In Ottawa

I decided to do a day trip with some of my classmates up to Ottawa on Sunday. They haven't been there before and it was the first chance most of us had to get out of Kingston. It was another fun day and I had a good time showing people around. It was also a good chance to get together with some friends that I haven't seen in a long time. After checking out Parliament Hill, we had brunch at a restaurant called the Courtyard in the downtown market area...good spot to eat!

Have a look at the pictures here.

Finally some sailing!

Part of my role as the fitness liaison for the class is to organize about two events per month. A lot of people were keen on sailing. There's a rental place in Kingston called Ahoy Rentals. The rent out bicycles, canoes, and kayaks. They also rent out sailboats and can even setup sailing excursions around the 1000 islands near Kingston. I managed to rent a Tanzer 26 and set up three 2hr sails for about 15 people in the class. One of the guys in the class, Dave, has sailed for a long time and used to be a sailing instructor. He helped me out for the day in teaching people points of sail and sailing the boat.

It turned out to be a really fun day and the weather cooperated. We had a steady gust of around 10 knots and the big boat handled fairly well. After about 9 hours out on the water, I was pretty beat. The sun has a way of tiring you out.

Here are a couple pictures from the day:





You can check out the rest of the pictures here.

MBA: End of Module 2

Well, two exams in one week marked the end of module 2: Statistics and Microeconomics. It was a start contrast in teaching styles by two different professors. Prof. McGill made a boring topic like statistics and made it seem interesting by continually referring to the real business applications of statistical methods. Prof. McHale, on the other hand, made the interesting topic of economics and made it seem really boring. You can't expect every professor to be great at classroom management, but I was really disappointed with how the economics class turned out.

I meant to post a blog last week, but I spent the weekend doing multiple regressions of housing data for North America. It was an interesting assignment. We had to use the regression technique to forecast real estate investment for the first two financial quarters of 2008.

The mad rush to finish the assignment in time was followed by a study session for the exam in the middle of the week. There wasn't any time to relax because we had to get to studying for the economics exam on Friday.

It was a pretty crazy week and I'm glad that it's over. No doubt, there's more craziness to come.