Everything so far has exceeded my expectations. I still believe my job is as good a fit for me as I can imagine. I got my team assignment on Wednesday — I’m trading congestion revenue rights in California. I’ll have to explain what that is and why I want to do it in a future post. Living across the street from work has already proven useful and I like my coworkers, especially the group of 8 others who started with me.

Better yet, there’s a gorgeous national park 15 minutes from my door. I heard that the Potomac is nasty and polluted, and it probably is near the city, but if you head straight north from Vienna you hit Great Falls National Park which is gorgeous even by Utah/Yosemite/Glacier NP standards, and has some very good outdoor rock climbing options (and I picked a good time of year to move in). Ten more minutes further north hits Earth Treks Rockville, a solid indoor climbing gym open until 10pm, with a good community of members. Also, a good friend of mine and hardcore mountain biker has some downhill trails in the backyard of his family’s house out in the country… but real biking may have to wait till spring when I can afford a new bike.

Now I’m on the patio of a bar on Dupont Circle in perfect weather (enjoy it while it lasts!) finishing up computer errands (opening a bank account) and getting ready to meet a mix of new work friends and new/old college friends at a ridiculous happy hour in Adams Morgan — 50¢ draft miller light starting 5pm, price rising 50¢/hr. Then to amazing-looking Ethiopian food at Meskerem, and choosing from a number of bars/clubs/house parties to hit afterwards.

Apparently this is the “Right Coast” because “best” doesn’t rhyme with “east.” Could be worse :)

Until then, I’m having some fun and I’m posting it here rather than sending a mass email. Hopefully I don’t have a stalker.

June 14 Graduation. Family stuff
June 15 kicked out of Stanford housing, bumming around NorCal for the week (hike, climb, beach)
June 19-21ish climbing in the Sierras (Charlotte Dome?)
June 23ish visit LA
June 25ish visit Flagstaff, AZ and help out on my cousin’s ranch
Early July head up to Park City (stop in Moab! I know, it’ll be hot, but I love Moab), mountain bike
July 15-31 lead a 2-week backpacking trip with NOLS. It’s hard to convey how excited I am for this.
Aug 1-2 family time near Mt Hood.
Aug 3 hike Mt St Helens?
Aug 4ish-14ish kayak the San Juan Islands
Aug 16 – 31 drive to DC via Boulder, St. Louis, maybe Chicago, maybe NYC.
9/9/09 – work!

Let me know if you can join in!
“Those were the best days of my life…”

It’s highly relevant to what I’ll be doing over the next few years and to probably 30% of my conversations with people these days — energy policy. I think everyone would benefit from staring at its many views for 20 minutes. Especially people who think wind and solar (or hydro!) will save us sometime soon.

I wish I’d built it.

It kills me not to know this
but I’ve all but just forgotten
what the color of her eyes were
and her scars or how she got them

…

One thousand miles away
there’s nothing left to say
but so much left
that I don’t know

-Rise Against

When I made the decision to move to DC next year — accepting my dream job — I’d been at Stanford for a summer, much of which was spent traveling, and a fall, which was so busy that I rarely socialized. At the time, my only thought of friends was, “I’m sure I’ll be able to meet people and have fun in DC.”

I had no idea what my relationships here would mean to me come graduation.

There’s still time…

After taking some finance courses from accounting through derivatives pricing it seems like the same thing holds in finance. Mathematical models of finance are all well and good (actually, most have crippling limitations that a lot of people choose to ignore), but when it comes to practicing finance, what you really need to understand are transaction costs, taxes, and regulation.

As a concrete example, check out this part of an April speech by the current Director at our SEC who regulates mutual funds, including money market funds. Money market funds try to keep their price (like a stock price) at a constant $1.00 per share. When the fund earns money, investors either get a cash payout or more shares and the value of each share stays the same. They try really hard never to lose money. However, the fund’s price obviously fluctuates a little as the bonds and other investments they hold change. They’re not required to tell you this until the change is greater than 0.5% (i.e. the value becomes closer to $1.01 or $.99 than to $1.00).

Andrew J. Donohue, Director, Division of Investment Management, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (April 2, 2009):

[T]his lack of sensitivity to volatility affords investors, particularly large investors, the opportunity to take advantage of the fund and its other shareholders. An example might be helpful here. Assume a money market fund has a loss on investments of 0.40% so that its NAV is now $0.9960, which is $1.00 and within the one-half percent deviation permitted under current rules. If investors who own 25% of the fund redeem at $1.00, the NAV is now $0.9947 or $0.99 per share. Sophisticated investors know this dynamic and will redeem their shares in the fund quickly, leaving the loss for the remaining shareholders. What had been a loss of 40 cents on $100.00 for remaining shareholders is now $1.00 on $100.00 because they did not abandon the fund quickly enough. I question whether this is appropriate and whether it increases the possibility and probability of a run on a money fund.

… As with the previous example, an investor purchasing at $1.00 when the NAV was $0.996 had no way to know that he (she) was at risk of losing 1% in one day merely because of redemptions by others or other minor valuation moves.

I think it’s funny that the proposed solution to this problem is to change the target value of money market funds to $10.00 instead of $1.00. This would probably be “good enough” because if someone abusing the system could only make 0.05% (vs 0.5% currently), it usually wouldn’t be profitable after considering transaction costs. But really, are these people using computers so old that they can’t just add more decimal places to $1.00? My guess is there’s some rule that says something like “only price changes of more than 1/2 cent must be reported to investors,” and this amount happens to be 0.5% of $1 (deemed “too insensitive”) and 0.05% of $10 (deemed “acceptable”).

Regulation is goofy.

Everywhere on the internet seemed to have this song horribly wrong, so I wrote it up. I added some explanations to the slang for fun.

Akon (TI):
(yeah)
konvict music (ok)
grand hustle movement (you know what this is partna)
hey (ain’t no games here)
[southern smoke]

we get it poppin on sight (hey)
i’m sure you already know my stilo (haters know what it is nigga)
see i’ve never been a busta just a true hustla
my squad is lethal (what’s happenin’ nigga?)
you come with the right price (hey)
i can make you look bigger than nino (hey come and holla at me)
just put a gun in your hand
and let you ride with the man (hey hey)
cuz i’m a motherfuckin hero (hey hey hey hey)
[southern smoke]
in my town

TI:
just make sure that he know, get it clear like pellegrino
from a c-note to a kilo i’m a neighborhood hero
they be talkin blow but they ain’t never seen a key though
ain’t never chopped a ‘63 down to triple-zero
hate on me so much but i’m what you wanna be though
might’a went triple-platinum ye ain’t never been a G though
i keep the 50 with me, tote it round like it legal
fly like a seagull, ridin’ round with three girl
so keep it pimpin with me, you know you don’t wanna see those
well if so, we can meet up, you get ya ass beat up
the reason people honor me is the reason why you under me
you don’t believe we run the streets well come and see nigga

Akon:
we get it poppin on sight (hey)
i’m sure you already know my stilo (you already know bout me)
see i’ve never been a busta just a true hustla
my squad is lethal (P-S-C what’s happenin’ nigga?)
you come with the right price
i can make you look bigger than nino (10 for 10 nigga)
just put a gun in your hand (hey)
and let you ride with the man
cuz i’m a motherfuckin hero (come holla at me)
[southern smoke]

TI:
i’m the man it’s apparent even when i’m runnin errands
gotta be the mclaren or what i’m wearin got’em starin
bitches i share’em if they in my harem
they ain’t gettin high, well i don’t go near’em
nigga wanna die, tell’em buck I dare’em
i ain’t gonna spare’em homey i’ma gonna tear’em
apart from his heart to his ass swear to god
give a fuck about his partner, give a damn about a charge
i’ll take it too far, pull up wherever you are
empty clips at your new car, make sure you dead and zoom off
admit it you lost, probly cuz shorty too raw
now you flawed
hey tell’em how we do dawg

Akon:
we get it poppin on sight (ok)
i’m sure you already know my stilo (boy you already know bout me)
see i’ve never been a busta just a true hustla (ain’t no secret)
my squad is lethal (tell’em akon we been doin this shit)
you come with the right price (holla at me)
i can make you look bigger than nino (got 10 for 10 that’s a hard one)
just put a gun in your hand
and let you ride with the man (hey)
cuz i’m a motherfuckin hero (west side money makin)
[southern smoke]

i got a box of ammo that i rarely use
9 millimeter that i shine like shoes
hope the day’ll never come where a nigger have to
let it go on a busta, and hope it ain’t you
cuz I be on deck on the grind like sex
takin over local city streets like feds
breakin down every nickel every dime every brick
down to the last dollar, i mean every bit

we get it poppin on sight
i’m sure you already know my stilo
see i’ve never been a busta just a true hustla
my squad is lethal
you come with the right price
i can make you look bigger than nino
just put a gun in your hand
and let you ride with the man
cuz i’m a motherfuckin hero

we get it poppin on sight (hey)
i’m sure you already know my stilo (you already know bout me)
see i’ve never been a busta just a true hustla
my squad is lethal (P-S-C what’s happenin’ nigga?)
you come with the right price
i can make you look bigger than nino (10 for 10 nigga)
just put a gun in your hand (hey)
and let you ride with the man
cuz i’m a motherfuckin hero (come holla at me)
[southern smoke]

This isn’t T.I.’s best rapping or Akon’s best singing, and the song is completely unoriginal, but I think I like it just for the line “cuz I’m a motherfuckin hero.”

A question I remember wondering a lot growing up as a math major (and hearing repeatedly from others) is “What the heck do managers actually do?” One of my readings for class provides the best answer I’ve heard, and not only that, I think it’s a good answer.

The Manager’s Job: Folklore and Fact (PDF), by Henry Mintzberg in 1990.

In short: people think managers organize and plan things, but in practice they are information arbiters. Their formal authority gives them several important interpersonal roles, which give them unique perspective and information, which give them important decision-making responsibilities. A key insight is that most of the information that flows through managers is verbal (for a few reasons, read the article) and is very difficult to organize in a formal/written system (which is what we’d need to do to replace them with robots or otherwise outsource them).

Also worth noting: managers in the real world are highly reactive and rarely able to actually plan or reflect: “superficiality… is an occupational hazard of the manager’s job.”

Maybe it’s just a personality difference, but I tried to explain: It won’t bother me if, in the next few years, I don’t become good at playing guitar. I probably won’t. But it’ll be fun to try to learn.

The trip to Costa Rica was what I wanted it to be. More action-packed stories to come…

When and why do you use Google, and what does it get you?

To find a home page of a site you’re already aware of — I don’t remember the exact URL of John Gruber’s markdown site, but I can find it in two clicks with a Google search. It’s not long before Mac and Windows will allow you to do this with one click (50% better). We all use Google for this today, but who really needs Google for this?

To find a person. The first few results are always Facebook, LinkedIn, WhitePages, and ZoomInfo. I can search those sites myself, thank you. Again, Google is only serving to save me 1 or 2 clicks today. Their service is easily replaceable by better-integrated interfaces like QuickSilver.

To research a technical topic. Today the only useful result is Wikipedia, and its content is becoming more and more incomplete and unprofessional (un-useful) every day. This used to be a core strength of web search engines — one of the original missing features of the internet, which they solved — but they all seem to have lost it, partly because experts don’t make webpages anymore and partly because the search engines have abandoned any desire to focus on serving a technical audience. I think the only audience that matters online in the long term is the technical audience, because today’s techies define tomorrow’s mass-market. Google Scholar and Google Search are opposite poles (both useless) of the service we need. This is technically feasible but completely un-implemented right now as far as I know, though I know a startup looking at business services. As an aside, I think PageRank is responsible for this mess.

To look up something in pop culture. At their current pace, this is probably the only place where Google’s general search will still be relevant in 5 years, which is sad for Google because MS, Time Warner, News Corp, and anyone else can do this just as well. This “lowest common denominator” search is not distinguished, interesting, or profitable. The only explanation for why Google has gone this way is relentless pursuit of growth (measured indiscriminately). Let’s hope they can spin out enough interesting side-products to remain somewhere near the cutting edge (or hope not, depending on who you root for).

Google Search is dead. Google will make plenty of money from organizing others’ advertisements for a while to come. “Internet Portal” has always been one of the most fickle and unreliable businesses to stake a claim in, and this is effectively where Google Search is. Now that I think about it I’m convinced that in the next 5 years “Portal/Search” belongs to the operating system developers (Apple, MS), and not internet companies — because operating systems own the first click, and that’s all it ought to take to find anything. Google won’t have a say unless they can get Chrome to replace the Finder/Explorer, which they want to, but I don’t think they can do that soon enough. Perhaps Facebook could get a niche foothold in if they can broaden their service enough to include static information as well as social info.

But reading mad me realize there’s a bunch of books I want to read. Just in case anyone ever feels like buying me something (and partly to keep track for myself), I used Amazon to make a wish list.

Check it out: good things to buy Tom.