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I had studied for about fourteen hours yesterday and attempts at sleep brought a pulse of around 120 and symptoms akin to food poisoning. After many fitful hours of sleep I woke up and tried to study more but about two hours out from the exam and 15 flash cards still unmastered I snapped. More knowledge was not going to make its way into my head so I did what any reasonable person would do and added goggly eyes and a wooden mustache to my giant microphone and took a picture of it. This is what insanity looks like.

Madness

I arrived a few minutes early to the exam center and began as soon as I was allowed to. The questions seemed to focus on topics about which I felt competent with the exception of one problem where I repeatedly got an answer that was off from the available answers by a factor 1,000,000. I only wholesale guessed on a single problem and felt hesitant about 2 more. 30 minutes were still on the clock when I hit the “submit” button and quickly a screen popped up indicating a tentative pass mark.

I was happy and nearly skipped back to where my car was parked, until I found out that my car wasn’t there. I called Mike to indicate I’d be late and that my car may have been stolen (or at least that was my dominant fear as my camera bag was in it). Mike said I should check that it hadn’t been towed and a quick call to the Philadelphia Parking Authority revealed that I had stayed in my spot 12 minutes too long and owed them $225. Next time I take Septa.

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I’ve put about two hundred hours into studying over the last forty five days. I’ve been a bit of a hermit and I thank my friends for being understanding. On the math side, I can do certain calculations and leave out steps with the answer still being correct. This would be neater if not for the fact that I sometimes look at my notes and am unsure what steps I left out. I see regions of integration without knowing quite what my logic is but my answers seem to be correct. Yesterday I solved a multiple choice problem by repeatedly mis-solving the question and eliminating those answers leaving the right one. These are the milestones of competency that I should have been looking at before I threw myself into failure the previous two times I took the exam.

Today was my last day of solid studying before my exam and I did 110 sample problems, the equivalent of four exams worth. I consumed 85 pieces of scrap paper and ate only about 1200 calories in food. Fear as a weight loss plan.

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I was a dick today. I didn’t want to be, and I could have avoided it, but I wanted to both attend Anthony Celona’s wedding and get in another four or five hours of studying so I brought a stack of flash cards to a wedding. I went through them before during and after the ceremony and while people at my table were making small talk. I was able to cut the number of cards whose answer I didn’t know reflexively from around 120 to less than 50 so I consider it a productive wedding.

Afterward, Joe and I were talking and he mentioned he had to explain this to someone. “What’s wrong with Terry, he seems agitated and distorted. I just looked at them and said ‘math, that’s what’s wrong’.” Thank you, Joe.

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Boss: Good job on those large-format prints. I’m rewarding you by letting you set up the two new workstations up front.
Me: Do you know what you just said?
Boss: Well, you like doing hardware work, so I figure it’d be a good reward.
Me: I don’t like it, I just prefer it. You essentially said “your reward for work is more work”. Rewards are things like attaboys, chocolates, a lunch out, or a promotion not more work. You were going to have me do it anyway, no?
Boss: Yes.
Me: Exactly, that’s like saying your reward for completing the first of three drawings is doing the second.
Boss: Will you drop this if I get John to bring in more caramel creams?
Me: Yes, yes I will.

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There are some people at work that have repeatedly proven to make my job easier. Sometimes this has been guiding me through a paperwork thicket and other times it’s just been keeping me abreast of changes coming down the pike that would influence how I do my job. These people receive special visits from me on cheesecake days and today I made my way downstairs with two pieces of chocolate-glazed cheesecake and dropped one off at the mailroom. My next target was in a cubicle farm downstairs and as I approached her desk her boss popped over to talk to her. I quickly dodged down another row not wanting him to catch me dropping off cheesecake. Why? To avoid this:

Him: What’s the cheesecake for?
Me: To thank her.
Him: For what?
Me: I did something crazy dangerous in the lab and rather than writing me up for it she helped hold the ladder while I changed the lightbulb one-handed over the mixer without safety glasses on.

I did a few circles around area and rechecked every few minutes to see if he had gone. The cube dwellers started to get suspicious so I had to walk around another wing. Finally he left and I dropped off the cheesecake. She was grateful and I later checked my pedometer logs to find that I had walked 2/3rds of a mile to avoid her boss.

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The last time I took Exam P in 2009 there were sections I simply wrote off as things I didn’t feel bad not knowing. Learning to calculate Jacobian transformations would take many hours and the odds of that being a question seemed low so I simply skipped it after I found it didn’t come to me quickly. This time around, I re-attempted the topics that I had failed at or skipped before and found again them to be inscrutable. Even worse, topics I had been recently doing well on had lost their quick ease.

I did a quick calculation about the number of topics this wall applied to and what portion of the exam they made up figured that I’d need to gain competency in three of the seven to have a good chance of passing my next sitting in a little over a week. I wasn’t going to be able to dodge this one so I talked to my friend Youtube about multivariate transformations and somehow a slightly awkward guy using Sharpies on a presentation board succeeded where two teachers, two exam prep guides, and a lot of wikipedia had failed. Two to go.

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I met The Avengers movie with some trepidation as this would be a chance for several of my childhood loves to be destroyed at once. The X-Men had made it through movie transformation largely unscathed and I could only hope the same would happen here.

Notes:

  • The entire second act seems unnecessary. Hawkeye shows that a single arrow can bring down the SHIELD heliship and Loki’s machinations to just release the Hulk seemed awfully contrived.
  • The writers forgot that Captain America’s superpower is that he’s always right. This is commandment in comics up there with “when Batman, Superman, or Wonder Woman appears it means shit got serious”.
  • The alien invaders seemed very… defeatable. Their alien jet skis seemed to go down to small arms fire to the point where a group of Montana militiamen could have stopped them.
  • The movie was shot as a comic. Each scene was a cell and jump cuts were the norm.

I enjoyed the movie except for how contrived the middle third appeared to be. I wonder how Thanatos will make as an enemy. “What’s his MO?” “Wants to bang his sister, Death, and wants to impress her by killing all things.” Seems hard to make that family-friendly.

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Coworker: Terry, I have an admission to make.
Me: Yes?
Coworker: I tried your cheesecake yesterday and felt guilty after a bite so I threw it out.
Me: That’s ok.
Coworker: I’m not done yet.
Me: Oh.
Coworker: It was really good, so I took it back out again, and had some.
Me: Was your trashcan at least clean?
Coworker: Yes, but I’m still not done. I did that four more times.

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After convincing six people do the Rock n’ Roll Half-Marathon with me from the Marketing and R&D groups, I spread my search pattern to include other areas including those that had previously rejected me applying to them. In one of these cases, it was the hiring manager for the position:

Me: Hey, can I ask you something?
Hiring Manager: Sure. I’m sorry we couldn’t hire you for the IMQA position but…
Me: That’s fine.
Hiring Manager: What do you mean?
Me: I understand that there are reasons why you couldn’t hire me.
Hiring Manager: Then what did you want to talk to me about?
Me: I wanted to know if you’d run a half marathon.
Hiring Manager: I’m sorry, I can’t do that either.

Break my heart again.