennis! You must be looking forward to a great day today! Well you seem to be enjoying your work so that’s cool.
