January 2005 Archives

The title for this entry could just have easily been Calm before the storm as our schedule starts to pile on -- the weeks closing out 2004 were a brief reprieve from the classes, the work, and the driving of last semester. As classes start up again tonight this semester promises more of the same and a lot of something new.

I'm still working as Director of the Informatics Lab at Ball State University this semester (a part-time position), and I'm again taking 6 credit hours of coursework on the way towards my masters. What's new is that I've resigned from my full-time position as Director of Assessment with Whitley County and am going to be consulting -- possibly in some educational projects, but mostly -- with a friend of mine whose business deals in real estate. As such, I start my Approved Real Estate Salesperson Course tomorrow night at IPFW, Tuesday's and Thursday's lasting through March 10th.

The great part of this is that I will be around a bit more during the day with Jill and the kids [but gone at least three nights a week...] as I work towards the degree and certification and try and keep up enough project work to pay the bills. Believe me: this is as an exciting, scary, faith-building time in my professional life as I have ever had.

And it all starts in 45 minutes, as I make the pilgrimage to Muncie.

You've probably noticed that the comments are now off by default on most entries. This is a reaction to the huge amount of comment spam that we were receiving. Having open comments allows for people other than Jill and I to have a voice on the website, but that just doesn't mean that people marketing Casinos and drugs should have that voice. So, they're off.

Thanks to everyone that commented over the years -- we appreciate the support from you! Feel free to continue to comment via email to jill -or- krjordan -at- 348north.com.

I was reading an article on Slashdot this morning about the hiring process at Google and some readers chimed in with other experiences wherein an interviewee was required to work through a "deep-think" type question during the interview. An example was pirates, quoted below.

five pirates have 100 gold coins. they have to divide up the loot. in order of seniority (suppose pirate 5 is most senior, pirate 1 is least senior), the most senior pirate proposes a distribution of the loot. they vote and if at least 50% accept the proposal, the loot is divided as proposed. otherwise the most senior pirate is executed, and they start over again with the next senior pirate. what solution does the most senior pirate propose? assume they are very intelligent and extremely greedy (and that they would prefer not to die).

The answer to this -- and many examples of other questions of this type -- are available on the techinterview.org website.

As some of you know, Jill and I took part in different mock investment strategies during 2004 just playing out what we might do with $10,000 to invest. The good news is that neither of us lost any of our cold, hard, fake cash.

Jill took the "I'm-too-busy-to-worry-about-this" investment approach which I dabbled in a bit myself. It follows that after no buys or sells, she still is sitting on her original $10,000. A lot of high-paid portfolio managers do a lot worse than that!

As time permitted, I moved in and out of several positions over the year with the likes of Silicon Graphics (SGI), Disney (DIS), JetBlue (JBLU), Anthem (ATH), MWave (MWAV), Sun Microsystems (SUNW), and Wesco Financial (WSC). I finish the year with only one holding and the rest in cash -- Wesco closed on December 31 at $393 per share, valuing that position at $4,716 (an unrealized profit of $132). Together with the cash that's a balance of $12,120.55, +$2,120.55 profit on the year.

I'll hold off patting myself on the back until I can do this with real money, but it has been interesting. I think as time allows I will continue to "trade" into 2005 and see what happens.

We've been busy over the past month, and now you can enjoy some of the pictures! Take a look at the six new albums.

The Christmas Holiday went off well, complete with family, presents, travel and snow. Shelbyville actually had 20 inches of snow to give us our white winter mornings.

Hope each of you had a great Christmas, and are enjoying this first day of the New Year.

UPDATE: I also added our 2004 family mugshots to the site so that you can compare us to years gone by. The change in Addi and Hale are obvious and awesome!