## Sunday, September 05, 2010

### Tales from a Long Weekend

1. Stats prof has not yet officially assigned the next homework yet, but I've had some free time, so I've been working on it. He hasn't yet covered the material in class, but based on the quality of the lectures I'm pretty sure that I would have to learn it from the book anyway. I'm totally stuck on one part of one problem. It's about a linear model of the form $y = \beta_0 + \beta_1 x + \beta_2 x$, and there are 30 observations used to fit the model. We aren't given any of the points $(x_1, x_2, y)$ used to fit the model, nor are we explicitly given the matrix $X$ (whose rows are of the form 1 x_{1i} x_{2i}) but we are given the matrices $X'X$, $(X'X)^{-1}$, $X'y$, $\hat{\beta}$, and $y'y$. I need to find the sum of the squares of the differences between the actual $y$ values and the $y$ values predicted by the model. I tried to go to office hours on Friday, but he wasn't there.

2. Dyed my hair again. Before it was a fading orange. A sort of University of Texas orange.

3. Work continues on the kitchen. While, yes, there is plastic hanging between the kitchen doorway and the diningroom, work is also being done in the dining room, the den, and the hall. More than half the house is involved in this project. The doorway from the kitchen is eight feet wide and eight feet tall. Just imagine how much dust was created when wall was removed to turn a normal-sized doorway into a giant doorway.

4. The dust is really depressing. I am a lazy neat-freak. I can not make myself mop enough to keep up with the dust. Roomba is helpless against this very fine dust. The dust is mixed with soot from the walls (house used to be heated with coal), so it is also a dirty dust.

5. Apparently Labor Day is a big deal around here? I am laying low and avoiding the hoopla.

6. Finally did enough yard work so that the house no longer looks like rental property in foreclosure.

7. One thing that is different about setting up a desktop computer than a laptop is that there is no pressure to get everything installed before taking it out somewhere. There is zero chance that I'm going to bring my iMac somewhere and discover that I forgot to install something essential. This is a problem because it means that I've had the computer for weeks now and still haven't finished installing everything that I want to have on it. In some ways I see this foreshadowing the unpacking process once the kitchen is remodeled.