Calm before the storm

Tomorrow I have the first exam of my Master's degree. Wow. It's so hard to study now, because I guess I feel comfortable with the topic matter. Comfortable enough I suppose. Strange how I've been told my professor has high expectations of me, and my classmates expect that I should have no trouble kicking ass... I guess I'm the only one who's not so sure. We'll just have to see.

Would anyone like to tell me what the shape of the objective function of a maximum likelihood estimation tells us about quality of the identified parameter set in a non-linear optimization problem? Yeah, great. And why is an estimated state a stochastic value? Yeah, cool! The answer has all to do with noise. The noise that exists in a non-perfect world, naturally. It's not a perfect world. If you don't know that, you have no business in statistics. And strangely, once you have studied statistics, it's basically impossible to see the world in black and white. That includes you too, fellow data point...


But man, I've been here since last June! And on top of that, it's been now over one year since I "left" Electronical fArts (gotta dodge the search engines here, the man is always listening)... the dream job that turned nightmare. Rather the nightmare in pursuit of the dream, which when finally awarded (danke schön Olo), then turned into a twisted scenario of being given a gift that can only be cherished if one is prepared to swim in a pool of sharks. Anyway, the work was nice, nice gift, but swimming in the pool with a bloody leg made the gift worthless. Hard to enjoy something when there's sharks picking at your bloody leg. Is anyone still following this analogy? Sensitive guy I am, I know, but am basically over it. There are two people remaining however, that if I ever see them again, before they get a 'hello' from me, they will get a firm elbow right in the mouth. Kind of a 'Hey, I owed you that and if you didn't already know that you'll get a second elbowing to the nose. Ok... now, how's it going? For me all is again as perfect as one could hope for."

9 months in Germany so far. Incredible. Still feels like I haven't been here long. Probably cuz I've been to broke to DO much, other than walk around town.

Been thinking about going to Norway again this summer. Tomorrow Tomek's coming to Berlin and we'll chat about the possibilities.

In a totally different topic area, I saw "The Departed" last night. Best line of film: "You gotta tell me if something is wrong.... I'm fucking Irish - I'll deal with something being wrong for the rest of my life."

Wish me luck tomorrow! Tomek is arriving just in time with heaps of fantastic Polish vodka... I wonder if he can bring me a few sweet Polish girls too.... Those Polish guys are lucky, not kidding at all. Seriously.