Greeks Remark

As quoted in the remarks of the MFE exam:

Greeks
Greeks are partial derivatives of the option price formula. “The actual formulas
for the Greeks appear in Appendix 12.B” (McDonald 2006, p. 382). As the author
seemed to want to avoid using calculus in the first half of his book, the definitions given
on pages 382 and 383 are numerical approximations. We need to be careful about the
units in which changes are measured. For example, it is stated on page 383 that “[t]heta
(θ) measures the change in the option price when there is a decrease in the time to
maturity of 1 day.” However, the mathematical definition for theta is the partial
derivative of the option price with respect to t. In the Black-Scholes option-pricing
formula, the variable t is (usually) in years. Thus, the definition on page 383 differs from
the partial-derivative definition by a factor of 365.

lol.

Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No.2 Mvt. 1

As you all probably know from my MSN display name spamming, I am currently working on an ambitious project to play Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2! There are 30-something pages and I have only gone through 6 pages. I will leave it at that.

MFE Exam

So far, the results are satisfactory. I have read over the important chapters multiple times and I am pretty sure I should be able to pass. Nonetheless, I still need to study, because the questions could have unique twists combining topics covering different areas in different chapters of the textbook... which is annoying. Already, I found several questions in the problem set where none of the information were in the textbook or that some of the topics involved were in different chapters than the "necessary" chapters indicated on their study note. I am able to get Monday and Tuesday off, so that would be invaluable. I have a feeling I still need to read up on a few problems and solutions before I am able to attempt any real hands-on questions.

I am quite satisfied that I am able to understand chapter 20 and chapter 24 though! Although mathematically challenging, it had been fun to decipher the concepts behind them, particularly, Ito's Lemma and Brownian Motion.

However, I am scared at the extensive coverage of the material. They even had a question that involved an equation I did not expect to memorize... that is, the Vasicek Model formula. In addition to that, I assume that I would need to also memorize the Cox-Ingersoll-Ross Model formula. But at least the Black-Derman-Toy Model is more friendly...

After I broke the machine...

Someone fixed the machine, duh. Something was funky with the RAID-0 configuration linking the 3 drives together in a disk group (2 disk groups = 6 total drives). He randomly pulled drives out of the bay and randomly played around with the RAID configuration utility and then it worked again!

I decided to redo the conversion with the same source and target. Results? I broke it again, bweeeee ^_^

... anyways, to have this occur 2/2 really tells something about the cause and effect of the conversion. People are now getting excited as to what happened during the conversion. They continuously claim that the software component in no way interferes with the BIOS and stuff, but something weird is definitely going on here. One of my co-workers told me how once, a bug appeared only on the hour. The developers constantly closed it as "unreproducible" and no one knew what was going on. When the hour is hit, some event log thing crashed and it took them almost forever to realize the reproduction steps!

Anyhow, I decided to switch sources and do a conversion with a SLES9 SP4. If this failed, it would be quite a story. Luckily (or unfortunately), the conversion completed successfully. Tomorrow, I am going to try a conversion with SLES10 SP0 to determine whether this is only a SLES10 problem. Nonetheless, this issue is quite high in the priority, so hopefully I can get it done soon.

Today, I broke a server!

Today, I broke a 8 64-bit Intel-Xeon processor that has 3 TB of harddrive space linked by 6 SCSI 500-gb hard drives in 2 RAID-0 configurations of 1.5 TB each. It also has 16 gb of memory and it was a Dell 2950 with DRAC.

So previously, there was a bug in which if there was a physical harddrive that has over 1TB of HD space, then all Linux server migrations (which we call conversions) would fail because of an integer overflow during the discovery of the target's specifications (it was funny to see that my hard drives were detected to have -652.2 GB of HD space). Hence, no one had ever performed such Linux conversions. The bug was fixed recently, so initially, I was planning to do a SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 8 64-bit conversion to it (was thinking of using GA or SP4), but we only supported AMD64 targets. Since Intel is non-Athlon, there is no support... although it is ridiculous that we support the Intel architecture for newer SLESes.

I decided to just try a SLES10 SP2 conversion to see if it works (also decided to charter this as part of my Linux 64-bit testing). Both the SLES10 SP2 and SLES8 were located Unfortunately, halfway through the conversion, while restarting the machine, the boot failed. I restarted the computer, but I was not able to get into BIOS, PXE boot, utility mode, nor configuration setup. I could only get into the BIOS / configuration utilities of the SCSI controller and the network card. After discovering the hard drives, the white cursor would blink indefinitely, waiting for a ghastly hand to press the button to give birth, only to die again.

Firstly, though unlikely, one of my thoughts was that the conversion software messed around with some of the BIOS or low level settings, but I was told that the conversion is software-sided, so it should not affect them. One of my co-workers told me that it was merely an unfortunate event of the computer dying at the wrong time.

The Da Vinci Code

I was offended by the book's many presumptions about the audience concerning the Bible. I have heard of the Holy Grail, but I do not know what is it. I did not know who Mary Magdalene was and what the Knights Templar was as well. Yet the book claimed that this is knowledge "almost everyone in the world" would know.

Furthermore, the book depicted a mathematician as a person who gets really really REALLY excited about phi.................................... Is that how literature authors think about mathematicians: socially enthusiastic about the subject, laughs at math jokes even I don't get..., make a fool of themselves?

Dan Brown noted in an interview that 99% of the facts in the story were historically accurate, but yet, the majority of historians have agreed that Priory of Sion was merely a prank made up by some random person who thought this would be interesting (Dan Brown noted in the first page that the Priory of Sion indeed existed). However, seeing how the book implicated the power of the Church, I think he ultimately wanted to implicate that the Church influenced most the historians, courts (the random person confessed in court that it was all a prank), and significant figures to release false information about the existance of the Priory of Sion. However, to distinguish my line between conspiracy theorists, I retain my doubts but also am cautious about the mainstream opinion. In short, I am indifferent about the truth, since it does not affect me at all!

From the above criticism, it appears that I depise the book, but this was not the case! It was really entertaining to read (the reader must take into consideration that I have not had much experience with mystery books)!

The book took a rather unexpected twist (I was expecting a twist, but later on, I thought that the twist did not exist, so I no longer expected the twist...) near the end and I was shocked at the moment the author wanted me to be shocked at, quite effectively, too! The storyline fitted in so perfectly that it was very scary.

Another ingenious element was the double entendres. Seriously, they were so incredible that I applauded every time the "2nd meaning" unveiled. Although I must say, the final double entendre was the best one of all =) The last few chapters were extremely climatic and it did not slow down even to the end.

Surprisingly, I must say that the main characters did not have much character development, but the side characters had an unbalancing amount development. The historian had the moral dilemma between truth and humanity, and the cryptologist appeared to have degraded as time went on despite this book celebrating feminity. In addition, the amount of masculinity was rather shocking; I expected more from one of the central themes that the characters revolved around. Meanwhile, the albino monk, the bishop, and the chief officer fell from the heights of power to regret.

I give this 8.2 stars out of 10!

Rashomon (1950)

The storyline was interesting, but unfortunately, lacking movie experience, I was not able to "get" the climax to feel the wave. I walked in there thinking that the final storyline or some twist would wrap the whole thing up, but there was no twist; there were just lies. Even after the ending, what really happened was up for the audience to think. I have my opinions that links perfectly to the theme and the storyline, but I am confused about the... dagger. Because I felt stupid after reading what was the climax, I do not feel that I have the right to rate this movie. However, it provokes lots of thinking if you pause between the storylines!

Again, the theme is self-preservation even after death and reading up the history of the movie, it appears that Westerners "thought" that this was a good representation of the Japanese movie theatre, so they endorsed it. It was very well-received by Westerners, but not by the Japanese, who heavily crticized it for a lack of the environment that Japanese movies have and for the shocking theme of self-preservation. Despite the Japanese government suggesting an alternative representative to the Westerners, their efforts were futile, but I am unsure of the aftereffects of the movie's success to the Japanese.

The movie caused something known as the Rashomon effect: retelling of a story from different perspectives that offer a different twist every time. It influenced the production of many movies, including the recent Vantage Point (which ironically influenced me to watch Rashomon).