The Stress of Finals

The stress of finals are mounting up. It is almost the end of first Period. Next week, I have four finals.

Now I clearly remember the happiest moment of my college life. The moment I left the amphi where my last final took place. The, good old, infamous Meyerson B1 @ Penn.

I have been studying stats for the last two days. When I was just feeling confident about myself in statistics, I just tried to do some old exams. Man I SUCK! All the exercises I have done, all of the simple small questions mean nothing. I give up. I am hoping the Z-Curve will help me.

Apart from the exam stress, nothing much is going on here.

Life sucks, then you die.
emre

E911 to the Extreme!

Singapore has a very high-tech taxi dispatch system. When you call for a taxi, an automated system answers and tells you where you are. Then, it asks if you'd like a taxi at that address now. All the taxicabs have mini computers with touch screens so they can accept jobs. When you call the dispacher, they tell you the taxi number that is coming to pick you up within 1 minute.

Here is the best part! It even gives you the address where you are even if you are calling from your mobile phone. It does not ask if you'd like a cab to your billing addess, rather it tells you where you are. WOW! Talk about big brother watching!

In the US, 911 tried a similar thing to locate those calling from their cell phones by putting mini GPS receivers on the phones and transmitting the coordinates when one calls 911 from a mobile number. Maybe they should come here and learn the art of triangulation!

BTW: Never call 911 and hangup the phone when the operator responds. A cop will be visiting your place as soon as he finishes his doughnut.


ciao
emre the geek

Back-pack City: Bangkok

Over the weekend I went to Bangkok with the glorious Barbarians (INSEAD Rugby Team.)

Here are some impressions Bangkok made:

- Dirt cheap! A nice guest-house/hotel clean bed, clean shower etc $10/night (per person, double occupancy)
- Dirty (dirtier than Singapore but not as much as other developing countries)
- Every "white" (not local) person has a back-pack.
- The high-ways are really high (elevated.) Very impressive infrastructure of highways built on top of the regular roads.
- Everything is open to price negotiation
- All the major bars close at 1am, but a number of late-night places are always available.
- Almost all of the monk's have a cell phone or a digital camera. Whatever happened to saying "No" to material possessions...

ciao
emre

Official INSEAD Poker Champion

I am the official Poker champion among those INSEAD students who are in Singapore. There was a hold'em tournament on Saturday evening with S$50 (approx US$ 30) entry fee. There were about 20 entrants, and I WON!!! It was kinda tough. Coming into the final table of 6, I had the least amount of chips and no luck. I guess the no-luck factor helped me a lot, because I played very conservatively, except for those one or two obvious easy to steal pots.

During the final head-to-head, the other guy, Jani, had more than 3 times the chips I had. That is, I think, where my newly acquired skills from playing lots of online tournaments showed. Ohh! I also forgot to mention my Chris Moneymaker approach: Most of the time, I wore my sunglasses with polarized lenses :-) I spent most of my night counting others' chips while bowing my head.

Anyway, bottom line, I won! And like every nouveau-riche, went out with my friends and paid almost for all the drinks until I ran out of my profits! (I guess I were at the 2nd stage of drunkenness where one is the richest person on earth. My friends thought it was very cool of me buying them drinks. The way I would like to think: I did good community service.)

still making progress at poker

emre

Singapore Weather Report

Today I saw something very funny during the Weather report.

During a weather report, you know how they usually show the whole country or a continent map and then put sunshine logos and rainy clouds and sometimes even snow flakes on different locations on that map depending on the conditions.

Singapore is an island no larger than New York City. Driving from one end to another in very heavy traffic maybe takes no longer than 30 minutes. (BTW: if the whole traffic is moving @ 30 mph, that is considered a BIG traffic JAM here.)

Today's weather report had a map of Singapore and had (I am not exaggerating) 5 sunshine images on it. One on each end and another in the middle! And they were all showing the same temparature (24 C). I thought it was hilarous and was about to fall off my chair!

I guess the government of Singapore is doing all they to make their tiny island look important and not different than any other country. Sometimes one has to envy the guts it takes to make such stupid decisions trying to deceive people.

Ciao
Emre

Getting better at Poker

Beat more people this time and won more with investing $0 (zero, zilch, nada). Now I have some real $$$s that did not come from my own pocket that I can gamble with at $0.05 tables.
This time I will try one of those tournaments where you have to pay $5 or so to enter, and I'll see if I can make more money. Who knows, I might be the next world poker tour champion!

After all, I might have something cooler in my resume.


Following are the tournament deatils:

Tournament Name: $50 Freeroll - 147
Total Players: 308
Tournament Completed: 2005/02/08 07:04:32
Tournament Results:
-------------------------------------
1st: player: emre - $14 prize awarded
2nd: player: Deltaman - $9 prize awarded
3rd: player: JingoIsMe - $7 prize awarded
4th: player: chadak - $5 prize awarded
5th: player: pokerman6667 - $4 prize awarded
6th: player: allin56 - $3 prize awarded
7th: player: Pennington_10 - $3 prize awarded
8th: player: Scurvydogs - $2 prize awarded
9th: player: dlight1 - $2 prize awarded
10th: player: Chri$urfer - $1 prize awarded

emre

Another day @ School :-)

Today's special was wake-boarding. It is pretty easy. I got up in my second try and after a bit of struggling, I became pretty confident. Soon after I started doing jumps, and started taking of from one wake behind the boat and land on the other one. X-Games here I come!!!

Once I find an easy way to post pictures on this site, I will start including pictures in my blog.

Have I mentioned before that I am actually quite happy to be in Singapore rather than in France during winter. Those students at the Fontainebleau (near Paris) campus are freezing their asses of, as they are buried in knee-deep snow. I am sure they have nothing else to do other than studying. Therefore, they may be pulling the curve up. I only hope the curve for the courses are not derived from scores in both campuses.

Did you know? (Same birthday probability)

Did you know that in a group of 23 people, having two people with the same birthday (only day and month, and not the year) is more than 50%.

In a group of 60 people or more the probability is greater than 99%.

Not so intuitive huh?

For more details check this link out: http://people.bath.ac.uk/clp20/thebirthdayproblem.html
The graph at the end summarizes it.

You learn something new every day :-)

Ciao
Emre

I finally am a world class Poker player!

Hanging out with obsessive compulsive Asian gamblers finally paid off :-)

I beat 191 random people from around the world!!!

Tournament Name: $10 Freeroll - 28
Total Prize Pool: $0
Total Players: 191
Tournament Cost: $0 / $0
Tournament Results:
-------------------------------------
1st: player: emre - $5 prize awarded
2nd: player: CSU_Jr - $3 prize awarded
3rd: player: SPaCKLeR - $2 prize awarded

Since I invested $0 to join the tournament and won $5, I have an infinite return on my investment ! (Business school talk!)

After winning my $5, I then went to a regular table with $0.05/$0.10 stakes and lost all my winnings in about 25 minutes. Ohh well. I will have to win another tournament to get going. I simply refuse to put any money from my own pocket into this ugly gambling habit.

The way I look at this, I got my first world class win. More winnings and stories to come. You never know. I may end up at the World Poker Tour by winning some of these tournaments.

EMRE