Labor Day Saturday

So I am sitting in St. Marks Coffee Shop because someone is snooping in my condo to see if they want to buy it.... keep you fingers crossed!!! This is the second person to check it out and I already have another visit scheduled for tomorrow as well. I would love to see a bidding war netting me thousands but I am not gonna hold my breath.

I have been bangin away at some Mathematical Economics this afternoon. This is a course based on math theory (to date algebra and calculus) and application of math to economics to deduce "real answers" about markets and their trends. For instance, if I thought a particlular commodity like let say Lattes was underpriced and had an opportunity to buy a bunch at this price I could deduce a equilibrium price based on current conditions to see what kind of discount I would be getting them at, or least give me an idea of what kind of margin I would have to work with when it came to unloading my mass of Lattes. I could also build a forecast for the market on Lattes based on specified parameters that would tell me what factors would more greatly affect the Latte market. Actually thats a little bit later in the course but you get the idea.

Another cool thing we are doing which is kind of related to what I was doing for work, or could be related, are the optimization problems we are solving. In the Operations Research Methods class we are using a functionality in Excel called "Solver". This has alogorithms for helping optimize. example: you get $x profit for selling a truck that takes 'y' time to build and 'z' time to paint; you get $a profit for selling a car that takes 'b' time to build and 'c' time to paint. You only have a build shop that is open for 'm' hours and a paint shop open for 'n' hours a day. Maximize the profit if all variables are given (a,x,b,c,y,z,m,n 200,250,4,5,5,6,10,9 respectively). Solver to the rescue...cool stuff. We are just trying to build the linear programming foundation right now, but the # variables should increase.

Anyway, I have been here to long and need to get off my butt before I lose feeling in it. (I have to sit on a book because the bench is too low to type, lord knows it isn't because I am too short.)

Hello Josh Grahmann!!!! Got your email and ya'll be safe south of the border. Watch out for the Hurricanes and I hear they have some good bass fishing down there, take a rod.