And no, not the bird kind either. Please avoid all sorts of contact with me for the next 24 hours as I just came back from the golf course and not only did I play the back 9 with 38 shots (par 36), but I also made an eagle on the 14th hole of the course in Salo. I opened with a 3 iron and an about 200 meter shot straight down the fairway (the actual shot wasn't very sweet; slightly thin). The second shot was a 150 meter approach against the wind with a 7 iron with one bounce on the green and then dropped into the cup. That said, had I played the front 9 as well, I would've been able to drop my HCP from 21.5 to about 4-5. And that illustrates perfectly why I don't want to return cards or drop my HCP. I'd lose my competitive advantage. And then again, I'm not sure that my game is stable enough to allow me to play another half like that for a while, as I don't even have the time to play that many rounds this summer. Mainly due to work.
Oh, and the new grips for the irons worked fairly well too and I'm satisfied that I finally got around to changing them.
Friday, June 29, 2007
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Colin vs. Hugh
Colin's victory may have been premature. Technically he still comes out on top, but Hugh's performance in Love Actually was, well...
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Visited Countries
Traveling is something that I think everyone should do to at least some degree; it not only broadens your horizons but also teaches you about different cultures and that there in fact is a world outside your own little world. That said, I'm not a very big fan of the typical tourist trips and different types of resorts. Anyway, below is a map of all the countries that I've visited that I could recall right now. Apparently 22 countries. Looks like I'll have to start going to new countries, since I think the last time I visited a brand new country was, well, I can't remember...
Saturday, June 23, 2007
VisualDNA
More personality tests... This time with a twist; pick the image that you think most appropriate when presented with different questions. My result isn't entirely precise (or at least I don't agree with everything in my results, but maybe I'm not that objective... oh well...).
Imagini also gives a nice and superficial description based on the choices you picked. As one would've guessed, my description holds quite true, but then again, it doesn't really say anything concrete. Regardless, the idea is fun and I bet the statistics that they're able to generate are fairly interesting.
Day 7: Brighton
Or actually we arrived here yesterday in the afternoon. Brighton concludes the sailing journey this time and right I'm just waiting for my flight out tomorrow evening. Then there's still the other week of vacation left... At this point I've concluded that I'm not old enough for vacations. At least not for long ones. Maybe two or three day long trips; just shooting in and out of some place (sort of like the Malmö trip). But a week and a half sailing was a bit too long. Nothing wrong with the trip per se, but a couple of days would've sufficed. I don't know whether I really feel this way or if it's just the shitty mood that I've been in recently.
Anyway, I'm sort of anxious to get back already, but am sort of terrified about the flight. I have nothing against flying in general, but in its current form where people are treated as cattle and I can't even fit the seat (I'm not fat, but try being 1.89 meters tall and bend your legs in a way that you'll be at least semi-comfortable in a plane -- it's impossible!) and then you get placed next to some annoying person who won't shut up about their daughter's dog's problems and won't even switch seats with you so you could have the aisle seat with slightly more leg room... And now a deep breath...
Anyway, I'm sort of anxious to get back already, but am sort of terrified about the flight. I have nothing against flying in general, but in its current form where people are treated as cattle and I can't even fit the seat (I'm not fat, but try being 1.89 meters tall and bend your legs in a way that you'll be at least semi-comfortable in a plane -- it's impossible!) and then you get placed next to some annoying person who won't shut up about their daughter's dog's problems and won't even switch seats with you so you could have the aisle seat with slightly more leg room... And now a deep breath...
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Day 5: Cowes
Somehow it doesn't seem that surprising to see JPMorgan Asset Management being the sponsor behind the Round the Island Race (a sailing competition around the Isle of Wight)... The race starts on Saturday and some competition boats have already started to show up, but we'll hopefully be gone before the whole circus gets underway.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Day 3: Brixham
Day 3 consisted of a short hop from Dartmouth to Brixham. Original the idea was to go a bit further, but the winds blew straight against us from the North-East, so after about three hours we just decided to call it a day and dock in Brixham. Tomorrow is apparently promising to have slightly better winds, but supposedly the weather will still be rough. Oh well.
Monday, June 18, 2007
Day 2: Getting sea legs
Ok, day 2 of sailing today. I've summarized some key points in the list below
- Number of fingernails nicked: 1
- Number of times thro... Fed the fishes: 2
- Number of rolling genoas killed: 1
- Percentage of time contributed towards paying off perpetual sleep deprivation: 80%
In the morning the weather was sort of rough with winds of about 25 knots and rather high waves. I got soaked fairly quickly and it was pretty close that we would've gotten a bit of water indoors. We stayed in a buoy in some river for the night and when we left in the morning, some other 40 footer left at the same time, but it says something about the weather when they decided to just turn back. Granted, they we're slightly smaller and undoubtedly much lighter than the HR.
The weather of course got the best of me too and on two occasions I got fairly closely acquainted with a plastic bucket, which was then used to feed the fishes. I personally haven't sailed that much before (just some casual sailing in the Finnish archipelago and then twice to/from Sweden), but even then I've never actually thrown up. So I consider this somewhat of a feat; granted, I did have a sort of large breakfast, which didn't help the situation at all. We eventually got to Dartmouth in the afternoon and the dinner was quite smashing (I just love the way how Brits use English; a lot nicer than that god awful dialect of the Americans...).
Right now the plan seems to be to try to get to Brighton by, oh, Friday. Then just stay there for the Saturday and then on Sunday get back to London and fly back to Finland.
And Micol, yeah, I'm still working on finding you a nice postcard... Fear not.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Vacation
It's my first official vacation in a while. I took two weeks off and on Friday I flew to London (or Stansted...) only to take a train from Paddington to Falmouth on Saturday. Today was the first actual day when we were sailing, and as much fun as sailing is, I can't help it but I always sleep most of the time while on the boat. Today I helped in the typical tasks associated with leaving the docks and when we had gotten the sails out and the decks cleared of all the ropes, I fell asleep. I pretty much slept through the entire day and woke up to take part in the landing (or actually we're right now positioned in the middle of a river in a buoy). That said, today was fairly uneventful as the sailing was quite straight forward and not much trimming of the sails was required.
Anyway, vacations are weird. I'm just about ready to go back to work. I actually did take my work laptop and RSA SecurID card (for the VPN connection) with me, so I guess I could do some work and at least check my emails. The problem is that I know that I have about ~40 MBs of emails with attachments in my inbox right now and downloading them using the GPRS connection via the mobile phone would take ages. So I guess right now I'll just not check my work emails. I can still access my personal emails, though.
Oh well, I guess I could sleep a bit more...
Anyway, vacations are weird. I'm just about ready to go back to work. I actually did take my work laptop and RSA SecurID card (for the VPN connection) with me, so I guess I could do some work and at least check my emails. The problem is that I know that I have about ~40 MBs of emails with attachments in my inbox right now and downloading them using the GPRS connection via the mobile phone would take ages. So I guess right now I'll just not check my work emails. I can still access my personal emails, though.
Oh well, I guess I could sleep a bit more...
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Strategy & the Real World
Ok, I threatened that I was going to write more about these subjects. And considering that I just came home from the pub and am in a provocative enough mood, I might as well type up whatever I please. At least I can just delete this afterwards (assuming that archive.org doesn't get around to indexing this first...).
So... Strategy? Just like decision-making, strategy is everywhere. You follow a certain strategy in regards to how you invest your money, whether or not it's deliberate or emerging in nature. Some people are more conscious about strategy than others. I find that I'm personally a person who has multiple alternative plans plotted out at any specific situation and then I intuitively make decisions according to the strategy that seems the most likely to bare fruit in whatever timeframe I deem fit for the strategy at hand.
This is all fine and dandy for school. My progress at school is essentially only limited by my personal capabilities and my time. In essence, I'm the bottleneck. If something goes wrong, it's because of me or because of my other undertakings. So the responsibility is clear. Work goes into this same category, although interpersonal dependence takes a slight role in this environment. If some task depends on some other person, you can't finish your task until the other person has finished his. To make things simple. More complex situations, of course, occur. Personal life is a completely different animal. Superficially it seems similar to the work environment; the common denominator is that both involve people. The fundamental difference, however, is that in the work life you can assume that people will act more or less opportunistically and attempt to maximize their own personal profit. The Economic Man (homo economicus) succeeds in this environment, thanks to his rationality and capabilities to objectively analyze situations and calculate the optimal strategies for each situation (according to his own perceptions).
Personal, inter-personal (non-work) relationships are in fact the difficult part. This reveals the true nature of people. There's quite possibly no such thing as homo economicus. Rational people fail when faced with apparent chaos and irrationality. Why do stock markets crash? Yeah, the same reason at hand there, too... Inter-personal relationships, as mentioned, are the difficult thing. You can apply whatever schools of strategy you want there, but the fundamental flaw that's still present is that (at least in my opinion) it's not a game. The same laws do not entirely apply. Foreign concepts (such as altruism) emerge in these situations. Granted, some clever economist will of course find a way to model altruism into the equation, but the thing, from my point of view, is that people act more randomly in this world. Chaos and gut instinct (uneducated intuition) reign supreme here. I greatly fear that I have made a truely stupid mistake.
So... Strategy? Just like decision-making, strategy is everywhere. You follow a certain strategy in regards to how you invest your money, whether or not it's deliberate or emerging in nature. Some people are more conscious about strategy than others. I find that I'm personally a person who has multiple alternative plans plotted out at any specific situation and then I intuitively make decisions according to the strategy that seems the most likely to bare fruit in whatever timeframe I deem fit for the strategy at hand.
This is all fine and dandy for school. My progress at school is essentially only limited by my personal capabilities and my time. In essence, I'm the bottleneck. If something goes wrong, it's because of me or because of my other undertakings. So the responsibility is clear. Work goes into this same category, although interpersonal dependence takes a slight role in this environment. If some task depends on some other person, you can't finish your task until the other person has finished his. To make things simple. More complex situations, of course, occur. Personal life is a completely different animal. Superficially it seems similar to the work environment; the common denominator is that both involve people. The fundamental difference, however, is that in the work life you can assume that people will act more or less opportunistically and attempt to maximize their own personal profit. The Economic Man (homo economicus) succeeds in this environment, thanks to his rationality and capabilities to objectively analyze situations and calculate the optimal strategies for each situation (according to his own perceptions).
Personal, inter-personal (non-work) relationships are in fact the difficult part. This reveals the true nature of people. There's quite possibly no such thing as homo economicus. Rational people fail when faced with apparent chaos and irrationality. Why do stock markets crash? Yeah, the same reason at hand there, too... Inter-personal relationships, as mentioned, are the difficult thing. You can apply whatever schools of strategy you want there, but the fundamental flaw that's still present is that (at least in my opinion) it's not a game. The same laws do not entirely apply. Foreign concepts (such as altruism) emerge in these situations. Granted, some clever economist will of course find a way to model altruism into the equation, but the thing, from my point of view, is that people act more randomly in this world. Chaos and gut instinct (uneducated intuition) reign supreme here. I greatly fear that I have made a truely stupid mistake.
Monday, June 11, 2007
Decisions
Relating to a project at work which has been recently starting, I've been looking a bit into decision analysis and stuff like that. How to take a formal approach towards analyzing and making decisions, so that when the day is done you'll still have something hard to justify your decisions with. It's an interesting topic, although I have to admit that I'm firmly in the Intuition camp. And in very many ways, decision making is applicable to all aspects of life. Sort of like strategy. And recently these two fields have provided interesting lenses with which to view the real world with; I'm still not entirely convinced that they're good tools for maintaining your personal life with, but oh well.
As already mentioned, I'm a firm believer in intuition (heck, just look at the MBTI test results...). I prefer expert opinions over rigorous analytical frameworks. Granted, calculating things is useful most of the time, but you just have to keep yourself in check when approaching issues that way. I think the problem is that if you calculate things, the calculations never end and you're always missing that little bit of fuzzy logic, that anomaly that might slightly weigh the results in the right direction. And at some point you just have to make a decision and in the end the person making the decision will have to make a call in regards to whether or not he believes the numbers. And there's intuition again.
I guess I have to admit that I'm becoming slightly old. You see, I acknowledge completely that both formal frameworks for analyzing decisions and intuition are needed. One without the other won't work. Some wise men said something about the problem with being absolute. The world isn't black or white. It's in fact neither, since it's all grey. I know it's such a cliché, but personally I very often succumb to treating it as merely black and white and completely fail to acknowledge the subtle shades of grey. And there are millions and millions of shades of grey. And because of that, even though I don't believe in formal models as much as I believe in intuition, I'm still going to try to fit in some decision analysis into my degree as well as tackle some projects at work.
I could go on about strategy, as I've recently witnessed first-hand some truely terrifying applications of it and I'm not certain that in all circumstances the world is such a nice place when viewed through the lens of strategy. But I think I'll blog about that later, if at all.
As already mentioned, I'm a firm believer in intuition (heck, just look at the MBTI test results...). I prefer expert opinions over rigorous analytical frameworks. Granted, calculating things is useful most of the time, but you just have to keep yourself in check when approaching issues that way. I think the problem is that if you calculate things, the calculations never end and you're always missing that little bit of fuzzy logic, that anomaly that might slightly weigh the results in the right direction. And at some point you just have to make a decision and in the end the person making the decision will have to make a call in regards to whether or not he believes the numbers. And there's intuition again.
I guess I have to admit that I'm becoming slightly old. You see, I acknowledge completely that both formal frameworks for analyzing decisions and intuition are needed. One without the other won't work. Some wise men said something about the problem with being absolute. The world isn't black or white. It's in fact neither, since it's all grey. I know it's such a cliché, but personally I very often succumb to treating it as merely black and white and completely fail to acknowledge the subtle shades of grey. And there are millions and millions of shades of grey. And because of that, even though I don't believe in formal models as much as I believe in intuition, I'm still going to try to fit in some decision analysis into my degree as well as tackle some projects at work.
I could go on about strategy, as I've recently witnessed first-hand some truely terrifying applications of it and I'm not certain that in all circumstances the world is such a nice place when viewed through the lens of strategy. But I think I'll blog about that later, if at all.
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