Peter’s Blog V2

Exactly four days from four years ago, I took my first step onto the actuarial career track.  Today, I’m done.

Memory is still vivid of the warm, sunny morning on September 21, 2004.  Hesitating to study for GRE and applying to PhD programs, I printed out the application for SOA Course 1 from my office in McBryde, hiked all the way across campus to the Post Office on Main, and sent it out via express because it was literally two days before the registration deadline.  Still unhappy about the $13.65 shipping charge, but had I second guessed myself then, I would’ve never started on the exam track and wouldn’t be here today.

At the time, I didn’t care much about either PhD or FSA.  All I had in mind was to move to New York to be close to Hong.  The career path became crystal clear as I found out how good math programs in NYC had unaffordably high academic requirements, and then my classmate Westin mentioned “there are a lot of actuarial jobs in New York.”  Bang!  No more math research.  No more software development.  I became an actuarial student, then an ASA, then a “real” actuary.  A guy could be a very simple-minded animal, huh?

Done!  What a beautiful word to finally say!  Four years (minus four days) of torture seemed way way way too long, and this breaking free feeling isn’t something money can buy.  Not sure how some of my “classmates” were able to endure the pain for 20 years… but hey, they got their letters before retirement.  Big thumbs up for the amazing persistency.

Here we go… FSA as of September 17, 2008!

Getting my diploma from the SOA president Bruce Schobel:

Great support team (and a whole lot of drinkwares on the table):

A lot of actuaries:

The FAC was a very humbling experience… here’s me with the two youngest FSAs among the 183 - Wendy and Itt.  At ages 23 and 24, they made everyone else re-think about being smart:

And the following section will show you how (fob) actuaries have fun:

DONE!

On all those nights when people around the globe stayed up to watch the Beijing Olympics games, I lost sleep making the Beijing Olympics mascots - the Fuwas:

Even though the project started concurrently with the Opening Ceremony, it wasn’t complete until after the game was over and city workers sweeped every street in Beijing 5 more times.  If I had known this to be 60+ hour time commitment, I might not have gotten it started.  Sigh.  Yeah.  I’m really slow when it comes to paper crafts.

It was a fun memorable process, though, and it showed what true fan (nerd) I was.  I also believe that these five dolls go well with the five Olympics Coke cans:

Just for the heck of it, the following is my documentation of the whole process that took a month and one day:

Want your own?  Get it here!

Via

For three years, coworkers have made fun of me for not having a TV… and using that to explain why I (have time to study and) pass my exams like nobody else.

Well, that’s changing as I got myself an HD digital antenna to hook up to the HDTV card in my new computer.

This is awesome.  With some minor setup and Windows Media Center, I started tuning into free digital TV!  Now I got 3 channels of Republican National Convention and 2 Spanish channels!

Sarah Palin in HD!  Wooow!  :-p

Where are my cartoons???

Google has released its own Web browser today (at noon PDT), and I installed it on both my work and home computers within 15 minutes.  I had not been so eager to try a newly released software since Internet Explorer 4, and I actually didn’t learn about this one until a few hours before its release.

Introducing Google Chrome, the potential next big thing in your life that Google has control over.  It looks like a cleaner and sleeker version of FireFox.  It’s supposed to be technologically “next generation” compared to all existing browsers with its multi-processor model.  And it’s open source (not that it means a lot to a non-programmer like myself).  And it’s got a very educational and geeky comic introducing its background and technical structure.

The comic was pretty long, but showed a very refreshing concept for web browser design.  I’m not enough of a techie to know if it’s actually as good as it sounds, but it does sound to make a lot of sense.  It’s the most unique comic I’ve ever read, and you won’t appreciate it if you’re a non-geek.

From the few forums I visited between 2pm and 3pm today, Google Chrome seems to get a lot of resistence from current FireFox users.  FireFox is a great browser, but I never used it much due to Microsoft’s traction (of if you prefer, inertia).  Started 11 years ago on IE3, which soon upgraded to IE4, beat down Netscape, and dominated the market.  The active desktop and dynamic content stuff was so awesome that no teenage tech-savvy boy could resist.  IE continued with the lead through V5, until FireFox came to take back the web.  Yet, well, folks like me decided to stick with something from the big monopoly that they could trust (or simply, were more used to).

But somehow when Chrome came about, which was not that many hours ago, I abandoned my old friend Microsoft.  Something from Google must be trust worthy, since they’re dominating the Internet just like how Microsoft dominated the PC software market.  After all, if I’m gonna spend most of my online experience with Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps, etc, might as well use a client-side software that’s guaranteed to be compatible with the system, right?  That was totally my reasoning for sticking with IE, too.