Easter 2008

We had my mom, sister and brother up for Easter this year. It was beautiful and sunny the day before, but Easter was cold with a mixture of snow and rain all day. Below is some video footage of the family.

Add comment March 25th, 2008

Sandbox

The girls are out of town this weekend, so I spent the day with my two sons. It turned into a beautiful spring day with huge white clouds and sunshine reflecting on the snowy mountains. We turned a corner of our patio into a sandbox using some landscape blocks left over from our wall project. The truck, which has been buried under a layer of snow for the entire winter, took a while to start (I forgot to unhook the battery last fall). We finally got going this afternoon and drove to a forest road where a huge sand bank is exposed. I shoveled about a square yard of north Idaho sand for our new sandbox while the kids ran around. It was really a great find... clean, natural sand with absolutely nothing intermixed. When we got everything put together the boys spent an hour digging and arguing about who owned which part of the sandbox. All in all, a success!

1 comment March 15th, 2008

Selling the Estate

Friday night I went down to Spokane to see my mom, who has been busy with her estate sale. She had an incredible turnout the first day, and when I arrived most of my dad's stuff had been sold. I did have a chance to walk through the shop and think about dad and all the memories associated with each remaining item. It surprised me how a simple object can bring back a flood of thoughts and associations. It's strange that the most important memories of our lives can be so well defined and remembered by association to trivial physical objects. Walking through dad's shop I can still see him in there, puttering around and looking for a misplaced tool in a sea of mechanical detritus. In the last few years some of my best moments with him were out in the shop or in the garden, talking about things we shared in common. I'll miss him. And, ironically, I'll miss the junk that reminds me of him.

Add comment March 10th, 2008

Cost Accounting

I've recently be re-introduced to the world of fifth-grade math, thanks to my cost accounting class. When was the last time you looked at a story problem? My team member and I spent two hours last night poring over problem sets from our textbook. Here's a flavor of what my course offers in the way of accounting problems for the MBA student.

"Jane and John decide to start a lemonade stand. They offer three products: Products A, B, and C. Jane buys lemonade powder for 3 cents a pound. John buys pre-stirred lemonade at a dollar a liter. Jane buys lemonade on a cash basis, John on an accrual basis. Using the actual absorption cost system, calculate to the milligram Jane and John's sales and productivity given that weather is 10 degrees cooler than normal and the cost of lemonade increases based on the consumer price index, minus exchange rate adjustments for imports from Australia. Note that Jane speaks only pig Latin so all communications with John must be done via braille cards."

This kind of problem actually has a solution, and if you spend about two hours cooking up assumptions and allocating costs, you can come up with a defensible answer. It's just that my brain has been programmed by my Protestant capitalist ethic to recoil in horror every time I see work that adds zero value and takes an infinite amount of time to complete.

So I ended up doing something I've never done before. I looked at the syllabus and calculated how much my grade would go down if I didn't finish every problem. Turns out that a 1% grade hit to avoid 10 hours of work is just about right.

2 comments March 6th, 2008

Quantrix and the World After Excel

I try not to write too much about my professional life in this blog; I have a hard enough time explaining my work to my wife, let alone everyone else. However, I think it's safe to say that anyone who works in an office and does any kind of analytical work also finds that they spend a lot of time in front of spreadsheets. Thanks to Microsoft, that spreadsheet is very likely Excel.

My introduction to Excel was during my first job out of college as an analyst for Payless ShoeSource. It took about a week in that position for me to realize that a good part of my success depended on my skill using Excel to transform meaningless numbers into actionable business projects. People who knew Excel got promoted, and people who didn't ended up working in HR.

It's no exaggeration to say that I spent the next two years almost wholly devoted to becoming an Excel pro. The great thing about working for a big company is that in the beginning of your career (if it's structured right), most of your time is spent learning. I think during those two years the actual amount of time I spent "working" in the traditional sense was less than 50%. The other half was spent experimenting, building, and rebuilding until I knew Excel and related technologies in and out. Since those days, not much has changed except the venue. Excel continues to be the tool de rigeur for anyone doing even marginally serious analytical work. At my current employer, I've spent a good portion of my time training the next generation of analysts how to master the secrets of Excel and VBA, and it is still the most important indicator of success in our analyst group.

However, anyone who has plumbed the depths of Excel also knows its limitations. Many people try to use Excel for jobs to which databases are much more suited; accordingly, I've had to become an expert in SQL and database design. But the user-side of any analytical tool is still going to be Excel, whether you want it to be or not. I've seen multi-million dollar systems languish because users simply copy and paste the results to Excel for manipulation, then paste them back when they're done massaging the numbers. Excel is simply more flexible than nearly anything you can think of, especially in a world of inflexible, user-unfriendly business software packages.

But Excel can't do everything. I ran into a problem about six months ago. I had built the latest incarnation of our company's item forecasting model in Excel. It was really an amazing tool, full of nuance and flexible to the n-th degree. And incomprehensible to everyone except myself. And, even for an old Excel hand, making any substantial changes required not only an expert knowledge of Excel, but hours of error-checking to find the inevitable problems. The cost of maintaining the model had escalated to where only a few people in the company would even know how to approach fixing an issue. With Excel's help, I had outsmarted myself.

Enter Quantrix. Part of my job is to keep up on the latest technologies that might prove useful for our business. One day I stumbled across Quantrix, and my life has not been the same since. I'm not kidding.

Quantrix does most of the things Excel does. But the fundamental premise is much different. For one thing, developing analytical models takes about half the time as Excel, and the time savings increases the more complex the model becomes. Need to add scenarios? Just add a new dimension. Changing the formula for net sales? Change it once, and it propogates throughout the whole model. Need to build a relationship between departments and sub-departments? Add another matrix, and Quantrix remembers the relationship and applies it to every formula. It's brilliant.

Now I'm in selling mode. Here are some key features:

Since discovering Quantrix, I use it more than Excel. For me, that's a change on the level of emigrating to a new country, or becoming a Mac user. It's revolutionary.

Check it out.

1 comment March 1st, 2008