Even My Car Sucks, and I Love Micro.

Someone broke my window to steal my crappy stereo. The window cost about four times more to replace than the stereo was worth to me. Now I guess I have a decent reason to get a new stereo, and a damn car alarm.

Damn cars.



In other news, I am totally absorbed by my Micro final. I can't get enough of this stuff. I could do these proofs all day, every day. They're just hard enough to make me really think, but not so hard that I get so frustrated that I quit. Not only that, but it's in a completely sealed environment, where everything is perfectly defined. Macro is really sloppy by comparison. Those guys like to get some kind of results, perfection be damned. Micro is all about exactness and elegance.

This is the kind of stuff that makes it all the BS worthwhile. Just thought I'd stop and savor for a second... OK, back to work!

Bike Expo and Sanoodi

Sanoodi seems like the rightful heir to Gmap-Pedometer and Routeslip.com. Finally a decent route-tracking app! Hope they make a ton of money off of it.

In other news, I went to the Chicago Bike Expo. It was a little underwhelming, but the high point is that I got an autographed hat from Toyota-United pro and New Zealand Olympic rider Heath Blackgrove!! Sweet! The cameras really do add 10 pounds--it's hard to believe how skinny these guys are until you see them in person.

I won!

Hot damn! Blogger extraordinaire Smithers sponsored a contest to guess his maximum weight over the course of a winter (which I may have suggested, I think?), and I had faith in the big fella that he'd keep it under control.

My strategy was to bid lower than everyone else and thereby catch the lower tail of the distribution. It didn't quite work, but I got lucky anyway, and managed to sneak in between some close calls!

It turns out the joke's on me, though. Smithers ended at 187.4, and I'm 187.0 now. That's 7 pounds over where I was at his time last year, and I've got to really struggle to get back into shape.

I'm really excited, though, to see what kind of shwag Smithers will dig up. The dude is deep in the industry, so who knows what kind of awesome junk he may have laying around his basement?!


In other news, econometrics sucks. If you were thinking about going to graduate school for economics, think again. Life is too short.