Already over my head.

THis is the second week of Grad school, and already I feel stressed with it. Oy, bad omen. It is my fault, I am taking 5 classes when I should only take three. My challenge is that I my interest is studying the underlying patterns within many disciplines, especially those which attempt to understand macro-phenomenon in a quanitative manner. I feel this puts me in a unique position to bring different professions together, but at the same time it hinders me from gaining a focus to my studies. Instead of narrowing, I still want to broaden. Right now I am in the Geography grad program. From this I hope to enhance my GIS and remote sensing capabilities. At the same time I want to gain a better grasp of statistical and economic modeling tools, computer programming, and math. I have finally cancelled out the idea that I want to eventually become a civil water engineer, which is good, but I still have no idea what I want to end up doing. The only anchor of focus is that I want to learn the tools (ie software) that are usefull for effective Geog, stat, and econ modeling and are attractive to employers.

My classes right now are:

Remote Sensing:
Hopefully this will be a good class to sharpen and knowledge of the subject and get experience using the software associated with applying it. I worry though that it will be too academic and not hands on enouph

Digital Image Processing:
This Class seems like it will be a more hands on version of the previous class. The good thing is each class will be using different software so I will get experience in both.

SAS Programming:
I am really excited to learn SAS. To clarify, SAS is statistical software tool that is very robust, and therefore complicated and hard to learn. It has its own language. Taking this will really help me at my work. I am able to edit programms that others have done, but after this class I should be able to make my own.

Math for Economics:
So far this is the most labour intensive class. I am taking it because I eventually want to take Environmental and Natural Rescource Modeling, which I tried but found that it was over my head.

Calculus 2:
This isn't a grad level class, but nevertheless it will require a lot of work. My reason for taking it. Math is the universal language of the physical universe, it will be usefull in whatever I do, or so
I'm told.

Mexico - Guanajuato

One amazing thing about this city is that the ground is made up of flat stones, this combined with the historical sites and multicolored houses make it quite a tourist spot.

More pictures of our Mexico trip - Guadalara

These are some pictures from Guadalajara's Centro downtown. These are the only pictures of the city I took because frankly, from what I saw, the rest of the city was fairly ugly.

Book Review

Author: Eric D. Beinhocker
Title: "The Origin of Wealth"
Rating: 10/10

I highly highly recommend this book for anyone that is interested in evolutionary thinking as it applies to business and economics. Many books on this subject attempt to make loose analagies between evolutionary theory and economics, that while interesting, provide little real value. This book draws from research on the cutting edge of computer modeling, evolutionary psychology, business theory etc. to show how the profession of economics must go profound changes if it is to be relevant to people in this century. More specifically he argues that The field of economics must stop thinking of the economy as a set of equations that will eventually reach equilibrium, only to be knocked out again by some outside force which will bring things to a new equilibrium. Instead, he argues, it must be seen as a complex adaptive system that is always changing and evolving endogenously, or by its own internal nature.

My description is very vague, but trust me, this book is good, and incredibly well researched.

Boulder and Mexico

Here Jarnah and I are sitting at a cute little plaza in Guanajuato.. we had food here a couple of times in our stay.
Here we are in Puerto Vallarta. It is nice, but overrated.
Sjona and I in Guanajuato, Mexico. This city was biig in silver and metals and the Spanish came here and took over the place. There are many churches and hitoric places. It is a very colorful city with multicolored houses. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Below are some photos of our previous visit to Colorado to celebrate my grandmothers 78th birthday. I havn't seen this many of my family members in one place for at least 7 years. My grandmother is amazing. A regular matriarch, she had six kids, and it is still she that glues the extended family together.



















My cousins and I. They are half Persian. Mitra is very outgoing, on our first night she managed to pull all of the tired family members on the floor to dance. Bijan is a very sweet guy....














Uncles, aunts, cousins...etc not a very good picture but the only group picture.







Vacationing was fun, but inevitably it has to come to an end. Grad school starts tomorrow, it will be a very hard semester, but I am looking forward to it....