I'm Back...

Greeting!

I opened this blogspot account several years ago, after being pressured to blog by my friends at Saint Cross College, Oxford. I wrote a single one-sentence post and then gave up my career as a blogger.

Being unemployed, I decided to make a serious effort to write this blog. I'm hoping to documents some of the things that occupy my mind. For instance, I will be writing quite a bit about CUDA, a new parallel programming tool from NVidia. CUDA lets you use the processors in your graphics card to perform mathematical operations really, really quickly (like 250x faster than the best CPU). I'll also be writing about speech recognition, or more accurately talking about speech recognition (I'm using the free speech recognition tool in Windows Vista to type all of these blog posts, due to a minor case of carpal tunnel syndrome).

I tend to talk a lot about technology, especially technology that relates to the fields of finance and actuarial science. I'm sort of a cross between an actuary, a statistician, and a database administrator. I'm currently working part time on a masters degree in Data Mining, while also taking the actuarial exams and trying to get my Microsoft certifications.

I've been working on the Netflix Prize competition for the past two years, and I will be using this blogger to document some of my progress. So far there is no progress, mostly because I've been focusing on completely novel ideas, all of which simply haven't worked. Thousands of really smart people have tried every existing Data Mining algorithm, as well as every possible combination of existing Data Mining algorithms. So I feel fairly certain that the only way to win the Netflix Prize is to develop a completely new algorithm.

On a personal note, I've eaten Filet Mignon every day for the past week. I decided to try the no carbs diet again, and thanks to the recession Filet Mignon is less than $5.00 a pound. I bought an 8 pound tenderloin, sliced it into 1 pound chunks, and tossed it in the freezer. There is nothing in the world more succulent than thin-sliced beef tenderloin fried in a garlic butter sauce. My weight was 250 when I started the diet a week ago, and now it's down to 245. I know it's all water weight, but it's encouraging nonetheless.

That's all for now, thanks for reading

The Greek Actuary Guy