Letters on the service

By lex, on March 29th, 2008

I got a thoughtful letter from a young architect a few months back, a fellow pondering a career change:

Life getting in the way

By lex, on January 24th, 2008

So. Transition Assistance Program classes, 0730 until 1600 or so. Provided for the most part by a 30-year bosun’s mate who left the navy to provide 18 years in a sinecure as transition assistance program instructor for the state of California.

That’s credibility for you, comes to looking for outside work. Doesn’t stop the state of California. Not much does.

Friday Musings 01/27/2006

By lex, on January 27th, 2006

That systems engineering course? The prof is this whole next level kind of smart. There’s a fine line between true genius and stark, raving, barking madness, and he’s right up against it. This is the first class I’ve ever taken where I feel more deeply stupid with each passing week.

Taken as a whole, this is probably a good thing, for me.

The other class is Marketing, and you can almost feel the entire cohort breathe a sigh of relief when she walks to the podium, and the SE prof takes his bow. Plus, she’s, well: Hot. In a lady-my-age-with-a-PHD-who’s-taking-care-of-herself kind of way.

Or was that an overshare?

It isn’t like I’m looking, because I’m not. To paraphrase from an older entry *:

GB – VMFA IX

Posted by Lex, on August 12, 2006

 

Snorkeling out to the edge of the reef was like swimming in an aquarium. Brightly colored fish moved in schools, darting away as they approached. The coral bottom was 6 or 7 feet below them, extending out into the bay. They swam and dove, watching for the occasional lion fish that lurked in the shadows of the larger coral formations.

“Had enough? I’m ready to swim back in.”

Transfiguration Sunday

By lex, on February 18th, 2007

Not everyone’s cup of tea of course, but today’s New Testament reading is, I think, my favorite bit of scripture (1 Corinthians 12-13):

Friday Musings 01/19/2007

By lex, on January 19th, 2007

This weekend. I will catch up with emails this weekend. I promise.

–

Class today – it was Friday, wasn’t it? – and the course was Operations Analysis/Research, OR. Which as I might have mentioned is a kind of cult at the Naval Postgraduate School. Reminds me of all those L. Ron Hubbard books. People believe. They want you to believe.

None more so than my current professor, whom I regret to add, is battling stage 4 cancer. Which I looked up, only to find that there isn’t any stage 5. So it’s the real deal. With chemo and painkilling drugs and the occasional stab that causes him to wince and moan aloud in class, when it isn’t dropping him off to sleep. Each week we are happily surprised to see him at the other end of the video-teleconference.

So it goes

By lex, on January 18th, 2007

So it was a two-day conference on top of the week’s operations research/analysis homework, and one got done and the other didn’t and it is left to the reader to wonder which was which while your correspondent tries to fit natural logarithms to y=mx+b curves in order to discover the slope and y-intercept, not to mention the MAD, MSE and MAPE that’s in it for any given data range.