the GREs

I took the GREs today (Graduate Record Exams, basically the SATs for grad school). It was sort of an entertaining practice run: I was going to apply for an MS program in computer science, but then discovered that I can take as many graduate classes at Stanford as I like, and up to 18 of those credits (at 3 credits/class) can transfer to a master's program whenever I feel like applying and making the commitment. Good things about this:

1. If you're actually enrolled, you have 5 years to complete the master's. That's just barely possible at one course per quarter (the most I could manage while working); accumulating 6 quarters' worth of credits before enrolling makes that 5 years a lot more feasible.
2. Good grades in actual Stanford graduate classes will weigh much more heavily on a Stanford application than the GREs or anything else.

The GREs were paid for, and I haven't really had time or inclination to really feel prepared, so I figured I should just take them anyway, as a baseline experience. Remember, these are the new GREs, as they just revised the test and deployed the new version in August.

I'm glad I studied what little bit I did, because they are sneaky bastards, those test authors. It's not hard in the usual sense. Just...sneaky.

It's a computerized test, which is actually pretty cool. I imagine I tanked the Analytical Writing section, because I thought it was 30 minutes for both writing questions, and it turned out it was 30 minutes each, so my first answer is probably unacceptably short.

The Verbal stuff seemed pretty easy (shocking!). The Quantitative was harder, but I found that I kept flashing on the answers as I went through, especially as time started to run out. I'm sure it helped that I was taking them as a dry run, with nothing actually at stake. I felt like eventually I was getting a bit into the swing of how those problems are constructed, although for many of them I definitely did not resolve them the elegant way. (One guess which is faster and more reliable: me staring and trying to figure out the clever shortcut, or me typing 5 different things into the on-screen calculator to see which one matches my answer.)

For the Quantitative and Verbal sections, they give you your score at the end. Unfortunately, the scores for the new revision won't be available until November-ish, so they just give you an estimate of how you would have scored on the old test. Memory is hazy on which was which, but it said "720-800" for (I think) the Verbal, and "750-800" for the Quantitative. Doesn't seem too shabby on an 800 scale, and for not studying.

How's that look for a grad school application? The Stanford CS department says:

While there is no minimum requirement for GRE scores, a strong application would include percentiles in the high 90s for the Ph.D. program and scores in the 90th percentile for the MS program.

Okay, so what are the percentiles? Wikipedia's chart agrees with this test prep site:

Scaled score	Verbal Reasoning %	Quantitative Reasoning %
800	99	94
780	99	89
760	99	84
740	99	80
720	98	75
700	97	70
680	96	66
660	94	61

Holy crap! 800 on the Quantitative, a perfect score, is only 94th percentile. That means that 6% of everyone who took the old GRE got a perfect score. 94th percentile for Verbal is all the way down at 660.

No wonder they revised it: that right there is a test that is very seriously out of balance.

(A corollary is that any range they gave me for Quantitative is pretty meaningless, being a range that starts at 84th percentile. Imagine if, on a standard American grade scale, your teacher said "You got somewhere between a B and an A+": no shit, Sherlock, I knew that when I walked out of the exam. The Verbal range, by comparison, says that I would have gotten a 98th percentile and up.)

At any rate, I'm glad I took them. While tricky, they weren't as scary as they might have been, and I still have some of my gift for standardized testing. I have no idea what my actual scores might be, and I'm looking forward to finding out.

[EDIT: If you're curious, it's now adaptive by section rather than by question, so you can jump around and skip questions and go back within each Verbal and Quantitative section, which wasn't possible before.]

changing things that weren't working

On Tuesday I decided to pull the offer on the house. Last week a comparable house--smaller, but 3-bedroom and a bigger lot--went on sale for 13% below our offer price. And a couple other houses are listed for 20-25% below. I was expecting a price drop, but not that steep, and I'd hoped it would at least come over a period of years, instead of losing money right at the start. Given the amount of my savings going in (a 20% down payment around here is a ludicrous amount of money), I decided this was all a bad idea.

Because it was a short sale and the seller's bank took forever to do anything, we weren't even in escrow yet after more than 2 months, so I don't lose any money: the deposit check hasn't been cashed. (Or, if anyone tried to cash it, it bounced.) Backing out was just a matter of telling my realtor, who told the seller's agent.

Tuesday night we went to look at a pretty cool condo for rent, and once the owner confirms she has a rental place to move into (she's moving to another town so her daughter can use the better schools), we'll sign the lease on it.

I was also supposed to take the GRE this Saturday, but realized I wasn't going to be ready, so I pushed it out to September.

To recap, on Tuesday, I:

1. Avoided throwing my life savings into a bad investment.
2. Canceled an enormous standardized test I wasn't ready for.
3. Found a place to live where we'll have a bedroom! And a couch!

I feel much better.

oof so busy

No house yet. The sellers accepted the offer on June 6, but as you'd expect, we're still waiting on their bank (it's a short sale). Still looking around at other places, but there isn't anything, really: lenders are only dribbling out the foreclosures and short sales, to keep prices from cratering, and combined with the local tech boom, prices are only inching down.

I'm flying to Western New York State this weekend for my grandmother's memorial service. It will be nice to see everyone and be supportive however I can. I expect miserable weather, although on the bright side there seems to be some hope of thunderstorms.

I studied a little bit for the GRE! Have I taken practice tests yet? Nope! Do I need to? Yes! When will I do that? Dunno!

Work is going smoothly. It's pretty slow in the office. Also pretty warm. The Ops office completely lacked ventilation until last night: one of our guys sent email (possibly profanity-laden) to a few people explaining that he wasn't coming into the office until they fixed the AC like they've been promising to since before I started there. They installed a couple vents in our office, but it was a little hard to tell how well it worked because one of the AC units for the entire building broke, so it was generally a bit warm. Our floor-standing AC unit seemed to keep us in better shape than the rest of the office, though.

For reference, the guy who complained has a weather station on his desk, and it was 86F in the office, with no air movement, when I gave up and went home yesterday.

My toes seem to be doing well. Anna had the bright idea that my awesome kick scooter might have been the problem, and sadly I think she was right. But, I can run again. Or I would be able to, if I weren't drastically out of shape and my limbs didn't feel like lead. I'm working on it.

Perhaps in lieu of studying for the GRE, I've been reading a lot. I finished Dracula! It's really, really good. I'm not entirely clear on how deep it is in the "literary" sense, as opposed to just being exquisitely constructed storytelling. I'm going to read some background essays for help: there are various claims of themes involving Irish-ness (did you know Bram Stoker was Irish? I didn't, until a few weeks ago) or the power/danger of female sexuality, or whatever. Philistine that I am, I failed to notice any themes that persisted through the book, despite my years of education. But I often think any fiction more complicated than Steinbeck is wasted on me.

(Speaking of nice things being waste on me, I tasted a $300 bottle of red wine last week. It had the exact same metallic-dirt taste as reasonably-priced red wine, except this was worse because it was a Bordeaux, so it was kind of watery as well. Yum!)

I highly recommend Dracula, because it's probably not quite what you expect. Set aside your previous vampire-fiction experiences: I got to the end and thought "Wow, that would make a horrible movie." Plus it's just fun to read.

Sunday felt like my first Father's Day. J spent the day with his dad, but Anna took me out to dinner.

Anna refers to me as a "bonus parent," and J and I are growing closer with time spent together. So I get to do things like tell him how to dump the nasty cough medicine on the back of his tongue so he tastes it less, and he occasionally steals my shoes like he steals Anna's. We have the occasional history lesson: for example, if you're building a Lego base on the moon a thousand years ago, there were no horses because they were brought later by the Spanish.

This is nuts. When did I ever find time to watch TV?

aaaaaaand pause.

*phew*

Okay! New job! Lots of fun stuff to learn, lots of desire to charge ahead and be productive and prove myself and learn more stuff and holy crap.

So, yeah. Writing hasn't been on the list. My brain has been tired.

Work is fun, though! One thing no one tells you when you get to the senior level is that they stop giving you stuff to do. It's my responsibility to go around asking questions, come up with a list of things that need fixing, and usually my responsibility to prioritize the list. (It has to be a list of things nobody wants to or can fix, of course, because otherwise, why am I here?) I check that list against what my bosses think is important, but mostly I'm self-directed.

Right now, I'm working with Team X. Team X's lead is a PhD, which rarely bodes well for code quality. It's extremely interesting to start diving into this system and see what makes me (and the inevitable comparison, my Danger colleagues) different in how we create software. The particular thing I'm looking at, for example, has no meaningful logging. There's no way to tell how many requests it's handling each minute, let alone of what kind. It seizes up every so often (1-8 times/day) and gets killed and restarted. There's talk of completely replacing it, but that doesn't really make any sense until you know what it's already doing--how many requests it has to handle, for example.

Team X is also on their first iteration of a development methodology called Scrum, so they've actually set goals for a 2-week period and they're a bit anxious about reaching them. So far I seem to be making the right choices about how to work with them, and I'm being reasonably efficient, considering I just learned the programming language a few weeks ago, and I know nothing about modern systems administration. I start doing something, discover it's difficult or tedious, then divert off to writing a tool to make it less tedious.

Anyway, there's months of work to do on this project alone. I feel like I should be doing more amazing things, more quickly; but I always feel that way, so I'm ignoring it.

I am sinking a lot of energy into ramping up, and I don't like how that takes me away from Anna and J, both physically and emotionally. We'll work it out, and it should settle down with time.

I did some more research on grad school, since a Stanford MSCS graduate at work pointed out that they have a continuing education thing you can do if your employer is a member (which is very cheap). It's the only way to do a master's part-time there, and it gets you a discount, so Stanford would only be 150% as much as Santa Clara, instead of 190%.

Anna: So, Stanford is twice as expensive.

Chris: Yep.

Anna: Is the Stanford name worth twice as much?

Chris: Yeah, it really is.

Anna: Yep.

As I was telling my team lead, the sad thing is that some amount of the Stanford coursework is likely to be online, so I suspect Santa Clara may actually be a better education. But the prestige and networking of Stanford really is worth the investment, even for my offbeat ambition of wanting to teach computer science.

I guess next up is the GREs. Because I don't already have enough going on.