What a freakin night, the 6 hour assignment of doom.

Forecasting is.... incredibly challenging. I don't know what I would do if I didn't have Michael's help. He saved my ass yet again on the homework.

I'll back up. As you guys know I've been working on this assignment little by little since Monday as well as try to keep up on my finance. I got about 3/4 of the homework done last night and thought I'd have no problem finishing it today. Unfortunately my forecasting homework took me 6 hours, two of which were spent correcting my code for the first problem. Like every other time I try to do anything in R, I hit a wall and wonder what the hell I should do.

This morning I woke up early to meet with Wassell and get some help on the code but he wasn't in his office when I got there.

Colby met me upstairs in the library to work on the assignment around 7:30. He had made plans with Rylan and this other guy who's got a really good grasp of the material to work on the material as well but they were MIA. It was about the point that Colby got caught up to me that I realized we were in the exact same boat and needed help. I started calling people I knew from the class and nobody picked up, except Michael G. (and you can just imagine me thinking, THANK. GOD......) He told us that he and Jessie were actually working on the assignment in Shaw and we could meet them there. Yes! Salvation! 

So here we all are in the Shaw computer lab around 8:20 and it closes at 10'. Michael pretty much instructed us step by step how to do it on an overhead and I followed along. This program is so painfully confusing to me, I'm trying to grasp how all of this syntax works the best that I can but there's so much more to it. I have a decent understanding of statistical models but choosing the right ones and making good inferences on them is an art. One that is not easily attained in 5 weeks or however long I've been in this quarter....

Wow it's getting really late.... The GOOD news is the assignment is now done (Michael and Colby actually came over after we got booted from the lab at 10 and worked for another 2 hours on it). Michael has a ton of people bugging him all the time about helping him with R so he's going to start having weekly R sessions to go through the homework.

Michael's got such an obnoxiously huge ego from all of this. I can see why, he's the center of a lot of positive attention for being so good at this and starting graduate school next year. That's fine, I'm proud of him. I'm just tired of hearing how great he is because I have to hear about it every day. He knows that he's smarter than everyone else, and that he's helping me survive this class, and thus pretty much has a free pass to say whatever he wants and be as condescending as humanly possible.

I've been listening to so much Pantera lately.

At least tomorrow's Friday. Another week I've survived. Next week is the test week for block 2, I've got my finance test on Monday that I'll be studying for a lot this weekend and Carbaugh's test on Wednesday which I will also be studying for ahead of time because I've got the next horrible forecasting assignment due Wednesday as well.

There's also one big assignment on the backburner which is my Econ 406 persuasive paper about why I believe Japan should continue to raise taxes and cut spending.

It will never be harder than this in my life. I just have to keep pushing forward. I have no choice, the time is going to go by anyway and I can't let fear keep me from doing what needs to be accomplished.


peace.