Christmas Sauce-omeness part I

Christmas is coming up, and of course that comes with a bunch of annoying stuff that people will complain about. BUT I happen to actually enjoy it...a lot. I find that it brings out a lot of the awesomeness that's in people, and I've already found a couple of examples of this, so here is part one of a new saga: Christmas Sauce-omeness.


Claire's parents are deaf and she decided to surprise them by signing the lyrics to the songs at her school event. Not only is it really cool that she decided to do this on her own, but also she is rocking it. I love it.

Spanish Playlist

I decided to make a Spanish playlist for my girlfriend Barbara. The idea was to expose her to a few different genres that are not as easy to find in the english-speaking music world, but also to share with her some of the songs that I grew up listening to. I also included some spanish covers of relatively well-known English songs that I think are somewhat well done.

She seemed to like it quite a bit, and honestly I am pretty happy with how it ended up so I figured why not share it here? Of course you can listen to any of these on youtube.

Song	Artist	Comments
De Música Ligera	Soda Stereo
El Baile de los que Sobran	Los Prisioneros
Pensando en Tí	Mago de Oz	Cover of "Dust in the Wind", by Kansas.
Juégale, Apuéstale	Aterciopelados	Cover of "Play the Game", by Queen.
La Culpable	Aterciopelados	Sample of "Música Llanera", from the East of Colombia.
Te Lo Pido Por Favor	Jaguares
La Vuelta al Mundo	Calle 13
Dar es Dar	Fito Paez
Me Voy	Julieta Venegas
El Testamento	Rafael Escalona	Sample of "Vallenato", from the coasts of Colombia. The right version (performed by Carlos Vives) is hard to find, so here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvHpRplXz00
Carito	Carlos Vives
El Hombre Divertido	Wilfrido Vargas	Sample of "Merengue".
Rebelión	Joe Arroyo	Sample of "Salsa".
Tarde (sin daños a terceros)	Ricardo Arjona
Ella y Él	Ricardo Arjona

If anyone is interested I'll add some of the ones that almost made it to the list.

Customer Support experience SearsOutlet

I would like to share my experiences with customer service dealing with a case this week.

Saturday Sept 21
I made an order for a washer and a dryer, the amount ia about 1400 dollars, I have about 2500 in my account.
I chose paypal as my payment method.


Sunday Sept 22
I receive an email saying my order was canceled. The first line of the email is
"No charge will be assessed to your credit card"
I decide to go to Lowe's and buy the washer and dryer there.


Monday  Sept 23
I check my bank website and see the charge from Lowe's. There is a pending charge for the cost 1400 from sears outlet
which will cause an overdraft in my account.

I immediately call customer service, and speak with Sheryl. She was very nice and helpful and when I asked for
an email summarizing what was done to resolve the issue she sent the following.

I did contact our online solutions department to request a release of funds be faxed to PAYPAL in your behalf. This was done by Frank. This is not a guarantee that the charges will not or have not already gone through.

At this point, satisfied with the way they are handling it. I ask if they will refund me for the overdraft fees that my bank charges me, she says she cannot commit to that but I can call if the charges go through and discuss that.


Tuesday Sept 24
I check my bank account and see that the charges have gone through, so I decide to call them, to update them on the issue and see if they need to process this differently now that the money has been transferred.

I speak to Linda who, very aggressively tells me that they've done all they can do and she can't help me. I ask her about the possible overdraft fees and she responds aggressively with "yeah, how much do we owe you?".

I am transferred to her supervisor, and then his supervisor, Star, employee number 70060. She reiterates that a fax is all they can do, that I need to speak with Paypal and with my bank in order to get my money, and that if I have any other concerns I'll have to get in touch with corporate. She cannot transfer me to corporate and says the only way to reach them is through email or a letter.
I ask her if she can send me an email saying that there is nothing she as a representative of sears outlet can do to help me, she says no.
I ask her if she can send me an email summarizing what we spoke during the call, she says she can't.
I ask her if she's going to write notes on my account about the case, she says yes.
I ask if she can send me a copy of those, she says no.
I ask her if she can write them and read them to me so I can have a record of what she has said to me, she says:
"Sir i'm not going to do that, thank you for calling customer support, have a wonderful day." She hangs up.

I sent an email to corporate describing the situation and asking that they please reach out to me.

Wednesday
I get a phone call from my bank saying they have just received a fax from sears outlet asking to remove the hold they have on my account, they say the hold was there 2 days before but by now the money is in their hands so they'll have to send the money.
I call customer service again and this time I speak to Ally, who was very nice, understanding and helpful. She says she can send a fax to Paypal and ask them to process the refund, that the best thing I can do is call Paypal and ask them to expedite the process on their end.
She calls Paypal and transfers me to them. I am directly transfered to Jo from Paypal and after she, who tells me that the money has been transferred to sears outlet and that they need to process the refund. I ask them about the fax, and she says she doesn't understand why they are sending a fax, the refund process is done by the sears account manager by going online and clicking issue refund.
I ask for and receive an email with detailed instructions on how to issue a refund.

I call sears outlet and ask to be transfered to Ally, she is busy and they say they can try to help me or have her call me when she is free. I ask to be called back.

2-3 hours later I call again, and the representative who happens to answer is Ally. I explain to her the situation and she says that unfortunately she is not in a situation where she can help anymore so she transfers the case to someone else who will definitely be able to help. The problem is that it will have to wait 24-48 hours.
I ask if I can have her word that she'll keep track of this and make sure the case is followed and I am reached on Friday. She says yes.


Friday
My girlfriend gets a call saying that there is a delivery from sears scheduled for saturday for the washer and dryer. So she tells them that sears cancelled the order and gets transfered to billing, where she asks about the status of the order, they verify that it's cancelled and state 3 times that a washer and dryer will not be delivered on saturday.


At the end of the day, since I have not received the call I was promised after the 48 hours, I decide to call again and am eventually transferred to manager Maria, with extension number 14446. She tells me that sears has a deal with Paypal and they process refunds that way, that two faxes have now been sent to Paypal and that after they receive that they can hold on to the funds for up to 30 days.
She cannot verify that Paypal has received the faxes and so I ask her to call them and find out, as well as ask why it is that they're telling me that the faxes are not the way to process the refund.
She calls them and speaks with them, then comes back and says that they want to talk to me and won't speak about the issue with her, so she is going to transfer me. I accept and and put on hold, there was not a representative there ready to speak with me, after waiting for a while, I get Gustavo, here is his email summarizing our conversation.

In order for you to have a transaction refunded since it has been completed already and the money is on the merchant's account, you will need to contact them and ask to speak with the person that manages the PayPal account. Once you do so, they need to go to the transaction detail and click issue refund bottom, then your refund will credited back into your PayPal account.
Since the money remains into their PayPal account, we do not have access to take it out from there without their authorization not even by sending any fax requesting it since it does not work like that. Its their own responsibility to refund it since they have it.

I call sears outlet again and get Julie, who is nice and patient. She says that on Tuesday, Linda transferred the case to "offline" which is the department that "processes credits", and that normally they process them in 3-6 days, but they're running a week behind so I should expect it to go through in 10-13 days.
I don't understand why I wasn't told this before, or what the point of the faxes was at all.

I asked if I could be notified when "offline" receives the case and she said she would add a note to ensure that. I asked if I could be notified daily of the status of this given that my account is overdrafted and I'm being charged daily fees. She guarantees that between now and when the issue is resolved I will get daily updates from customer support.

My intention is not to get anyone fired, the people I have talked to have very hard jobs and are not given the tools and resources they need to assist the customers they are supposed to care for.
I believe that sears outlet can provide service better than this, especially if someone with actual decision power hears about the way a situation this urgent is being handled.
A 13 day delay to refund money that they said they would not charge me is not acceptable by any standards. I am posting this in as many places as I can hoping to get the attention of the right people.

Thank you, and have a nice day.

Math Grad School

Quora is a site where people ask questions and other people answer them, they get votes and I get a weekly email with the best questions/answers according to the preferences I entered.

This is a pretty cool one that I read today, hope you enjoy it.

A lot of math grad school is reading books and papers and trying to understand what's going on. The difficulty is that reading math is not like reading a mystery thriller, and it's not even like reading a history book or a New York Times article. 

The main issue is that, by the time you get to the frontiers of math, the words to describe the concepts don't really exist yet. Communicating these ideas is a bit like trying to explain a vacuum cleaner to someone who has never seen one, except you're only allowed to use words that are four letters long or shorter.

What can you say?

"It is a tool that does suck up dust to make what you walk on in a home tidy."

That's certainly better than nothing, but it doesn't tell you everything you might want to know about a vacuum cleaner. Can you use a vacuum cleaner to clean bookshelves? Can you use a vacuum cleaner to clean a cat? Can you use a vacuum cleaner to clean the outdoors?

The authors of the papers and books are trying to communicate what they've understood as best they can under these restrictions, and it's certainly better than nothing, but if you're going to have to work with vacuum cleaners, you need to know much more.

Fortunately, math has an incredibly powerful tool that helps bridge the gap. Namely, when we come up with concepts, we also come up with very explicit symbols and notation, along with logical rules for manipulating them. It's a bit like being handed the technical specifications and diagrams for building a vacuum cleaner out of parts.

The upside is that now you (in theory) can know 100% unambiguously what a vacuum cleaner can or cannot do. The downside is that you still have no clue what the pieces are for or why they are arranged the way they are, except for the cryptic sentence, "It is a tool that does suck up dust to make what you walk on in a home tidy."

OK, so now you're a grad student, and your advisor gives you an important paper in the field to read: "A Tool that does Suck Dust." The introduction tells you that "It is a tool that does suck up dust to make what you walk on in a home tidy," and a bunch of other reasonable but vague things. The bulk of the paper is technical diagrams and descriptions of a vacuum cleaner. Then there are some references:
"How to use air flow to suck up dust."
"How to use many a coil of wire to make a fan spin very fast."
"What you get from the hole in the wall that has wire in it."

So, what do you do? Technically, you sit at your desk and think. But it's not that simple. First, you're like, lol, that title almost sounds like it could be sexual innuendo. Then you read the introduction, which pleasantly tells you what things are generally about, but is completely vague about the important details.

Then you get to the technical diagrams and are totally confused, but you work through them piece by piece. You redo many of the calculations on your own just to double check that you've really understood what's going on. Sometimes, the calculations that you redo come up with something stupid, and then you have to figure out what you've understood incorrectly, and then reread that part of the technical manual to figure things out. Except sometimes there was a typo in the paper, so that's what screwed things up for you.

After a while, things finally click, and you finally understand what a vacuum cleaner is. In fact, you actually know much more: You've now become one of the experts on vacuum cleaners, or at least on this particular kind of vacuum cleaner, and you know a good fraction of the details on how it works. You're feeling pretty proud of yourself, even though you're still a far shot from your advisor: They understand all sorts of other kinds of vacuum cleaners, even Roombas, and, in addition to their work on vacuum cleaners, they're also working on a related but completely different project about air conditioning systems.

You are filled with joy that you can finally talk on par with your advisor, at least on this topic, but there is a looming dark cloud on the horizon: You still need to write a thesis.

So, you think about new things that you can do with vacuum cleaners. So, first, you're like: I can use a vacuum cleaner to clean bookshelves! That'd be super-useful! But then you do a Google Scholar search and it turns out that someone else did that like ten years ago.

OK, your next idea: I can use a vacuum cleaner to clean cats! That'd also be super-useful. But, alas, a bit more searching in the literature reveals that someone tried that, too, but they didn't get good results. You're a confident young grad student, so you decide that, armed with some additional techniques that you happen to know, you might fix the problems that the other researcher had and get vacuuming cats to work. You spend several months on it, but, alas, it doesn't get you any further.

OK, so then, after more thinking and doing some research on extension cords, you think it would be feasible to use a vacuum cleaner to clean the outdoors. You look in the literature, and it turns out that nobody's ever thought of doing that! You proudly tell this idea to your advisor, but they do some back of the envelope calculations that you don't really understand and tell you that vacuuming the outdoors is unlikely to be very useful. Something about how a vacuum cleaner is too small to handle the outdoors and that we already know about other tools that are much better equipped for cleaning streets and such.

This goes on for several years, and finally you write a thesis about how if you turn a vacuum cleaner upside-down and submerge the top end in water, you can make bubbles!

Your thesis committee is unsure of how this could ever be useful, but it seems pretty cool and bubbles are pretty, so they think that maybe something useful could come out of it eventually. Maybe.

And, indeed, you are lucky! After a hundred years or so, your idea (along with a bunch of other ideas) leads to the development of aquarium air pumps, an essential tool in the rapidly growing field of research on artificial goldfish habitats. Yay!

Original link to the question
http://www.quora.com/Mathematics/What-do-grad-students-in-math-do-all-day

Crazy morning.

As some of you know I'm taking an online class in algorithm analysis, it's a lot of work, but also a lot of fun and last night I had to turn in one assignment. Of course I waited until the last second to start it so I had to work on it until late at night.

Also I'm competing against chino (one of my friends from high school) and the one does best gets a 3/4 pound burger from El Corral in colombia...delicious.

At some point I thought I had the program right but when I ran it it told me that the program had exceeded the maximum amount of memory that these programs are allowed to use. Chino had told me this would happen and how to fix it. Good. Then some other problems came up, i fixed those. But then something weird started happening the program would stop running in the middle of the execution, and it didn't tell me anything about what caused it to stop!

Not having any clue how to fix this i went to bed with a program that in theory worked, but could not finish executing for some mysterious reason. I stayed up until 5:30 working on a program so I could turn it in before midnight (US time) but it just wasn't ready. All that work for nothing...but oh well you know me, it was fun working on it.

Went to bed slept my 3.5 hours woke up at 9 to go to class. Chino got online while I was getting ready and asked me "did you finish it?"
 "no it was running and it stopped for no reason, i have no idea what is causing it blablabla"
 "it's not your code, you just need to increase the memory"
 "i already did when it told me 'i'm out memory' but now it's not telling me that"
 "shhhh...just do it"
 "ok..."
 I increased the memory of the program to 1gb, which basically tells my computer i know you're doing a shit ton of stuff, running mac os, making sure the battery is charging checking for wi-fi...all the stuff that a computer usually does, BUT i'm going to need you to devote a fourth of your workspace to this ONE task. (i had the max set at one eight of the workspace before)

well...i don't think i can express how i felt when i saw this so i'll just say what happened. The program started running (and i'm not exaggerating i thought for a long time about which number needs to go here, and i can almost prove that it did) FIFTY times faster.

50!

and most importantly it got way past the point where it got stuck last night. But oh well, too late now, I'll just finish it tonight or tomorrow and get half the points.

Now i needed to go to class, it was 9:40 so I paused the program, put the laptop in my bag and went to take the bus.

On the bus I was thinking dang it...i was so close, now i'm only going to half the points even though the program is right....WAIT! the deadline is midnight PACIFIC time! that means...(counts) 10 am! (counts again) yeah! (can't believe it, counts one more time) HOLY SHIT! i can do this!

So I opened the laptop in the crowded bus, finished running the program, it finished in like 10 seconds, and gave me and answer that looked really good.

Ok, now how do i turn this in...normally this bus will get me to the central station at 9:56 if i run inside i have time to get online, and turn it in.

Then traffic happened, the bus was stopping a lot and for long periods of time, dang it!

wait! some buses have internet...check...this one doesn't, but wait there's an open wifi network! connect! bus starts moving, lose signal. this was followed by about 10 minutes of get signal connect lose signal. It was the perfect go/stop ratio so that I wouldn't make it to the station on time but also I didn't stay in one spot long enough to connect.

Got to the station, 9:58! come on come on! i can make it! run. connect. can't find the network i ALWAYS find, try on my phone,
there's the network,
there's the website,
login,
put in answer
it's right!
check time!

Last attempted 12:07:03 ... 1 day late

Now it's sleepy time.