terrshee's Diaryland Diary

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Making Meatballs for the First Time

Impulses are odd things. Today I will make meatballs, because it occurs to me that I like spaghetti and meatballs, yet have never before made a meatball. I doubt this shall prove beyond my abilities.

Much of this week at work involved struggling with my ego and my insecurities. Once again I realized I'm as good or better at certain things that my co-worker does and didn't do this week because he was on vacation. And once more I realized that I have no real desire to do them because they mean being on the front line all the time and I dislike that. But, oh, the lure of actually having work that someone looks at and from which one can accure a little satisfaction. I'm also about to get my own weekly feature, and I'm not at all sure about having my name go on something that is almost entirely based on my opinion and analysis It is nothing major, just a pulling together of calendar items, but I've found out that people actually read calendar-related stuff.

My loathing of the statistics class continues to trend higher. The gods be thanked next week is spring break and then there is a scant month to go. In spite of getting decent grades I simply have no feeling of comprehension for the material, although I must be absorbing something. There's a French expression for the "retort on the staircase," the thing you should have thought to have said before leaving in a huff. Perhaps this class is a delayed sort of learning that will come back later.

Actually, it did come in handy yesterday. A co-worker, who really does understand math, came to me wondering why the standard deviation on a table was zero. I was game, looked at the numbers, and realized the scale was off, i.e. 1.171 million, 1.200 million and 1.220 million were very little different for purposes of measuring the standard deviation, but that 1,171 thousand, 1,200 thousand and 1,220 thousand would produce the desired result. Durn. Maybe this isn't about math and is about making sensible analysis. Maybe I can get this.

6:35 a.m. - 2006-03-18
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