Some of my resolutions:
Lose 50 pounds this year
Do something about snoring
Get a new job

Brokeback Galactica Video, 2+ min. Thanks rmjwell for the link.

Second Yahoo interview seemed to go well. I’ll post a summary of both interviews later if anyone’s interested. A handful of technical questions, but just as many were about my management style (not really a management position but some project management and leadership/mentoring is expected) and about my prior experiences. A couple of questions like “How would you handle something like X” I answered with “I dealt with something quite similar, and in that situation I did Y.”

Anyway, I have a reasonably good feeling. I will keep everyone posted.

I think I forgot to post this before, mostly because I didn’t want to get too excited, but I had an interview at Yahoo a couple weeks ago. Tomorrow I have a follow-up interview for the same position. So, think me some good thoughts tomorrow afternoon!

‘Dilbert’ deserves the economics Nobel

Scott Adams (famous Dilbert cartoonist) published a one-page “Unified Theory of Everything Financial”. I think it’s brilliant. If you’re not doing something very similar to this with your money, you may want to think carefully about why not.

I won’t reproduce the 9-step plan here, but go read it, it’s fast. What the Marketwatch article mentions right below the 9 steps almost merits being step 10 (or part of step 9):

“Everything else you may want to do with your money is a bad idea compared to what’s on my one-page summary. You want an annuity? It’s worse. You want a whole life insurance policy? It’s worse. You want to invest in individual stocks? It’s worse. You want a managed mutual fund instead of an index fund? It’s worse. I could go on, but you get the point.”

Apparently Adams sought to publish this as a one-page book but publishers weren’t interested. Adams felt that adding any more to it would be misleading and get in the way of the message, so he published the one-pager as part of a larger work.

Crossposted to

I got cranky at someone at work. Someone who I feel is failing to do his fair share.

Basically it went something like this: Extremely long rant ahead! Warning!

[I’m capturing this from a chat session with a friend. I mostly edited out my friend’s words for privacy reasons, so it might sound a little disjointed.]

Here’s an interesting math+social problem I have been thinking about on and off. There’s no practical application for it (for me, right now anyway) but it’s something interesting to think about.

Let’s say N people decide to own a house together. Based on how much each person puts down, and how much they pay per month toward the “household” bills, how would you determine what fraction of property belongs to each person? (The situation could be roommates who want to quit renting and buy a house together, or someone who already owns a house and wants to share the house while actually giving the other person a chance to earn equity instead of just paying rent.) Continue reading →