Tuesday, October 14, 2008

MacBook Pro

So the new MacBook Pro came out today.  A couple things about it:

A)  It's beautiful.
B) It's beautiful.
C) It's my next computer purchase.

I already have a MacBook Pro and there's nothing wrong with it other than it's two years old.  Maybe I'll sell my old MBP to my little brother or something.  That's the ticket.

A lot of people have been complaining for a long time that there's no docking station from Apple.  The new 24" display handles many of those concerns.  I might get one of those too.

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Chronicles of Insight

So, first blog post.

My interests are highly varied; too many to list quickly.  At the moment it's on the job search.  How do you subtly get the information you need from would be employers so they like you enough to talk to you about an interview.

I found a company Crimson Hexagon (CH), that I'm curious about.  The thing that caught my attention was the way they wrote their job posting.  Usually, posting read like an HR drone wrote it.  Pretty boring and to me a clear sign that the company is large enough to have a sizable HR department and relatively little room for creativity.  But!  CH had a very personable post.  They said they were looking for people with expertise and interest in several areas.  The one that caught my attention was "statistics, mathematics and the R programming language".  Just the kinds of thing for me.  

Stats was my favorite math class.  First, because I had a teacher who was really really good. Second, stats gave me a new set of tools for thinking about the world.  I read a book called Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.  He said something that has stuck with me.  He said Mathematics is principally a tool to meditate, rather than to compute. I prefer this approach above the Math is cool for the sake of Math's coolness approach. Now granted, Math is cool.  But it is far cooler when it can actually be applied to something.